Retro

Got talking with my tiki advisor and newly excited for that novel. So many basic questions to solve yet. Take world-building. What kind of world am I after? What kind of world-building am I using (that is, how much of the Gernsbakian explain-the-tech stuff is appropriate for the style I'm after)? How much world-building at all?

I mean, I don't even know if there are aliens.

Minor work on my personal tiki shrine -- aka, things I can have around me while I write. Found a nifty (plastic, but it looks okay) mp3 player shaped like an old transistor radio. Have tiki mugs. Thinking rattan mats...maybe even a palm.

***

Also retro is the new LORA I tried out in my SD install. Broke Automatic111 again (which is good) but finding it easier and easier to do a clean re-install so it is working again (which is bad). I'm only doing stuff for my own amusement and all I need in my life is another time sink.

But anyhow. I'd been bookmarking some "look like an illustration" LORA but not using them because I didn't quite see the point. Now I do. There's an unreality about AI creations which is rather off-putting. Well, turns out that making it look like an illustration and not a photograph eases past the worst of the Uncanny Valley. 

That, and this library is just really deep, and seems very good at interpreting. That could be the new model; tried out SDXL, now using a fork off that. It is much better at parsing prompts, though things like color words do have a tendency to go wild and spam over everything (the "man on a beach with a white shirt" problem).

I was having very little luck txt2img with the new LORA and was about to give up on it. See, most illustrations have story in them -- even if the "story" is just "proud engineer points at the new car." And I am all about story. Well, AI can only associate pixel patterns. That's one of the basic problems. There's no underlying logic outside of "this pixel pattern is often found near this pixel pattern" (which is why a wire will turn into a panel line half-way across a control panel, and vice-versa).

And there's no understanding of function, which is not just "the wire needs to be connected at both ends" (and not turn into a painted border in the middle), but the underlying logic to, say, a pose.

But it can inherit that given a proper reference. Turns out between the model and the LORA my local SD install has become really, really good at "reading" a source image and reconstructing what is actually going on. Well, things like humans holding swords or which part of a torch is actually on fire, it still has trouble with. But enough of the original logic of the source image is getting preserved that there is some decent mimicry of, well, story. 

***

And speaking of time-sinks. Still feeling so lousy that Satisfactory is all I feel up for some days. My last video just reached 1K views and a bunch of likes, which is a huge surprise. I guess people like my aesthetic.

But I am contemplating another build, this time heavily modded and with most of the alternate play options switched on, like free materials and no spiders.

One of the mods allows you to replace your trains with more historical-looking ones. With that and a texture mod, could maybe perhaps do something that isn't modern brutalism-plus-neon (which is practically the default look for most of the extreme builders. Called by one of my video commenters "reminds me of Portal."

Moving Day

I am...not sure about the changes in Satisfactory 1.0

I know they play-tested the thing, but that was with a closed beta (unlike the Early Access through version 0.8) There are several things that radically change the paradigm -- and are possibly in need of more balancing than they saw.

One of the biggest crunches in pre-1.0 was getting yourself and building supplies around the map. The two major strategies were either a really good bidirectional network (so you could run out to a remote factory and stock up on some necessary part for the new build) or depots, whether centralized and massive, or more like the "construction shack" buildings I was making that produce locally all the parts you need to build your new factory.

Or simpler "plop" factories, which I've been using a lot in my latest play-through. These are one-blueprint compact things that you set down and leave churning away filling a storage container of basic things like concrete.

To really make a good construction site depot you needed to add facilities to handle trucks and/or trains. Which made the depots more elaborate. And that in a large sense is the greater purpose of the game. Basically, you finish the game in order to get an (in-game) coffee cup. So making things work efficiently, or look cool, or be impressively large (or all three) is the real purpose of play and the reason the game is so addicting.

Yeah, so that changed.

1.0 added the Dimensional Depot. Stock gets teleported from wherever you are manufacturing it, straight into your interdimensional pockets. You don't need to run across the map (much) because you are almost done installing lights in the new factory but ran out of quartz.

They can't be hooked into a production line, at least. So those complicated supply lines are still there for major manufacturing sites. For the process of new construction, though -- these have streamlined it to the point of making it completely different.

And dimensional depots change another paradigm -- when you include things like the way they nerfed the deliverables for Tier 5.

Used to be, you couldn't get past early game on hand-crafting and plopping down a single Manufacturer and a bunch of spaghetti conveyors as the absolute minimum to reach your deliverables and unlock the next technology tier.

Yeah, well that changed. You can skip the hassle of conveyor belts and trains and all of that just by physically dropping by your machines at intervals and refilling them out of your own interdimensional pockets. And that's not the worst. With the addition of Somersloops, you can sloop the parts (it is a two-for-one return for the same amount of supplies) and that brings the targets well within what you can do with a couple of machines and a few containers plopped down on the ground without walls or even a foundation under them.

Basically, most of the reason to build a factory at all just went away. I've unlocked ALL the tech now, and I've just started building anything actually nice looking.

Okay, there was a bit of scale involved. I'm getting better with blueprints and I used saved blueprints from the last game (including some mega-blueprints made with a mod that isn't even installed on the new save) that could create a fairly large factory without anything but hooking them up to power and raw ore.

***

Other than that.

The desert start was a good one. I started this time right at the little oasis, which I carved up with a chainsaw and fed to a huge array of biomass converters for early-game power. Iron copper and coal are all over the place in that part of the world, and there's quartz sulfur and caterium not that far away.

Well, I'm finally at the point of the game where I have all the tech unlocked all the way to the end of the tech tree, all the Awesome shop unlocked, and all the key alternate recipes. And have (mostly with plop factories) enough supplies to build as much as I care to build.

I'm just...not quite as enthralled about building. The new multi-modal railroad system just doesn't look as nice as I'd hoped. And there's a few other odd changes, such as adding new fuels to the tier that mean you can keep expanding and altering your fuel generators and never go nuclear at all. 

And even drones. Used to be drones were restricted by having to use batteries, which were so hard to build you had to ship them (often using a second set of drones). Well, now the little guys will use local fuels. Ouch.

Oh, so here's my second video, messing around with the elaborate transit network I was talking about as a way to handle the personal logistics of a 0.8 build...

Teal Deer

Got another comment on the Paris book. I am so starved for comments and criticism. I have zero reviews on that book, not even any ratings -- it sunk into the Amazon pond with nary a ripple.

I knew it was going to be dense before I even started. The main plot thread was intended to be a sort of Umberto Eco conspiracy theory, winding together multiple weird tidbits of history. The bulk of the book, I rapidly decided, was going to be "friends chatting in cafes." That's what was going to fill the page count, not climbing monuments or solving puzzles or having a knife fight in the catacombs or whatever.

But what are they going to chat about? Well, the Paris art scene is a natural. The real-world alternative is philosophy and I don't do that -- my readers should thank me for that! Which turned out to work for the mystery because then instead of stuff about Bavarian Illuminati I could do stuff about Monet and Gaugin.

From a top-down view of the process, I get too much "stuff" in the books because I start with plot and themes and search for things that will carry that plot and illustrate those themes. And in the bad old world of "Show don't tell" that means being concrete. A specific thing means you can dramatize the delivery instead of having a maid-and-butler walk on to do an info-dump on the reader. And dramatizing implies a scene, which fills out your chapter plan and lets you work out the pacing and timing of your outline.

So we've moved from the necessary plot information of "This is a military base and they have guards" to getting stopped by two Air Force people in a jeep who have some amusing interactions.

And here's the problem, which I seem to increasingly have. And that is that the real world rarely offers the perfect platonic ideal of the thing that demonstrates the thing. Instead you have things that are sort of about the theme you are after, or include part of the clue you are trying to leave, but like any ordinary ornery individual they are also doing a bunch of other things.

And that means this thing, this perfect set-piece that delivers the information, is hairy with extraneous detail. And worse; the thing you turned to for an explanation of something plot-relevant itself begs explanation. 

In the Japan book I have a quick info-dump about the historical ninja, for which I expanded on a display/semi-museum that I'd actually been to. So a real place, the Toei Edo-era standing set. Which is also these days pretty much a ninja theme park. So getting to that museum for the info-dump pretty much required explaining why there is such a museum in this part of town and why it is surrounded by multi-colored ninja.

***

But that may not actually be it.

I'm thinking today that maybe the problem isn't coming from the top down, it is happening at the root, at the sentence and paragraph level. And is potentially an artifact of both the way I craft sentences, and the working method when I am doing them.

I largely write fast, at a sentence level. I don't worry a lot about word choices and I don't really stop that often to look things up. I am these days writing in a strong narrative voice, even when not in First Person. But having a motor-mouth auto-didact who geeks out about history certainly makes it worse; it is the natural narrative "voice" for Penny/Athena Fox to drop a zillion historical and pop-cultural references in as she goes.

Every single one of my critical readers has constructed this version of my work-process in their minds where I stare at a line of text trying to figure out how to cram in yet another bit of history...which I then proceed to waste another week in researching.

That's not what is happening. My natural narrative voice seems to reach for analogy more than description, and it is always drawing comparisons. So my process is actually I do a first-pass which is written almost as fast as that character would talk. Then I go back and take out as much as I can without destroying the integrity of the sentence.

The problem is made worse because I write in spurts, and I dream up new things for the following chapters as I am working on the current one. So in the heat of the moment I might name-drop Xenophon, but I almost immediately realize I could make a running gag of it. Before I've finished that writing session, the Xenophon references are a thread winding their way through the narrative and the scene to where there would be a lot of editing to try to replace them and stitch the wounds closed where they'd been.

And I've already come up with a payoff. And I love payoffs. Plot threads should when possible come to a conclusion that the reader will find justified for the work getting there. 

And I am not entirely ignoring that future reader in this process. One short running gag in the Paris book is about Monet haystacks. He was learning about light, you see, and painting them...but never mind all that. All you need to know is he got a reputation for haystacks in different colors and a critic even called it out.

It came up quite naturally when I was doing a nickel-explanation for Expressionism -- set at a museum exhibit, because fortunately there is such a thing in Paris. My lecturer character was talking about light and mentioned the haystacks, and because it was funny, quoted that critic I mentioned. I think it works and is illuminating as to what the Impressionists were, why they mattered, and what they have to do with the rush of the modern world, the fin d'seicle and the Paris Exposition and future shock and all that (which is, in my essay, at the core of Steampunk.)

But now it was out there. Hux makes a comment about Lo Lo's "Radium Dance" (yes; scientific exploration and future shock, all wrapped in one!) He comments her dresses were in more colors than a Monet haystack.

And when Penny is tailing the would-be treasure hunting gang through a Virtual Van Gogh exhibit, she briefly hides behind a haystack. And comments again.

***

It might even be a flaw with Discovery Writing. There's a big element of seat-of-pants in my process. And I've mentioned before that especially when I am working and there's no time to write, I think about the book and I dream up stuff that I now want to include.

But I still feel it isn't "stuff." It isn't add-ons, chocolate sprinkles. It is the muscles and tendons that make the story move. It is just that, as in real biology, those muscles and tendons aren't neat. They sort of go all over the place and there's a lot of them to keep track of (yes, I studied Artistic Anatomy once).

I hear about writers who write "lean." Not only do they go back to add adjectives and descriptions and otherwise put Color Commentary until their drab retelling of events has become a proper Monet haystack, they also go back later to add the things that I can't see writing the story in the first place without!

Like, the plot. Like love interest. Like the theme; the reason any of this is happening and why the reader should care.

I just don't see it.

And now we're circling around again to why I can't just go around with a red pencil and take out all the haystacks. It isn't just on a sentence level where I am left with a gap in the logic of the sentence. And when the sentence would be three words long and too short for the rhythm if I didn't come up with one more thing to say. One more verbal tick or bit of description, something that will add another three words and make the meter come out.

It is also on a story level. The big plot and the underlying themes aren't expressed in singular well-defined things that I can prune around. There's no "The Empire is evil -- hey, look at this Darth Vader dude!" There's Sith and First Order and merchant princes and Jabba and the underworld and...

The historical vision underlying the book is the fin d'siecle (and no, for my blog posts, I don't look up spelling). The accelerating technological change, the social change that goes with it, and industrialized warfare in the form of W.W.I is racing towards them. Writers and politicians and philosophers and artists are trying to make sense of the new world.

And that's why Monet haystacks.

I'm faster on my own

 Or so Aloy says at various points in the game. 

Most of my play-throughs, though, it's really been the opposite. Horizon Zero Dawn is not quite Metal Gear Solid, or even Alien: Isolation but it really does help to use the stealth mechanics. Or, at least, to plan ahead, scope the ground, and lay traps.

One big reason is, oddly, that stealth is cheaper. You've got arrows that can take down a machine in a couple of shots but they cost a lot of resources to craft.

Stealth kills cost nothing but a little time.

That is, if they are spear kills. Which brings me around to the flip side of the equation. As in all games, the NPCs are dumb as rocks when it comes to combat, and especially the friendly ones prioritize getting close-up in melee -- that is, putting themselves in danger instead of staying up on the ridgeline sniping.

Thing is, the character design is so good in Horizon Zero Dawn I care about these characters. Fallout 4, despite liking several of the companions, I can stand to see them in danger (with the exception of Dogmeat. I'll always go to his aid.) Starfield, well, I've made my feelings clear there. But even with these games, there's an emotional grab when allies are in danger that makes you want to run out there and protect them any way you can.

Which usually involves running into the thick of things. Forget hiding in the bushes and taking carefully aimed sniper shots only when the conditions are perfect. Instead it is jump in with spear swinging. Or as Gordon Frohman put it, "Must kill with my fists because guns too slow!"

Grotesque

The gaming community has found its latest outrage. Personally, I think this is overdue, the way the similar problems Adobe is having was. The large companies have merged too much and become far too distant from actually serving their customers. It makes sense that pot would boil over with louder and louder cries from said customers.

In any case, Ubisoft and Assassin's Creed is at it again. Once one of very few companies that were doing a first-person/third person experience (that is, something other than a top-down tactical game) based in history. Games that offered the chance to walk the streets of Alexandria or climb Notre-Dame de Paris.

 Yeah, that was already a bad sign. When Viollet-le-Duc reconstructed the old cathedral under the combined impetus of Haussmann and a public stirred to interest by Hugo, every grotesque created and carved was unique. But go parkour around the thing in the game, and you have the strange experience of encountering nothing but Le Strynge, over and over.

Forgivable in a way. Game assets are a conserved quantity and they didn't want to have to create every single Evangelist (on the spire) and Biblical King (on the facade) as individual models. Also, they were constrained by IP; there are protections to the stained glass, for instance, meaning Ubisoft couldn't just copy the stuff.

And there are artistic decisions I would probably make myself. Such as including the spire, even though the pre Viollet-le-Duc spire was rather smaller, and history indicates it might not have even made it as far as the French Revolution (and was certainly a mess by that time anyhow). But the spire is so much the look of it, part of the essence of the building, you'd lose that frisson if you presented a building without it.

There's a similar artifact in the latest (as yet un-released) game; an ocarina that looks to have been repaired by kintsugi. Well, that technique of repairing pottery with gold would be a decade or two early, and unlikely to be applied to (or work well) with a musical instrument. However, I'd reserve disagreeing with this if it is an artistic choice; the thematic resonance of the broken thing restored by metal to something that is both broken and repaired, old and new, is just full of potential symbolism.

However.

You can't see it very well in this image, but even to I -- who is hardly an expert on Japanese castles -- this leaps out as badly as the xerox grotesques on their version of Notre Dame.

That's the Shachihoko of Nagoya Castle, they are famous, and just as famous is that there are two of them. On the highest roof, and deeply symbolic. Covering every castle in the game to add a little more architectural interest is blind to the reality of the historical buildings, the highly codified styles of Japanese architecture, and their meaning.

According to a rising tide of native Japanese commenters (it tells you how bad it is that Japanese are making public statements about how badly they feel their culture is being served) this is all over the game.

But it isn't entirely creative decisions, and it isn't just laziness (although one can never rule these out). No, there is something else that also was visible way back in Assassin's Creed: Unity (the one set in Paris during the French Revolution.)

In Unity, blame might be cast in the direction of Abbe Barruel, author of one of the first histories to promote the same conspiracy-mongering about the Revolution that Unity also wants us to believe. (Basically the "rich merchants manipulated the stupid peasants into overthrowing a king they actually kind of liked" narrative.)

For Assassin's Creed: Shadows the book and name are even clearer. Thomas Lockley, who is a living historian, and far too happy to get "interviewed" on Ubisoft's pet podcast. His work may be of a higher standard than the Royalists that tainted the Unity story (to be fair, the games needed something to work in the Templars/Assassins conflict -- although oddly, they left that alone in Black Flag, where the pirates were quite happy to have their own story separate from all that conspiratorial nonsense). Still, it all reminds me far too much of the more than one Hollywood product that made use of a certain well-known "Plastic Shaman" rather than talk to actual Tribal experts.

There's a narrative here. History is always a narrative, historical fiction even more so, but it is increasingly off-kilter in the AC series; through the series it has fallen from the Enzo stories being deeply rooted in real currents of Italian history, to the entire game of Valhalla becoming nothing but a lame fantasy Viking retread. It is slipping off the slope until it stops having any link to history, and instead is just a theme-park background for the usual wearing hoods and stabbing people game play -- a looter-shooter with wrist blades instead of laser pistols.

Two of the Japanese commentaries I've watched so far were struck -- as struck as I was about the shachihoko -- by the really, really strange rice fields. They had that peculiar incoherence about them we associate with AI now; the shapes were there, but they made no sense. Where's the drainage? What are they doing in the fields in this season and this is clearly not a harvest (unlike what the dialog says). And why are there random bales of rice lying around where they will mildew and get infested by weevils?

There's no sense to it...and this is Japan. Rice is at the base of the economy and society. Taxes are collected in rice. Wealth is measured in rice. There are gods of rice. Ceremonies are based around the growing cycle of...rice.

It isn't like you can't put the whole thing in a game and get it right.

Getting it wrong isn't merely lazy; it is disconnecting your game, from gameplay to story to theme to message, from any attempt to engage with real places, real people, and real history. It is time for Ubisoft to stop claiming they are in any way attempting accurate history. They ducked out when it came to Notre-Dame de Paris, rightly explaining that their game model would be of no use to those reconstructing the cathedral after the fire.

Getting into a shit-throwing contest about how they did their homework and Assassins Creed: Shadows IS SO historical? Stop that.

Respect the rice!

Stimpacks

Finally the improvement is solid. I have managed to drive across town for brunch, as well as shop for groceries. 

And getting a bit of reading done. In my current rotation is a book on the history of NEST, a book on issues in indigenous archaeology, and a book on land rights and environmentalism at White Sands which is really a nice capsule history of the area -- and a lot of the things I want at play in the novel.

Oh, and Albee's book is waiting in the wings. I have yet to find a book I want on the Navaho and uranium mining (the ones I've found so far are only in expensive hard-cover). And there's a few other things I want to read up on.

(Other than, the legend of the Spear of Antioch in the context of the Crusades...a thesis project I discovered and have been enjoying reading).

Oh, and there will be a dual-time element in this book. Sort of. It isn't going to be Oppy's time, or anything like that. It is going to be sketches, done in third-person omniscient. This book has the widest historical scope of any of the Athena Fox stories, one almost Stapletonian in scale (aka Last and First Men). 

So far the sketches on my list include Lucy, the Egtved Girl, someone either in Berengia or Doggerland, an immigrant -- possibly at Ellis Island -- and "Seagull," from pissing on the bus tire to having stew with villagers in the Altai Krai.

***

The world still doesn't mean enough to me. I am finding it hard to engage with anything, but especially with fiction. Still, when my concentration was too bad for anything else I did manage to spend a little time playing games.

Tried out Nier Automata because I had heard the story was interesting. Actually, the story is depressing, and the game pretty much forces you to help it belabor the point (I seriously stopped shooting at the poor little robots unless I really, really had to). It also has a brutal save system, which combined with truly odd control mapping and camera and un-helpful prompts (the game is designed for controller and runs poorly with keyboard and mouse) left me restarting the game from practically scratch FAR too often.

Eventually it just bored me.

On the other hand, between Windows updates and the (very small) possibility that bugthesda actually did some work on it, Fallout 3 actually plays now. I'm finally to the Museum of Technology and really, really thinking about another fast-travel back to Megatown to purchase more stimpacks (threw all my points in small arms and INT -- I'm a total glass cannon).

Nesting Instinct

When a bunch of guys in white suits with close-circuit breathers show up waving geiger counters, someone will probably call them a "NEST Team."

Well, I've decided. The White Sands story is happening on a giant-ass military base and they have radiological people already but there was ongoing NEST training and lectures (Los Alamos is not far geographically. The NTS and Livermore are not all that far organizationally). So this really is real NEST guys taking the opportunity for a little practical exercise.

But that just underlines the directions I'm going with this. To go a bit further over the top. To go ahead and do some of the things that are popular in fiction. And, yeah, I am using many details of the actual White Sands paleontological discovery, but this is a clearly fictional dig with various things changed about it (I mean, besides the lack of a dead body in the original!)

Meanwhile I'm still piteously weak, unable to do much more than eat and sleep (and not much of the former, either). I don't see it plausible I'll be recovered enough to plan a trip for mid-October. But the main reason I wanted to visit the Trinity Test Site was more for the things they don't let you photograph; how built-up it is around there and whether it is at al possible for me to have a chase scene and climax happening there, in a chunk of far-from-deserted desert covered with cameras and sensors and some rather tight security.

I'm making a lot of progress with Jackson, Freeman, Specialist Lopez, the Ray Cats, "depressed" and "greasy" (two key characters that don't have even stand-in names, not yet). And more and more about Dead Guy, but nothing I've worked out so far about what we was working on and why it is secret is telling me how his body ended up in the national park.

My concentration is just about up to reading a bit of my growing stack of references over a meal. Then I go away again, to the point where even playing a game is too much for my concentration and energy (and my lack of interest in, well, anything.)

Did make a distinctive bit of progress with Starfield. Got a bit further on a faction quest, which is better than the main quest but still incredibly bad. A lame sneak session that was so poorly put together I'd actually completed it and was crouch-walking past confused embassy guards before I realized I'd completed it.

There's a bit where you are in a wrecking yard of people scrounging an old battlefield where mechs were employed against nasty alien "bioweapons" (the usual, "this creature killed a bunch of our soldiers so obviously we want to get more of them.") There's a part you need to finish the quest that either costs a bunch, or you can assemble from available scraps. The NPC is so very proud to lead you towards the game's crafting system in hopes that this time, you'll actually get interested in it.

Except that unlike every single other craft-able item, this one requires three other nonsense parts that can only be found on this one quest. In heaps of wrecked warbots with dangerous aliens crawling around the wreckage. You gotta search that old battlefield while not getting eaten.

Well, that sounds cool enough. Except...said battlefield is about two hundred meters, the lootable containers are lit up on the HUD like neon signs, and if you've sunk even one point in jetpack you can hop on top of a wreck and the aliens can't do squat to you.

Except...the things you need are randomized, the loot boxes remain on the HUD even after they are searched, and after two hours walking back and forth across this very very very tiny sandbox searching and re-searching I finally realized the game had never bothered to code it to make sure you'd get at least one of each!

And then it crashed again, locking up the computer so badly no key combination would even get me to Task Manager or otherwise in a position to do a soft quit. I had to power cycle the computer. When it restarted in good shape, I immediately DELETED Starfield forever and applied to Steam for a refund.

COVID Cookbook

Back in the first month of COVID when there was vaccine and everyone was sheltering in place, it was actually sort of fun getting creative and concocting meals out of whatever weird leftovers had been in the back of the cupboard.

I finally caught it, and bad. Stuck at home with nothing stocked up. But I also had severe stomach pains and so I had to be extra creative. The winner was some Irish Oatmeal I'd gotten on a whim a week ago. I could cook that soft and it would stay down.

The other success was a tomato-rice soap. My emergency Nishiki (white rice in a five-pound bag), a can of tomato sauce, bouillon cube and broth packet from my jollof rice recipe (definitely not on). 

I'm firmly in recovery now (after a week of pain). I can concentrate a little, I'm not falling asleep every four hours...

...and nothing interests me. I want to be alive again. See my friends. Go outside. Eat.

But I'm still carrying a viral load, I should still be isolating as much as possible...and over that ugly week I seem to have developed a bit of a food phobia.

Oh, and my New Mexico trip is starting to look like the nest of that wee Scottish mouse.

Western Europe is east of me

Which means Satisfactory 1.0 will be released at 8:00 AM tomorrow morning. Not a lot of time to make sure I've got footage of my previous game!

On the other hand, I'm finding surprisingly little of that world I really want to show off. As with so many things I do -- really, that most people do -- I run around trying out new ideas rather than sitting down to finish the old ones properly.

That, and I suck at videos. Everybody is doing their "farewell to Update 8" videos this week. As part of stirring up interest in what for some of them is going to be a full-time job doing a marathon Let's Play (or even Live Stream) of their first official 1.0 game.

I also finally got a video flagged. Apparently they won't be allowed to see this one in Russia...

I really wanted to do my own music, but that's another thing I start and never finish. Spending some delightful hours rebuilding my DAW and libraries. So many things turned out to be "That version is no longer supported, but we can sell you the next version..."

And not only are there incompatibilities with VSTs (one of the common plug-in formats for DAWs) -- OS9 stuff doesn't work with OSX, Intel doesn't always work with Silicon, since Catalina OSX has gotten insane with the "Are you sure you want to run this software you downloaded from someone that wasn't us?" Since you can't get a pop-up box from inside a DAW, the only way to press the "Yes, run it anyhow" is to drill down to the UNIX shell. Get on terminal and type in a little "sudo xattr -rm apple.hates.independent.developers the_new_plugin.vst"

I started to throw together a little modern Les Baxter thing...but turns out I am rusty in music theory, too. That, and I really, really need my good keyboard. Which there's no room for until I finish the rest of cleaning I've been trying to get to...

Oh -- did I post the video I finally threw together for the recording I did a while back? By the time I finally had a lighting set-up I liked, it was time to move out of that space. (And to add to the difficulties, my old camera couldn't handle the Barry Lyndon lighting levels and I had to shoot on iPhone instead).

But that's the way it goes.

Learning curves...err...Non-Uniform B-Splines...

Learned enough on Sketchup to start working out the floor plan for our new Tool Room. Plus catching up again on Fusion360, where I finally reconstructed a thing for work I'd been getting printed at Shapeways. 

Tried printing it in ABS for extra strength but my Ender3 isn't handling ABS properly yet. Need an enclosure. Possibly a heated enclosure, and that gets into project creep oh so quickly (like my fancy laser enclosure, which is currently wrapped in plastic on a shipping pallet on a very high shelf).

Also earned a wee bit more about Shotcut so I can animate a basic motion and add some smoke and sparks for a YouTube intro.

Yes, I paid a guy on Fiverr to do an animation for me but as so often on Fiverrrrr he ignored what I'd asked for and did his own thing. Often worth the gamble -- it's cheap, and their ideas could easily be better than mine. Well...not this time.

While I was at it with video and audio, dragged up various free VSTi's and the sample libraries I'd purchased so long ago and started installing them into Reaper on the Mac Mini. Thank Zepherus all this nonsense about passwords is meaningless as long as you have your original email address...

Yes, I'm still trying to cut some game videos.

But my last session in Satisfactory, I got distracted polishing the fruit at the bottom of the bowl...I mean, dressing up the entrance and walkways, adding lighting, and basically making things nice around the front of a Compacted Coal plant deep in the Badlands west of the main desert. Which is not just a place I'll probably never visit again, but is in a playthrough that was entirely to try out some ideas to make my foray into 1.0 a little smoother.

It is really hard not to keep working on that world. That's the game in a beryl nut; addictive.

(Just now I watched a few minutes of the final version 1.0 teaser trailer. Had to stop -- so much exciting stuff, I just want to discover it all as I play. Four days now...)

Robinsonade

The literary genre started by Robinson Crusoe has become a fashionable gaming genre. I think it may have happened through a merging of the streams --

 That is, the elements of crafting in survival games (which are themselves often a kind of Robinsonade) and the various "Dad Games" building and management games, right back to Sid Meir's Civilization. 

The big recent change -- and I'd put it pretty much smack between Factorio  and Satisfactory -- came with a move from top-down or orthographic to First Person perspective. That immersion within the world brings back in full the older elements of the Robinsonade; the isolation and self-reflection just below the struggle for survival. The ideas of loneliness, separation from society, and becoming an island on to oneself as what you bring to the table defines your life, purposed and whatever mimicry of society you end up building.

What changes over games spanning the period from Half-Life (which had the loneliness and isolation but no crafting element) through Tomb Raider 2001 (where you can build and upgrade the tools and weapons you use to survive) to Fallout 4 (where the "base building" mechanic is added to the series, allowing you to construct entire villages from scraps) is the theme of "building stuff."

And this is when SF entered the Robinsonade, beginning with Jules Verne and Mysterious Island, where a group of shipwrecked engineers build an entire bamboo civilization starting with a kitchen match, a seed, and one metal dog collar.

The change is to focus. The loneliness is still there, and even some of the old themes of anthropology and social commentary both in reflection on the society the character came from and in the relationships they make with local life forms. But the bootstrapping element, the "building stuff" element, is the more prominent.

It is said that a frontier blacksmith would start with an anvil. Every other tool could, eventually, be made from there (as long as there was access to iron). Whether marooned in open ocean with just a wet suit and a crashed lifepod, or standing alone on the surface of a hostile world having just melted down your landing pod for scrap, you are presented with a wide-open world.

You don't know what you will find as you explore, you don't know where you will find sustenance and the other tools of survival, and you are filled with both dread and joy at the prospect of trying to find a new purpose for your life. But you do have one thing; your anvil.

(Satisfactory 1.0 is just five days away!)

Oppytunity

I decided a while ago I'd take a trip to research the next Athena Fox story. I'm almost out of places I've visited and I'd want to write a novel around. Bangkok was too short (less than three days) for me to really have a good sense for the place, and Berlin was just long enough ago that there's gonna be a lot of changes in that city.

Of course San Francisco is right next door.

Well...turns out the only open house this year for the Trinity site is October 18th. That's...pretty soon!

And I haven't nailed down nearly enough for that story.

This one has a big problem for me. One of my goals for the Athena Fox series was to do real history. To not fake it up with Atlantis and whatnot. Well, this story is getting into real history, even if it is fairly recent history.

The fossilized footprints at White Sands. Real discovery, real archaeologists. And my brain went immediately to, well, the rest of White Sands. I really wanted to construct a plot around the SLAMM project -- the nuclear-powered cruise missile -- even if that was mostly at the Nevada Test Site. Still, that's also real people and real history.

If it is wrong to pretend that somehow historians never noticed Atlantis, or that Napoleon was hiding fifty tons of purloined gold behind a series of elaborate clues, then isn't it just as wrong to have the wrong people and the wrong motives digging at White Sands, and especially wrong to have nefarious nuclear hijinks going on somewhere south of Albuquerque?

(I mean, besides the real stuff Kerr-McGee was getting up to...and let's not even on some of what was committed on tribal lands and against the Diné.)

Even a disclaimer isn't enough. Even having a totally unrelated excavation that just happens to be in a similar area isn't working for me. Because that may not be lying about history, but it does cross a line where the world of the series is truly fictional.

So far, I've just had a few fictional buildings which were deniably fictional (I can't swear there isn't an Irish Pub called something a lot like "The Harp that Once..." in the Battersea area). Oh, and an Elon Musk stand-in called "Jameson." But he's only been mentioned in passing as existing in Penny's world and being well-known as the same kind of tech-bro.

So I kind of don't want a fake version. And I kind of don't want the real version. It's a problem!

(Be a great trip anyhow...have to rent a car anyhow to get through Stallion Gate, but I'd really want to get out to Roswell while I'm at it. And Shiprock. I can leave Blackwater Draw alone, though. And it is probably a good idea to skip Trementina Base!)

(Also tempting, though, to just put the story around Jackass Flats to begin with, and make the biggest detour in the direction of Goodsprings instead.......)

Oh yes, we both reached for the blaster

I'm slogging along in the tiki book. (Also went and purchased Ritual of the Savage because it really is a well-written mystery novel). I have enough of the beats for the first sequence to be properly tiki-adjacent, and I have become comfortable with not sustaining that particular focus in the other sections.

On the other hand, the more I work on the monster-on-a-ship section of the book, the more it turns into Alien. Even without the cassette futurism. And the mining and jungle adventure and "SHADO" sections...? But as much fun and informative as iterative outlining is, I need to press on and draft the first sequence and really find out how this universe works.

Sigh.

The trouble is, more and more I understand how I am driven in writing not by cute concepts or even the basics of story, but by a different thing. The theme thing. You could call it "message" but that's too heavy-handed.

There's stuff I want to talk about in the next Athena Fox story. I'm not going to bring any insights, I don't have a big philosophical point to make, but it interests me and drives me to want to write that story. And the tiki book just doesn't have that thing.

Okay, sure, there's a bit of a riff on invented cultures v. appropriation, and an argument for leisure as a goal to itself. And the real tiki as of the second or third revival here has an element of urban archaeology which is mildly intriguing. I'm getting some of this by presenting an invented origin of tiki in this alternate world, in much the same way "Donn Beach" invented himself and the story of how he came to open the Beachcomber.

The Early Fox, though!

Purpose. That's what that one is about. All the way down to the selfish gene, Lucy crossing the savanna with child on her hip. An archeologist who has found a nihilism so deep that even suicide is too much trouble. The aging DOE guy who will hold to his purpose of keeping his atomic secret until he dies. The first humans to migrate into the Americas and the possibility of the last humans if it turns out Fermi asked the load-bearing question and we experience the Great Filter ourselves. And Penny, still trying to find hers.  

Really, what hope do mixed drinks with little umbrellas have against that?

Tiki-Adjacent

That's the phrase used in tiki forums. There's no official literature, so instead there is literature that is considered "adjacent."

Primarily, pulp noir. Well, tiki is in large part a drinking culture, so it sort of makes sense to go towards those infamously hard-drinking low-rent PIs. But there does seem to be a peculiar resonance with Black Mask type stories, post-war Americana and filled with sweltering heat, bottle blondes, murder and copious drinking.

As the author of the crime novel Ritual of the Savage (to be confused with the Lex Baxter album of the same name) notes, the idea of "Tiki Noir" is a recognized sub-culture. The connections between pulp detective fiction and tiki seem well established now.

Ritual of the Savage also very much touches on what Crime Reads calls "Nuclear Noir," as exemplified in book and especially film Kiss Me Deadly. I guess it makes sense in terms of 1950s Americana but there is some peculiar connection here to Cold War fears and radioactive dreams.

But what else are you going to do? It is largely a visual style. It isn't really Polynesia (and the food is Chinese, the music has a Latin beat, and the drinks are rum based). So you sort of can watch Elvis movies, South Pacific, the right Gidget movie or maybe some Hawaii 5-Oh, but this doesn't really speak to a writing genre or style.

Or at least, not a specific one. You are left hunting for the appearance of tiki elements in something like an old Brady Bunch episode.

***

I'm having a different style problem, though. I've outlined the first sequence, and I'm to the point where I'm trying to figure out the look and feel of the tech. And more than that; the approach. There's a style in some consciously retro SF to belabor certain descriptions. Sure, that was seen in some works so it makes a useful signifier, but the good authors were avoiding it and that I think is the more important thing. Story, that is. Style has to take second place to clarity of story.

Just, we are so far along the trail of retro-retro pastiche...we recognize intentional mimicry of things that are mimicking things. And I do have to think the same thing was going on in later Roman comedies, with things that were intended to remind the audience of other playwrights, who were doing those things to remind their audience of the Greeks...

When you mix this in with SF (or fantasy) you've got worse problems. The experience of reading F&SF is all about figuring out how this particular world works, what this particular author is doing, and how well they are doing it.

Especially SF; a lot of authors now don't know their science, and are equally unfamiliar with what used to be thought of as the foundational works. So if they drop a "psionic" in the mix you don't know immediately if they are referencing Campbell or Cronenberg, or for that matter, if they think the stuff is real.

The reader is, in short, extrapolating and filling in the gaps, and if you leave it too long, they will construct a world that has nothing to do with the one you are trying to present. (There's an amusing series now on bookTok where the presenter is reading the first page of a fantasy book and trying to form the picture of the protagonist in her mind. "Wait, pirates? Oh, hold on, let me change that," and switch to a different actor in completely different costume...)

I could have hit this in a dozen places. I hit it where my outline suggested the good guys switch some labels on a cargo manifest so the wrong crates get loaded.

Which...are they holding up readers and scanning the digital labels? Doesn't that imply a whole wireless infrastructure as well, which has obvious knock-on to things like personal communication, electronic banking.....?

If you try to scoot around it, just suggesting this is something electronic, then you are letting the reader imagine too widely and two minutes later when the bad guys jump them, the cry of "Why don't they just call 911!" is heard.

But if you nail it down...well, besides taking away options, you are creating a whole bunch of other knock-ons.

And worst; this is one of those places where the style, whether post-war or atom punk or cassette futurism or what have you is given a chance to appear. So you kind of do want to break the rules just a little and go into slightly more detail than many of the actual period writers would. Because you aren't a period writer. You are writing for a modern audience who has a lot more background in all the ways other writers -- and the real world -- has come up with in solving those problems.

You are talking to a reader who has met bar codes and RFID, carbon paper and floppy disks in their lives or in history, and all sorts of tricorders and PADDs and sonic screwdrivers they have seen in fiction.

Which means on the one hand you can suggest something they've seen in the world or in other media very, very efficiently. "Blaster" is now such an established term of art there's no need to go into the extra words of "plasma" or "atomic" or however you are justifying "pistol-sized weapon of scientific destruction." But at the same time, you have to be very careful the reader didn't just imagine a red-headed jedi -- instead of your blonde with a totally unrelated kind of laser sword.

What the smeerp

Language. Always fun in SF.

I was writing a test paragraph in my head, feeling out what are the elements I want to stress in this book, and how to bring them to the reader. The heat, the beach, palm trees...shit.

Always a problem. SF and fantasy has long wrestled with the question of what you do when the creature in question fulfills the role of chicken in your fantasy medieval village, but clearly can't be a chicken because this is some other land with purple trees and elves taking out the garbage.

Calling it a "chicken" invites the Luke Skywalker response above.

Calling it a "smeerp" invites the Blishian disdain. And then there's the half-arsed of "pseudo-chicken" that ends up satisfying nobody. Besides, the further you get away from naming it as a chicken, the more work you have to do to explain that this is a small not terribly smart farm animal bred for meat and eggs.

(Or "space-eggs," if you must.)

I've been reading a light space opera series lately (it was mostly free) and the author has chosen to give the idea of linguistic drift over time by changing the spelling of relatively common words. That confused me at first; there was a creatively spelled version of "coffee" that had the flavor of being a brand name. First chapters are always fun because this is when the reader is trying to figure out what kind of world this is (and what kind of writer) and I wondered if she was going for a The Space Merchants kind of super-consumerist society.

But no, it is just drift. The really odd thing is that the author italicized them.

And, sigh, I get it. Because if you just left "Donut" as "Donot" then the reader (especially that particular cranky kind of reader who loves getting aggravated by what they consider laziness around language) would decide this was instead just really, really poor proofreading and throw the book over the shoulder of disdain.

Italicizing is a signal to the reader from the writer, a sort of "STET" in typography, telling them it is supposed to be that way. Which means, of course, it is also Doylist, external to the world, and after the lesson is absorbed, can pull the reader out of the text.

Dark Side of the Rainbow

Roughed out the basic plan for The Tiki Stars. Over the past few weeks I've been finding the underlying plots and themes that tie together what is currently planned as four sections.

Still feeling tired. Took a break with a space opera on Kindle/Prime. Julia Huni, the Trianna Moore series, four books for the price (free!) of one.

And the parallels! Book one is a station-side adventure that orients the reader to the universe and gets the basic world-building done. Book two is nefarious plotting and corporate skullduggery. Book three, trouble on a passenger cruise. And book four adventure in the jungle. Sort of. (It is planet-side.)

And what do the notes say for my new book? Part one is world-building and establishing the ground rules with a sort of South Seas-flavored adventure mostly around the space port of a tropical island. Second part is asteroid miners, golden age rockets and space suits with rivets and a touch of Space Western. Third sequence is in two parts; a man-v-alien monster thing (with some cassette futurism elements) then takes a turn into glossy Space-Age Bachelor Pad world with a SHADO-like organization of alien hunters. Part four is jungle adventure; revolutionaries, poachers, and a lost temple in a volcano.

But really that's the easy stuff. I got to plot all this adventure. I realized yesterday I need to drop an exotic and dangerous local life form into whatever is going on in my little Smuggler's Cove. And all I've got for a plot at the moment is reason for a fist fight in a bar. And I have even less plotted towards whatever is going on with struggling mining companies and claim jumpers and whatever else is happening in the next one. Of four.

Yeah, probably not the smartest book for me, especially if I want to write fast. I realized half way through the Paris book I don't even really need to plot Athena Fox stories that far ahead. Just have the frame, because when I'm actually producing text I basically dream up a thing, open the maps to find a good place to do the thing, and that's when I actually need the research close at hand.

My notes are, "Penny does something clever here" or, more likely, "They talk, he tricks the secret out of her," or "She chases after the guy but he does parkour and gets away." I don't bother figuring out the details until I'm writing the actual scene.

See, those books are very linear plots. They are almost Plot Coupon books; Penny blunders around learning lots of stuff that mostly doesn't matter, with a guy coming through the door with a gun every now and then just to keep the adrenaline moving. Then at the climax, she Hercule Poirots the clues and announces the solution (without, thankfully, a full drawing-room scene).

Doing a tighter plot...that's new to me. And for all I've been worrying about underlying themes and the difference between what works in a museum exhibit (they had some cool period consumer sound stuff at MOMA last weekend...basically, cassettes!) and what works on the page, that is just the spices on top. The meat of this thing is the mechanics of who gets the drop on who. And why.

Fortunately, the models I am emulating were basically written at a run as well, with the author having just as little idea how he was going to have his hero win the fight THIS time...

Without Reason

Mystery bug hit again. I was really hoping the surgery would stop that happening. It did make it easier and I'll be back to work tomorrow. Today, I am trying to catch up. Installed Reaper and Shotcut on the M2. And realized I do not have the patience to edit audio. Or video.

It's funny. I put models up on Shapeways and people seemed to like them. Put Poser content up at Rendo and people bought (not a lot, but some). Did replica props and people wanted them. But the one thing I've wanted to do since forever is write, and nobody seems to want the books.

I read, a lot. A long list of authors on Amazon that I know aren't that good or that famous. And they have decent sales numbers. Nothing spectacular, but if I had those figures, I'd leave my day job and have more time for writing.

So what is different? Grammar? I'm not seeing a huge difference (but then, I am trusting my own eyes, and computer checks. And I just don't go insane about grammar or spelling, personally. I know some people do. Some people will see a single word and throw the book across the room with a scream. I don't.)

Plotting? Character? Emotion? Description? Am I falling short somewhere in the art of story-telling? Is there something I don't even notice when it isn't there?

Or is this visibility? Advertising, volume (most of these people have multiple books in multiple series) social media presence?

***

Possible data. A family member really loved the "relationship with Amelia." I had never planned this. I wasn't really intending to write anything other than a typical friendship. Originally, in fact, Amelia was sort of a one-scene wonder. She was there to be the neophyte tourist that Penny could see her past self in, and compare to where she was today.

I'd gotten all the way to the first Louvre scene when I realized it wasn't working to have Penny know all this stuff about art, not in addition to history. So the both of us went back to Amelia and gave her that job.

Then, as I worked, I understood that the (small) character arc Penny has for this one is accepting that she actually makes a pretty good hero. That meant getting her to finally talk about the stuff she'd been doing (she keeps it so under wraps she doesn't even tell herself, or the reader). So I got her to chose to open up to Amelia.

And that's what this reader was seeing. The trust. So is this the kind of thing I should have been doing more of all along, and why my books aren't getting attention? Probably not. But it is very tempting to think of oneself as perhaps being socially naive, and not noticing when the kind of grit of real people in real relationships is missing from a book -- whether yours or someone else's.

Oh, and by sheer coincidence I ended up watching a bit of first season Xena. Where the relationship between Xena and Gabriella is absolutely key.

***

In any case, I re-learned a bit of Reaper, picked up the basics of Affinity Photo, and re-acquainted with Shotcut as well. I lost access to the room I was shooting the video in, so never really finished making the clips I wanted. But I figured I could just splice in some stills and call it good enough for viking.

 

Q2Q

While I was on Hackaday, having just completed a visit to check out a Gameport adapter project, I followed a link to a laser safety and radiological clean-up guy. Local, too. I did an archive binge on his blog and down in the last pages there were some comments on the mindset of a Q clearance.

Which was exactly the mindset I had been thinking of for the bad guy in Penny's upcoming desert adventure. It is something some of my father's friends had -- they were in similar circles, and I can't even swear that some of them might not have had that clearance.

The important part here is that the access may lapse but the clearance never leaves. As Phil explains it, most things have to be classified Secret, and that classification only lasts if regularly renewed. Nuclear weapons, and a few related things, are born classified, and that classification lasts unless specifically removed. According to Phil, when you've been DOE long enough to know about stuff most of us don't know about, you are capable of having thoughts which are inherently classified.

So basically exactly what I was after (and what I had observed); a lifetime of keeping those secrets, no matter how long ago the Cold War or how long you'd been a civilian. You didn't talk about that stuff. You didn't talk about your experiences, lest you accidentally reveal something.

A weird loyalty born out of how the job worked, what kind of people were in it. And I understand that part, too, and not from the Army. But then, this blogger has also spent a year at McMurdo and that's another set of highly-skilled people doing something that most people don't want to hear the details of, trapped together in a very small space under a lot of pressure. Heck...a theater tech can relate, if only in a small way. It isn't that strange a mental state.

So, dammit, stuff keeps showing up for the desert book. Despite that series not selling well enough to justify making that my life's work. (I don't care about the money -- I just want people to read it!)

It is possible that I could game Amazon's algorithms a little better. The key to a series is that a new book has a boosted ranking on Amazon, and if it is part of a series, the entire series gets a bit of that boost (plus, of course, if you have done your work properly the prospective reader can always click back through and discover your back catalog).

There's a slight risk that the book that is most visible is later in the series, meaning you have to choose between being friendly to readers who jump on in the middle, or take the chance that they will click through and read fast enough so you get the kick anyhow. (Because you might pay per click when you are using Amazon ads, but your ranking is based on actual sales).

Thing is, that boost phase is short. The only way to benefit is to keep the time between releases short. Really short. Like under a month, now (Amazon is always tweaking the algorithm, and they've progressively shortened the happy hour since people first discovered it).

And I don't think I could kick anything out in a month. Not even if I could afford to quit my day job.

Go go Gadget

Writing is a process of accumulating. Like a bit of dust falling through a supersaturated cloud, when you have a germ of a story it just starts collecting stuff from the environment around you.

My intended quick-and-dirty, write it in six months retro SF book has been collecting slowly. The cloud layer over there is sparse. Ran into a nice Reddit thread on Cassette Futurism, I've got lots of History of Tiki popping up in my feed, but...

The book I am trying to put off (the last book in the series moved ONE electronic copy. And as far as I can tell every print copy went to family or friends) is, however, sitting in an atmospheric river. Right now I just stumbled into a whole bunch of stuff about the locals who got irradiated in the Trinity test. I was thinking a lot about setting the climax there anyhow.

That's the thing, though. The magnet for the retro-SF novel is a weak one. That's most of it, right there; "retro SF adventure." I don't feel I have much to say or much to explore.

The Athena Fox story I'm trying not to get too involved with yet (or perhaps ever?) is measured in tesla. NAGPRA, indigenous archaeology (ran into a book that was briefly free on Kindle and snagged that right away). And the original seed is the still controversial pre-pre-Clovis footprints in White Sands. The Anthropocene (which as of when the novel is set hadn't been shot down by geology yet). And then there's the Drake Equation...

See, each Athena Fox story more-or-less has a location, an aspect of modern archaeology, and a slice of history. The slice for this one is Olaf Stapleton sized; the human race itself, from the first humans to cross into the Americas, to the Fermi Paradox and the possibility that we might be ending our own species some day (it looked a hell of a lot more likely to some in the early Atomic Age). And in typical Athena Fox style, brought into the plot, with a Persistence Hunter chase scene across the desert and a climax at the Trinity site.

And, yeah, this is...I don't know what you call it, but there's probably a term like "Pathetic Fallacy" that contains some of the same dismissive air. Maybe I'll waste the rest of today web-crawling in search of that. I wonder if the Turkey City Lexicon has anything?

That, and finish reading the nukee and laser-guy blog I discovered via Hackaday while looking for adapters...

The Chromium Dream

World-building on a retro-SF universe for a new novel. It is intended to be Earth -- or rather Earth was a part of that history -- but my intent is to down-pedal that.

Still, no matter how unspecific I am, it doesn't change that probably space flight happened while electronics were still primitive and people still smoked. So you could call it alternate history. I'm just shying away from the idea of making it a specific moment or specific cause.

No alien space bats. No "Italy won the second world war" stuff, at least, not as the reason everything looks very different by the time we get to 2001. And it isn't really keyed off the sudden discovery of cheap nuclear fusion or a Dean Drive or something.

Basically, space flight is just...cheaper. Energetically I mean. By a factor of maybe four. And, yes, there is (relatively cheap) FTL that also blows conservation of practically everything out the window. But, for whatever reason, this didn't make history as we know it unrecognizable (or anything else, for that matter; you do not go toying with gravitational constant or inertia or whatever it is you did to allow a one-man flitter with a tank of "Rocket Fuel" to do SSTO and still have plenty left to jaunt off the Mars for a dry martini).

And, no, I'm not intending too much in the way of other scientific violations. You will still need a helmet to breathe in space, even if -- again, somehow -- space radiation isn't as much of an issue as it should. All those clear lexan helmets give us is a manly Space Tan. 

My intent is for Earth to be in the background, mentioned glancingly but not often, and even then, somewhat inconsistently. And as is the rule for your basic Rocky Jones adventure, nobody is getting Atomic Rocket deep with what exactly is the ISP of "Rocket fuel." It is just space trucking, things working like familiar cargo ships and pickup trucks In Space. 

***

Oh, and I mentioned to a friend at work I was tempted to mount a throttle quadrant or something on my desk so I could play-act Rocket Jockey while I was getting into the mood. A few days later he popped up with an old Wingman and after a dive into such places as the Internet Wayback Machine and the always-spicy Hackaday I found a project on github complete with a BOM with Digikey parts numbers, a PCB already loaded in the community area of OSHpark (a fabhouse I'd used before) and even the STL for a housing at Thingiverse. This DB-15 to USB adaptor already has a profile for this stick in the software and it is an Arduino family device.

Which all made me so nostalgic I went and opened my old accounts and ordered the parts. And I don't even need a flight controller. 

Goodwill Hunting

Turns out it's not so easy to make a story from well-used furniture.

SF and Fantasy are primarily about story. All genre fiction is. But part of what the reader expects is originality. That's a problem there. The more original invention, the less it is a pastiche, a throwback. I thought this was about deconstruction -- and deconstruction is so much the default this days it is hard not to go that direction -- but it really is that we can't invent, today, the way the writers of 1950 would. Or, more importantly, appreciate that invention the way the readers of 1950 would. Our picture of the world is different and the intersection is small enough that staying within the bounds of what we understand they would do is too narrow a box and the results look artificial.

Not to say there aren't a lot of people trying their hands at the consciously retro, and some number making it work (there are probably as many failures in genre fiction that isn't trying to be consciously retro. Sturgeon's Law, after all).

Too many. You might think the well-used tropes and familiar props are easy to pick up, but enough people are also familiar, and have also used them (often in new and interesting ways, as well) that the modern reader is going to be just as familiar with them. If not more so. Once again, there's no easy route. You still have to read up and research and think about what you are doing.

But past that, especially when the invention of truly new worlds or exploration of new technology and science is taking a back seat to the rest of the material, emphasis is thrown on plot. We've emphasized character in different ways, and some of this is expected by the modern reader, but when you are talking pulp the big emphasis is plot.

I'm not a great plotter. The Athena Fox stories are lightweight mysteries in which my protagonist and POV character pretty much walks around learning clues. If they were a video game they'd be a walking simulator.

(And just as well. I liked a lot about Deliver us Mars, probably enough to sign on to the Kickstarter for the third game, but...the platforming sections with the ice pick were ghastly. I do like the action sequences I have in the books, but for what they are, they are best without more of that than they have.)

All of this realization came slowly as I was pulling at threads that didn't even look like they were connected to the sweater. I had set out to work up the top level of the outline, but in the process discovered that I wasn't nearly ready to do so.

Well, now I am there. And this may just take a more detailed and iterative outline because there is a lot of plot there. Not the themes-and-arcs stuff (which is what primarily populates the Athena Fox stories). But the mechanical stuff of fights and chases, sneaking and climbing and surviving and all the rest of the stuff that fills most of the pages of a pulp story.

And it is going to take a while to work out.

Unless...the old-school writers could be seat-of-pants, too. Especially, the more you divorce the mechanics of the action from the mechanics of the universe. You can always have a man come through the door with a gun to get you out -- or into -- a plot problem. Or a jaguar come through the jungle with claws, your choice.

 

Garfield

I am not excited about the book project that's currently on the table. A big part of it is that I don't have anything to say in this one. There's no theme or question -- not like the Athena Fox stories. Well, okay; the Paris book was floundering until I stumbled on "The book will be the death of the cathedral" and that led me to where I wanted to go with the idea of how to read history, and how to explore history without breaking things in the process (always a problem when you are playing a character modeled after Indiana Jones.)

This current book was intended to be built from well-used furniture. Familiar and well-understood sci-fi props. That may not, however, be compatible with a unique or interesting setting that offers something novel. I contrast that with the Venus setting, which may be implausible but at least is diverting.

The problem might also be character. In part because I was thinking pastiche, I was planning an everyman character who can fit equally well in any setting (the way that Equal Temperament on musical instruments makes all scales sound equally good. And equally bad). That removes having an interesting internal conflict or journey, however. And having a rotating cast takes away from having a strong set of interpersonal interactions to drive the story.

So I tinkered a little to see if I could find an underlying theme, or at least something about the setting that wasn't basically a visual style (because that translates poorly to prose.) Raygun Gothic might be amusing but the only direction I can see involves deconstruction; and these days, deconstructed is pretty much the major presentation of that stuff.

Plus, you know, primarily a visual style.

(There's more here, in a subtle way. Just typing "fins" or "chrome" or "googie" doesn't give you a strong sense of place. What does, is going into the functionality and the five-senses stuff. How exactly a bubble helmet works and feels, for instance. And that is backing right into deconstruction again. Plus it is work, which goes against the utility of setting out to build with used furniture.)

I explored the option space to see what were the directions that interested me more. 1960's spaceflight sort of attracted me. Especially given a flip, overly-stylish (even Spy Movie) UFO sort of spin. But think about it; near-future, the actual science de-emphasized so all this is, is a visual style...

What do you know; I just invented Starfield.

Incidentally, the "Deliver Us..." series does a much better job with this aesthetic. Because in Starfield, the ships and spacesuits is just the paint job and underneath is exactly the same bullet-sponge armor and mix of weapons and handy loot crates of your basic looter-shooter. Deliver Us the Moon (I've just started Deliver us Mars and I'm still unsure whether I like that one as much), the setting is the gameplay. Since it isn't a run-and-gun, you are mostly interacting with the tech, or reading logs or talking to people about what can be done with the tech.

(Deliver us the Moon you play as a one-man rescue mission to figure out what happened to the Moon-based beamed-power facility that is keeping energy-starved Earth alive. So you are mucking about with microwave antenna and Helium-3 scrapers...)

And I still want to see if I can get Tiki to work. There's some potentially interesting space to explore re created cultures, exoticism, even urban archaeology. But there are people who have dedicated a life to tiki culture and...what do I really know about the stuff?

Burning man

There's a bit in Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year when a fellow in the madness of a full infection breaks out of his house, runs to the Thames and swims "vigorously" across it before collapsing. And as if it was that exercise that had done it, his fever breaks and he recovers, becoming one of the lucky survivors.

I went and watched the Steiner Tunnel burn at UL in Northbrook, IL. And I was not feeling good. Trapped in an old Prius with bad air conditioning in bumper-to-bumper traffic for over two hours in the sweltering Chicago heat, got dropped off at the Field Museum just five minutes to closing -- so much for seeing Sue. Took a short stroll to look at the lake and was really, really suffering.

Somehow kept on my feet all the way to a Target, bought and drowned water and electrolyte drink and...it turned around.

I started feeling strong, and two days later, I'm still feeling pretty good. Good enough to walk to work today for the first time in a long time.

Now if only I could get back to writing. Have been playing The Outer Worlds for inspiration, and ran Stable Diffusion to create a picture of Yma Sumac with a ray pistol. But still on the first phase of outlining the thing.

Have sold...zero copies. Well, I did sell one copy of the first book, but the Paris book? Not a single one. The high water mark right now is 129 pages read in Kindle Unlimited, which is at least through Part I (Kindle Unlimited pages are Secret Amazon Math, not actually anything normally displayed as a page).

Not like I was expecting to make money, but I was sort of hoping someone would read the damned thing. Doesn't do anything for my confidence, or my interest in writing another, if they aren't.

From cheese symphony to rum rhapsody

I seem to have chosen which book to work on first.

Or perhaps it is that this one, I can start outlining now, and outlining is what I want to do. Even while I am continuing to read about NAGPRA and ferric sulfate compounds.

House cleaning continues. I have to get rid of a whole bunch of stuff, and that's time consuming if I don't just want to rent a skip. Been toting books to the local book hutches. Taking electronics to work because we have a robust e-waste recycling process (and some of it is scrap I'd previously rescued from that process in the first place, so...no foul?)

And still mending from surgery. But mended enough so I can go back to work. And take my car in to be worked on. And go to Chicago to watch them burn stuff (that's work-related too; a UL test).

***

Picked out a listening list. Several CD's worth of Martin Denny, Barry Gray, Lex Baxter, Don Ellis and Juan Carlos Esquivel. A little John Barry, too...but no Don Ho.

Converging Series

Proofs came in for Sometimes a Fox. Found one mistake already. Wrong tense...so tell me again how automated grammar-checkers are so great, huh?

Speaking of software, also purchased Affinity Photo. After I've given it a spin, I'll start the process of trying to get out from under my Adobe subscription. It isn't anything about the latest news, exactly. It is just that I was already unhappy and this is not only an excuse, but a time when better options are being offered.

Relapsed on Friday but I think I'm finally on the mend. I miss being a recently ex-soldier, with all the strength youth and stupidity. Did not expect to take this long to recover and I'm still weak.

So...good time to continue assembling, towards making a choice of what to write next. I'm simultaneously reading books on Venus and on Indigenous Archaeology. And thinking about a third book but that's not really the same kind of research problem.

There's no show-stoppers for Venus, not yet. I am still learning about the chemistry, and Venus is all about the chemistry. Unfortunately my best book is fifteen years old, and although we haven't been sending any landers lately, science still marches on.

Always been a problem with Venus, really. At the time of writing, those steamy jungles and those planet-wide oceans were defendable from current knowledge.

But this is a convergent thing. I'm more and more accepting, for the purposes of the book, of it being a very rare thing indeed to be bare-faced to the wind there. The main location is above the deck of the clouds so temperature and pressure not issues, and you aren't swimming in sulfuric acid, either (the Venusian clouds are actually quite thin, by cloud standards. They are opaque because they are so damned deep. That, and chemistry.)

The lack of a magnetic field has interesting trickle-downs. Also, more chemistry happens because of it. But anyhow; I'm not as concerned about cosmic rays because those things explode in upper atmosphere anyhow. Solar storms, on the other hand, is an open question. But since those don't happen all the time, that smells to me like plot.

That's what I mean about convergence.

And the UV? You can block that with whatever is holding the breathing air in. And if you are out on deck -- well, you are wearing those brass goggles anyhow, unless you really like getting mild acid in the eyes.

So the books may go on about this not being viable for colonization, but there's a real difference between Futurist paintings of people cavorting on carefully manicured green lawns, and the kind of conditions real human beings have lived and worked in. If the combination of ray burn and acid and all the rest means you get blind and scarred and your lungs rot by thirty -- hell, there's even some people today who would trade for that.

The more I can play with the real Venus, the better. That's an argument I've always made about historical fiction, and research in general. Sure, you can image fun stuff. But the real world has been imagining crazy shit for four billion years and it is likely to surprise you. Find the real thing first. See if story comes out of it. Plenty of time to argue later.

 

PunkPunk

What I really should be doing, now that the decks are cleared, is house-cleaning. And catching up at work. And finishing some music products.

Did a (too-long) walk today and that was tough enough. I'm under orders to refrain from heavy lifting anyhow. So scrubbing floors and carrying books and electronics to recycling not really on the things to do this week.

I'll be doing more than I currently expect if I can work two full days at work.

So it isn't the least appropriate use of time to Begin the Gather. I don't even know which book project I am likely to work on (I'm doing book projects rather than searching for something completely new because I've already got a target that I think will work.)

One of them is just an aesthetic deep dive. That would be fun. Pretty much, look at movies, games, images, fiction, cocktail recipes that all fit the retro vibe I'm looking at. The most active research part might be sitting down at a tiki bar or two.

Another is a visit-the-place dive, and I want to regain more health than I went into the operating room with if I'm going to be hiking around the American Southwest.

One is a really deep dive that has the disadvantage of being a whole lot of reading material away from being ready for. Someone has been asking a lot of annoying questions about the Sea Peoples on Quora lately, so it is back on my radar, but I'm not even up on what's been done on the Luwians, or how we better understand the Hittite Empire and their fall, much less whether we are firm on who the Sherden or Ekwesh are.

And then there's the Venus book.

When it comes to spreading the nets, first it goes wide. Then you focus in. Right now I'm starting to see just how wide it gets. Take "Solarpunk." That's art and philosophy movements, mostly -- like steampunk, they've retro-borrowed existing fiction as belonging (like Jules Verne being honorary steampunk), but there doesn't seem to be that much which is organic (ahem) to it.

It is described as being philosophically naive, a future-optimism with a DIY and egalitarian emphasis hearkening back to Whole Earth Catalog and that lot, with enough of a tech emphasis to remind me quite a bit of early Electronic Democracy evangelists.

But oh boy are there are lot of connections. Take just one...Afro-Futurism. Which I don't know what it is, even, except that apparently Wakanda is that way now. So there are a lot of weird paths you could explore just checking out if any of the concepts and ideas and, for that matter, tropes, are going to be of use in the kind of story I want to tell.

I haven't even distilled down to the elevator pitch yet. Um..."Waterworld in the Air." Yeah, that's not a bad take. Survivalism in rafts and boats. Some level of unsustainable practices, probably. Organizations in conflict with each other. A quest plotline.

Story-wise, it is all about The Swift, experimental airship, and its (of course!) motley crew representing every major socio-political body/trend so they can argue out themes. On an optimistic voyage of discovery that brings them to things that could threaten the whole world they know. 

But largely a string-of-incidents, Flash Gordon style, with oversized characters running into equally colorful new places and new dangerous situations. 

I stopped by the used bookstore on my walk but the only thing I picked up was a Paris mystery by a local author. Signed, too. So...there's that.

Adieu Paris

Every book, for years after I keep discovering things that I wish I'd known, or at least could have included. I'd hadn't remembered the other part of it, though; the first days, when I'm still surrounded by all those books, bookmarks, movies, links, images...none of which I am going to need again.

I kept them around through editing because that's when you have to go back and check spelling or a fact.

But now? Paris is done. 

And I haven't really gotten rolling on the next one. So there's no stack of open tabs and so forth waiting my attention. Oh, sure. I could finally finish watching Amélie. But that feels no more productive than playing games.

But that may be what happens. I'm not in the mental space yet for a new book, and to get there I need to make a clean break from Paris. So no Amélie, probably -- but no Oppenheimer, either (despite it just having come up on free rotation).

Besides, recovery from surgery is taking much longer than expected or hoped. Tried to make it in to work today. Couldn't even handle a walk around the block to get up strength. Tomorrow is Juneteenth and maybe I can at least get that done before I try to head back in.

Oh, yes. Despite having intended to hold back on the print version, I've gone and prepped both eBook and paperback and they are available for pre-sale now on Amazon, with release on the 1st of July.

Gremlins

I tried, I really tried to hire someone to do this part.

For the past several days I've been crawling through the manuscript, looking for every place where I've changed the capitalization or punctuation on a Belle Époque somewhere -- or worse yet, forgotten the stupid diacriticals. And checking things like whether opening and closing quotation marks are italicized properly.

French...is difficult. I don't know why so much of our modern machinery can't handle the stuff, but my various spell checkers and grammar checkers just have no sense about getting the spelling of French terms correct.

And then there's those choices...my grammar checker insisted that it is Art nouveau. Wikipedia prefers Art Nouveau and there is better source for this. This is why I laugh in the face of grammar pundits, worse, those cranky ones who leave a negative review because "they found a clear typo in the first chapter."

Dudes, why is there an MLA, an APA, Chicago, NYT? The fact that there is more than one house style in publishing should tell you that there isn't always one clearly right answer.

I did solve my formatting woes and I've finally got the chapter epigraphs sitting correctly. A lot of weird work-arounds to get it so the clue poems are set out correctly below the chapter heading, then the actual text begins with the zero-indent, three capitalized words format. With luck, given the changes Scrivener has made in Version 3, I can translate most of this to the pdf as well and not have to start from scratch.

At least I can sort of think clearly. I'm home recovering from surgery and the bleeding isn't anywhere near as annoying as the weakness. The main thing I'm short of is the attention to keep staring at text which has gotten far too familiar.

So maybe it is time to spruce up my factories and take pictures of them before Satisfactory 1.0 breaks them all. (Like most players, I intend to start a new world when 1.0 releases.)

There's a draft in here

I actually made it. The next Athena Fox novel, Sometimes a Fox, is in completed draft.

Came in just under at 73K. May or may not do the threatened "symphony of cheese" pass and add more detail to every meal she has in Paris. It isn't until the last chapters that she actually has the budget and time to sit down to something other than coffee and a croissant, though.

I'm up in six hours and going in for surgery. Here's hoping I get some strength back from it.

Weird to look back on what I started with and why. I was juggling a couple of ideas and the idea of an ersatz Dan Brown set in Paris looked like the easier one. I figured I knew enough about stupid historical conspiracy theories to spin something, especially as it was intended from the outset to be clearly a total fake (the actual tension and later action stemming from a few idiots who don't realize that it is a fake!)

I also figured; I've been in Paris, and I knew something about Impressionist art. I almost picked Montmartre out of a hat, even though I had been there, because I pretty much went there for the same silly reason; it was the only district I knew the name of because I'd done the musical Can-Can in high school!

That was the framework, right there. I picked 1900 because that was the International Exposition I ran across pictures of first -- the 1895 probably would have been more appropriate, as it turned out. Also turns out the Impressionists were sort of old hat by that point but that mattered less than it could have because it turned out I really didn't know that much about them anyhow!

And because one of the things I try to do in the Athena Fox stories is hit a few things that belong in the setting but are possibly less expected, instead of making a lot of stuff about the Eiffel tower or the Moulin Rouge, I chose practically at random to feature parkour and steampunk.

Which I also turned out to know less about than I thought. And they were harder to fit in.

As had happened with Drea in the very first book, the Chapter One guest, who was originally there just to give a neophyte tourist example to contrast the maturing Penny against, turned out far too useful as a guest lecturer, sounding board, and a way to turn narrative into dialogue more than would otherwise have been possible.

But jump back a bit. A strong theme is related to Paris Syndrome; the way Paris is so hard to grasp that everyone ends up forming their own (incomplete) idea of it. And so many of these ideas are found in media, and Penny has since I discovered in the first adventure that it worked far too well for her to have been a theatre kid, been reaching for popular media.

That meant two sequences in particular became extended explorations of a media franchise; Phantom, and Hunchback. Also something I hadn't expected, and that meant the steampunk, the Impressionists, and other things had to take even more of a back seat.

Does it work? Maybe.

I could easily call it rambling, unfocused, and self-indulgent. I could have trimmed more. I made the choice not to.

At best, maybe it might carry off a sort of kaleidoscope, an extended musing on how art and literature, architecture and history, illusion and memory bounce off each other. Bad Hugo, in other words. Maybe even bad Proust.

I am looking forward to the bare open spaces of the American Southwest.

But first to the sulfuric acid clouds of Venus...

Can I complete Blackdamp in eight months? There's a lot of world-building still to be done.

I also need to edit and format this monster. But at least the writing is done.