Laughter Through Tears

I formulated this post originally for the lore channel of the official Palia Discord server. It got a pretty positive response, so I decided to post a backup copy to Dreamwidth.

I know there's been a lot of chatter about the connection between ancient humans, Flow, and the emergence of Majiri people. I haven't read all the threads (so many!), so I probably missed a bunch of important stuff, but it's made me think. Especially in the context of Subira's temple quests, the consoles, and the "protocols" that they mention.

IIRC, two protocols are mentioned: the "Cosmos" protocol (here) and the "Mirror" protocol (which apparently predated it). Mudan personally enacted the Mirror Protocol, as per his letter to his wife (here). We have reason to believe that both protocols were attempts to fight whatever mysterious "shadow(s)" brought about the downfall of Mudan's golden age.

( More lore and speculation )

Alternatively, I could be full of it. That's always a distinct possibility.

There's a lot I could squee about, but I think by now it's obvious which part of the story I'm most invested in.

So, Breden. Right.

In my mind Breden is a little fixed as a she because I had them as a female character in my first two playthroughs (including Reynard's game, where I both romanced Breden and replayed every chapter but the first three times). As such I'll be referring to Breden as "she" throughout.

( spoilers and speculation )

I watched most of Punisher in a few days and it wasn't half bad, but I think I sort of... forgot... to watch the very last episode.

After seeing Shohreh Aghdashloo in Punisher and being delighted, I discussed it with my brother and he mentioned that she was also playing a major role in The Expanse. Which he'd been encouraging me to start watching for a while now. Since Shohreh Aghdashloo is the actual love of my life, and since I developed a mystery virus that laid me low for a day and a half, I ended up marathoning most of the first season. Fast enough that I had trouble distinguishing between the episodes (thank you, Netflix autoplay). And despite the fact that the first few episodes are so dense and complex I alternated between watching them and reading the (extremely detailed, slightly analytical) episode breakdowns on the fandom wiki.

The Expanse is like Killjoys, except it's wearing a suit and tie instead of jeans and a tube-top. That is, TEX is ostensibly hard sci-fi, and lends huge weight to things like the effects of gravity on bone density (even if it's still trying to convince me that you can wave a magnet at someone and turn them into a sociopath). Meanwhile Killjoys leans pretty hard space opera, at least the way I see it. But the commonalities are more important (to my eye) than the differences: terraforming as a vehicle of social inequality, space miners as a pervasive blue-collar underclass, lots of parallel approaches to social issues.

Not to mention the seemingly sudden introduction of a genre-shifting plot twist, which in retrospect appears highly foreshadowed.

I feel like there's more to dig into here. Not sure I'm well-equipped to do the digging, though, and both shows have been around long enough. I can hope that someone smarter than me has gone and done that analysis already, so that I can simply bask in its glory instead of breaking my head trying to figure out what I'm looking at.

My thoughts are too disorganized for a proper blog post.

Other shows that I am still following: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin, The Good Place, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

As a writer, RPer, and all around nerd, I have a whole bunch of name generator websites bookmarked, and am always on the lookout for new and exciting ones. Of course I have also tried my hand at creating some small, primitive generators myself, like this one.

But one of the best qualities of worldbuilding, whether in games or in books, is the ability to simulate greater depth than you actually have. No one can build a world as rich as the real one, and if you tried to do it you would never have time for writing the actual stories taking place in this world. The trick is to make it look like the gaps in your knowledge are full of something that you just happen not to have mentioned. Part of it is investing more work into the things your characters have knowledge and interest in, or rather the reverse: make your characters proficient in something you're interested in developing.

What all that means is that most SFF writers aren't conlangers, and they don't need to be. You can simulate the richness of a unique language to the satisfaction of most, usually just by creating a quick-and-dirty phonology guide, and then staying out of your own way by being careful about idioms, puns and wordplay. The reader's (or player's) imagination provides the rest.

Part of my process is that I find it terribly difficult to write about characters if I haven't named them. This means I'll usually have a string of names before I have any kind of set phonological rules to follow. It also means I find it very hard to change those names, even if they were only meant to be working products. What I would like to be able to do is design a naming tool that you could input a string of names into, and it would break them down into an approximation of individual syllables, and then use those units to construct a series of new names.

I'm pretty sure I have the skills to do this, but it would take time and a fair amount of thought going into designing it, instead of just jumping into tinkering with code like I'm used to.

I'm open to feedback on the technical aspects of this project. I'm also interested in discussing the meta theory behind it, but based on the premise that I laid out. I'm not here for "everything you said is wrong, you're not a real fantasy writer unless you build your own language from scratch". Or anything along those lines. Comment at will, if you cross a line I promise I'll let you know.

My new phone has a lot more space in it than the one that got stolen, so I have been lenient with downloading apps. For example, I downloaded a podcast app that lets me get new episodes wherever there is wireless, without having to remember what day everyone updates. I was wandering around looking for interesting podcasts and happened across Galactic Suburbia and their episode on the new Ghostbusters. I've been listening to it in bits and pieces since it's fairly long and I usually listen to podcasts on the bus.

It got me thinking again about what I did and didn't like about the movie. It also made me want to go look for a supercut of all the times the 2016 movie referenced iconic lines from the original, but that involves going on YouTube and I bet I don't need to explain why I don't want to do that.

( Read more... )

I watched the whole of Stranger Things over the course of the last few days. My brother has been bugging me to see it. Not that he gave a plot synopsis or anything like that. He's gonna want to know what I think about it and I thought it was pretty meh. The only character I cared about was one, and I cared about them specifically because (without giving any explicit spoilers) the narrative seemed to dismiss their very existence.

How do I explain to my brother that this show was literally made for him?

On Monday evening I returned home from a grueling evening class, intending to "just quickly" check my social media before turning in. Now, normally I am a lot less active on Twitter than I am on Tumblr, but I like to check in and make sure that my account has something on it other than links to my blog posts. It was on this occasion that I discovered the hashtag #OwnYourOwn.

Own Your Own was started by the YA lit blog Interrobang and championed by Kaye M., a Muslim American YA writer and intersectional feminist activist. ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I posted to Tumblr a link to a game I wrote in Twine. Well, not exactly a game. This Twine story contains images of the Minor Arcana, the lesser-known component of the Tarot deck. The code allows you to select random cards and arrange them in one of three different ways, the better to exploit Tarot's rich history of symbolism as an aid to characterization.

Normally when I use Tarot cards, they serve primarily as a handy go-to source of writing prompts, perfect for little warm-up exercises when I'm having difficulty revving up the writer's engine. ( Read more... )

Diversity and representation have been climbing up the public agenda of late. When it comes to writing disabled characters, there are a few recurring pitfalls that I’d like to address.

Be Specific

You want to write a disabled character. First, you need to know what their disability is. “In a wheelchair” is not a disability. A wheelchair is a mobility aid, one of several different kinds available to the mobility-impaired. That’s your character, by the way. Did you mean, perhaps, that your character is paraplegic? Paralysis due to traumatic spinal injury is, again, one of many conditions that require or warrant the use of a wheelchair. Are you certain that you want your character to be paraplegic? True, this is the thing that most abled people think about (or avoid thinking about) when conjuring the mental image of a wheelchair. However, it is far from the only reason for someone to use a wheelchair.

( Read more... )

This essay is not an encyclopedia; it’s barely an introduction. I hope, however, that it has given its readers some food for thought, for engaging with their own writing as well as the media they consume.

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.

This is the story of how DC comics depowered Barbara Gordon.

For twenty five years, Barbara Gordon played the role of Oracle, a master-hacker and world-class information broken, leader of the Birds of Prey and a revolving roster of superheroines, and one of the smartest people in the DC universe. This Oracle persona was developed by John Ostrander and Kim Yale after her spine injury in the famous (or notorious) storyline The Killing Joke. This storyline was rightly criticized for treating Batgirl as a prop in a story that focused on the relationship between Batman and the Joker. The Killing Joke is commonly included in lists of “fridgings”, brutal plots visited on female characters, for the purpose of providing motivation for male characters.

( Read more... )

Crossposted to hazelgold.net.