Hatches

The "Tewa taco" scene is finally done. And it ended up overstuffed like a Mission burrito.

(For those who don't know, the American burrito is considerably larger than its Mexican ancestors. In SF's Mission District, they came up with a way to steam the burrito in order to fit even more inside it.)

There were a lot of constraints going on there. I did want to do more of the thing I just did above; the processual view of things that I've had Penny doing since the first book (if only to underline that she is an archaeologist). So spotting, say, a connection between the red soil around Santa Clara (many houses are painted that same color) and the famed Santa Clara blackware. 

I also wanted to keep this scene low-key, without conflicts -- and that meant without uncomfortable questions -- because the theme here is a moment of peace. And on top of all of that, I find it harder writing about Native Americans than I did shamelessly exoticizing the French. That means a lot of the obvious things like "how do you say that in your language" are things I don't feel right including.

(Yet for some reason, I get three words in Navajo. And none in Tewa, which I had intended for my focus. In part this is because the character we get closest to is Mary Cartwright, who is Tewa but doesn't want to share. The Navajo man, Edward, we got those three words from is someone they both encounter as an outsider.)

The process of getting though this whole sequence went long enough I forgot the details of my outline. Besides, discovery writing. Some stuff doesn't feel right now that I've looked at it longer. But I've more or less got it figured out now and I am ready for the Sheep Ranch scene and the Atlas crawl. 

The latter went a strange direction. I'm going for a Fallout sort of vibe now, and Penny is discovering a series of short poem-like writings scattered about the place by a prior urban explorer, notes I'm calling an "apocalypse log" after the thing that's in so many games.

But I am seriously considering opening up a C emulator or something and writing a bare-bones text generator for these. I want them to be poetic and I've had my (recent) fill with poetry. I want it to be mad and mad is hard to write. And I just thought of this and I've got so much to write already to finish this one anyhow...

So I don't have a next book yet. At this point, I usually have another Athena Fox I already want to write. I do have three, rather more fantastical, projects in the wings...but I was thinking today how much they are not so much a problem of theme, but one of philosophy.

The philosophical thing that's beneath my Steampunk Venus story (well, almost everything is beneath them, being as you can't land on the surface of Venus and live)...anyhow, that's about the inertia of systems.

Yeah, sounds thrilling.

Basically, that politics and culture, technology and government and industry, all of these things are complex structures because they need to be. You can make a stone axe with two stones. You can't make a turbojet without factories making the parts you build the factories out of that make the parts. At least that many layers deep, and probably more.

A city-state with its necessary physical infrastructure (um, floating above the acid clouds, anyone?) and the relationships with other polities is going to be big, and have a lot of interconnected systems, and have a lot of history and a lot of cruft.

And this is set against the backdrop of a Venus that someone started terraforming. Or something. The planet is changing, and ecosystems especially when they interconnect with some crazy high-temperature chemistry get really, really complex and potentially chaotic.

There are villains, because people are people and some of them are gonna angle for "what's good for me" regardless of the cost to others. But mostly there is inertia, the inertia of past choices and present command structures and fragile economics and the big-ass problem of changing the spark plugs while the damned engine is running. 

The tension of the story is whether humans and their systems can move faster than the changing environment of Venus.

 

Which actually said the way I just did makes it seem interesting. Regardless, I am thinking a lot more about the new idea, my engineer-hero space opera. To sum up the theme of that book, it's post-processual. Err, that is, it is about how structural understandings are a powerful tool -- as long as one understands their limitations.

So there's a lot of that structural understanding going on. Some of it weaponized. But, and especially once some of it has been demonstrated, it gets abused by people who want to take the process without the caveats, or worse, take the results without the process at all. 

That's the watsonian. On the doylist side, this is plot written by one of the older underlying conceits of science fiction as a form; to start with a question, and then consider the implications.

Not exactly new. In Asimov's The Caves of Steel every clue is rooted in something about that environment and the implications thereof. In his robot stories, each story is the working out of possibly implications of the Three Laws of Robotics. In Niven, plot points come out of his behaviorist view of his alien species. Oh, wait -- that Kzin wasn't smiling.

The purest form of this being right at the bread-and-butter are those gadgeteer sorts of books. Sometimes they invented something, sometimes it is something alien they are working out the possibilities of. But there is fast-paced, mad-scale development of this ideas in real time and that forms the backbone of the plot. 

And yeah, that goes back to the Edisonades. 

And that's what I've been wanting to see in an engineer hero. But even when the book was co-written with Mr. James Doohan himself it tends to stick with conventional fisticuffs and when tech is encountered, someone "techs the tech."

(That was what they actually advised outside writers to do on The Next Generation. Just write that with the planet about to explode, Geordie techs the tech and the Enterprise is saved. The regular staff writers will put the right technobabble in there. Which certainly works for story purposes but only underlines that the science and engineering is never the point.)

Doing a book which wears that Edisonade history on its sleeve, in which the characters actively talk about technical debt and design-for-manufacture, means it is an active part of the ideas being explored when your engineer-hero crawls into a duct to cross-wire a critical circuit. Not just some fine work by Matt Jefferies.

This sort of thing -- usually found in harder SF -- is akin to the mystery form that choses to play fair with the reader. I am reliably informed, however, that even in Ellery Queen's this style is not the most popular. Plays fair, in this context, means the solution is in the clues that have been provided equally to detective and reader. They can, and sometimes do, guess the solution before the detective does.

Really, though, there is much to be said on having what is at play be character and emotion. Us monkeys want to watch other monkeys dance, after all. Not stand in a blank room solving math puzzles. The point being, by both using an engineer hero of a particular mindset, and by making that sort of thinking about design goals and understandable compromises and the implications thereof an explicit theme and in-universe plot points, the process of solving those particular math problems becomes a thing our protagonist does and the reader (hopefully) enjoys following along.

That all puts me in mind of Holmes. Reading or watching him work now, it feels like he pulls it all out of thin air. He might as well be asking the Bat Computer for the answer.

But back when they were written, the often extremely structured lives -- in a class society with clearly defined trades and roles, with the esoterica of those trades rather less esoteric than the nature of a transducer-test technician is to us today -- meant his guesses were more believable. Some of it is the satisfyingly comfortable stereotypes, so his deductions felt emotionally right. Some of it was trivia that one could find someone who actually was a printer and confirm that, more-or-less, that was how it worked.

Maybe this is why back with Doyle, or with Christie, we could have these very structured mysteries, these locked-room murders and so forth. And why we've gravitated towards character instead, to the point where it perhaps doesn't even matter that the clue or the method of acquiring it is nonsense.

But alas, science has also increased in complexity and detail and thus in distance from the reader. You could present a clever bit with throwing a rock around an asteroid back when we were mostly in a Newtonian universe. Not saying it can't be done today -- but the clever things Mark Watney did took a lot longer to explain. The Martian spent a lot less time solving chemistry problems, and a lot more time going "Ahhr!"

Which sounds like I am talking myself out of Ensign Blue. Not necessarily. Maybe this stuff is too nerdy and the readership isn't there for as much as I want to put it. But the fact that I can do it, attracts me a lot more than the rather more hidden themes lurking behind those sulfuric-acid clouds.

Which brings me to mixed drinks. There's some potentially fun stuff in The Tiki Stars. Colonialism, exoticism, the commercialization of leisure. The uneasy balancing act in which "cultural appropriation" is but one slice and one label. That and a sort of fable about the birth of Tiki culture, taking the existing mythologies and re-mythologizing them in a different setting.

There's also a writerly question, about how much you can do and have fun with old-school pulp in this modern age.

But this is definitely the lesser of this trio, when it comes to having an interesting philosophy to work off of. There is, in plainer and simpler words, a lot less to say (or at least less that I am interested in saying).

Frybread

I'm calling it the "frybread" scene now. They are making Tewa Tacos. I did some more reading up and watched a couple videos so if it felt like I wanted to do some kind of "sounds of cooking came from the kitchen" I'd have some idea of what was going on there.

Well, now I do.

I'd taken a sick day but just before the grocery store closed I woke up with a need to actually cook something. Ran out and threw the basics for Indonesian hot rice in the basket. And then said what the hell and added a bag of flour and a box of baking soda.

No recipe, no measurements, just memories of what I'd seen on YouTube and mild experience with dough in the past (making pasta from scratch. I'm glad I did it, feels nice to know how, don't really want to do it again).

And the frybread came out...okay. Could have been fluffier, and crisper, but it was tasty. 

The other bit of research that cropped up during this scene is I wanted to show family and relationships. The opening there came by accident; I opened the scene with Helen Naranjo on the couch and wrote in another woman just to open the door for Penny. So now I've got three people and there's a chance to do genealogy stuff I've watched my own family do. The "You remember Sarah, don't you? She's the sister of the mother of that friend of my daughter's from school. Well she just moved in with Peter, a man from Boston who goes to the same poetry readings as my friend Lana."

For many Native American nations, this is clan stuff. The whole "Born to Bright Water Clan, born from Beaver Clan." Except. Turns out the clan names (and associated things) are considered private in Tewa culture. They are not shared with outsiders.

My research method failed on this whole sequence. I'd read about a third of The Tewa World (there's actually two books by that name) but by the time I did the scene where Mary talks a little about it, I'd forgotten practically everything. And because of other story reasons, my Tewa character ends up spending most of that conversation talking about Dine mythology instead!

(And, yes, there was a hole in the narrative that Mutton Man fit into perfectly. So I did get to use him after all.)

And apropos of nothing, I'm oddly attracted to San Antonio for the next Athena Fox story. No idea of a plot. I just like the history, and their extensive underground world. 

Anyhow, even with adding this "sister of the mother of the friend of the" stuff, I'm within a half-dozen paragraphs of finishing the Rez sequence. This is the tipping point; the book accelerates from here, and for various reasons both internal to the text and having to do with my working methods, it should go much faster after this.

There's a lot of stuff to go, though. A "Glowing Sea" sequence as Penny pokes through an illegal dump site with a borrowed Geiger counter in one hand, the "Duel" sequence on the highway that ends with Penny being very glad she got collision coverage on her rental, a visit to the War Zone -- sorry, "International District" -- of Albuquerque, the descent into the pit and a few bad moments at the very bottom of an old Atlas-F silo, a confrontation with a bully at a 50's diner that goes strange, a trip to the Waste Isolation Plant Prototype, a doped-out conversation about nuke cats and the heat death of the universe, another "Hello Clarise" scene, a confrontation with the senior archaeologists and digging up a grave for the third time, a confrontation with a mysterious assailant in the trailer of a dead conspiracy nut with a convenient weapon-lined wall of everything the aspiring mall ninja would want, and then the long long trek through White Sands on foot after a horse that probably does have a name, dreaming of Lozen and Etgveld Girl and even Lucy...

Finishing with a little rock-meets-laser as Penny shows what she's learned about knapping flint at the very base of the Trinity monument. And the final scene with Jackson and Sanchez, when at least they explain what part of the Air Force they work for. Although I don't think Jackson will ever explain what inspired him to buy a hummer.

Structural Elements

 

I am almost through the "Rez" chapter. Just finishing up the conversation between Penny and the aunt who Mary Cartwright choses to spend time with. There's a lot about Mary that I'm leaving for the reader to unpack. How much of what she has said and done in other chapters came out of her interactions with her extended family, life in Santa Clara and Albuquerque, even the way this favorite aunt used to work "on the hill" (aka Los Alamos).

In archaeology, they call this processual (there was a lot more to unpack in this movement, also called the New Archaeology, and why we are somewhere in post-post-processual today). In SF, we call it part of the fun; Gernsback's "What happens next?" and so on. And it is absolutely all over the Athena Fox books.

How did this thing come to be? What forces shaped this thing? What are the implications of this thing? You can't stroll through modern Paris and not have the very path you take be shaped by the decisions taken by Baron Haussmann, working out of the philosophies of his time -- and the desires of his Emperor Napoleon III.

This is why I keep coming back to the Athena Fox series. And why I have so much trouble with the tiki book. Because the latter is just conceit. It is surface texture. There are interesting things I'd like to unpack and explore about the nature of tiki; about exoticism, appropriation, the commercialization of leisure. But it doesn't really have those meaty questions of "why."

And that's why I keep taking notes about Ensign Blue. (Working name for the file folder, I will have you know! Not an actual title or character name.)

Which came, mind you, out of experiments I was doing with WAN2.2 et al towards telling a story in animation via AI. Which is a fool's quest but that's another story. So; those same questions you ask of "Why didn't the Maya use the wheel?" or "why are barns red?" are baked into this project from the start. "Blue" is because the renders I used as a starting point had a character in a blue uniform. Okay?

And in longer twisty paths I don't feel like spending the time going over, there are things about the various cultures and their interactions which came out of those WAN experiments. Things about them that became ways of thinking about them, and the kind of exploration I've been talking about.

A theme, even; behavioral determinism with its insights, its process, and its limitations. (Which, to any student of the history of archaeology, is familiar ground; the way the understanding of cultures was shaped by the systems of thought of archaeologists themselves, which themselves came out of the same processual -- and other! -- forces.)

(Something which was way back in the first Athena Fox book. Our way of looking at classical cultures is shaped too much by our history with the Classics. The Greeks and Romans wrote. A lot. And via Rome -- and to a lesser extent the Greek Orthodox strains of Christianity -- western culture preserved the ability to read Latin and Greek. Which circled around and became a status symbol -- something that started back when the clergy were, essentially, the lettered class -- and that meant privileging of a particular way of viewing the classical cultures that also not-coincidentally privileged those doing so.)

(Or so goes the gloss. It would take a very long essay to unpack that one even slightly more than that.)

But to boil it down, Ensign Blue gives me an excuse to play Jared Diamond/Larry Niven games with biological and environmental determinism, while at the same time making pointed commentary when the facile "The Hrunt are descended from herd animals; they will never go to war" gets shown wrong on the pointy end of an incoming armada of Hrunt warships.

And all the fractal way down; Blue is an engineer, a ship's engineer, and there is always a world of "why the hell did they design it this way!" that can, at times, be ways that make it difficult to maintain, ways that make it prone to break under certain conditions, ways it can be repurposed, and ways it can be hacked.

Like, well, vents. You can call them Jeffries Tubes if you like, but at the bread-and-butter, there's a way that your clever characters can get around the boarding party.

One thing, though. (Well, there's a lot more than one...) Having this sort of underlying structural rationale that can be leveraged to generate "what kind of ships do they have on this planet" answers, or exploited to explain how the good guys (or the bad guys, who are allowed to be clever, too) manage to get some plot-necessary thing to happen, means it would all work better if some of this world was planned before I started writing.

Yeah. I actually have a structural and even thematic reason to want to embrace world-builder's disease.

(That, and I'm plotting backwards. Well, plotting is always a dialogue, but I've had a lot of experience lately with having to build the plot around what is actually on the ground. My concept for this book, it works just fine if I already have the map and the tech and I try to figure out stories that work with that groundwork.)

Non-Linear Narrative

Actually, non-linear plotting. Maybe that's why the simple-concept, easy-to-write books are taking so dang long in reality. 

Sigh. I set out to give this one a clearer plot progression. Distinct breadcrumbs; each plot point was something specific Penny needed to know, and took a specific measure to learn. And there would be a defined moment when she learns the thing.

Also, the plot would change course. Not just the direction of the next question, but the shape of the world. Largely, that has turned into different environments the plot takes her. Where I am in the story right now, it took her into the reservations. So this is the desert level, right after the underwater level that everyone hates.

(Huh. I just realized that in Horizon: Forbidden West the underwater level is in the desert level!)

I knocked down a lot of the reaction, by military, law enforcement, mystery men in black trucks, etc. I always seem to cut back from what I imagined in my outlines, to where there's less action, fewer bad guys, less intense emotions and all-in-all a more restrained (ahem; "realistic) scene. 

So the world changing is mostly that Penny gets kicked off the dig. And that's as much a change in environment as it is the world changing in response to her efforts. 

And here I am again, sending her on a quest after a specific question (who are these guys in a truck following me around) and discovering, Dirk Gently style, random ideas that eventually synthesize into a new realization.

Okay. Heading into the climax of Horizon Zero Dawn, Aloy puts together that HADES inspired the Shadow Carja to attack Meridian so HADES could get access to the MINERVA array and achieve its own goal (aka, wake up the ancient war machines and wipe Earth clean of all life). This is something Aloy puts together not because of specific clues, but through a gestalt of understanding how Zero Dawn worked, what HADES was programmed to do, what role MINERVA had in the project, and so on.

This despite that on a day-to-day, mission-to-mission level, Aloy is, "go there, talk to this guy, figure out how to climb to a place, beat up the machines there, return to the guy, fight totally expected boss-fight machine that shows up for no reason, collect XP and a new bow."

Because that's what I was thinking of in terms of linear plot. Bad guys have the McGuffin. Chase them. Guys with guns get in the way. Shoot them. Lather rinse repeat.

I'm just talking myself up to why I think the next book won't be as hard.

Poor man's outpainting

So one of the big uses of AI as a tool is filling in blanks in an image (say, if you did a Stalin on it), or extending the image.

(Oddly enough, one of the most famous images of the space program is extended. Buzz cut off Neil's head, but since the surrounding negative was black anyhow, they re-cropped it. And straightened it, too.)

So there's a stupid trick you can do with AI video generators; command a change of pose or camera orbit and let the AI interpolate the new image in three dimensions. With work, you can get what (the AI thinks) your model looks like when seen from a different angle. Pretty much, you can turn around the guy in the photograph. It's just the AI will make up a new face on the fly.

In practical terms, it will probably require some rework. But it is a fast-and-dirty way to get a different starter pose or camera angle on the same basic set/model/composition.

***

As I posted a bit back, I think the limitation on long renders is not actually a problem. Well, there are shots where you want to do a long tracking shot or a walk-and-talk. And there's formats like talking heads interview or podcast where the camera setup remains the same for minutes at a time. But especially if you are trying to tell a story, intercuts not only don't harm, they may even be necessary.

But back to that longer shot. After all, depending on which models you are using, how strong the prompting is, if you have useful LoRAs etc., the image can lose cohesion in as little as three seconds. Especially if that outpainting effect comes in; if the camera turns further than the previously seen setting, and the AI has chosen to put elements that don't fit your vision into those previously un-imaged locations.

In general, the video models are strongly biased towards taking the pixel patterns they see and mapping them to motions that are in their training data. It is a lot like the interpolations img2img uses all the time, except the idea of time/animation progression is added into the mix as a strong constraint.

Unfortunately, the AI really can't separate character moves from camera moves and it is almost impossible to lock the camera. That active, steadicam or hand-held camera, language is baked in to the models. It's the usual figure/ground, map/territory problem with AI. They don't know what a forest is, or what trees are. They get there by the fact that most forests have trees, and many trees are in forests.

So I've been messing around with extended videos.

The simplest solution is a cutaway, or change of angle or subject. I rendered a separate set of insets I could switch to whenever I needed to cover a break or change.

These still require observing the 180 rule and preferably keeping line of action as well. The latter is particularly important when cutting between related views. If the vehicle was moving right to left, even if you are cutting to a steering wheel, preserve that right-to-left. It makes the cut much smoother.

***

After that there is daisy-chaining. Especially since you can cut in and out using different angles and insets, you can go a pretty arbitrary length while maintaining the model. Keeping clarity on the set is a different matter and I don't have solutions to that yet.

i2v is the workhorse. This takes a starter image which is on-model, and animates from there. At some point it will diverge enough to become objectionable. In any case, the last-frame-extract node is great here; it pulls out a png of the last frame before compiling the video. (You can also pull the entire image stream and sift through them).

Why? Because you can take the last image, clean it up, and run a new i2v on that. Or you can do an arbitrary "generation" animation to get a different starting point, pull an image off that, and clean that up.

f2l has some advantage here. It is especially good for generating a join. You take as first image, the saved last image of the first animation. Then you take as last image for the f2l, the starter image for the clip that will be following.

The AI will do some weird things getting from A to B, though. As with all things AI, it sees things in a different way. We didn't notice a subtle change in the background because we were watching the action. The AI did, and has the martial artists suddenly engage in a little moonwalk to get to where it can join up with the background in the final image.

Best one I had yet was I had done a long daisy-chain and texture and LoRA burn-in had made the back wall look like a set from Beckett. The AI had the answer; a dozen frames before the end of the splicing clip, it had buckets of mud appear out of the air and throw themselves at the wall.

The odd one out here is s2v. I love sound-to-video because the presence of voice and sound effects makes the AI generate action. As with all things visual AI, it defaults towards static posing. "Model stands looking vaguely at the camera" is what you get so often even when you fill the prompt with action verbs.

I haven't learned that much about controlling the sound. A few experiments show that it is slightly better than Prisoner Zero at figuring out which mouth to work when given multi-character dialogue. I haven't tried it out yet on multiple musical instruments. It does seem to react to emotional content, though. Where it is extracting physical motion from, I don't know.

The other oddity of s2v is it allows use of an extension node that passes the latent on to the next node in the chain. It can get out to thirty seconds before the image degradation becomes too objectionable to continue on.

So what is this about "clean up?"

Yeah, this is what many people are doing now, at least according to the subreddit. Unsurprisingly, everyone wants to let the AI do the work, or at least automate it. So throw it into a Quen node at low denoise, possibly within the same workflow.

I'm cheating right now in that I haven't finished learning how to make a character LoRA. So instead of being able to plug-and-play, I drop the image back in AUTOMATIC, and I flip back and forth between several different models, employing various LoRAs and changing the prompt to focus in on problems.

And, yes, not just inpainting, but looping through an external paint application to address problem areas more directly.

It is a bit more than I need to address image degradation and get a clean starter image in high quality, as well as to stay on model, but it also means that taking an animation that produced a new view or state can be repainted, manipulated, inpainted, and otherwise brought on-model.

This stuff does mean I have a whole scatter of files, for which I have no consistent naming scheme. And can be a pain searching through clips to find the one that actually bridges two other clips properly. But it all sort of works.

Now I want to explore more interesting story beats. Something to do with fixing spaceships.

More Little Buildings

I needed a break. And I have a new video card. So what is more natural than a bit of games?

(It beats more messing with AI.)

I've been doing a Connecticut Yankee run on Satisfactory. This is starting with the entire tech tree unlocked (and yes, that includes alternate recipes and Ficsit Shop). I also abused the "allow flying" advanced setting to collect a whole bunch of slugs and sloops.

The reason being, I just wanted to build shit, and I saw no reason to build giant-ass factories if I could overclock everything and use alt recipes to further reduce the footprints.

I didn't have a big plan going in. Mostly just wanted to enjoy that Robinson Crusoe vibe (well, more like Verne's The Mysterious Island, which is a Victorian Robinsonade on steroids). Even with the tech tree unlocked before-hand, the old Satisfactory Red Queen's Race continues; I'd started a huge coal plant to secure my power needs, but by the time I'd scouted coal and built up my industry to the point where I could build it, I'd already discovered oil and had the tech base to exploit that.

That's the turbo-fuel plant on the left there, with the generator towers behind it. In the center, having fun with "what can you make with petroleum coke" alternate recipes. Including the stripped-down aluminium process in that work-in-progress building behind it.

Another thing I wanted to do is avoid the plop-factory look, with buildings just sitting out alone in the middle of nowhere, and things like miners or extractors sitting on top of nodes on their steel skids, lifting eyes visible. So I blueprinted a couple of ad-hoc buildings to hide the latter.

And added various support buildings (which mostly do nothing) and bits of roadway, container yards, plus extended the pads under the buildings to make it look like it actually got built and continues to be supported, not just magicked into existence.

There is one bit of logic here; cleaning up the power lines makes it a lot easier to figure out which way they go (and what you can afford to cut or change when the inevitable upgrades ensure).

 

Ideas are Easy

There's two stories appearing this week on the BBC's feed. Someone's been photographing the hyenas that live in an abandoned diamond-mine town in Namibia. The other article is about a different mine in a completely different country that the Nazis were using to hide looted artwork.

Yeah, that's a central image right there. A ghost town haunted by memories of old wars and potentially dangerous current wildlife, and somewhere below, in a maze of shafts barely propped up by rotting wood, are priceless art masterpieces.

I've said this before. Writing an archaeological adventure series? The BBC has a plot germ at least once a week.

EDIT: and it continues! Not the BBC this time, but researching a nice "ominous black car" for the current book and while reading about hummers discovered the Northwest Passage Drive Expeditions, including brightly-colored humvees refitted with tracks to use as a test bed for potential Mars rovers. Which is amusing enough already, but connects to the Haughton-Mars Project and their sort-of Mars base on an ancient impact crater on Devon Island, which also has a nice history of failed colonialist attempts, 5,000 year old archaic Innuit settlements, and the first place where traces of HMS Terror was found (the Franklin Expedition).

And just the topping on this "hoo boy" cake, the one above is named the Okarian. After what, you might ask? The Okar nation of the frozen north of Barsoom.