The eight-fingered hand

The morality of AI art. 

The subject has complexities, but it isn't anywhere near as murky as the people trying so hard to sell AI to the consumer are making it. Admittedly, whatever the core issues are, they are hard to untangle from discussions of the purpose of art, the economics of art, the process of art, and empowerment.

Take the last. Art is hard, and talent doesn't strike all of us, but even those with talent need to have time and -- for many arts -- finances to pursue it. It is far from impossible to go from the wrong side of the tracks to the concert hall, but there is no denying that it is harder than it would be for someone who went to properly-funded schools, had parents who could afford tutors, could afford a decent student instrument, etc. (Don't get me started on the heartbreak of Violin-Shaped Objects.)

There are always gatekeepers who, when art is democratized, cry out that it is being debased. Cutting loops in Abelon "isn't real music." And AI makes it so easy to cry "they didn't make art -- they just pushed a button."

But on the other side, there's a difference between enabling people who might not otherwise be able to pursue art, and selling the illusion of making art in order to make a profit. Not exactly peculiar to AI, this. Any hobby you name is almost instantly overrun by people looking to sell the hobby to you (in the form of "must-have" tools you were getting just fine without, and so on). AI, viewed this way, is a digital paint-by-numbers kit.

The potential customers aren't the only ones buying the illusion, either. Artists are right to be concerned, just as musicians were when they began to be replaced wholesale in certain fields. There is always the economic drive to replace what is good but expensive with what is good enough. And that's a race to the bottom, as the current "good enough" soon becomes the "good but expensive" and the search is on for something else...

As long as the intended audience will accept it, and that is one of the fears. Flood the marketplace with "good enough" and keep it there long enough, and the public would lose the ability to tell the difference. That's what the Academy de Beaux-Arts was afraid of...but what they tried to keep out, and failed to, were the Impressionists.

I think the public is canny enough to keep looking for better, if given the economic opportunity. For all the cheap schlock, there remains a paying audience. For all the fast food, grocery stores, markets and restaurants aren't going out of business. 

Enough of the public have learned to despise the quick-and-dirty AI art that the economic model of many of the big art sites has forced them to take steps to control the flood. Which leads into a discussion of the value of gatekeepers to the consumer. Self-publishing, for instance, exploded. There are so many self-published works that the costs to place your work are going up, and the readers are complaining about the difficulty of finding anything.

Self-publishing did flirt with AI. It got smacked down by Amazon the same way that every other get-rich-quick scheme that tried to use their site did (like low-content books). Writing is in a weird position as it seems to promise wealth and fame, but it is currently difficult for software to do the work for you. The people selling dreams to would-be authors are selling books on how to write, world-building software, and services.

And outright scams, because vanity publishing remains the best money-maker.

Not to say people haven't tried AI, but there are no easy riches in publishing. It is a buyer's market, and despite how much effort individual writers may be putting in, to the greater market their labor is cheap; so cheap there isn't a need for an alternative.

AI art, meanwhile, is having trouble pulling up money outside of the flash-in-the-pan niches of, say, monetized YouTube slide shows. The challenge is similar. The world has no lack of hungry artists willing to work cheap; all that AI can offer is its novelty (the surface gloss, largely) and volume. And the latter is self-defeating, just as it is in publishing.

Which slides into another problem with democratization. The big players in AI art have expensive rigs, and spend a lot of time at it. More and more, they are looking less like artists than like bitcoin miners. Even to how critical a high-end video card is.

And that looks like a segue into "but are you really being an artist." I believe that those slide-show makers are prioritizing pushing output. AI is in a peculiar place that might be inherent, or might be the current circumstance of technology -- and I am biased towards the later. Right now, the way to make money is to push out a bunch of art before the market gets over-saturated (too late!) and the way to push out art is not by being an artist but by pushing buttons on a powerful and expensive rig.

Exactly the model all those salespeople are wanting. "You too can be an artist...if you drop a thousand bucks with us on the right graphics card."

So here's the thing. We talk up freeing the inner artist from their inability to hold a pen or afford paints, but much more importantly, from the need to have a liberal arts education and time spent in traditional art classes.

But the infinite world of possibilities is...smaller than it appears. This has always been so in the arts, I hasten to add. An artist that wants to be seen or heard uses the modes and forms that are currently understood by the audience. There are always those (like those Impressionists) who are fighting to get something different accepted by a potential audience, but economically this is at best a gamble. The market reality is "do what everyone else is doing."

Technically an AI art engine can create anything, in practice, the people using it are narrowing the existing constraints of the training data even further in order to pursue the flavor-of-the-month and get those eyeballs they crave.

Let me explain in a little more detail. The training data was what the original academic researchers could scrape off the internet. Which means that a well-known painting is more represented than the output of an outsider artist. Meaning the engine is already primed to regurgitate the "look" of current media (which itself is feeding off itself, looking to other shows or other advertisements or other book covers as to what the audience is primed to expect).

It is very, very focused on what is common and normal in mass visual media. Poses, for instance, trend towards the presentational. "Showing off the new winter jacket" is the pose a figure will take even with a heavily weighted prompt that attempts to put them in an action pose.

As I said, many artists in those social media circles where popularity rules are going after what gets eyeballs. To focus in on that flavor of the month (or, more benignly, to focus in on whatever personal vision they are pursuing) the tool is LoRA (and checkpoints, and embeddings...but let's keep it simple).

And this is the thing. The academics who trained the original models had some shred of honesty and did their best to anonymize by using as much data from as many sources as possible. LoRA are more tightly focused. When a young artist thinks "I want to make stuff that looks like Masamune Shirow" they are drawn to a LoRA that was trained specifically on that artist. On a small number of works. Overtrained on them. So much so, given the right prompts it can and does recreate enough of a specific image you can recognize it.

Again this is implicit in the concept of the training data. Tell the AI to give you a Florentine woman with a mysterious smile and you could get anything. Tell it to give you the Mona Lisa and what you get back will be recognizable as Leonardo's painting. But there's a difference between training on a million images, and training on as little as six (some LoRA are that small.) In the former, you get a guy in a jacket but it isn't a recognizable individual guy or brand of jacket. In the latter...you might get one of the six images back complete in far too many details.

(It gets worse. Some LoRA go right out and say, "For best results use this image." That is, to base the new, supposedly unique image on an actual specific piece of art. And not with text prompts as in the Mona Lisa example above, but by, basically, taking that image, blurring it slightly, then reconstructing it with AI. But more on this when I post about the inpainting process.)

The social art world is fads of the moment and the successful focus is hyper-narrow. The original inspiration is clearly seen. Basically...this is digital fanfic. I mean; there are lists of prompts for the hopeful new AI artist that are the names of other people creating AI artwork.

(This is really nth-generational stuff. It requires LoRA that are trained on the output of artists who were probably already using the same...)

So while the AI proselytizers are going on about how stealing from a million anonymized images isn't really stealing, the practical reality is far from that case. Yes; the big commercialized online engines are filtered now with long lists of illegal prompts that can't be used anymore, including the names of public figures, the names of artists, and even the names of some art styles. But they are only part of the picture -- and the users are really, really good at finding the loopholes because the data is still there. They just changed the names to make it harder to find it.

Is this, though, different from being inspired by the style of another artist, or even the movement they have begun, and doing work in the same way? How does the specific kind of work done in making this derivative matter? Or is it the nature of the link between them?

From one perspective, AI is absolutely stealing the original because that original was fed into the computer. From another perspective, it has been digitally shredded in a way that makes it impossible to reproduce it exactly. No matter how close the AI reproduction may appear to human eyes, the pixel patterns are not the same.

Is a copycat more ethical than a straight clone? Is the fact that on a pixel level, down at the digital heart, it isn't actually the same an important distinction, or is this just a fancier way of filing off the serial numbers and selling it as unique? There are people flipping, cropping, or blurring clips from movies so they can post them on YouTube without getting caught by the automatic check for copyright violations. Is this really, substantially, different?

And does it matter if the creator could have painted it from scratch themselves? Does it make it better if they are a skilled artist in their own right? Does this have to be the same skill set as the original? Does it make it worse if they were "pressing buttons," that is, doing things that don't look like how we conceive of the process of creating visual art?

Because your average "hand painted" art these days is done on a screen with a hell of a lot of computer assistance. And resources which are not original. And some of those resources might not be paid-for commercial stock or copyright-free (cough Greg Lang cough).

On the third hand, it is somehow worse if a forger is skilled enough to have made original art, and chose not to?

This gets really tangled because all the way across the art world, homages, training by copying, working with a mentor in their studio, doing cover versions...this is all how artists learn. And so very many of the good artworks are part of a dialog; Vietnam vet Haldeman reacting to Robert Heinlein's jingoistic Starship Troopers and moved to write The Forever War. Saint-Saens spoofing themes from Offenbach and Mendelson in his Carnival of the Animals. Generations of artists using the pose from Michelangelo's Pieta. 

I mean, look, I'm currently working on a novel that is consciously and openly using "used furniture." Something that is meant to be recognized as retro. The characters and background are being carefully crafted to remind the reader of things they know (or think they know; the thing about retro nostalgia is that so much of it is rooted not in a deep understanding of the original, but an exposure to other people's distillation of those elements they find most cliché).

Thing is, though, it is arguable that AI artists are not having a dialog -- because they aren't engaging with the material personally and at that level. They are dancing about architecture; they are entering text instructions to a computer for it to make a mindless reconstruction of what it thinks is happening in the original work.

Perhaps. It is certainly true that one can go to a model that other people are recommending and copy a list of prompts from some forum, push the button and sit back. But I think that even the most production-oriented, assembly-line artist has that urge to chase their own vision. It is difficult not to engage your aesthetic senses. And there are functional choices that can be made at every step; all the way down to picking which generated image to up-rez and post and which to throw out.

For many, they are engaging with the image itself, on the terms of visual art. Adjusting the composition with their internal sense of aesthetics and whatever understanding they have of traditions. Discarding or altering poses and hands and musculature because they understand anatomy in the way a practicing artist does. Perhaps not as deeply, but not every artist has those years of figure drawing behind them. And, even, choosing prompts because they have some grasp of the history of art and the figures in it.

This is of course the basic Google Query problem; understanding that what you want is not the precise and technical term, but a common term -- one which may even be incorrect. You don't type "Elizabeth Tower," you type "Big Ben" to get the result you are seeking. Often in prompt crafting you know the AI will misinterpret, taking the most popular meaning of a word. It is the visual version of autocorrect gone rogue. Especially if what you are targeting is obscure, the best strategy might be to describe something similar but better known. Instead of "the gadget" (as the Trinity device was known as), type "sea mine with wires" to get a similar-looking thing.

Again, this is why direct cloning of source images gets used. The AI gravitates towards the easy to understand. Dial up the amount of regeneration and your actual source image of a vintage locomotive will be warped into Thomas the Tank Engine. Which is, again, why AI can be stealing to a degree rather more than the AI fan club likes to admit.

(As a sideline -- more when I talk about the process of inpainting -- it is true that you can make an original digital painting, that is, something more akin to manual painting with traditional tools, and then hand that to the AI to add detail and gloss. But the AI doesn't see things the way we do. A fairly decent sketch is actually less effective than blobs of color. The things we do as traditional artists to sell an image are to the AI artifacts that have to be interpreted. Better to paint a blob and dial up the "denoising" to give the AI a relatively clean slate. So, in this way, AI works against the use of traditional painting skills.)

(The exception to the exception is models that are specifically trained -- or different operations such as Control Nets -- that are designed to interpret drawings or paintings. These will bridge the idea expressed in an outline to the object that this line describes to our human understanding. Without it, this isn't the external contours of an object to the AI; it is a physical thing itself, a black string hanging in space.)

(And, even, it is possibly good training for the artist in learning to think in color masses, values, and planes, and not get misled into outlines and external contours.)

So this is work, and it does take skill, and some of it is traditional art skill. It is also not debatable that AI takes "less" work. The AI artist may spend a lot of time, but that time may be hitting a button over and over again and waiting for the next generation to complete. It isn't with pen in hand, strongly engaged with every aspect of the artwork from brush stroke to composition.

This is why we draw a line between a mixer or recording engineer and the musicians. Between actors and playwrights. Between authors and editors. 

I don't think you can say that AI isn't art. But you absolutely can say that it isn't traditional art. Being able to paint, and in fact doing that painting, can be a part of the process. But they can also be omitted.

Does this have anything to say about the morality of it, though?

When you are on the social media sites that are currently flooded with the stuff (and many are actively beating back the tide) it is absolutely stealing art. But that was happening before AI, as these are sites where people are sharing their own versions, or remakes, or mark-ups and distortions, of commercial IPs. Where one person will take an image out of a movie and add some corny dialogue, and another person will like it so much they steal that person's marked-up steal, add some of their own scribbles, and post that.

The questions around the training data are one large reason (that and the backlash) are the bigger reasons why AI is not being used as much for commercial work. Or when it is, they attempt to hide that they have. Sightings out in the wild have included such things as illustrations in a textbook, or in a paper submitted to a scientific journal, though!

AI is tainted, now. Adobe Software is just one entity that is trying very hard to sell it, and mollify the consumers that reacted badly to the first surge of clumsy images and the questions raised about copyright. On the latter, Adobe (and a growing number of other companies) have pledged that they are not using copyrighted work.

Okay, first, this pledge is coming from a company known for suspiciously qualified statements along the lines of "We are not training this AI engine on work that our users have uploaded to this part of the cloud."

But even then...is it still, morally, stealing art when what you are stealing is free to use? Sure, there are copyright free and royalty free resources being used all the time in the arts. They are usually used in a transformative fashion, if for no other reason than that a hundred other people bought that stock photo and you really should do something to make your book cover not look just like the other guy's book cover.

(Guilty. I did my own repainting of the stock images I used for the Athena Fox books, even if I then handed them off to the actual cover artist).

But...the way AI is used is a lot more like the guy that goes to the tray of free cookies and takes two handfuls of them, stuffing some in his pockets for later.

I also worry about small reference pools. If your training data is nothing but what they could get that was royalty free and cheap, it is going to slant the nature of the data. You risk a sameness. You risk artifacts of drawing too deeply on too few sources.

There are already those structural problems within the commercial art world. Already there are external pressures to make the art look like what the market is currently saturated with. The artists are already working with tools (brushes, filters, stock photography) that are a small slice of that infinite possibility, meaning that even without those external constraints the tools themselves are pressuring the artist to do certain things in a certain way. And more so when they are in a commercial setting where the art directors and supervisors and buyers and so forth are tacitly urging them to use the tools that the company is already using.

I worry that AI tools, the data those tools are based on, and the specifics of the look, are going to spread. Basically, the visual equivalent of Autotune.

Will we forget the lessons of classical art because all we are training on (or meme-ing on) is a cliché impression of the most well-known works, or worse, crass commercialized imagery. Will we become so inured to the artifacts and flaws of AI images we cease to see them any more -- and stop trying to correct them. (Like clipping in video games. We just don't notice it any more).

And is it driving out people who are taking the slow path, doing things by hand because they want more than the results of button-push art? As I touched on above, having a traditional approach and skills is, at the current state of the art, counter-productive. Knowing and caring what a Dutch Elm looks like is counter-productive when the AI is over-trained on other trees and is almost impossible to force away from duplicating them. Knowing and caring about weird discontinuities and bad anatomy when, again, the very process conspires against fixing those things?

AI is very good at gloss; at those surface effects, textures, blending, lighting, that are difficult to achieve manually. It is very bad at poses and composition and logic and story. The one conspires against the other, though. You can rarely do a half-decent hand painting that does do good composition and uses the correct historical research or whatever, and then have AI add that last bit of gilding, because the mindless AI will paint the roses gold as well. In the process of adding ground fog or godrays, it will muck the hell out of the foliage.

But that's not...ethics.

The Handbag of Minerva

So every book is a learning experience. I'd never done a contemporary adventure book before, and it took a lot of experimenting before I found the direction the series seemed to want to go.

So that's a lot of choices that were more-or-less made for me as I put in what seemed to work and then found myself stuck with it. No place more than with my protagonist. She started with a checklist of "strong female character" tropes I was determined to avoid. And then accumulated a bunch of baggage I hadn't planned -- things that, again, worked for that book and ended up becoming canon.

She's being pulled in too many directions and is too unfocused as a character. I long for having a single-minded character with a clear emotional goal; "I must find the Lost Talisman of Abraham that my father spent his life searching for."

It hit me over brunch. Maybe it was a couple of BookTube videos on trends in modern fantasy, or a really long dissection of Totally Spies! by a non-French-speaking Canadian (yes, language came up frequently).

I want to write a stock 90s Urban Fantasy heroine. I want to check every one of the little boxes I so carefully unchecked when I created Penny.

A loner that hates crowds, hot as hell but always wears black jeans and leather jackets, never skirts and especially nothing "girly." Hates cheerleaders. Skilled martial artist and fighter and confident in her skills. Viciously snarky. No romantic confidence at all (or experience) but every hot guy in the story -- and there are many -- are all chasing her.

Trouble is, I wouldn't be able to get through it without lampshading. 

Bar of Adventure

That's not actually the name of the TVTropes entry. The idea is a bar or tavern or club that provides a meeting place for the various heroes, and in many cases, is the neutral grounds where they can also meet up with the bad guys.

There is entangled with it the concept of a central spot, a hub location, for loosely connected adventures. This bar might be in the borderlands of space or in a sprawling multi-cultural trading town or a big city with a violent underbelly.

Basically, this bar is not just a place to relax, it is a place where the next adventure begins.

And boy does this tie into tiki culture, because tiki has since its invention packaged exoticism and the lure of adventure right down to the very drinks.

I am working on the first chapter of The Tiki Stars. My protagonist Rick Starr had a Mai Tai in his hands...and I stopped to look it up. Because part of the game I'm playing is that Ray's bar, out on a sandy spit and across the tidal flats from the spaceport of this colony world, is not just a Bar of Adventure where crooks and drunks, smugglers and revolutionaries are known to meet, it is also the Birth of Tiki. An imaginary version that is no less re-invented than Donn Beach's colorful past.

I was also crossing it with the idea of a pilot's bar, with the typical memorabilia (pictures from the war, a prop hanging on the wall, that sort of thing). I wasn't sure if that made a good blend with the tiki decor, which historically started as, basically, all the crap Donn had lying around that he could pin on a wall.

Yeah. That Mai Tai? Aside from the contested origins of the recipe...so there's Victor Bergeron in the mix, and Sven has a word about that, of course...it also was likely based on and certainly has a relationship to the Test Pilot, the Q.B. Cooler and the PB2Y.

Yeah. Q.B. stands for "Quiet Birdmen," a fraternity of...pilots. There is very much already a connection to pilots, and specifically, W.W. II pilots, in the early days of tiki.

***

But outside of that...

I think this is a good project for me. I am still reading up (now a great -- and angry -- book on the relationship between the nuevomexicanos and Los Alamos). And getting new ideas. But the tiki book is bringing me back to very basic writing, writing on the sentence level. Stopping at every adverb (I've got a problem with those) and with every noun of world-building, asking if this detail is really necessary, and if it is confusing.

The incredibly freeing thing is that I don't feel constrained by the real world. This is a big problem for me in the Athena Fox books; I started them in reaction to the bad history of the typical "Archaeological Adventure" and that sort of infected the process to where I didn't want to alter the menu of a (real) restaurant I wasn't even giving the name of in the text.

I'm not the only one. There's a phrase I've forgotten that gets used around writing circles for when a writer goes out of their way to explain something that the audience was, actually, quite willing to just take on faith. This one is so old, it shows up in Homer. There are several bits where Odysseus goes on laboriously about why he didn't do this other thing instead.

One suspects in that case the "imagined reader" was in fact a very much there in person heckler as the story was being told (from memory) by a story-teller. And that answer to audience objections ended up getting codified in text when Homer wrote it all down.

For the tiki book, if something in the world looks like it could raise a question with the reader...I just go and change it.

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.