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demiurgent

The return of Banter Latte!

Hello all!

It's been a long time since I've been here, but I thought I'd jump in and mention that my fiction blog, Banter Latte, has revived and is once again updating. This includes new Mythology of the Modern World entries, Interviewing Trey (the sequel to Interviewing Leather), and Lovelace 1/2, an entirely new serial.

Otherwise, stuff is going well. I hope you are having an excellent life as well.

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websnark

The Return of Websnark

Hey all -- diving in long enough to say that we've brought Websnark back! It's actually at http://new.websnark.com for now, and running off a Tumblr engine. You don't need a Tumblr account to read it, and as we use Disqus for comments now, you can log in via Open ID -- for example, a Dreamwidth or Livejournal account -- without needing a separate account on that system either.

I am not dead, I am not planning to die

It has been quite some time since I've checked in through my journaling life. In part, this is because of Twitter giving me a short burst outlet for comments. In part, this is because of plans connected to Websnark that have that part of my brain occupied. In part this has been fatigue. In part, this has been part of my personal evolution. In part, this has been mechanical bees.

Admittedly, the mechanical bees haven't been a major part.

I've fallen out of the habit of reading journals the same way, and for that I apologize. I want to rededicate myself to such in the coming academic year. However, we'll have to see what happens.

So, this is just to say: I am alive. I plan to continue to be alive. I hope everyone here is well.

Thank you as always.

Six minute poem, for no good reason

( Don't read too much into this. )

An observation that should, in retrospective, have been obvious.

Some people simply enjoy being outraged.

I'm not dead yet...

...and I have a Garak icon now. So, you know. I have that going for me.

Tired of death, man.

Is it weird that I'm significantly more affected by the death of Billy Mays than the deaths of David Carradine, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett or Michael Jackson?

Maybe it's because the latter were celebrities, living the celebrity life, but Billy Mays was at heart just a big cheerful guy who sold stuff.

Or maybe it's because Billy Mays kind of reminds me of Frank.

I dunno. I'll admit, I'm a fan of Discovery Channel's Pitchmen, but I never thought I'd feel badly to hear the guy who hawked Zorbeez had died.

It has been some time...

...but I have my machine back. Weds and I have observed the 1-year mark well. And beyond that....

Well, Weds and I are talking. Weds is amazing to talk to, when it comes to things.

It's time to get back to work. It's time to start building shit again.

I am in... a good mood.

I wouldn't expect much from me for a while.

My computer has gone back in for repairs, having elected to stop booting mid-last week. I'm on a variety of loaners, but I'm therefore behind on e-mail, reading journal type stuff, webcomics type stuff -- almost everything, really.

I'll be back when I can be, but in the meantime, please see any absence of response in the context of my not hearing, not any lack of caring.

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I guess this is something like a long vignette. If that even makes sense.

This is something of a followup from yesterday. I was asked if I also did scenes or other bits to help me work out worldbuilding. The answer then was yes, and here's some of the evidence of that

Specifically, this is a scene set in one of those alternate universes -- one where the physics is set to fantasy/exotic instead of 'science fiction.' The high concept is relatively simple -- assume for the moment that the gods of the world were all real and struggled for dominance, and assume that the Greek Pantheon got that dominance around 13 B.C. and never let go. All the other gods are still out there, but they pretty much (happily or not) live under the dominance of the Greeks.

So. Here's a little ditty set in that setting, just to help get a feel for the world. I have to give action Mason Kramer a credit and a thank-you as part of this. And of course I'll stick the whole thing behind a cut lest the world become a dark and forbidding place. Later on, when I set up my writing groups on Dreamwidth so they'll pass through, stuff like this will be stuck on the writing filter and those not interested won't have to see.

As for how this differs from... writing with Intent (as in, Intent of Publication) -- well, this is in a way the textual equivalent of sketchbook pages. Before I can actually write about this world, I have to try a few things out, see how they run, feel how the characters feel, explore a few things... it's like doing six different sketches of a character in a sketchbook -- they're all a bit rough, perhaps, but they give the artist a chance to work out what works best visually for the character before drawing him 'for real.'

For now, please click through if you actually are interested, and please enjoy the cheese plate.

( Let's all do the City-State Rag! )

The sheer fun... and deadly lure... of worldbuilding.

So I'm kicking around ideas for a setting. It may be an RPG setting, it may be a fiction setting. It has some antecedents going all the way back to 1998 or so when I floated an idea or two of picking up the Intellectual Property for the old Pacesetter system Timemaster. (At the time, the money they wanted was far more than I was willing to spend -- it may be that they've made more in the ten years since by selling PDF versions on RPG Now, but they haven't actually produced a new product for it since 1991, more is the pity.) Things have finally gelled in my brain, forming a very, very different take on the concept of intrauniversal/spatiotemporal adventure, with a healthy dose of Space Opera and a bit of Doctor Who for good measure.

And so I'm worldbuilding as I let the actual story gel, if it's going to be fiction, or the world proper gel if it's going to be a setting.

Worldbuilding is incredible amounts of fun, and very very dangerous. It's very dangerous because it's incredible amounts of fun. The problem is, you end up getting a level of detail on your fictional or RPG world that far exceeds your capacity to put it into your work, and the process of worldbuilding is satisfying in a way that is very similar to -- and scratches the same itch as -- writing.

Only it's completely worthless beyond your own brain.

Take this setting. You know it's intrauniversal. You know it's time travel. That's a start, right? Right. Now, the mechanism of how they hop from one alternate universe to another might interest you.

What is not going to interest you... is the coordinate/navigational system used to do so.

But I've got it down. I've got it down, in fact, to a freaking science. I know that the posthumans who first built the technology have sixteen fingers instead of ten, so everything's in Hexadecimal. I know how to create unique identifiers for alternate universes that have meaning for me even if they're just jumbles of hex code for everyone else. I have a standardized ISAN unit (ISAN standing for Interfleet Standard Altiversal Nomenclature) of measure for everything from position to alternate timeline to dimension.

In fact, I know that if one of my (hypothetical -- remember, I'm not actually writing this dumb story or world yet) heroes punches in the following coordinates manually into his system--

41E19A45D2483D9978D8A-0-0-0@0x0-2D0DAD8.146F642.BA.62193FF58947846

--they would arrive almost exactly at the place of my birth just in time to watch me be born. With absolutely none of the above pulled out of my ass. It all makes sense in the context of the system in question.

This information will never be useful to anyone, ever, including me.

Seriously. I can't put a jumble like that into a story. If I feature an action packed chrononautical navigation scene, no one's going to spout off hex code. If I put this system into an RPG, it would never, ever be used and in fact would be held of as an example of needless crunch for no reason.

And yet, I love it.

(This is not an invitation for Shut Up And Write comments, by the way. The actual writing isn't anywhere near in a 'start putting words down' state. This is just an observation, and it is mine.)

On the subject of one year

Monday was the 1 year anniversary of Wednesday crossing the border into the United States, at the time on a K-Visa, for fianceés. For the first time in our relationship, we were on a trip to unify our households against our upcoming marriage.

For the first time in our relationship, our time together was not potentially measured in weeks, or days, or hours, but in years.

Since that day (well, technically a couple of days before while we packed her stuff up in Ottawa, but I have a poetic thing going here), there has not been a single day when Wednesday and I have not been in the same room. There has not been a single day that we have not touched, have not spoken in person, have not embraced, and have not kissed.

Not one day.

For the last year and two days, Wednesday has not been "my Canadian girlfriend" or "my long distance relationship." Wednesday has been the person I share my life with.

Next month, Wednesday and I will celebrate the first anniversary of our marriage in Las Vegas. But more quietly we've been celebrating for the last few days. Celebrating our lives joining. Celebrating our coming together and not having to leave.

For the last year, we have been Home.

I am the luckiest bastard on the face of this planet.

The gout, the sleep, the bleh

I had a bad gout flare last week -- my worst in years, and in an entirely new place. My left knee.

My usual meds didn't touch it. It got worse instead of better. I went on high grade anti-inflammatories and steroids to work on it.

There have been some side effects, though the pain is much better now. One is what you expect when you dump a fuck-ton of NSAIDs in your stomach for a week -- diarrhea, some discomfort in the stomach lining. And last night I don't think I put fifteen minutes of sleep in a row together.

I don't think I'm going out today. But on the other side of things, now I need to stay awake for the day, so I can get to sleep in a reasonable amount of time to get up tomorrow and work, then do things I was going to do today.

I'm ready for my android body now.

Paranoia

I have lost writing before.

It's nothing new, of course. Everybody loses writing. In the early days of home computing we all learned to back our floppy disks up because we had that one disk fail, and in those days that one 5 and a half inch disk contained your entire electronic existence. Every poem, every story, every badly rendered scene you'd never show anyone and every piece of absolute literary gold you were positive would one day redeem all of humanity through its profundity. Losing your floppy disk was like having a chunk of your brain cut out.

In more recent years, it's happened less often. But... well, I'm hard on computers. I'm hard on computers and I'm hard on computer media. I've had multiple complete hard drive failures in the last ten years, and sometimes, I've lost things. Important things and unimportant things. And years later -- years later -- I find myself scouring old repositories looking for them.

So I've become paranoid.

I have a Mac, so I have Time Machine, and it backs up every variation automatically. I have a backup image for my whole hard drive I use as well. But for my actual writing folder -- the folder where all my creative work lives -- I have a subversion repository and every now and again I back that whole freaking thing up to a server in another state.

Just in case.

I have no point, save that I just backed it up again, and it occurred to me... I've become paranoid. I've reached the point where I am so afraid of losing bits of writing I do -- regardless of quality -- that my backup procedures have become almost absurdly redundant. And yet somehow I know -- I know that if I have a true failure... the one thing I need will somehow not be backed up anywhere. It will magically slip through the cracks.

I know this will happen. I know it. And I know that whatever I lost I could easily have saved, if I had only just.... X.

I spend my life trying to figure out what 'X' is.

On the Antagonist in Star Trek

This too is a spoilery spoilsport of spoiling.

( And outrage in five... four... three... two.... )

For those interested in my critical ramblings....

There was an excellent, if spoilery, review and critical commentary on Star Trek here. I got this particular link from action buddy

chadu.

However, as excellent as that essay was, I disagreed with it. At length.

It's pretty criticism-crunchy stuff. On the other hand, it's been how long since I dirtied up Websnark with 2,500 words of rambling?

A minor Star Trek comment

This is just spoilery enough that I'll put it behind the cut of cutting.

( Chekov! )

The power of meeting distraction

I sit in a meeting. The meeting has good coffee. The coffee is flavored. The people are nice though some of the topics are tense.

It is a meeting. Like many other meetings. We talk and become empassioned and have arguments and within a week we won't remember anything we said. There have been thousands of them since I came here. There will be thousands more.

I am just plain tired.

I am entirely content.

Star Trek was amazing. Well done, utterly satisfying, and Jesus Christ, when did Chekov become awesome?

I am very, very happy with this movie.

On the road again....

Thanks to monumentally good sales I am now the owner of a 'Peek.' This is a remarkably useful unitasker (to use the Alton Brownism) that gives a fellow access to e-mail essentially everywhere. In other words, it gives the key advantages of a Blackberry without the monumental cost or the need to press a freaking brick to my ear when taking a cell phone call.

This post is my test of the Peek and my 'post by e-mail' system. Exciting, isn't it?