The site has now been migrated to a new host.
Maybe that means it’ll get worked on again.
Category: Musings
Rambling thoughts
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I’ve noticed.
I’ve noticed that I haven’t been writing lately, that I haven’t managed to create anything interesting. I had an interesting idea for a time travel setting, which I flesh out a bit, but it stalled somewhere.
I should be doing more writing. I shouldn’t let the ideas get stalled. I should create something and when it doesn’t feel right, either push through it, or move on to something else.
And instead, I keep thinking about things, but not putting anything down on the screen.
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VR game idea
I’ve got a vr game idea I would love to see developed.
A moral choice game where you have an angel and a demon on your shoulders, that are only visible in the peripheral vision, not when you look at them directly, and that emit a glow when you’re working for their alignment.
Titling your head towards one voice, better hearing it. Except when the other one decides to scream.
Thinking it would work best as a detective game with really grey moral choices.
At one point, I wrote a screenplay about an implanted conscience, so that’s the other possible direction.
You’re on parole, you’ve got a digital conscience on your shoulder, as you navigate the world. Then one day you wake up with two of them, with different agendas.
At one point the idea was cyberpunk, it was an implant in the brain, creating the hallucination, and then a hacker who wanted to kill the program hacked in to sabotage it. But is there really a hacker? Is there really an implant? Are you really out of jail?
I kinda like the idea of a story that unfolds possible ways, with one ending being that you find out it’s an occurrence at owl creek execution hallucination, one you save the world by exposing a conspiracy for mind control implants, etc.
Games tend to not go with the huge branches, because you end up doing far more work than a given audience will see, if they take a different path.
And it does interfere with a single coherent narrative and even narrative consistency, if you don’t have an objective truth to refer back to.
Though having an objective truth that is hinted at and a series of subjective truths that the player is exposed to, is something interesting to explore.
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Private security drones.
Given the rise of private security forces, it makes sense for someone to put together a collection of drone riggers for the purposes of special operations. Better overwatch potential than most groups can manage, especially if concealed as paparazzi and tourists. The technology is here, which means the profits are likely there.
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Social training
A recent facebook post a trio who saw someone drug a woman’s drink and then told her about it got me thinking about social conditioning. Specifically that for the most part, people don’t intercede in things. There are a few exceptions, who have that protective impulse that overrides the Someone Else’s Problem Field that so often protects the perpetrators.
Would it make any sense to create a group that operates something like improve anywhere, but with a domestic abuse focus? Creating scenes in public and seeing who, if anyone, intercedes, and then perhaps talking to the witnesses about it afterwards?
I can see this having a few legal hurdles and a few ethical ones. Some people might find being exposed to such things to be triggering. Overall though, would it be worth it? I think if it contributed to the dialogue, it might be.
A recent reddit thread, people were talking about how it didn’t matter who they were, if they left their drink unwatched, they pitched it out. It felt like it was implied that not doing so was foolish, which to me feels like victim blaming. Often times, that seems to be where the conversation in society is at when it comes to domestic abuse, various forms of rape, etc.
Part of that is sadly just the nature of the offense. If the perp is anonymous, it is hard to mentally assign the blame to them, and for many people, the residual blame will just drift onto the person who disturbed their quiet illusion of a safe world, the victim. And in cases where the perp isn’t anonymous, but is someone that you don’t want to believe would do such things, it’s hard to accept it. Another comfortable illusion at risk, the trust you had. The person wasn’t the monster you were expecting. They did monstrous things, but there wasn’t all the warning signs that you were taught to expect; they were just too normal.
Of course there’s also the sort who have a reputation and are known to be a problem, but action isn’t taken against them, for various reasons. Those bother me the most.
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Content generation
It was suggested earlier that I should consider doing a podcast. That I take my gift for writing and create some decent serial content.
This means I need a writing partner, and a session partner. Any volunteers?
Also, there is a suggestion to create a series about using esports to influence frat boys into rivalries in a series of vaultec style experiments. Monoculture and tribalism.
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Writing a bit more, but not writing enough.
I need to be working on more of my fiction. I need to be reading and writing on a daily basis. I haven’t worked on much fiction lately, and I really should be. The only way to become a better writer is to write, to keep putting words down. Minimal edits for clarity, rather than writing and rewriting the same chunk over and over again, until you bugger off from frustration.
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The Patrician’s Oubliette
A few months back, I killed my fetlife account, ceased being active in the community, and basically put that aspect of my life on the backburner, including dating.
There were a few things that caused this, one factor was my continued discomfort with the toxic masculine behavior I kept seeing online. The final straw though, was lack of reaction from the community to an act I considered to be unforgivably wrong by someone else in the community.
Last weekend, a local promoter called me, because he thought he needed a last minute favor. I agreed, showed up, helped with things. Didn’t attend the event, just helped with the setup. I thought about, but decided against it.
Later in the week, I helped with the load out, showing up with the van to move the gear. On the way back, we had a conversation about the event and various things. Some of it reminded me of what I’ve been missing about the community.
So, I’m trying to figure out how to go about it. How to reactivate my account, how to reconnect with people, get myself out there again. In the meantime, I’m focusing on my health goals in the background.
I’m still having the same issue with dating that I was having before. It’s hard to explain, but basically it boils down to this. There are plenty of aggressive and abrasive assholes out there, hitting on women, both within the community and in the general online community. It bothers me, though it’s hard for me to articulate exactly how and why, beyond the simple “Treat expletive-ing people with respect, they’re people, expletive for brains.”
I don’t know how to stand out from that crowd, when I’m uncomfortable enough wading into that cesspool in the first place. Mostly what I do well, is writing. The problem is, writing isn’t really something people appreciate these days, as people tend to TL; DR most of it.
My brain keeps bouncing off a brick wall when I try to figure out how to best express what I am. Especially since I keep feeling like I need to distance myself from the toxic ideals that I keep seeing. I don’t know how to explain that part, though perhaps by saying I’m not suffering from “Nice Guy Syndrome”, but at the same time, I’m generally a nice guy.
Right! This is an issue of semiotics; specifically shorthand, expectations and frames of reference.
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Mutters
Much like a prion disease is a malformation of a healthy structure, cults are a malformation of a tribal family.
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Relating to humanity.
I’ve been writing for a while now, and while some point love my ability to take a conversation or an idea and turn it into something concise on the page, I lack the skill to do the opposite of that. I seem to lack the ability to write characters who have believable dialogue or believable motives. This may be related to social awkwardness that I’ve suffered from, or perhaps a yet to be diagnosed position on the autism spectrum. Some of the reading I’ve done lately suggests that I have a tendency to make mistakes that are common among those who are on that spectrum. There was an interesting post on reddit listing a dozen or so common mistakes that get made, mostly relating to matters of social conventions.
Generally speaking, when someone asks me how I’m doing, I reply, “Not dead yet.”, referring both to the character getting thrown into the charnel wagon in Monty Python, and to the quote from Herodotus, “Call no man happy until he is dead.” In essence, I’m saying that I could give you a complicated answer, but I think you’re just asking to be polite, so I’ll give you something that sounds amusing, though the implication is that there is more there, if you want to know. Often, people don’t. They’re just asking because it’s how people interact. Sometimes, they do want to know, and then I try to explain it to them. I tend to have more woes than can easily be encapsulated though, so this tends to go flat rather quickly.
When I was writing at Douglas, my classmates found my dialogue to be a bit too overthought, or overly intellectualized. At the time, the conversations that I was having that weren’t basically functional, tended to be of that nature, so it was hard for me to understand that complaint.
I am trying to express my difficultly in natural communicating with others, both in my life and between my characters in my writing. I am acknowledging this, and I’m making a note to be more aware of it in the future.
Also, apparently I shouldn’t end sentences with periods when texting, as that comes across as abrupt. And use more emoticons.