Book talk

After a little more research and a little more thinking about it, I've adjusted to the idea that if you encounter a Japanese person speaking English, they are probably quite skilled. The Japanese who are awkward or uncomfortable in English avoid it whenever they can.

The things that will stick out, then, to an English ear, is that the speech is very bookish. That, and the pronunciation is strange. But I decided long ago that reflecting a Japanese accent in spelling was not going to happen in this book.

So I just reworked some of Hanae's conversations, and it works for her to have grammatically correct but stilted and awkward. Besides, she is a Senior Room Maid at a fancy ryokan and speaking formally works for the position. 

It is, alas, another version of the Funny Foreigner speak. I already played the card of the Romance languages and their gendered nouns and their difficulty with articles. I tried to throw in some Germanic grammar, at least verb placement (difficult to reflect in English without it sounding really awkward.) I have no idea what I'm going to do when I have a whole book full of French speakers to deal with.

It's funny, but the most stereotypical speaker in the current book is Penny's friend in Boston, who is a self-admitted otaku, even weaboo. She's the only person in the book so far to say "chan."

The tyranny of the calendar

I thought this book I would be able to go a little more free-form and not worry about specific dates. But there are a few dates that are, unfortunately, absolute:

First there is the solstice. In real history, the winter solstice of 2018 fell on December 21. This is a small moment in the book; is is one of the moments between Penny and her landlady that lead eventually to Hanae sharing with her plot-important things about Japanese culture. In this case, the evening of the solstice is traditionally the yuzu bath.

It also puts things on a faster pace as before this, the deadline was nebulous. It is after this that Penny realizes the ultimate deadline is New Year's Eve, and it is racing towards her.

(Well, that's a very small bell-ringing, at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum. Which does get mentioned in the text!)

But there is another key date in here, and that one falls entirely too soon after the 21st. By the evening of the 24th Penny needs to be in Tokyo to enjoy a traditional Christmas Eve Dinner:

And there is a way the 25th is significant. Penny is struggling with a lot of things, and part of her melt-down during the climax has to do with her own biological clock.

No, not that way! What I mean is, she's growing up, and she's at a point where she has to decide if she can or should continue to spin her wheels doing nothing much in particular with her life, or whether she should commit to the hazardous (and morally ambiguous) path of the archetypal hero that has opened up for her.

(Of course she's going to become Athena Fox. She's got a whole series of books to do!)

In the Japanese context, there is the phrase "Christmas Cake," and it doesn't just refer to the Japanese version of the fruit cake (this a rather more palatable thing covered with seasonal strawberries):

The term was more common a decade ago, but just as no-one wants the cake after the 25th, nobody wants the would-be bride after her twenty-fifth. Which Penny is fast approaching. Of course the "Fox's Wedding" of the title refers specifically to a weather event and the mythology around it:

But I would very much like to be as close to the 25th as I can, and not moved on to the festivities immediately preceding the New Year, as motivators for when Penny goes a little crazy in the deep snow with killers on her tail. That, and there is yet one more Christmas-related bit I really want to work in:

Read dead contention

This is the bookshelf that has most of my Japan books:

It does not include the manga, including a great many back-issues of the Japanese Language through-manga magazine Mangajin, or the history books concentrating on the Pacific War (which is, oddly, how I got into Japan in the first place; not through anime, not even through Kurosawa, but through the Kaiten and the Never-Die ship and...well anyhow.)

Besides the new Turnbull ninja book, the one I've really been spending time with is the Lonely Planet Kyoto that I actually had on me in Kyoto. Which has helped a lot in trying to remember what it was I saw there a decade or two ago.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the big Philosopher's Path chapter. Which as I've been tinkering has grown from a walk for my protagonist to stretch her legs to an introduction to Japanese religion, the most being-a-tourist-in-Kyoto scene yet, a long musing on archaeology and the Artifact, and a sort of Tomb Raider sequence with a (slightly) hidden shrine and with a tough hike standing in for jumping from rock to rock, white-painted ledges not included.

By the by, I finished Shadow of the Tomb Raider, main campaign and all but one of the optional "Challenge" tombs. I've been feeling unwell for far too long this time. Today has been the longest I've been able to sit at the computer and work and I still only got another thousand words or so finished.

And since I'm still unsure where exactly I'm going with her investigation of the cult I can't even tell exactly where and how or even what information I need to feed to the reader. So a lot may be changing when I get into revisions. As much as I'd love to shove another book out there I need the editing time. And besides, any inertia left over from the last release is already spent. Really, I should have waited until I could dump four books on the store within a couple of months.

And that's the other reason I haven't opened up most of my books. This time around, the stuff I need on the general shape of the culture and the historical and archaeological stuff I'm keying the adventure off of is already in my head. This is more detail stuff, feet-on-the-ground stuff, meaning I've been spending most of the past few days scrolling through maps, watching travel videos, and reading menus online.

Yojiya is one such bit I had to look up stuff on. She goes there for coffee, but the cafe is a relatively late addition to a popular Kyoto make-up store which claims to have created blotting-paper (for skin, that is) and made a start selling theatrical makeup at the turn of the 20th century but is named for toothbrushes...well, there's way too much to put in, especially as there's a conversation about seasonal and festival foods as well. 

But I do seem to be making some progress in down-pedaling the facts and the names and especially the Japanese words and filling a lot of pages with more generic "stone and leaves" sorts of descriptions. That, and a focus on physicality which is going to be about a third of the book. Basically, she's getting back into shape, and this gives me a chance to talk from experience about muscle pains without having to, again, put in all that stuff that some of my readers complain about being "too much detail!"

***

Finished the first draft of the Philosopher's Walk scene and am a thousand words into a "Walk around Nanzen-ji" scene that basically continues the action. By the time I'd finished with blotting paper, matcha cappuccino and stone mice temple guardians I needed to put in a scene break. I'm now up to the point where I'm going to do a description of Penny's first day "on set" as Athena Fox, as this chapter has also become a critical beat in her accepting of her new life.

Zen and the art of the ineffable

I've been in Kyoto.

That's a big part of this experiment, this series, this attempt to not wallow for years with ideas and research but never actually write the book; to write about places I've been.

Kyoto is called the city of a thousand temples. It's actually got some 1600 temples and another 400 shrines. Depending I suppose on how you count. So that means that, no matter what I might have intended when I started plotting this book, eventually it was going to have to be about faith and worship and the unseen world.

Related to that, my current thought on the underlying super-plot is there isn't some singular and easily explicable thing with fake gods and atlanteans or whatever. I've realized no matter what I came up with, it would be a let-down. So instead there are what look more and more like gods or something that fits similar niches choosing to involve Penny in their games. That was one of the original conceits, after all; that Penny went to Athens and at the very temple of Athena atop the acropolis took the god's name. And after that it looked a hell of a lot like said god had noticed.

The London book, the brush with the supernatural is extremely muted. There's a little side discussion about modern mythologies and heroes supplanting older beliefs; Toutatis out, Doctor Who in. And some mysterious goings-on in the sewer and the open question of who was working against her all along.

My current plan is that at the end of the Paris book I'm going to finally reveal Jameson, a sort of Elon Musk Silicon Valley figure who has been name-dropped from the first prologue, and who turns out to have direct connections to several of her old friends and some of the things that have happened to her.

In any case, there are vague hints about Kitsune in this one, and some moments enjoying some of the spookier spots around Kyoto (I've been lost above the big Inari shrine -- I know!) But the closest the supernatural will get to a come out and slap you moment is when Penny holds the Mirror and becomes absolutely certain it is the Mirror. 

And, oops, spoilers?

***

So I am doing research. Reading about religions, which is a whole lot of fun. Turns out religion in Japan is both syncretic and, shall we say, ecumenical. The lines between Buddhism and Shinto get very blurred. And of course on the other hand there are so very many sects (plus Shinto doesn't have a holy book, and despite the legacy of State Shinto is more like multiple unique collections of ritual traditions.)

And about the thousand temples of Kyoto, because even though I visited at least a hundred of them (or so it felt) they all run together in my mind. So I'm doing the legwork to try to find which ones are most appropriate to the story I'm trying to tell.

***

Which leads to a last. When I set out to write the Athens book the only subject I'd really delved into was the Bronze Age. I hadn't even read The Iliad yet. Japan, though; Japan has been an interest of mine for a while and I wrote a previous book and a long fanfic with that setting (more or less). I've got two bookshelves full of histories and stories and mythologies of Japan, castles and homes and traditional crafts, Kodansha's Kanji dictionary and other language studies, and a pile of manga to boot.

And I haven't the time to open most of them. This idea of writing a book in a year means all research must fall into the category of "do it only if you must." Even if the book is right there on my shelf and I read it once already!

Death by Camera: Shadow of the Tomb Raider

This review is likely to be somewhat long and rambling. For one thing, the game in question was intended by the creators to round off the reboot trilogy, thus has to be considered in the total context of not just the other two reboot games but the franchise as a whole.

For another, it hooks into the Gail Carriger book I just read and the plot concepts that I am currently wrestling with. There's a clear illustration of this around the first quarter of the game; the big Jonah/Lara argument after the destruction of Cozumel, where Jonah is arguing to help the locals and Lara is arguing she needs to personally go off and fix things.

In any case, I'm going to try to walk through this semi-methodically as Graphics, Gameplay, Story, and Culture and Context.

So here we go!

Graphics-wise, I find it a mixed bag. There is no denying that the lighting is improved and the jungle foliage is ridiculously lush. It also has a more saturated look, appropriate to the climate certainly, and one does have to admit that Rise of the Tomb Raider went too far the other way in having a rather dull look color-wise.

It also impacts the system to a ridiculous extent; it took a long while to find a combination of settings that would run without actually crashing to desktop, but didn't introduce some abhorrent artifact. Between the fine details of foliage and grass, draw distance problems, and some deep failure in either texture sampling or anti-aliasing, all of the pre-made settings suffered from shimmer and sparkle in everything from hair to distant buildings.

There is another graphics issue that relates to gameplay. The "Bat Vision" introduced in the first reboot game is simply layered on just as it was for that game. But it no longer works right in the upgraded graphics and more complicated environments. The overlay is ugly and it effectively reduces the information you get, not adds to it. Also, use of this mode is tied firmly to puzzle clues, which meant if I hit the button to see if any one of fifty similar-looking containers actually contained crafting material, I'd hear for the fortieth time Lara say, "I need to find a lever to lower that basket!"

And, yeah, we're sliding into gameplay here. This game emphasizes stealth (more on that later) but this makes the Lara Vision a problem not a solution. Whereas in, say, the Arkham games you would turn on Detective Vision in order to see where the mooks were in a darkened room, when you turn on Lara Vision it marks only those enemies that were in line-of-sight at that moment. Worse, the nature of the overlay means you can no longer see which way they are looking! Oh, but even worse? If you are hiding in shrubbery, the shrubbery turns bright white in the overlay meaning you can't see shit in any direction.

They almost fixed this with a lingering "heightened senses" effect you get from ingesting certain plants. But this one overlays all enemies with bright white, meaning all you can see is white blobs and you can't tell if they are looking at you, readying an arrow, or being observed (a useful clue -- or at least it was in the previous two games). It also lasts for about thirty seconds and you can only carry a small handful of the herbs with you.

The last is the basic failure, and it is where graphics as part of the design concept slams into play concept. Lara's old enemy from the previous series has returned, and is more dangerous than ever. Forget cultists or animals or pit traps; the thing most likely to kill Lara is the camera.

First off, this is a game that finally delivers the old Tomb Raider experience. Puzzles are back with a vengeance (even if most of them are optional). Combat is reduced. Traversal is more varied (and much more difficult) than ever before. Enemies are much more real and deadly and even on Easy setting one guy with an obsidian-studded mace can totally ruin your day.

But...

This is the same basic problem I have with the difficulty scale in most games, and the nature of elite and boss enemies in those same games. Increasing difficulty increases the number of hits the enemy takes to go down. That does make it more difficult, but it is like saying it is more difficult to play piano with one hand. It isn't more interesting. You just have to go back to the save point more often. 

In the case of Shadow most of the puzzles are difficult in a good way. They actually take a bit of brain work to figure out. (Although, to be honest, the most difficult part of the puzzles is not figuring out how to jury-rig an ancient mechanism, it is figuring out what the game designers wanted you to do. Which is often completely at odds with what seems plausible to actually work.)

This is also true for the traverses, and here I really have to disagree with the game. In the earlier games there were multiple plausible paths. In this game, particularly, there is only one path. And as with the puzzles, half the time it isn't "I'll bet you could push through the brush there," but instead, "I'll bet the game designers wanted me to do another jump, so let's see what is exactly fifteen feet away."

And, yes. It isn't that it seems logical you'd be able to leap straight up from an underhang. It is that you know what the game designers are likely to do. Depth cues are difficult in this game and the camera is often constrained or even locked during jumps, meaning you can't actually look around and see which way you might need to go.

You end up just going whatever way seems like the designers would probably want you to, and if that was wrong, you die and go back to a distant save point. Again and again. This isn't difficult; this is just frustrating.

And that's only starting with the camera. It is always moving, always trying to angle for the best cinematic angle. When you are lining up for a difficult jump or trying to target an enemy, the camera is moving. During the scripted sequences, with things falling down and explosions going off, the camera shakes and goes sideways and so on, plus you stagger as well (and not always in the same direction.) The game also has a delight in the canned animations that must play at the best camera angle; during swimming sequences, if you rise to an air pocket, a canned animation takes over, yanking you out of any sense of what direction you were swimming in or where the thing was you were trying to reach.

And that is all over the game. Fights and falls are placed just after massive load-ins of new environments, meaning even running off an SSD you get killed because the scene started to play before the frame rate came up above 1. Again, none of this is fun. It is challenging, but the challenge is in trying to anticipate what the computer is going to do. Every jump you make, there's some subtle rule going on about when the game will actually respond to the control, and when it will ignore it -- making the jump doesn't give you a sense of physical accomplishment, it gives you a sense of, at best, playing Simon Says.

At least the dreaded Quicktime Events are largely absent. They've modified them again, though; guessing when to hit the button has been made easier, but they decided to have the label pop up at the last second. So, again, instead of watching a life-or-death struggle against a jaguar, you are watching a yellow circle waiting to see if it is going to contain an "E" or an "F."

I was going to hold off on this but, basically, this is the choice the game made; to prioritize the cinematic experience. The scripted sequences, the frequent cut scenes, the canned animations with their own extra-special camera angles; it is all done to show you exactly the game they want to show you. So little things like multiple paths to the goal are looked on with horror. If you jumped left and used the vine to get over to the broken bridge, it wouldn't look as cool as the path with the rock pick that they intended you to take.

The very first reboot game, Tomb Raider 2013, suffered from split vision. There was the vision of the writer. And there was the vision of the design team, which seemed to be largely, "The committee has determined people like crafting and looting and collectables and DLC in their games, so we need to put all of those in." This led to the worst case of ludonarrative dissonance I have ever played.

Shadow of the Tomb Raider, though; on the one hand it found its way back to the roots with an emphasis on traversal and puzzle-solving and a de-emphasize on giant gun battles, but it did this a bit haphazardly. They made these changes in intent, then re-used and re-treaded what were already somewhat creaky mechanics.

The Lara Vision being a case in point. The new intention for combat is stealth, and there are some new stealth tools...but then they wrecked it by re-using a vision that doesn't support it, and choosing to upgrade all the enemy so they can't be killed with any of the silenced weapons! The silenced pistol is an expensive buy that is possible at about the 1/4 point at the earliest -- and there was one enemy encounter where it could have been used. One. Every other enemy is wearing helmets and reacts to getting hit by a silenced pistol with calling in 2x their number in magical teleporting reinforcements.

Heck, the game scripts in these magical teleporting reinforcements even if you do beat the stealth portion.

The enemy still bobs and weaves, but the new camera and an even more janky sight picture means it is basically impossible to line up a shot during melee. And yet, they decided that open melee wasn't what they wanted, so Lara is realistically fragile to it. The end result is you stealth until the game gives you an unbreakable-by-design setup, at which point you use a shotgun or machine gun to hose the area that contains the rapidly dodging enemy. And pop healing herbs like they grew like weeds (which, well, they do!)

So let's talk culture. There are overheard conversations, way many letters and codices and diaries you can collect and read, and plenty of NPCs to talk to. Well, listen to them talk; this is not a Bioware game. You don't get to select a response. The conversations are interesting on paper. Which pretty much underlines that writers are the cheapest part of a modern game.

The voice acting of the main cast is fine. The NPCs are a bit canned. The best I can say is that they seem to be in the appropriate languages. But...

The Peruvians are all speaking bog-standard Mexican Spanish. And whatever Nahuatl or something is being spoken in Patiti, at least it seems to be spoken by people comfortable in it. There just isn't a lot of voice acting going along with it.

And, yeah. There's a nice bit on all the multiple dialects going around, but that's really part of a long-winded grind mechanic where you read inscriptions in order to learn a language so you can decipher another inscription that tells you were there's some buried gold you can use to purchase that silencer or whatever.

To give them credit, Patiti really is a Mayincatec culture; fleeing Maya came to this location and hooked up with local pre-Inca when their own agricultural methods were a total fail in the highlands of Peru. Then some Aztecs moved in and formed their own insular religious ruling party. Still, the game doesn't go out of its way to identify which culture you are looking at from one moment to the next, making it all a bit of a pre-Columbian mish-mosh.

And unusually for a game, there's a bit where the mythology being tapped to solve the latest puzzle machine is...the Stations of the Cross (it was a Catholic Missionary who set that one up.).

It is again hit or miss. There are fewer of the full 3d artifacts to examine, but those are done in some detail. There are a lot of chunks of mythology being read off inscriptions but the iconography isn't there; it's the same damned plinth every time. And...in the Young Lara sequence, she gets a chance to look through some display cases at Croft Manor and one is identified as containing "The death mask of Agamemnon." I think it even name-drops Mycenae...but it is a stone monkey-mask of a thing. I've seen the Mask of Agamemnon. I've been in the museum where they keep the Mask of Agamemnon. This was not the Mask of Agamemnon.

Which means it is time to move on to Story. But I don't care for that at the moment. This game is as I said trying to conclude the "birth of a Tomb Raider" as begun in Tomb Raider 2013. At the end of this, she is as close as the reboot series is going to get to the experienced and hardened Lara Croft of earlier games.

Except not really. For every little step it takes that way -- such as elements of the iconic outfit sneaking back in, and increasing confidence and skills -- it misses. The twin pistols are nowhere to be seen. And even more weirdly, the same mocap animation from the first game is still there. It made sense then that inexperienced Lara would do a desperate scramble for cover or flailing attack with an ice axe. But Lara, as much as she is doing a coldly practiced stealth take-down in this game, still flails and scrambles. Whereas the previous Lara Croft could be flamboyantly gymnastic, this one still climbs over a low barrier with all the grace of a graceless thing.

Apparently the original cut of the game had Natla (the Big Bad from several of the previous games) making a Marvel Cinematic Universe style cameo. That got taken out before the game shipped. But here's where they have left it; they've evolved the character away from the scared and desperate kid doing the best she can, but they don't seem to have evolved to anything in particular. There's a lot to go before we've got a solid character; at current she is still uncomfortably balanced between various things that no longer quite fit.

Which can be, actually, a good place for a character. But how I'm having to deal with that same problem with my own girl archaeologist -- well, I'll leave that to another essay.

It ain't easy being blue: Halo 4 (and Halo Reach)

 Halo 3? I really don't remember much about it. That's my review of the game; nothing that new, blends seamlessly into the previous games. I think there were some tweaks to combat, which for me was mostly being annoyed by an intrusive pop-up every time dual-wielding the same weapon became possible (something that in practice was essentially useless), and still being annoyed that sprinting was a special function that could only be used if you didn't have a jetpack or something else useful equipped.

Oh, there is a long horror-movie sequence where you rescue Cortana from a crashed ship completely over-run by the Flood. And since the Warthog Run of Halo 1 was so popular, they made another one only even more epic (and even more able to annoyingly kill you on the first time through because it is packed full of scripted events you can only steer around if you already know they are going to happen).

Halo 4 is a product of a new studio and it shows. It opens with a view of the creche Master Chief -- aka John-117 -- was raised in, and an interview questioning the morals and judgement of Catherine Halsey, chief architect of the Spartan program. The game proper opens with Master Chief being awoken from cryosleep by a much more human and visibly distraught Cortana, his AI assistant and growing friend, who soon reveals she is nearing the end of her service life and is already descending into madness.

Most of the game is the same-old running around huge but pretty environments shooting at everything, with the last half or more of the game feeling like a long sequence of running from one button to another with inevitable spawning enemies just to harass you from plugging in Cortana so she can so the whatever she is doing.

The reviewer from Kotaku itself (who do games for a living) found the ending confusing. I stopped trying to pay attention, just going where-ever the mission marker was in the rare moments where there was one, and running in whatever direction was open the rest of the time. At least sprinting is back, on top of special armor abilities. Unfortunately my favorite weapon, the glowing melee sword, runs out of juice after a dozen hits and has to be retired.

And of course the game resets you to the starting load-out with every ride you get to the next major location. On the down side, you never get to find and polish a particular play style. On the plus side, you always have to keep adapting and it keeps you on your toes (still, almost nothing beats hijacking a Ghost and driving around the landscape ramming whatever it is you can't shoot.)

But forget all of that. What holds this game together is the interaction between Master Chief and Cortana; between this child locked in a super-soldier man's body, an almost autistic outsider who doesn't even consider himself human, much less the same as the civilians he encounters, and the scared, vulnerable, super-powerful and sometimes raging maniac AI that is the only thing John has ever had an emotional relationship with.

And this builds on the relationship that was there, if much more muted, through the games. Master Chief did rescue Cortana in Halo 3, after all, and through long stretches of several of the games she has been the talkative commenter and aide and shoulder angel companion in your ear.

***

Halo Reach jumps back to events preceding the first game, when the Covenant suddenly and surprisingly attack with overwhelming force. You play as an un-named rookie on a team of Spartans (who all show more character than Master Chief ever has). They are all character actors and rather stock characters, too, but since most of the game is fighting this isn't a problem. And the incomprehensible plot and gratuitous Capitalized Nouns are kept to a minimum as well.

Since this is the fall of a peaceful colony planet there's a lot more civilian infrastructure and even actual civilians being seen. You don't "interact" with them per se -- but then I'm spoiled by Mass Effect and other dialogue wheel games. You watch a cutscene where colonists talk to your squad. Much of it in Russian, which is a nice little touch (I guess it is a most Russian-speaking colony? Or is that just the area you are in?)

This game pretty much maxes out on the smoothness of the combat system and options (although sprint is still a replaceable option). It also breaks things up even more than usual, with several vehicle sections including a dogfight in space and a helicopter gunship sort of thing with an extended sequence and lots of mini-missions around the rooftops of a city.

These, really, are the apex games of the series, and the only ones I could see myself playing again. There is just enough leavening of character and story to make the combat feel meaningful...and the combat flows well, too.

Fast and Simple

I'm beginning to wonder if fast and simple are antithetical.

People keep giving me trouble about "putting too much stuff in," and when I complain about how long it takes to write a book, they sigh and say, "maybe if you didn't put so much stuff in."

I think it might be the other way around. I'm doing all this research to try to find those singular characteristic emblematic things that can stand by themselves without any of that other stuff. And I'm far too conscious that I'm working on too tight a deadline, without enough time for research or planning to be able to discover then focus down on those single vivid bits.

If I was just doing an info dump, there would be no research at all. If I were to just "put in everything I know about Japan" I would fill a book easily and I wouldn't have to look up anything first.

But yet, I'm not even sure that the simple and clear actually exists, even if I spent all the time I wanted trying to find it.

***

I still don't know how to fill pages. When you get down to it, it is about filling pages. Things go on the page that are interesting enough for the reader to want to continue.

And, yes, you can't just have one thing. Nothing but plot would be a dry exercise indeed. Nothing but description would feel empty, nothing but action would feel trite, nothing but dialogue...you get the picture.

The London book ended up being dialog-intense. Well, the Athens book was largely a solo trip -- it's the reason I made her a first-person narrator, so someone could talk during the long journey. Both, too, I was conscious of the huge info-dump. Largely, the narrator explained in the Athens book. In the London book, people explained to the narrator. Hence so much dialog. I did try to slip some in through direct experience or demonstration, though.

The Japan book I'm trying not to have so much stuff to communicate. My intent was to fill the bulk of the pages with "raw" description. Not explanations, not info-dumps, not lists of things or Japanese names of things, just trees and rocks and clouds and sun.

Somehow.

The other idea was to fill a bunch of pages with description of physical activity, and again not so much technical details of climbing or info-dumps about physiology or names of exercise types but more than anything else the experiences -- physiological and psychological -- of exercise.

I just did a thousand-word scene which can be summed up with, "That morning I went for a run."

Well, okay, I cheated. First there's a conversation with her friend, via the magical bluetooth earpiece (it is only identified as "something special from a company Aki flew out to interview at" so it can do whatever I need it to do without worrying about real-world details). Then her friend cues up a workout soundtrack for her.

The original plan was to go 20,000 words worth of exercise, plus some shrines-and-temples-and-sushi Old Kyoto tourism stuff, plus some flirting with Ichiro. 

And so I'm up against it again. I have two scenes in my planning list right now. One is street food in a popular alley in Kyoto. Another is a small rock gym and a beginning climber to be a Watson for the scene.

So I could list and describe street foods for pages. I would have to look that up but it wouldn't take long. Could pretty much vomit the right Wikipedia page.

The climbing, too, I could go a thousand words just explaining drop-knee and dyno, crimps and buckets and pockets, and that's before getting into Cliffhanger jokes and T-Rex routes...

I still  don't have a feel for what the Japan book is going to do. And I still haven't quite worked out if there is a standard Athena Fox story, once she's finally accepted the role and gained the basic skills (a process she is still ongoing).

Sumimasen, Nihongo ga wakarimasen

And as Penny pointed out a book or two ago, saying "I do not speak your language" too well, with good grammar and pronunciation, sets up a cognitive dissonance. It is actually recommended in Japan to say, "So-ri, I do no-to su-pi-ko ja-pa-ni-su."

Which leads me back to what I didn't want to do in the current book. Sigh. I'm writing a world adventure series but my protagonist doesn't speak any of the local languages. That gives me nothing but awkward choices;

She can have no conversations with the locals at all. Nothing of culture, no character interactions. 

She can speak in halting pidgin. Besides dragging down the pace of the story, besides taking the more nuanced observations of society off the table (it's a bit to say "We belong to a socio-anarchist collective" in pidgin), it also risks filling the book with Funny Foreigners. That is...all the locals look like idiots because they can't speak correctly.

She can mysteriously run into fluent English speakers everywhere, and in regards to the funny foreigner problem above, nobody takes notice of it (because "You speak English well for a backwards tribesman" is not the way to go.)

And what really kills me is that Japanese is such an seemingly accessible language. The pronunciation appears regular (hint -- it actually isn't), the grammatical rules are exposed (and are a lot more difficult than they appear at first glance), etc.

Take the title above. If you know the "hello and thank you" words then you already know "sumimasen" is "I'm sorry." And you might remember "Nihon" is how you say "Japan" in Japanese, and that it like several nouns appears in noun-compounds; such as "Nihonjin" for "Japanese person." And lastly, if you have delved at all into grammar you know the "su" endings are "is" and the "masen" endings are "is not."

And that means you can reconstruct this as "Sorry, Japan-thing verb-isn't." Doesn't take much guesswork after that to make out Nihon-go is Japanese language, and Wakari is "To understand."

Ah, but understanding why the particle is "ga" and not "wa"...?

Eventually I'm going to send her to Central America and there her High School Spanish will mean she can converse near-normally. Except for all those intriguing little differences between dialects and idioms (as quoted in The Fruit Palace, "Does red make you fight?")

Next up, though, is Paris, and the running gag in that one is going to be the seeming failure of Penny's magical mimetic ability. No matter what she says, the Parisians will correct her. 

***

On another front -- and I almost started with this instead -- I've found myself writing historical fiction. When I did the Athens book I was extremely careful about describing actual places correctly for the would-be traveler. I didn't want to give bad travel advice, so if I said there was a train from so-and-so, then I made damn sure you really can catch a train there.

I was a little less careful about the London book but I still added a back-page disclaimer that some of the things I portrayed were out of date or modified for the purpose of the story. But here too, I was being careful.

I'm still being careful in the Kyoto book, but something has happened in the meanwhile. The world is changing. It is probably happening a lot less in Japan, but right now, I am feeling more and more that what I am writing about, in stories set in 2018 and 2019, is a vanished world. My reader is no more going to be able to follow exactly in the footsteps of Penny Bright in the London of 2018, than they would be able to go and do what Linnet did in the 1940's diary Penny discovered in the Underground.

January is going to be a tough month. February might be too. I think it might be March before we see a light at the end of the tunnel -- and find out if it is daylight or an oncoming train.

Military Blues: Halo 3 ODST

I am tempted to call this a Noble Experiment of a game. The stated purpose of the developers was to get away from the all-military environment of the Spartans and Master Chief and show some of the smaller stories of people caught in war.

The best parts of the game, in fact, is when you as The Rookie are searching the war-ravaged streets of New Mombasa through one long night, avoiding Covenant patrols while looking for other members of your squad. It is dark, noir-like chiaroscuro lighting and cool sax music is playing.

And as The Rookie picks up emblematic items left behind by his fellow soldiers -- a broken helmet, a discarded sniper rifle -- you shift in time and POV to play as that soldier and experience what they saw before that long night.

This is reasonably clever but it is also great play pacing. After sneaking around and running from firefights it is nice to get into a pedal-to-the-heavy-metal Warthog Run.

But that's the first 2/3 of the game. The rest of it, you are back to frenetic firefights, running back and forth trying to reload from weapon drops and pick up more health packs.

Thing of it is, even The Rookie is ODST. Master Chief might be a super-soldier in the Steve Rogers mold, but you are Special Forces. The ordinary soldiers the developers spoke of are still cannon fodder, and there's still chatter about how grateful they are about having one of You to help them with their battles.

And the civilians? Nothing but voices on a recording (which is too easy to miss, too). (Plus those darkened streets are so dark you end up playing most of the game with Batman Vision -- sorry, HUD enhancement -- on.)

The Heroine's Journey

 I've been reading an interesting book called The Heroine's Journey, by Gail Carriger. Her thesis is that, for as many stories that can be dissected in terms of the Campbellian "Hero's Journey," there are as many for which the themes and tropes of that journey are antithetic.

To explain; the Hero leaves his/her social circumstance to begin their adventure. The Hero's ultimate victory is in solo heroics. Their victory also leaves them outside society; they may as Campbell says "bring the boon back to the village" but they can not go back with it. Frodo must sail away to the Everlasting Isles.

Which is actually a great way to talk about the contrast. Samwise Gamgee returns to the Shire. Sam spent his adventure as one of a group of companions. Whereas Frodo followed in the footsteps of Bilbo to leave home, Sam travelled for the Shire -- he almost literally carried the Shire on his back (well, on Bill's back). Sam did go into the Underworld, but the one time he took up the Magic Artifact and set out on a Solo Adventure he was only to happy to get back to the supporting ground of being a supporting character.

Which is Gail's argument; that for some characters and some stories they stay within society and have equal companions and win not by becoming special and an outsider but by fitting in. 

And also that these aren't mutually exclusive stories -- as seen in the above example with Sam and Frodo, who both go through elements of the traditional Hero story as well as the alternate Heroine story.

Actually, Gail's thesis is perhaps more that a story shouldn't be described as "failing" if it doesn't have the proper Hero's Journey elements to it. But her book is really about understanding the various themes and tropes both as analytical tools, and as tools for the writer.

***

I'm only a few chapters into that book but it is already making me think. My novel Shirato I thought of Mie's social circumstances as something she had to overcome, even if her ultimate goal was to get back to society (to "find her proper place," as she kept saying.) But really; she is a heroine forced on a hero's journey and the worst mistakes she makes -- the times she hurts people and almost makes things worse -- are when she is isolated. Her greatest triumphs are swaying her old crew to her side, her friendship with Yuri, and making herself a temporary home in the market on Koyama.

This same intersection is happening in the Athena Fox stories. I am more conscious of the themes I am weaving, but this gives me a new analytical tool to describe them and think about them.

The climax of the London book was absolutely constructed as the Underground sequence of a classic William Campbell. So much that the bit where she has to bluff a guard to get into the excavation at the start of the journey is called, in the chapter titles omitted in the final compile for the public, "Threshold Guardian."

But even there, underground, the Graham Magic comes into play. This is the way the character Graham had attracted various skilled people into his orbit: it is also the analytical tool Penny uses now to look at the friends and supporters she has made. It is a conscious choice I had been making since the first book; that Penny meets people and makes friends and these are all people who can help her later.

(It is also that she is a Fox. Her nature is not to be a really good fighter, it is to manipulate the situation around her. A Wolf would fight their way in. A Fox sneaks...or makes a phone call to a couple of Ninja she met earlier...)

I could easily take this too far, such as by saying her stabbing of Fawkes crosses the line into isolation but the epilogue pulls her back into society (by getting her arrested but, eventually, forgiven by the society she has transgressed against).

Because helpful companions aren't the same thing as equal companions. Penny is more on a Hero's Journey than a Heroine's. And at least for one more book, at the crux she will be once again solo (at the climax, though, she has -- if not friends, at least allies. So even there I was aware that she works not by doing everything herself and fighting alone, but by making friends and allies.)

***

And, yes, I'm still struggling the transition into story proper. Roughly 20,000 words in, the reason behind some of the things that have been happening to her in Kyoto has become clear and she's been introduced to Transcendence and convinced to help investigate them.

I re-read and re-wrote dozens of times before the transition finally started making sense to me. 

And, yes. I am totally going to do a Mario Kart scene. Having just discovered they have them in Kyoto, too. Even though it does require a really big hand-wave...

It has a familiar ring: Halo 2 (Anniversary)

I've wanted to play Halo for a while but it was originally Xbox exclusive. Until the Master Chief Collection came to Steam, and the price dropped down to about as much as the last paperback book I bought.

Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, and Halo 3 form the core trilogy. Halo Reach is a sort of prequel to Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 3: ODST takes place on Earth during the events of Halo 2 and the start of Halo 3, and Halo 4 returns to the Master Chief, but in a new situation on another planet.

All of these are in the Master Chief Collection, with the first two games being remastered or "Anniversary" editions.

That all straight now?

***

Anyhow, Halo 2 is when the lore starts getting complicated. You play about half the game as the Arbiter, who is an Elite chosen by the Prophets to redeem himself after losing a Sacred Ring to the Demon, and finds himself in conflict with the Brutes especially after an Oracle explains a few things the Prophets had wrong about the Great Journey....

Yeah. This is what Yahtzee was talking about in one of his Zero Punctuation reviews. There are conversations in this game where every other word is capitalized.

So short version -- as of Halo 2 -- what is known is that the long-extinct high-tech Forerunners (as if you couldn't tell just by their name alone) were losing to the Flood, a parasitic alien life form (think fast zombie plague with all the trimmings), and they created the Halo Rings; ring-shaped habitat megastructures with about the habitable surface area of your average planet (for whatever reason) but entirely intended as doomsday devices; when the Rings fire they wipe out all life, period -- thus starving the Flood of potential hosts.

Some years later, the Covenant -- a theocratic alliance of several alien races -- has decided the Forerunners are gods and has confused the firing of the Rings with some sort of mass spiritual transcendence which they would very much like to happen. Oh, and they hate Humanity for desecrating all their cosmic temples. But while brawling around the Ring of the first game someone lets a sample of the Flood out of secure containment.

In the second game the three-way fight turns into a globular cluster. The three leaders of the Covenant have a religious falling-out, one of the more militaristic member races pulls a coup, and the Flood gets enough infected brains in one place in order to grow its own colony intelligence. Shifting alliances and frequent betrayals characterize the remainder of that trilogy.

A cool thing about that brain thing; the Flood tactics visibly change through the game, going from Zerg Rush to being dangerously canny. There are some other social dynamics at play; the Brutes operate in packs, fighting cooperatively, but when isolated from his pack a lone Brute will go rogue and start charging things. The Unggoy cannon-fodder lack esprit de corps and if their commanders are killed they will flee the battle.

***

The second game has more visual impact, and communicates a little better the scale of the Halo megastructures. There is more sense of space overall and orientation over a landscape, even if you traverse that landscape by going through far too many similar valleys/rooms/corridors/tunnels. At least there aren't quite as many this time, and they aren't quite as claustrophobic.

Still, I have to compare again to Mass Effect and Half-Life. Both of those games changed things up, with the environment, the mix of enemies, special goals or properties causing dynamic changes to the mix of strategies you could employ. In Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2 the combat is largely defined by your personal preferences and whatever weapons you managed to find lying around. Even in the larger arena-like spaces there aren't good ways to bunker and snipe or to bunch up enemies for a grenade or take over a pintle-mounted heavy weapon and go to town. You pretty much just do the same thing, only it takes longer to reach the next save point.

It is nice looking, and the play is fast and dynamically changing and you need to be smart and adaptable. So that's all to the good. Not bad for the price of an omelette.

Thank Ou

 Today was mostly re-reading what I've written so far. And I got hung up on the Japanese.

Specifically, the romanization.

So in the Hepburn Romanization, this would be written Arigatō. Notice the macron there. In the Revised Hepburn Romanization, the spelling is rationalized to be closer to the Japanese original; Arigatou.

If you look closely, you can see the hiragana above has five characters; A, Ri, Ga, To, U.

But this is a Japanese word (not, however, a loan-word) which is familiar to English speakers. Who have gotten used to seeing it spelled Arigato.

For this one, I feel okay diverging. But Kyoto, too, is more properly written Kyōto. And that can be a problem; taking words the reader is familiar with but making them unfamiliar by using spelling that looks unusual. I had the same problem in the Athens novel; many people outside of die-hard Classics folk are using a closer approximation of the Greek names rather than the Latin versions we've grown up with. Achilleus instead of Achilles, for instance. But that was, I felt, one thing too many to throw at my readers.

In any case, the older Hepburn is deprecated, plus too, many readers aren't used to the idea of the macron as a long vowel. And then there's the problem of a long ī, which is hard to read with a macron and works better as ii. The preferred Arigatou, however, to an English-speaking ear looks as if the final vowel sound should rhyme with "you." It is even harder for the average reader to understand that this is simply the same "o" sound drawn out to take twice as long to say.

***

Plus I'm fighting the usual struggle between natural variety and nuance and idiom versus simplifying the language so the reader has half a chance of figuring some of it out (or at least, not being completely flummoxed at Penny's ability to pick some of it up.)

That's been my intended goal since the first book, incidentally; that if it is plot-significant, the reader learns it at the same time Penny does. Sometimes I will have to break this, mostly by having someone (usually Penny) drop a lecture on the reader, but whenever possible I'm trying to let the reader learn more organically, by demonstration within the story.

The Japan book I have two strings to that bow; first is a running gag about a really thick "History of Japan" she picked up just before she got on the plane. Second is her friend Aki, a self-described otaku, on a bluetooth earpiece. Both of these allow me to dole out history and culture and language a little bit at a time. With lots of opportunities for gags.

And I am getting to be afraid that's going to be the nature of the series. As much as Penny is impersonating Athena Fox -- the experienced and polished world traveller, expert in history and speaker of multiple languages -- each story is going to drop her fish-out-of-water into yet another unfamiliar situation so the reader can as much as possible be shown and not told how the place works.

Bucket Heads: Halo CE Anniversary

Way back when I first joined the Replica Prop community over at the RPF, some of the greatest looking props were coming from the video game world. Several names were popping up all the time in the stuff I really liked the look of; Portal, Half-Life, Mass Effect. And Halo.

I impulse-bought Portal when it came on sale for a couple of bucks, and that started a whole love affair/huge time suck with modern games, especially "twitch" games -- first-person and third-person real-time games, as opposed to the turn-based strategy stuff I'd been doing before then.

It has taken me this long to work my way around to Halo.

Mostly I came to it for the world-building, the setting and lore. And that's a mixed bag. Yes, you are exploring a (small) Ringworld. And you can look up in those very few scenes that are set outside and see the Ring stretching above you. But other than that there's little sense of the thing.

Well, that's for Halo: Combat Evolved, the first game in the series, which I played as the Anniversary graphics upgrade. (Which, in a cute but poorly-documented bit, will toggle between the upgraded graphics and the original graphics with a tap of the tab key.)

Scale is a bit inconsistent in the game anyhow. In the last section you fight your way through a crashed ship with the final battle being in the main engine room with thirty or more opponents shooting at you. I've worked in much bigger buildings. But then you drive at top speed for six minutes to escape the ship. Drive, at a scale speed of at least thirty MPH. 

And that sort of segues to the lore. The lore is interesting, and complicated, and it has a deep history. And here is where I'm going to contrast with Mass Effect because Mass Effect gets history. Everything in the ME universe arises organically from the foundations. Yes, real history is complicated and inconsistent and entire civilizations go missing for centuries before someone reads the right inscription.

But the Halo universe feels wrong. It feels like every time the game designers needed to break up the endless combat with some slightly different version of the same endless mazes of corridors and small useless rooms, they invented some new bit of lore. "Wait, that couldn't have been made by the Forerunners! Oh, okay. So we'll just say this was made by the Predecessors. What happened to them? Oh, let's say there was a war with the Forerunners."

To give the first game credit, it keeps most of its lore behind the scenes. Why did Cortana send them to the Halo and how did she even know about it? Why did the Covenant attack Humanity? Who built the Halo and why were the Flood held captive there? None of this is explained and this is actually a strong choice -- a lesson George Lucas apparently forgot. You don't need to know everything; you are just one soldier doing the best with the facts at hand.

Which mostly involves shooting at far too many of the same basic enemy types in a maze of identical winding little rooms and corridors. Seriously, I got lost so many times. And getting killed, which moves us to gameplay.

Whereas the primary elements of most modern AAA shooters are the Holy 4 weapons selection and chest-high walls. (you will always have four weapons; not three, not two. Five is right out.) That is, cover shooters and you largely vary your tactics by choosing rifle/sniper rifle, machine gun, shotgun, and nobody chooses the pistol. Except me, and a few other people who have realized that often the pistol deals the highest damage at intermediate ranges and is extremely accurate.

Halo CE introduced the Holy Trilogy of Halo; weapons (which you have two and only two), grenades, melee. Instead of cover, it has recharging shields. And smart AI and lots of indirect fire. So the usual tactic is to hit-and-run, actively engaging to take out priority targets then ducking out of sight just long enough to recharge your shields.

Also, whereas vehicle sections, heavy weapons, and other ways to break up the pattern are usually scripted bit in AAA games, Halo CE largely integrates those. And I have to say, shooting an enemy driver and stealing their Ghost (a motorcycle-like ground skimmer) was my go-to any time the game gave me an opportunity. 

Some enemies are bullet sponges, and the Flood particularly go for Zerg Rush tactics, so the biggest enemy is, as with most games, attrition and fatigue. After dodging near-misses and scrounging for ammo (usually by trading off weapons endlessly for every weird alien weapon you find lying around the battlefield) and trying to watch your shields over a ten-minute mad fur-fight, eventually you blink and...it's back to the last checkpoint.

It does keep things lively, though. You rarely have the chance to really strategize and pick the optimal weapon and approach. Instead it is whatever you currently picked up and the best you can make do with it. Halo CE also has an annoying habit of insta-kills; there are artillery and various things that explode and enemies that spawn right on top of you and there's a lot of times you didn't do anything wrong, it was just you got unlucky.

So my rating? Aside from the endless, endless little rooms and corridors, the combat is decent. I probably would have dropped to an easier setting not because I had any trouble beating it, but because it was getting boring and repetitive.

The lore? It is a very Marines-themed universe (well, at least the parts you see of it). So now I understand that part of how people talk about the game and it's universe (because make no mistake, there are dozens of games, plus books and comic books and fan-made films, set in that universe.)

But regardless of how you feel about the lore, the interaction with it is different. You don't make choices, you don't have dialog, you don't really interact with anyone (particularly not civilians). So on that basis, I really prefer walking around the Mass Effect world.