Okay, who bent the algorithm?

Suddenly this morning, my Quora feed is full of chess questions. I swear, I have never looked at anything chess-related there.

Worse, YouTube is trying to entice me with TERF and anti-SJW rants.

I mean, I know better; I still remember when I was looking up a concealed weapon for a story and for the next six months I was getting Right to Carry stuff in my sidebar.

Doesn't help that -- well, it is really my own fault -- that so many of the things I need to do are requiring sign-in now and so very many of them offer the alternative of just using Google. I'm trying hard to get out of Chrome now, but most of the alternatives are worse. I don't actually mind Chrome spying on me as much as I mind how many CPU cycles it is wasting grinding away at remembering every single detail of every single thing I do through it, and broadcasting the information to all its little friends.

Seriously, I have to shut down Chrome any time I want to use a heavy-demand application. Like Reaper. Or PhotoShop.

Imagine my delight when Chrome starts right back up because PhotoShop requires via-browser activation each and every time it runs now. It is a subscription, and extra-aggressive about it. It wants to make damned sure no freeloader dares use its software without giving them a fat check every month.

So it makes absolutely sure that it is connecting to the same Google log-in, that same ultra-secure login that requires only an email to verify or change, that every stupid site out there already knows...

Including Quora.

New foxes for old

Finally, 900 more words on the Cult HQ sequence. The monorail is in the next scene. Except the next scene is also what I've been calling "Hello, Clarice"; a psychological battle between her and the cult leader (with Penny mostly being the loser).

And I'm plugging along at figuring out why the heck she's going to be way out in snow country getting attacked by yakuza. Or, rather, chimpira; young wanna-be's. But I've also been plugging away at the Paris plot, so I can try and hit that one running.

I hate to lose three months and a nice winter and postpone the next adventure all the way into April. Somewhere is the thought of crossing folk music, Viking re-enactors, the Kensington Rune Stone, and a chance to make a Winter is Coming joke...but I guess that's going to have to wait for another winter. Among other things, the Japan book is just too over the top, and I need to send Penny on something that ratchets things down a bit. With her being on a budget again, and making stupid tourist mistakes, and not getting any respect, and of course, without everyone calling her Athena Fox.

I wish I could send her on a dig. But the three ideas I've got are all more research; one is to go on an archaeological tourism junket. One is to be hired by a church to dig in the Holy Land. And one is something to do with the Great Atari Burial but is also desert and the history of the early Atomic Age and NAGPRA and...

Anyhow, my stomach is killing me -- had a whole bunch of blood drawn but they didn't find anything, of course -- and it was all I could do today to concentrate enough to knock out the first draft of a single scene.

It wasn't a complete loss of a day, though. I finished the bulk of the repaint for the first of the revised covers:

Just about ready to collapse the figure so I can get into the detail work of blending the different elements together, tweaking shadows, adding interobject lighting effects, painting in more hair, etc. For some reason the dark hair makes her look more cowgirl than archaeologist, but whatever. Then of course there's a new cover layout to do, some brush effect filters, re-do the title text...

I ordered and got another Inari statue brush art for the internal art. I like this one better than the last but it is still not working for me. I hate to spend the very little time I have away from work doing art that I should be able to just hire someone for, but so far my experience has been I'm not getting what I'm paying for, and I'm spending far too much time trying to save time trying to get it done for me!

Monorail....monorail...!

I just started writing the scenes inside the "main compound" -- rather, headquarters buildings -- of the cult at the center of A Fox's Wedding. 

And I don't know how it works. I mean, sure, I could scribble a map of the physical building. More or less. But I have so many questions, starting with --

Who is here? What is the purpose of this building? 

Part of the problem is the hybrid nature of the "cult." Transcendence is primarily a business (well, all successful cults are more-or-less businesses), a small to mid-sized company known in-story mostly for the Genki brand of health-conscious cosmetics.

Which means that somewhere in the world are accountants, legal staff, sales, all the stuff that makes it possible to manufacture and ship product. They could be contracting out much of this. They could be locating those offices anywhere -- process development and quality control and all of that should be located at the factories, for instance.

This is a very hierarchal organization with an illusion of being a meritocracy so the headquarters in the hills outside Kyoto is very much the Special place where only the Special people get to work. The highest level execs, and of course the activities that aren't strictly about getting cold cream to market.

And I want it big enough to justify a small security staff. And a monorail. (The monorail is in-story a useless extravagance anyhow...the campus doesn't actually have to be big enough to need one!) It may end up in the end being a side comment by some character; "We wanted a monorail but...."

Anyhow, it is inspired by an actual building:

So I've been in the workforce (as opposed to being in theater) long enough to know just how many bodies, hours, offices and shops it takes to run a company. But they don't need to be in this building --it's not a story about the HR Department. Penny is mostly interacting with the very top people; the charismatic ex Enka singer who is the visible face of the organization, his school chum "Uchuu" who is the theorist who dreamed up the details of their beliefs, the "old man" who doesn't seem to contribute much but who is treated with unusual deference, the drab middle-aged couple who lurk in the shadows and are always within sight of the old man...

And, yes, one reason to have more people running around is so the latter trio don't stand out quite so much as being This Is Important To The Plot.

So I'd like to have some of the other cultists, particularly aspirants to the higher ranks, in there with her. I am in no way going full Moonraker here! But at least I can have a little fun...

(Most of the in-the-cult sequence is when the James Bond basically fails. They know she's a spy, those kinds of tricks aren't working. So it is moving much more in a Chuck 2.0 direction with Penny getting a chance to put her own unique spin on things. And of course...at the end of it, the cult is in general as benign as the people behind the museum pictured above. It is the situation that gets out of hand...)

Best village by a dam site

 I didn't think I could get everything I wanted in an actual location. I was this close to just making up some snowy landscape a plot-convenient distance from Kyoto.

But I kept reading, and I just happened to look in the right place, and all research directions I'd been looking at before came together.

This is just what happened in Fox and Hounds. I'd been reading up on various Roman discoveries and the Crossrail project and the Aux units and the Deep Underground Shelters and of course ghost stations -- and when I looked at the old Nine Elms station it all fell together. A largely imaginary history of this one-real station, but it tied so neatly into real history of the London Underground and the Shelters and the quite topical big construction and excavation in that area.

Anyhow. The village is Shirakawa-go. Or, rather, that's part of the story. This is another "lost in time" preserved historical village, with a distinctive snow country architecture. It is in one of the areas where they have a heavy (and early) snow, meaning thick snow in late December is quite accurate. It is a 3-4 hour drive from Kyoto. It is remote and isolated and sparsely populated and there is a convenient mountain involved as well. It isn't, unfortunately, the mountain that is famous for the Tengu, or one that is closely associated with ninja (or yamabushi) but that's okay.

Because there is also a dam. As soon as I saw that, I started looking, because there are known ghost towns in Japan that were abandoned as a result of a dam. (Not drowned so much as cut off sufficiently to become irrelevant and economically unsustainable.) And the date of the dam is 1960s -- so I get to have my ghost town be the bucolic post-war architecture.

(And heavily disintegrating, because building philosophy at the time was lightweight wooden buildings intended for a mere 30-year life span.)

So there's almost too many connections into thematic meanderings about Japan's aging populace and the flight into urban areas and the efforts to recover and restore old buildings...

And there's an onsen, of course there is. 

Oh, did I explain? The routine with the abandoned village is an intentional reference to the abandoned (but rather older) Japanese buildings of Yamatai, from the current Tomb Raider reboot. Pretty much, all I want to do is look at them. Although it is tempting to have a fight there, now that I think about it...

An Italic Type

So I am considering using italics this time.

The choice seemed straight-forward in The Fox Knows Many Things. Penny's narrative "voice" is youthful and exuberant and I knew I'd be having italics for emphasis occurring frequently. In addition, I made the choice that her only companion through the solo part of her journey is communicating via text messages -- which for this book, I was representing in italics. (A Fox's Wedding has a friend on voice, and for Fox and Hounds the friend is there with her.)

There was also a deeper philosophical reason. And, it turns out, it is something that is being actively discussed in writing and publishing circles -- particularly with the rise of bilingual authors trying to communicate that "other voices" experience.

Here's a typical example of that discussion. The writer Daniel José Older put it amusingly in a short video where he begins a sentence in English; "So I realized I needed groceries so I stopped by the --" quick cut, now wearing a Havana hat and strumming on a Spanish guitar "-- super mercado --" another quick cut to restore, "-- for rice and beans."

As Daniel puts it, this is not how we experience language. Not, at least, when you are facile enough to be code-switching between them.

But I am straddling the boundary in these books; I am trying to put across not a true bilingual experience, but the tourist experience; starting from unfamiliarity to reaching a point where it seems absolutely natural to say please and thank you in a language other than your own -- to where, as a for-instance, "arigato" stops meaning "the Japanese word for thank you" and just becomes the reflex when you want to thank someone, just like (as happened to me) a short bow.

***

There were additional technical questions. In The Fox Knows Many Things there wasn't a single language I could identify and separate out. There were bits of Greek, German, French, Latin, Italian...and Fake Italian. But also, with the exception of opera lyrics (which are sort of a thing of themselves) there weren't a lot of full sentences appearing. Just a word or two, and almost always in a context that let you figure them out.

The experience of A Fox's Wedding is different. This is the book where language feels like a barrier to Penny. It is even more than the Germany sequence of "...Knows," Penny being thrown into the deep water of all the conversation around her being unintelligible. And unlike the bits of language she acquires in "...Knows," she is also picking up complete sentences that she can speak -- but not understand a word of.

This idea of unfamiliarity is the main argument. There are two views on what happens when a reader hits a foreign word in the middle of an English sentence, particularly a word they don't know. One is that they will try to read it as if it is English and be thrown. They might try to look it up in a dictionary. They might think the writer has mis-spelled it. Italics functions there to alert the reader; "New and special word; you aren't expected to know this one."

(I still think that reviewer bumped into British slang and idioms when he slapped me with a "lots of typos" comment.)

The other argument is that the italics themselves are the stumbling block. Especially if the reader already knows the word, it could throw them out of the text. It is also othering; the main objection bilingual authors have. Italics are like forceps used to carefully isolate this suspect, foreign word so it doesn't get all over the English sentence. And then there is the tradition of italics for emphasis; is the man saying he is going to the banhof, or is that supposed to be read he is going to the BANHOF?

And of course; Science Fiction has rarely felt the need to italicize unfamiliar terms. Fantasy, however, often does -- but usually when they are understood as arising in a language other than English. 

***

And I have technical issues with applying italics here. Penny is learning the language, and she is not always getting it right. Similarly, her friend Aki is an American weaboo, using the fanboy Japanese an English-speaker. Italicizing everything they say is putting an unearned stamp of authenticity on it; "It must be real Japanese, because it is in italics!"

For that mater, Penny pretends to speak Russian at one point. Should that be in italics? Is the rule "We aren't expected to understand it" or "this isn't English" or is it "this is a specific other language?"

And then there's honorifics! If I italicize through the book, we end up with things like, "Arigato, Samantha-san. I will tell Richard-san to wait for us by the itzakaya on Nakamura-dori."

Talk about the reader stumbling! Fortunately, as far as honorifics, I have some justification for simply having honorifics (and name order) follow the rules of the language most of the conversation is taking place in. So it is “Kochira wa Yamada Jiro-sensei,“ but "This is Professor Jiro Yamada."

And what about terms? Do I have to make a word by word choice if a word is considered naturalized in English and wouldn't normally be italicized? Should Penny say, "Enough samurai history lesson, let's get some sushi?" This seems awkward. But where is the cut-off? "That ninja attacked me with tekko-kagi and a ninja katana." Weird.

And then there’s wasai-eigo, but I have a character making the point that English words appearing in a Japanese context are to be thought of as Japanese. They aren’t there to be understood by English speakers, they are functional elements of modern Japanese. 

Still, that’s a rule that easier to apply to “apato” (originally, “apartment”) than to “Happy Science.” The latter is intended to be recognized as Japanese. Perhaps the guideline there should be — if it occurred in a sentence written in Japanese, such as in a manga, would it appear in kana or in romaji? Trouble is, I'm not writing in Japanese characters. So does someone shout out, "Sugoi, senpai, supa kawaii sungurasu?"

The MLA says that you can introduce an unfamiliar word in italics then revert to normal case after that. I can't do this slavishly -- it creates too many awkward sentences -- but I can use that as a general rule; keep words in italics when they are largely unfamiliar, and drop them to normal case when they are domesticated. 

Aki's weaboo can be a special case; since weaboo is annoying to most people as it is a self-conscious and superficial insertion of random Japanese words into otherwise functional English sentences, italicizing all the Japanese makes sense. But immediately I run into a snag; Aki calls Ichiro a "bishie boy." That's fanspeak; the actual Japanese is "biishonen." So it is an unfamiliar word, even a term of art, but it isn't Japanese.

And even "Arigatou" is borderline. Penny knows what it means, but she's never used it in conversation. In addition -- she is (subtly) getting it wrong. Aside from being a gaijin (an important qualifier!) she should be saying "Arigatou gozaimasu." Just as she insists on saying "ganbatte!" when that's the wrong verb form to be using on herself (it should be "ganbaru"; "you should do your best" versus "I will do my best.")

And when we are talking about the use of italics as alienation, as a sign of "this is something you aren't expected to understand," the first big language challenge for Penny is when some very official men start shouting, “Ashina Fokusu-san,” in her direction. Italics further obscures what she eventually realizes; this is her own name!

***

So I went and put the italics in several chapters to see what it looks like. In some places, it does seem to make the text clearer. In other places, though, it looks a little awkward on the page. The Akihabara sequence is one of the worst, where new words and slang terms are being introduced rapid-fire in the middle of an English conversation. 

A much earlier scene, those terms were being introduced with quotes around them and defined immediately:

"Deacon believes strongly in the old values of ’Shūshin Koyō,’ lifetime employment."

So I'm comfortable in letting the quotes do the work here. And in an earlier scene, the words are names of objects being described in the sentence in which they occur:

The weapons and tools exhibit was fun. Ninja-to, the straight ninja sword. Tekko-kagi, the nasty looking hand claws and Ashiko, iron climbing cleats.

So that, too, is fine; I don't need to drop italics into it to make it clear that these words are not intended to be read as mis-spelled English.

It is the Akiba sequence where things fall apart a bit. First there are tough choices, as in:

Ikebukuro sounded interesting, though, with the Otome-dori — maiden road? — where all the female otaku shopped for BL and ikemen goodies.

There, Ikebukuro is a place name but Otome-dori is not the actual name and is supposed to be interpreted as a meaningful phrase. Otaku has been defined long enough to be normalized in the English of the main text, BL is an otaku term but it stands for English words (Boys Love) and, of course, ikemen is unknown and furthermore is never defined or brought up again.

So, basically, it has to be done pretty much on a case-by-case basis.

Wasteland Riches

 I've got it made!

In unrelated news, I've been drinking a lot of Munich-made beer lately.

So, Fallout 4. As I've said, the main campaign is only mildly amusing. Exploring the wasteland is a lot of fun, but like Skyrim, encounters with NPCs are fairly fruitless. Mass Effect this is not. In Mass Effect you are a social creature; your play is informed by how you interact with people. In Skyrim, you have little effect on the world (in-game, you stopped the end of the world, but that still doesn't keep guards from insulting you about missing pastries.) In Fallout 4, forget the main gameplay loop; make it a cut-rate Sims instead!

So I started with the Wasteland look; scrabbling out some semblance of civilization out of the ruins.

Which, especially when I started to lean on the console codes, usually started by cobbling up a nice-looking workshop slash home base. All the crafting stations I'd need, some decorations to add that cool look, and a cot for when I needed sunlight for the next bit of work.

You can do some cool stuff with that, especially when you throw off limits and just start slamming boards around to make gigantic sprawling settlements.

I think that one is from my "Roman" run. My head-canon for that play-through is when I woke up in the vault with Nora dead and Shaun gone my mind snapped. I'd been teaching history and, well, I decided I was actually a lost Roman Centurion, thrown into an unfamiliar world, and doing what any good Roman military man would do then.

Engineer the shit out of things. And of course build up defenses. Turns out that if you use the Conquer mod to create closely-spaced settlements you can run a road from one to the other. Things break a bit doing this, though.

This is also what got me into modding because I really, really wanted the appropriate props. But importing them into the game is, well, not for the weak.

So next step is Nuclear Nora, Planet Janet. Head Canon here is a highly educated, competent, and confident person from before the bombs fell, and aside from the Institute most of the people of the wasteland have forgotten how to build things properly. So max out the science, first off. Collect laser weapons, sure. But pretty soon it is into mods because then I can build properly, none of this tarpaper and broken furniture.

And of course make a nice room for myself.

Funny thing about screen shots. The Fallout 4 universe is a 3D one. You are used to being able to look around and see things in true depth. So it really doesn't look right from single POV static screenshots. That, and in screenshots the lack of decorations is a lot more obvious. I can decorate...I'm just usually so bored of that settlement by that time I move on.

So that was fun but I was starting to get experimental. I was tired of having most of my settlers off lost in a field somewhere and I wanted to see them do more sandboxing.

First thing is to set up the proper infrastructure. A nice workshop, and a recycling point.

Some fixed defenses to keep the Raiders at bay so my settlers can relax into a life of leisure.

(That one has a fusion plant in the base. I couldn't put windows around the other turrets to protect them because in that location the build height is extremely low.)

Then secure a good source of clean water.

(This actually makes in-game sense. Sometimes settlers will get lost poking around the water pumps. Enemies also like to damage them, and even the repair robot isn't a panacea for annoying clean-up work. So put them in a protected shell with a good generator, and lock the door behind you.)

And I toyed for a while with the idea of greenhouses. Stick some crop-tending robots in a box with planters -- same idea as the water supply. But the robots get lost too frequently, and without farming to do the settlers are, it turns out, even less interesting.)

I was getting to the point of having robots do everything, but amusing as that was, I miss the settlers. So time to try to get some more interesting behavior out of them. I made a couple of spaces absolutely crammed with sandbox opportunities and those were mildly amusing. Somewhere, there's a way of making a vibrant-looking community by placing the right interaction opportunities around and balancing the number of people with the inability of the game to handle large numbers of AI objects. But so far, the results have been pretty...but sterile.

Oddly enough, though, the best-looking settler activities weren't vendor behavior or using crafting stations, they were guarding, doing push-ups, playing with knives... So that moved me into going the direction of heavily armed camps, and trying to resist the temptation of hanging turrets on everything.

Which is in a way getting back to the Wasteland Aesthetic I'd started with. Although by this point, the mod stack is extremely long, half the mods are hand-modified by me plus my own tiny attempts, and let's not forget all the console work that goes into it.

All in all, though, it is a mildly amusing way to pass the last hours before bed after I've lost the creative ability and focus to do something more worthwhile. And when all is said and done...sometimes just heading out to wander around the wasteland is all you really want.

Untrustworthy

Penny is an untrustworthy narrator. I've decided this is going to be how she is going to be in the long haul; a self-doubting hero. An onion, or rather, parfait; she will in following books (assuming there are following books) do the typical self-effacing hero wisecracks to hide the fact that she's terrified and doesn't think she can pull it off. And she remains blind to the fact that she really is that kind of bad-ass as she once again does pull it off.

This book in particular, though, she is hiding things from the reader. First she hides the Nine Elms scar, barely mentioning it until Ichiro points it out and asks if she's covering it up because it brings back bad memories.

In the Cult HQ sequence, the intent was that she is also hiding the way she figured out it is Fake Aki, not her friend, on the headset. She doesn't tell the reader until later. I did something like this early in the London book; a street hustler is pulling the "gift bracelet" routine on her and as far as the narrative is concerned she is blandly going along. Until she reveals that she knows that hustle all too well from LA.

But here's a new problem:

I don't know if the payoff of Fake Aki is sufficient. I don't really need the extra betrayal from Ichiro, not the way their relationship actually developed on the page (I've done the "scars" scene -- the closest this thing is going to get to a sex scene.) It would help to have a native Japanese speaker for the moment when the Chimpira show up but I can get around that easily enough.

The downsides are that there is eventually an Aki betrayal. Of a sort. In the epilogue, she's implicated as being part of the Long Game that stretches through the series. So having her replaced by a fake for a few chapters just complicates things unnecessarily.

And then there's doing the cult scenes without Aki. A lot of the quips have been Penny and Aki bouncing pop-culture and other references off each other. I realized this the moment I started to explain the color codes of the cult's ranks, which are in my mind -- and possibly in-world -- drawn from Logan's Run. Aki would have a quip about, "If someone invites you to Carousel...don't go!"

Or something. Heck, maybe it would be better to remove one more temptation. I did cut the Garth Brooks reference and a couple other things I mentioned in the last post. And I still plan to cut more.

I've also decided to leave out detail on the Ancient Aliens theories of the cult. They talk about their own spin on it, but I'm going to leave off specifics. So no name-dropping Nazca Lines and Coso Artifacts and so on, not this time around.

So...maybe no Fake Aki. I'm at 1,000 words into the final part of the book and I've re-written the scene in the car twice already. Got as far as the front door but then decided that Greek/Roman classical architecture and "Quod est superius est sicut quod inferius..." wasn't the way to go. So now I'm going for a different classic.