Two more (related) fanfic bunnies:
2013 Lara Croft looks for Atlantis instead of Yamatai. This is not the story you'd think at first glance. The 2013 reboot is somewhat more realistic but certainly more gritty than the original (or Anniversary remake) story. More so, the character and arc presented in the 2013 reboot is far from the person Natla would have hired.
So take it that one step further. The thing I've loved about the reboot Lara -- as much as the actual games largely fail to deliver -- is that she is an actual academic. She's a professionally trained archaeologist, not a treasure hunter. Plus of course she has (as she discovers in the game) remarkable depths of endurance and determination.
So change the entire Atlantis setup until it becomes something that a college student could reasonably be sucked into. Discover it not as a great adventure by a skilled adventuress, but as a completely unexpected and world-changing discovery made during an ordinary excavation.
2013 Croft (yes, that's the theme of this pair of bunnies. Sorry.) discovers the Stargate. Sorta. You have to change the Stargate universe significantly, not just to make it a story the, again, college student just starting out and unsure of her strengths Lara would fall into, but because having the whole Stargate Command thing already happening is to me not as interesting a story. So it's a rewrite there, too. The Stargate is still buried in Giza.
Or is in a warehouse outside of DC, because once you've changed one canon that far, why not change the other...that Lara's dad played the Ernest Littlefield role, the circumstances of his disappearance were covered up by the government, and, yeah, Ra is still out there.
Sigh. That's one of the downsides of learning to write. You start seeing story elements as little gears and pulleys you can re-arrange. And some pieces are like that block in the Tetris world; just so easy to fit into anything you want to keep reaching for it -- even as everyone else has already done the same. That's how well-used furniture and worn-out tropes and stock characters keep coming back and back. It is too easy to think in mechanics, not in the complexities of life. Too easy to go "Say, why don't I just add a spoiled princess here; she could tell them about the magic sword then...."
Associated with that is the urge to tinker. To take a work that someone else has produced and try to fix it. Or just shake it up and see what happens differently. What if Paris had taken Athena's bribe instead? (I bet it still would have worked out badly for Troy). What if the Ten Thousand hadn't stood down when they got word that Cyrus was dead (still probably in a world of hurt after the heirs of Artaxerxes got their shit together.
From such exercises comes alternate histories, sequels...and fanfic.
Showing posts with label fanfic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fanfic. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 31, 2018
Thursday, December 28, 2017
Bunny of the Day
Had another idea for a story I'm not going to write.
Yes, I do think of lots of ideas outside of the already-created worlds of others. Fanfiction ideas are, however, easier to explain.
(For instance...there was a real moment in history when Lenin tried out the experimental musical instrument of a certain Leon Theremin. According to onlookers he was "surprisingly good." Now put a fictional concert violinist in that audience and let him hear the uncanny music from this electronic violin and catch a glimpse of the future racing in all streamlined and chromed -- and realizing that even the dangerously intelligent Lenin is of nothing to a man who's very name means "steel"... I'm not going to write it, because first I'd have to sit down for ten years with histories of Russia).
So here's today's bunny.
Harry Potter universe, 1946. I've started to hate Sorting Hat scenes because I really dislike the entire idea of the Houses. I love challenging the rules. I love out-of-context problems -- crossovers provide these in spades -- even if they tend to break the original universe.
1946 and off the Hogwart's Express come four first-year students -- siblings -- who refuse to be broken up. Who don't even adhere to normalcy in their timing, as they are of different ages. They work as a well-honed team and are surprisingly talented with the sword and other unusual skills and can draw upon a poise and gravitas that should only come with full adulthood in a position of power.
Because once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.
And that's pretty much it. Tweaking the HP universe. But this is also deconstruction of CS Lewis and The Problem With Susan and all and as uncomfortable as the situation may be to the Pevensies -- yet more reminders of a full and well-lived life yanked away from them by the caprices of gods and fate -- they make everyone else even more uncomfortable.
Because, really, four Narnian kings -- even without The Lion backing them up -- are damned scary. They break everything about Hogwarts just by being there. Not by magic, not by some sort of extra-narrative rule, just by being in character.
Especially if you follow through (if you are more honest than Lewis was willing to be with his creation).
Yes, I do think of lots of ideas outside of the already-created worlds of others. Fanfiction ideas are, however, easier to explain.
(For instance...there was a real moment in history when Lenin tried out the experimental musical instrument of a certain Leon Theremin. According to onlookers he was "surprisingly good." Now put a fictional concert violinist in that audience and let him hear the uncanny music from this electronic violin and catch a glimpse of the future racing in all streamlined and chromed -- and realizing that even the dangerously intelligent Lenin is of nothing to a man who's very name means "steel"... I'm not going to write it, because first I'd have to sit down for ten years with histories of Russia).
So here's today's bunny.
Harry Potter universe, 1946. I've started to hate Sorting Hat scenes because I really dislike the entire idea of the Houses. I love challenging the rules. I love out-of-context problems -- crossovers provide these in spades -- even if they tend to break the original universe.
1946 and off the Hogwart's Express come four first-year students -- siblings -- who refuse to be broken up. Who don't even adhere to normalcy in their timing, as they are of different ages. They work as a well-honed team and are surprisingly talented with the sword and other unusual skills and can draw upon a poise and gravitas that should only come with full adulthood in a position of power.
Because once a king in Narnia, always a king in Narnia.
And that's pretty much it. Tweaking the HP universe. But this is also deconstruction of CS Lewis and The Problem With Susan and all and as uncomfortable as the situation may be to the Pevensies -- yet more reminders of a full and well-lived life yanked away from them by the caprices of gods and fate -- they make everyone else even more uncomfortable.
Because, really, four Narnian kings -- even without The Lion backing them up -- are damned scary. They break everything about Hogwarts just by being there. Not by magic, not by some sort of extra-narrative rule, just by being in character.
Especially if you follow through (if you are more honest than Lewis was willing to be with his creation).
Brane and brane, what is "brane?!"
Been sick and staying in reading. Somehow found myself reading fanfics. Several fanfics. Set in the same universe. And reading them simultaneously.
So I'm basically flipping back and forth between multiple alternate worlds, having to adjust with each page with an, "Right, this is the one where they don't have brooms yet, but she's older and he's a girl. Or is this the one where everyone is a pony?"
In want-of-a-nail fashion a unique narrative spins away from every jonbar hinge, each step of the plot creating a new set of potential universes and discarding a previous. This is true of every book; every path not taken leaves a wondering horse. Reading a dozen simultaneous branches at once just emphasizes the process.
Being fanfic, every work must be a traceable variation on a single cantus firmus, that Earth One of the original work. And being fanfic, parallel evolution features more frequently than one might expect; the plot drifts back to that invisible melody like a long jazz solo winding up -- if only to hit certain well-known and well-beloved moments of the original in an exercise fanfic commentators have called doing the Stations of the Cross.
As with alternate history, there may be clockwork airships overhead and a sea monster in the Thames but there will always be a Queen Victoria. (One is tempted to say there will always be airships, but that's another issue.)
And that's my insight today. Historical fiction shares with fanfiction and serialized fiction the mingled joys of the surprising and the familiar.
You come to an episode of Buffy to be in the company of Wills, Xander, Cordy, Mr. Giles, and of course the Buffmeister again. You delight in the familiar, even as you expect to be shown something new and exciting as well. In a well-written series even the familiar ground will become more detailed over time, with season delivering a little more backstory, a little more character development, a little more nuance.
And this is why there is a Sorting Hat song in hundreds, thousands of fan-written stories. Even if the song itself is unique. The cantus firmus is not the song, it is the singing hat. (And I'm really looking forward to the story where Harry is sorted in Hufflepuff and the 'puffs get to demonstrate that Nice is not Weak but anyhow.)
When a reader decides to open a book set in a historical period, they frequently (but not always) expect to find something familiar. Readers drawn to history know history. And specialize. If they opened your book on the life of Seti I then they probably know something about Ancient Egypt.
That reader also expects to find something new. They want to learn -- or, at least, be surprised. This may be why Alternate History works so well. It is the familiar pieces, but re-arranged for freshness; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, as the Vulcans would say.
Well, the second is going to be easy. The moment your book says, "Here's some Sea People, here's the siege of Wilusa," then you are writing an original take, one single splintered mirror of a reality largely lost to history. There isn't a consensus of historical opinion to diverge from, not here.
Which makes the first the more useful question for now. What are the touchstones for the Late Bronze Age? What familiar places is the reader hoping to see?
So I'm basically flipping back and forth between multiple alternate worlds, having to adjust with each page with an, "Right, this is the one where they don't have brooms yet, but she's older and he's a girl. Or is this the one where everyone is a pony?"
In want-of-a-nail fashion a unique narrative spins away from every jonbar hinge, each step of the plot creating a new set of potential universes and discarding a previous. This is true of every book; every path not taken leaves a wondering horse. Reading a dozen simultaneous branches at once just emphasizes the process.
Being fanfic, every work must be a traceable variation on a single cantus firmus, that Earth One of the original work. And being fanfic, parallel evolution features more frequently than one might expect; the plot drifts back to that invisible melody like a long jazz solo winding up -- if only to hit certain well-known and well-beloved moments of the original in an exercise fanfic commentators have called doing the Stations of the Cross.
As with alternate history, there may be clockwork airships overhead and a sea monster in the Thames but there will always be a Queen Victoria. (One is tempted to say there will always be airships, but that's another issue.)
And that's my insight today. Historical fiction shares with fanfiction and serialized fiction the mingled joys of the surprising and the familiar.
You come to an episode of Buffy to be in the company of Wills, Xander, Cordy, Mr. Giles, and of course the Buffmeister again. You delight in the familiar, even as you expect to be shown something new and exciting as well. In a well-written series even the familiar ground will become more detailed over time, with season delivering a little more backstory, a little more character development, a little more nuance.
And this is why there is a Sorting Hat song in hundreds, thousands of fan-written stories. Even if the song itself is unique. The cantus firmus is not the song, it is the singing hat. (And I'm really looking forward to the story where Harry is sorted in Hufflepuff and the 'puffs get to demonstrate that Nice is not Weak but anyhow.)
When a reader decides to open a book set in a historical period, they frequently (but not always) expect to find something familiar. Readers drawn to history know history. And specialize. If they opened your book on the life of Seti I then they probably know something about Ancient Egypt.
That reader also expects to find something new. They want to learn -- or, at least, be surprised. This may be why Alternate History works so well. It is the familiar pieces, but re-arranged for freshness; Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combination, as the Vulcans would say.
Well, the second is going to be easy. The moment your book says, "Here's some Sea People, here's the siege of Wilusa," then you are writing an original take, one single splintered mirror of a reality largely lost to history. There isn't a consensus of historical opinion to diverge from, not here.
Which makes the first the more useful question for now. What are the touchstones for the Late Bronze Age? What familiar places is the reader hoping to see?
Sunday, April 16, 2017
Plot Bunny of the Day
So in the Stargate, SG1 episode "Watergate" (no relation) it is revealed that the Soviets have their own DHD, which they grabbed off the Germans in 1945.
It is a bit of a weakness of the series that the US sat on their stargate until Catherine finally got them to restart it. Especially after the episode "Tantalus" revealed that Ernest Littlefield's group had successfully opened it in 1945. (And this without the ten years and four supercomputers Samantha Carter claimed had been necessary in 1998).
So...instead of a Manhattan Project, a crash project to open the Stargate. Because the Germans got theirs opened first (maybe they got the entire Giza gate -- and never you mind that outside of Indiana Jones movies they don't get to do what they like in Cairo in the 30's). Which means the US might have had to somehow discover the Antarctica gate...
But anyhow. The fun is having that same polyglot group of crazies, Feynman and Fermi and so forth, only working on wormhole physics. And Werner von Braun's group getting to explore the universe like they wanted, but without rockets. Of course the physics of the gate means that Tantalus and Abydos are the most likely successful contacts anyhow. Which ends up with one side joining forces with Ra and then things really get crazy.
But let's shake it up a little. Instead of the usual suspects for heroes and villains, have the US play Ra like an analog of Stalin, handling him with what they think is a long enough spoon at least until the Germans are out of the picture. Except they don't know about the Goa'uld parasite. And it is left up to a third party to try to save more than one world from the madness.
Some really motivated Italians, perhaps? Why is it that the role of being the only heroes who can fight well enough always goes to the ones who, historically, had the kick-ass armies in the first place? But, alas, that's too much research. As is the obvious Bear in the room (Soviet Russia, that is.) Or even further afield, China (who had enough on their plates already, and besides, let's keep this to the Western Front). Ah, but given the fun of pitting the Manhattan Project against von Braun's rocket group, who else but to throw in the mix are those doughty and reliable underdog heroes, Bletchly Park and Alan Turing and so forth...I speak of course of the Brits.
The other bunny of the day is even odder. So when the reboot Tomb Raider 2013 was made Crystal Dynamics re-used some assets. The rusty, tramp-steamer-looking Endurance which Whitman's archaeological expedition charters re-uses the model of the two big fancy cargo ships Amanda has in the final game of the previous canon (aka Tomb Raider: Underworld).
But...what if it is the same ship? Ten years, rough seas and a few more changes of ownership (plus Lara did a number on one of the ships anyhow. Sunk it, actually, but who's counting).
And once again let's skip the stupid island so conveniently filled with soft targets and spare clips for the various machine guns lying around like a cheap first-person shooter. Instead, assume the previous canon is true. At least as far as Amanda and Natla (though, pretty obviously, Natla didn't actually destroy the world in this chronology). Lara might or might not be real; it would be interesting to have her as a reclusive countess with stories about her past that sound downright mythic.
But she's not our protagonist. Our protagonist is stumbling across, on that same ship, evidence of a story that already happened.
Which is not to say it isn't a story that's been concluded! Lara might not be holed up in Abbingdon and not talking to anyone, but Natla is still out there and dangerous as ever. One might reach at this point for "Young" Lara, the inexperienced college student of the reboot. But that ship has already been around the world a few times. Instead, try someone else for the starring role. But keep the other characters.
I think this is actually more interesting. Stephanie, say, might be discovering there's a darker side to archaeology. And she has to reach out to people who have the skills she needs now, but people who don't have that existing relationship to her. Like Conrad Roth, who in this chronology is friends only with Angus Grim and isn't already staged as a mentor and trainer and dead father figure to the protagonist de jour.
(Actually, in a way it is even more hilarious to make Roth the hero. He'd very much fit the archetype of a certain kind of masculine adventure fiction; he's practically an early Alister MacClean protagonist. So he'd be retired, going to seed, his only contact with military adventure being the stories he shares with his mate Grim. Content to captain this ship around even if the current charter are a bunch of idiots. Until they discover more than they can handle and he has to step up to the plate.)
(And there's everything such a character could want. A young man -- or young woman -- to take on as protege, at least a couple options for romance, an abrasive academic who thinks he should be in charge, a gentle giant and a tough cop as solid right hands and a geek for tech support.)
These are wild plot bunnies, of course. I'm not petting them. I'm pretty much done with those two silly universes anyhow (at least, I will be in another four to six chapters).
It is a bit of a weakness of the series that the US sat on their stargate until Catherine finally got them to restart it. Especially after the episode "Tantalus" revealed that Ernest Littlefield's group had successfully opened it in 1945. (And this without the ten years and four supercomputers Samantha Carter claimed had been necessary in 1998).
So...instead of a Manhattan Project, a crash project to open the Stargate. Because the Germans got theirs opened first (maybe they got the entire Giza gate -- and never you mind that outside of Indiana Jones movies they don't get to do what they like in Cairo in the 30's). Which means the US might have had to somehow discover the Antarctica gate...
But anyhow. The fun is having that same polyglot group of crazies, Feynman and Fermi and so forth, only working on wormhole physics. And Werner von Braun's group getting to explore the universe like they wanted, but without rockets. Of course the physics of the gate means that Tantalus and Abydos are the most likely successful contacts anyhow. Which ends up with one side joining forces with Ra and then things really get crazy.
But let's shake it up a little. Instead of the usual suspects for heroes and villains, have the US play Ra like an analog of Stalin, handling him with what they think is a long enough spoon at least until the Germans are out of the picture. Except they don't know about the Goa'uld parasite. And it is left up to a third party to try to save more than one world from the madness.
Some really motivated Italians, perhaps? Why is it that the role of being the only heroes who can fight well enough always goes to the ones who, historically, had the kick-ass armies in the first place? But, alas, that's too much research. As is the obvious Bear in the room (Soviet Russia, that is.) Or even further afield, China (who had enough on their plates already, and besides, let's keep this to the Western Front). Ah, but given the fun of pitting the Manhattan Project against von Braun's rocket group, who else but to throw in the mix are those doughty and reliable underdog heroes, Bletchly Park and Alan Turing and so forth...I speak of course of the Brits.
The other bunny of the day is even odder. So when the reboot Tomb Raider 2013 was made Crystal Dynamics re-used some assets. The rusty, tramp-steamer-looking Endurance which Whitman's archaeological expedition charters re-uses the model of the two big fancy cargo ships Amanda has in the final game of the previous canon (aka Tomb Raider: Underworld).
But...what if it is the same ship? Ten years, rough seas and a few more changes of ownership (plus Lara did a number on one of the ships anyhow. Sunk it, actually, but who's counting).
And once again let's skip the stupid island so conveniently filled with soft targets and spare clips for the various machine guns lying around like a cheap first-person shooter. Instead, assume the previous canon is true. At least as far as Amanda and Natla (though, pretty obviously, Natla didn't actually destroy the world in this chronology). Lara might or might not be real; it would be interesting to have her as a reclusive countess with stories about her past that sound downright mythic.
But she's not our protagonist. Our protagonist is stumbling across, on that same ship, evidence of a story that already happened.
Which is not to say it isn't a story that's been concluded! Lara might not be holed up in Abbingdon and not talking to anyone, but Natla is still out there and dangerous as ever. One might reach at this point for "Young" Lara, the inexperienced college student of the reboot. But that ship has already been around the world a few times. Instead, try someone else for the starring role. But keep the other characters.
I think this is actually more interesting. Stephanie, say, might be discovering there's a darker side to archaeology. And she has to reach out to people who have the skills she needs now, but people who don't have that existing relationship to her. Like Conrad Roth, who in this chronology is friends only with Angus Grim and isn't already staged as a mentor and trainer and dead father figure to the protagonist de jour.
(Actually, in a way it is even more hilarious to make Roth the hero. He'd very much fit the archetype of a certain kind of masculine adventure fiction; he's practically an early Alister MacClean protagonist. So he'd be retired, going to seed, his only contact with military adventure being the stories he shares with his mate Grim. Content to captain this ship around even if the current charter are a bunch of idiots. Until they discover more than they can handle and he has to step up to the plate.)
(And there's everything such a character could want. A young man -- or young woman -- to take on as protege, at least a couple options for romance, an abrasive academic who thinks he should be in charge, a gentle giant and a tough cop as solid right hands and a geek for tech support.)
These are wild plot bunnies, of course. I'm not petting them. I'm pretty much done with those two silly universes anyhow (at least, I will be in another four to six chapters).
Thursday, March 16, 2017
Chapter Up
Been not feeling up for anything more physical than writing. I'm overdue for a full physical, I think. But at least I got another chapter done.
I cast my net a little wide this time. I spent a while browsing maps of New Mexico, trying to plan an itinerary of properly colorful places. I knew I wanted to include the Trinity Test Site and erroneously drew up a tentative route down to the far South of White Sands. Then I did a new search for rock climbing areas and that turned up the fact that Hueco Tanks, "The Tanks" themselves, were close to my route.
A few more scribbles and searches and I had it; leave Roswell, stop at Alamogordo and admire the Great Atari Video Game Burial, continue through El Paso to Hueco Tanks and get a little climbing in, cone back North to the White Sands Missile Range Museum and gaze longingly through the parking lot fence at Victorio Peak -- while Lara grabs a dirt bike and "sneaks" up through White Sands to the Trinity Site. (Which is, of course, to the North).
That was looking about right for material. Add something about Chief Victorio and the Apache Wars and I'd have a 6,000 word chapter, right?
Didn't work out that way. I hit 10,000. First off, I'd only meant to open the chapter with Lara in the middle of climbing some rock. Because I really didn't want to open with more talking heads. But that scene got more and more elaborate as I thought of new wrinkles, until it is a good thousand words with a literal cliffhanger to boot.
And the Victorio stuff kind of got out of hand. Maybe it was because, due to more coincidence than anything else, I've been listening to a lot of programs on the Indian Wars. And, yes, it is pretty topical stuff, what with the Dakota Access Pipeline started up again and so on. Even in my own town there's a shell mound which is being contested over. So I ended up with a lot more words there than I had expected.
And I'd thought of more to do with the Trinity scene. Like throw a predator after her. I was thinking cougar but research turned up that jaguars were rare but had been seen in New Mexico. And that's when I tried to do something extra tricky; to have an injured Lara fabricating an improvised weapon whilst going over in her wandering mind the history of stone tools and human hunting from the golden age of the Plains Indians back through paleolithic mastodon hunters to the encounter at Olduvai between a troop of chimps and h. zinjanthropus and his unfair invention, the club.
Cross-cutting between that and the resolution of the cliff-hanger at Hueco Tanks. And bringing out some of the information Lara went to Trinity to find, in the form of a series of hallucinatory memories of the distant past.
And I don't think I made it work. I've got ten thousand words and most of it is talking heads. And most of what they are talking about advances the plot not one iota. And I even cut stuff!
I cast my net a little wide this time. I spent a while browsing maps of New Mexico, trying to plan an itinerary of properly colorful places. I knew I wanted to include the Trinity Test Site and erroneously drew up a tentative route down to the far South of White Sands. Then I did a new search for rock climbing areas and that turned up the fact that Hueco Tanks, "The Tanks" themselves, were close to my route.
A few more scribbles and searches and I had it; leave Roswell, stop at Alamogordo and admire the Great Atari Video Game Burial, continue through El Paso to Hueco Tanks and get a little climbing in, cone back North to the White Sands Missile Range Museum and gaze longingly through the parking lot fence at Victorio Peak -- while Lara grabs a dirt bike and "sneaks" up through White Sands to the Trinity Site. (Which is, of course, to the North).
That was looking about right for material. Add something about Chief Victorio and the Apache Wars and I'd have a 6,000 word chapter, right?
Didn't work out that way. I hit 10,000. First off, I'd only meant to open the chapter with Lara in the middle of climbing some rock. Because I really didn't want to open with more talking heads. But that scene got more and more elaborate as I thought of new wrinkles, until it is a good thousand words with a literal cliffhanger to boot.
And the Victorio stuff kind of got out of hand. Maybe it was because, due to more coincidence than anything else, I've been listening to a lot of programs on the Indian Wars. And, yes, it is pretty topical stuff, what with the Dakota Access Pipeline started up again and so on. Even in my own town there's a shell mound which is being contested over. So I ended up with a lot more words there than I had expected.
And I'd thought of more to do with the Trinity scene. Like throw a predator after her. I was thinking cougar but research turned up that jaguars were rare but had been seen in New Mexico. And that's when I tried to do something extra tricky; to have an injured Lara fabricating an improvised weapon whilst going over in her wandering mind the history of stone tools and human hunting from the golden age of the Plains Indians back through paleolithic mastodon hunters to the encounter at Olduvai between a troop of chimps and h. zinjanthropus and his unfair invention, the club.
Cross-cutting between that and the resolution of the cliff-hanger at Hueco Tanks. And bringing out some of the information Lara went to Trinity to find, in the form of a series of hallucinatory memories of the distant past.
And I don't think I made it work. I've got ten thousand words and most of it is talking heads. And most of what they are talking about advances the plot not one iota. And I even cut stuff!
Friday, December 23, 2016
10,000 Fleece
I've made the first major error on a PCB. The drill holes are too small for the LEDs. I can ream them out easily enough, but I'm using the through plating as a via in several places. With luck I can solder top and bottom and restore connection...but that also emphasizes that I completely forgot I was going to increase the size of the annular ring on several of the pads, too.
Ah, well. It is going to take weeks to laser-cut enough Holocron kits to even use up the first set of PCBs. The lasers are booked nearly solid, and even on top of it being cold and dark and often raining when work ends I've been feeling sickly and not up for the trip to the shop anyhow. And besides, I have enough parts to build one full production model, so I'm doing that first (in case I discover something new that needs to be adjusted).
And as for the boards? The v1.1 revision was just a stop-gap, mostly improving the silkscreen and adding a resistor to the resistor ladder. The next revision I suspect strongly I'm going to go for a "larger" CPU chip (but do it in surface mount instead of DIP). I'm also tempted in the direction of taking off the USB socket and replacing it with a microSD socket. Except the controller chip for above is a thirty-six pin SMD that can't be hand-soldered -- that's a big jump up in my SMD skills.
Made a breakthrough on the fiddle. Apparently the beginner is supposed to play detaché, separating each note. I've been practicing legato since the beginning.
Well, immediately on hearing that I tried putting a slight pause in the bow between notes. Wow. All that struggle to get clean string crossings in a slur has really paid off. With that little pause it is downright simple. Oh, and I can dial the pause down to barely perceptible and still get the benefit.
Similar really to my fun with shoulder rests. It was far too hard to handle the violin at first. Shoulder rest allowed me to progress. A better shoulder rest allowed me to move to the next stage. But now that I'm so much more comfortable moving about the fingerboard and keeping the violin balanced, I can omit the shoulder rest and play nearly as well.
So now I throw in a "naked" practice session at intervals. No shoulder rest, no Snark tuner; just ears and meat (and a thick shirt...yes, it can hurt without that padded rest!) So I can get through Hava Nagila without stumbling...but I still have squeaks and some other finger noise to clean up (and my intonation will continue to need work. Especially as the string crossings are just horrible in the C part and I've been playing that in third position as an alternative).
Trying my first audiobook now; listening to a free reading of the Anabasis I found online. Which means I'm avoiding spoilers for a work that came out 2,300 years ago.
Also read a couple more Kindle books. Both were oddly alike in having a very breezy tone; short sentences, short paragraphs, simple construction. Also both alike in having fairly poor description. One is (more or less) in first person and eschews scene breaks or other real organization, letting changes of space or time roll right past, moving in and out of dialog or action without pause or even change of pace.
The other at least has some of that helpful organization, but uses the increasingly rare third-person omniscient. Which I think is a horrendously poor choice, but could perhaps be excused or at least explained as a larger choice that may not be that of the authors.
To explain; this is a Tomb Raider book -- a proper printed book for all that I read it on Kindle -- and it features the 2013 "reboot" Lara Croft and is explicitly set immediately following the events of the 2013 game.
This game is basically subtitled "Birth of a Survivor." It takes Lara as a young, inexperienced student on her first serious expedition, and drops her into a hellscape where she is beaten down to her essence; becoming both dogged survivor and (as necessary) brutal killer.
Which means any work featuring her, and particularly one that pretends to follow the events of the game, should be about her struggle to return to the normal world and come to terms with what she was forced to do. And indeed, the book -- The Ten Thousand Immortals -- shows her having panic attacks and flashbacks and struggling to re-define her belief system after being confronted with the reality of nigh-immortal weather-controlling undead queens on the haunted island of Yamatai.
This can be done in third person omniscient. It is just in my opinion much harder to do it right. Because what matters to the reader is not the clinical dissection of Lara's inner life. It is not the unwrapping of the complexities of a psyche in the way of Joyce's Ulysses. What the reader wants is to feel along with Lara. To be invited in, to even experience this vicariously -- the way the game allows you to do. Third person limited, or first person, are better narrative choices.
(Something which even one of the game development team seems to have misunderstood. But never mind about that now!)
And this is even a good point from a mechanistic story-telling direction. Much of the story has Lara possibly being followed, not sure who to trust, wondering if she is surrounded by enemies or if she is merely letting her post-traumatic stress drive her to unwarranted paranoia. This confusion on her part is completely undercut by an omniscient point of view that at any moment can and does cut to the very person who actually is following her, and listen to their interior monologue about exactly why they are following her and who they work for and what the whole mystery is about.
A more limited perspective is perfect here. Seeing only what Lara sees is a better mechanical way to present the mystery and suspense of who to trust and when to be wary (as well as being a vastly superior way to let you empathize with her situation emotionally). This shades all the way down to the small tricks; a detached omniscient observer makes Lara look foolish in those rare moments when she lets her guard down. Seeing the scene through her POV, the narrative can subtly guide both where you are allowed to look and how you feel about what you see; presenting open, clear vistas or presenting menacing shadows, and make her reactions feel justified and rational to the reader.
So the escape hatch I alluded to earlier is this; perhaps the authors were asked to provide an adventure, told not to actually develop her character any because all that would be in the games, and basically were led into presenting the bones of a story without most of what allows for proper emotional involvement. It is Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff; lots of running around and shooting and that all sounds exciting on paper but there is so little tangible about any of it -- especially the inner life of the people involved -- it is not terribly thrilling.
But there is more here. One of the two authors involved has a more recent book featuring the "Classic" Lara Croft. And three paragraphs in he threw me right out of the story by featuring a "20mm steel-kern climbing rope."
Okay, sure, the movies (and many books) will always get the details wrong of that thing you yourself are expert in. And maybe the non-expert will never even notice, although to someone who knows anything about climbing, that description is ridiculous as specifying a "Diesel powered laptop computer with a 74" screen."
But no. It takes less than a minute to do better than that. This story was written within the last few years and yes Google and Wikipedia were available. Heck; Lara Croft is using both constantly within the story itself! If the author did enough research to find out what kernmantle construction is, then he damned well would have learned the difference between static and dynamic, and as well been presented with examples of appropriate diameters.
Even going from first principles, a basic understanding of the physical universe would clue you in that something was off. As my friend put it, Lara Croft must be tough stuff if she nonchalantly ties a knot in a half-inch steel cable.
(And, no, you can't get out of this one by assuming a typo on the number. Because pretty much every single other detail about this rope and how it is used is wrong.)
In any case, 10,000 Immortals (the previous book and the one under discussion) doesn't make quite such obvious errors. The archaeology is terribly simplistic, and I think that too is a mistake. The games may not give that much detail, but there's good indication there's a contingent of the audience that does want to see more. What bugs me, though, is the ways the book looks like it is getting wrong things that people with even a smattering of a classical education will already see are wrong.
The title is one. It is referring to the Persian Immortals. Sort of. It is about half-way through the book that it becomes clear there is a group that calls themselves "the ten thousand immortals" and has based the name on the so-called "Immortals" of Persepolis et al. And the book correctly at that point explains the legend that there were 10,000 of these elite soldiers, exactly; as one died, another would be sworn in to take his place.
Except that this is another one of those many, many places where Herodotus...well, you know the drill. And even the name is quite possibly a mistaken translation. So the book jars once in that Lara doesn't seem to know who the Immortals are (despite apparently having that good Classics education) and that makes her look like an idiot. And the book doesn't correct her at first, making it look like an idiot. Only eventually does the truth out, finally making the title seem less awkward -- but it does this a few chapters in and never moves past that "revelation" that is probably within the first hour on Persia in your History of the Ancient World 101 class. (And what is especially ridiculous is that at some point the writer provides the name "Anûšiya." So he almost certainly knew and was choosing to either ignore or withhold the more complex real story.)
The Golden Fleece is an even better case, reeling out the bit about gold-panning with sheep wool about five chapters in, but never moving a step beyond that not particularly obscure revelation. This book has either a frightfully low opinion of its audience, or is written by someone a lot less educated than he thinks he is. One keeps hoping there will be something about the Argonauts that goes beyond what appeared in the Harryhausen film. In vain. The story actually moves the Aegean and an archaeological expedition and a rock-cut cliff dwelling and reveals -- damn-all. Again, what little is revealed on the subject happens less than half of the way in. The rest of the book spins out chases and shootout with nary a new bit of historical information or archaeological clue from then on out.
I am tempted to blame the usual process of "Decide on the plot first, then pick and chose the historic and/or scientific details that support it." There is also some hair-thin evidence that the bad-guy group are the ones who are making the stupid errors; that they are essentially Foucalt's Pendulum-ing themselves. There's a bit of business, for instance, with a derringer that is claimed to be but is as likely not to be the one used by John Wilkes Booth. (A derringer which is never fired, despite being on that damned mantlepiece at least twice). So one can half believe the bad guys were meant to be idiots who didn't understand who the Persian Immortals really were, or know anything more than a teenager (and from the evidence, a poor student at that) does about Jason and the Golden Fleece.
There's another oddity there. The reviews on Amazon fall into two categories; long, carefully written reviews that lay out in detail the literary offenses, or one-word reviews with five stars. The suspicious take here is the latter are spammed to drive the rating up. A different view, though, is potentially illuminating. Maybe the breezy, error-filled, childishly simplistic writing is all these particular reviewers needed or even wanted. The ones that have a word or two other than "Amazing!" talk only about how cool it is to have the character from the games be in a book. It would be informative to introduce these reviewers to something like the deeply psychological fanfic "Easier to Run" and see if that opens their eyes to how much more a story can offer.
A few words now on the other Kindle find. I've now read the first and second books of the "Athena Lee" chronicles and I doubt I will read any others. The premise is promising; a young woman is marooned amid the wreckage of a space battle that went well for nobody. Her thing, however, is engineering. Survive until rescue? Deal with the changes in politics back home, threats on her life, pirate attacks, treason..? Whatever it is, she's got a spanner and a slide rule and she's going to engineer the heck out of it.
The character has an engaging voice and what can be seen of her personality is amusing. There are some cute touches elsewhere (although a little 1990's pop culture goes a long way). The problem is, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe engineering. Actually, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe anything. Well, actually -- the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of how to write. I read a free excerpt from Book 8 and he seems to be just starting to learn how to handle POV changes and exposition.
These books, too, have many short (as few as one or two word) reviews praising them highly. Again I have to wonder if someone is gaming Amazon's rating systems. But the unsettling and more likely answer is that there are people who have read so few books they have yet to discover that they get a hell of a lot better than this.
Like the Tomb Raider story above, it should not be enough that a character you like is on the page. Or that people are shooting at stuff and so it must be exciting. Those can be, should, usually are a given in a piece of genre fiction, but said piece is also generally expected to bring a minimum standard of craftsmanship with it. To leave one with a sense of place, to portray characters well enough one can speak of them as if you had met them in person, to immerse the reader in the experience and smoothly and seamlessly carry them through transitions and exposition and all the other necessary stage machinery of an unfolding plot.
Ten Thousand Immortals is a madeleine offered in excuse of a full meal. The Forgotten Engineer is a handful of granulated sugar offered in excuse of actual food.
Ah, well. It is going to take weeks to laser-cut enough Holocron kits to even use up the first set of PCBs. The lasers are booked nearly solid, and even on top of it being cold and dark and often raining when work ends I've been feeling sickly and not up for the trip to the shop anyhow. And besides, I have enough parts to build one full production model, so I'm doing that first (in case I discover something new that needs to be adjusted).
And as for the boards? The v1.1 revision was just a stop-gap, mostly improving the silkscreen and adding a resistor to the resistor ladder. The next revision I suspect strongly I'm going to go for a "larger" CPU chip (but do it in surface mount instead of DIP). I'm also tempted in the direction of taking off the USB socket and replacing it with a microSD socket. Except the controller chip for above is a thirty-six pin SMD that can't be hand-soldered -- that's a big jump up in my SMD skills.
Made a breakthrough on the fiddle. Apparently the beginner is supposed to play detaché, separating each note. I've been practicing legato since the beginning.
Well, immediately on hearing that I tried putting a slight pause in the bow between notes. Wow. All that struggle to get clean string crossings in a slur has really paid off. With that little pause it is downright simple. Oh, and I can dial the pause down to barely perceptible and still get the benefit.
Similar really to my fun with shoulder rests. It was far too hard to handle the violin at first. Shoulder rest allowed me to progress. A better shoulder rest allowed me to move to the next stage. But now that I'm so much more comfortable moving about the fingerboard and keeping the violin balanced, I can omit the shoulder rest and play nearly as well.
So now I throw in a "naked" practice session at intervals. No shoulder rest, no Snark tuner; just ears and meat (and a thick shirt...yes, it can hurt without that padded rest!) So I can get through Hava Nagila without stumbling...but I still have squeaks and some other finger noise to clean up (and my intonation will continue to need work. Especially as the string crossings are just horrible in the C part and I've been playing that in third position as an alternative).
Trying my first audiobook now; listening to a free reading of the Anabasis I found online. Which means I'm avoiding spoilers for a work that came out 2,300 years ago.
Also read a couple more Kindle books. Both were oddly alike in having a very breezy tone; short sentences, short paragraphs, simple construction. Also both alike in having fairly poor description. One is (more or less) in first person and eschews scene breaks or other real organization, letting changes of space or time roll right past, moving in and out of dialog or action without pause or even change of pace.
The other at least has some of that helpful organization, but uses the increasingly rare third-person omniscient. Which I think is a horrendously poor choice, but could perhaps be excused or at least explained as a larger choice that may not be that of the authors.
To explain; this is a Tomb Raider book -- a proper printed book for all that I read it on Kindle -- and it features the 2013 "reboot" Lara Croft and is explicitly set immediately following the events of the 2013 game.
This game is basically subtitled "Birth of a Survivor." It takes Lara as a young, inexperienced student on her first serious expedition, and drops her into a hellscape where she is beaten down to her essence; becoming both dogged survivor and (as necessary) brutal killer.
Which means any work featuring her, and particularly one that pretends to follow the events of the game, should be about her struggle to return to the normal world and come to terms with what she was forced to do. And indeed, the book -- The Ten Thousand Immortals -- shows her having panic attacks and flashbacks and struggling to re-define her belief system after being confronted with the reality of nigh-immortal weather-controlling undead queens on the haunted island of Yamatai.
This can be done in third person omniscient. It is just in my opinion much harder to do it right. Because what matters to the reader is not the clinical dissection of Lara's inner life. It is not the unwrapping of the complexities of a psyche in the way of Joyce's Ulysses. What the reader wants is to feel along with Lara. To be invited in, to even experience this vicariously -- the way the game allows you to do. Third person limited, or first person, are better narrative choices.
(Something which even one of the game development team seems to have misunderstood. But never mind about that now!)
And this is even a good point from a mechanistic story-telling direction. Much of the story has Lara possibly being followed, not sure who to trust, wondering if she is surrounded by enemies or if she is merely letting her post-traumatic stress drive her to unwarranted paranoia. This confusion on her part is completely undercut by an omniscient point of view that at any moment can and does cut to the very person who actually is following her, and listen to their interior monologue about exactly why they are following her and who they work for and what the whole mystery is about.
A more limited perspective is perfect here. Seeing only what Lara sees is a better mechanical way to present the mystery and suspense of who to trust and when to be wary (as well as being a vastly superior way to let you empathize with her situation emotionally). This shades all the way down to the small tricks; a detached omniscient observer makes Lara look foolish in those rare moments when she lets her guard down. Seeing the scene through her POV, the narrative can subtly guide both where you are allowed to look and how you feel about what you see; presenting open, clear vistas or presenting menacing shadows, and make her reactions feel justified and rational to the reader.
So the escape hatch I alluded to earlier is this; perhaps the authors were asked to provide an adventure, told not to actually develop her character any because all that would be in the games, and basically were led into presenting the bones of a story without most of what allows for proper emotional involvement. It is Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff; lots of running around and shooting and that all sounds exciting on paper but there is so little tangible about any of it -- especially the inner life of the people involved -- it is not terribly thrilling.
But there is more here. One of the two authors involved has a more recent book featuring the "Classic" Lara Croft. And three paragraphs in he threw me right out of the story by featuring a "20mm steel-kern climbing rope."
Okay, sure, the movies (and many books) will always get the details wrong of that thing you yourself are expert in. And maybe the non-expert will never even notice, although to someone who knows anything about climbing, that description is ridiculous as specifying a "Diesel powered laptop computer with a 74" screen."
But no. It takes less than a minute to do better than that. This story was written within the last few years and yes Google and Wikipedia were available. Heck; Lara Croft is using both constantly within the story itself! If the author did enough research to find out what kernmantle construction is, then he damned well would have learned the difference between static and dynamic, and as well been presented with examples of appropriate diameters.
Even going from first principles, a basic understanding of the physical universe would clue you in that something was off. As my friend put it, Lara Croft must be tough stuff if she nonchalantly ties a knot in a half-inch steel cable.
(And, no, you can't get out of this one by assuming a typo on the number. Because pretty much every single other detail about this rope and how it is used is wrong.)
In any case, 10,000 Immortals (the previous book and the one under discussion) doesn't make quite such obvious errors. The archaeology is terribly simplistic, and I think that too is a mistake. The games may not give that much detail, but there's good indication there's a contingent of the audience that does want to see more. What bugs me, though, is the ways the book looks like it is getting wrong things that people with even a smattering of a classical education will already see are wrong.
The title is one. It is referring to the Persian Immortals. Sort of. It is about half-way through the book that it becomes clear there is a group that calls themselves "the ten thousand immortals" and has based the name on the so-called "Immortals" of Persepolis et al. And the book correctly at that point explains the legend that there were 10,000 of these elite soldiers, exactly; as one died, another would be sworn in to take his place.
Except that this is another one of those many, many places where Herodotus...well, you know the drill. And even the name is quite possibly a mistaken translation. So the book jars once in that Lara doesn't seem to know who the Immortals are (despite apparently having that good Classics education) and that makes her look like an idiot. And the book doesn't correct her at first, making it look like an idiot. Only eventually does the truth out, finally making the title seem less awkward -- but it does this a few chapters in and never moves past that "revelation" that is probably within the first hour on Persia in your History of the Ancient World 101 class. (And what is especially ridiculous is that at some point the writer provides the name "Anûšiya." So he almost certainly knew and was choosing to either ignore or withhold the more complex real story.)
The Golden Fleece is an even better case, reeling out the bit about gold-panning with sheep wool about five chapters in, but never moving a step beyond that not particularly obscure revelation. This book has either a frightfully low opinion of its audience, or is written by someone a lot less educated than he thinks he is. One keeps hoping there will be something about the Argonauts that goes beyond what appeared in the Harryhausen film. In vain. The story actually moves the Aegean and an archaeological expedition and a rock-cut cliff dwelling and reveals -- damn-all. Again, what little is revealed on the subject happens less than half of the way in. The rest of the book spins out chases and shootout with nary a new bit of historical information or archaeological clue from then on out.
I am tempted to blame the usual process of "Decide on the plot first, then pick and chose the historic and/or scientific details that support it." There is also some hair-thin evidence that the bad-guy group are the ones who are making the stupid errors; that they are essentially Foucalt's Pendulum-ing themselves. There's a bit of business, for instance, with a derringer that is claimed to be but is as likely not to be the one used by John Wilkes Booth. (A derringer which is never fired, despite being on that damned mantlepiece at least twice). So one can half believe the bad guys were meant to be idiots who didn't understand who the Persian Immortals really were, or know anything more than a teenager (and from the evidence, a poor student at that) does about Jason and the Golden Fleece.
There's another oddity there. The reviews on Amazon fall into two categories; long, carefully written reviews that lay out in detail the literary offenses, or one-word reviews with five stars. The suspicious take here is the latter are spammed to drive the rating up. A different view, though, is potentially illuminating. Maybe the breezy, error-filled, childishly simplistic writing is all these particular reviewers needed or even wanted. The ones that have a word or two other than "Amazing!" talk only about how cool it is to have the character from the games be in a book. It would be informative to introduce these reviewers to something like the deeply psychological fanfic "Easier to Run" and see if that opens their eyes to how much more a story can offer.
A few words now on the other Kindle find. I've now read the first and second books of the "Athena Lee" chronicles and I doubt I will read any others. The premise is promising; a young woman is marooned amid the wreckage of a space battle that went well for nobody. Her thing, however, is engineering. Survive until rescue? Deal with the changes in politics back home, threats on her life, pirate attacks, treason..? Whatever it is, she's got a spanner and a slide rule and she's going to engineer the heck out of it.
The character has an engaging voice and what can be seen of her personality is amusing. There are some cute touches elsewhere (although a little 1990's pop culture goes a long way). The problem is, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe engineering. Actually, the author doesn't seem to know how to describe anything. Well, actually -- the author doesn't seem to have much of a grasp of how to write. I read a free excerpt from Book 8 and he seems to be just starting to learn how to handle POV changes and exposition.
These books, too, have many short (as few as one or two word) reviews praising them highly. Again I have to wonder if someone is gaming Amazon's rating systems. But the unsettling and more likely answer is that there are people who have read so few books they have yet to discover that they get a hell of a lot better than this.
Like the Tomb Raider story above, it should not be enough that a character you like is on the page. Or that people are shooting at stuff and so it must be exciting. Those can be, should, usually are a given in a piece of genre fiction, but said piece is also generally expected to bring a minimum standard of craftsmanship with it. To leave one with a sense of place, to portray characters well enough one can speak of them as if you had met them in person, to immerse the reader in the experience and smoothly and seamlessly carry them through transitions and exposition and all the other necessary stage machinery of an unfolding plot.
Ten Thousand Immortals is a madeleine offered in excuse of a full meal. The Forgotten Engineer is a handful of granulated sugar offered in excuse of actual food.
Sunday, December 18, 2016
Game Levels
Just reviewed the chapters to date of my Tomb Raider/SG1 fanfic. Funny how much it looks like it was planned, even though I know I'm pretty much writing it as I go along.
I started with a McGuffin; a small jar in the shape of a falcon. About all I knew was that it was connected to the ancient Egyptian god Horus. Next I needed a setting for the opening scene. The yacht from the third game, of course. Put it in some nice waters for skin-diving; where? How about near Malta.
I literally had not made the connection until I was writing the first scene set in Valetta and thought of tying the Tribute of the Falcon -- yes, the Black Bird itself, the Maltese Falcon -- to the story. Similarly, I had already passed through Libya before silphium became an important plot point. It wasn't until doing research eight chapters later I realized silphium, that wonder drug of the ancient world, had only grown in a narrow strip of coast near Tripoli. And these were not the only bits of serendipity (it helps, of course, that I cast my net very wide in the first place, including putting lots of random trivia in each passing chapter that I might later profitably mine).
The main place where the lack of planning shows up is that the evil scheme the protagonists eventually discover isn't that interesting, and doesn't lend itself to a satisfying resolution. But, then, similar could be said of the plots underlying many of the games. Where things worked out in a surprising way is how close I came to the game framework of go to an exotic locale, pick up a clue amid the archaeology and/or history there, and have a bit of action (a fight, some climbing) before moving on.
The first "Level" is essentially Malta. Surprising this location hasn't been used in Tomb Raider before. It is close to the center of a number of the historical events around the Mediterranean and is littered with the archaeology of Romans, Byzantines, Turks, etc., etc. For my story I concentrated mostly on the period when the Knights of Malta were in conflict with the Ottoman Empire in a multi-nation struggle for supremacy in the Mediterranean that came to a climax at the Battle of Lepanto (not coincidentally the last major naval battle conducted between rowed galleys).
The "action" for this level, however, takes place in a flashback, in which a teenaged Lara climbs up and BASE jumps off the pyramid-shaped Transamerica building in downtown San Francisco.
The next level is Cairo, and this one is almost complete; for archaeological puzzles there is the mysterious object dug up in Giza in 1928 and spirited away to America before the Second World War, and mysteries surrounding a newly-discovered Amarna-period tomb in the Valley of Kings (the real-world KV63). There's a brief tomb crawl with a bit of life-or-death gymnastics, and a knife fight with some thugs on the outskirts of "Garbage City," the grass-roots recycling center in the heart of Cairo's slums.
Outside of fulfilling the basic game objectives (the sprawling, semi-abandoned munitions plant in the desert would of course have made a great map in an actual game) this sequence also fulfilled some more literary requirements. I got to talk a little about the long history of Egypt and current sociopolitics, and as well explore a little more of Lara's psychology and her ongoing inner struggles. (It also took me much deeper into the rabbit hole of research, including staring at old sales brochures trying to identify exactly which guitar donated by the Red Hot Chili Peppers hung on the wall of Hard Rock Cafe Cairo).
The following level is on the face of it less exotic; Colorado Springs. I touched a little on the gilded age and silver barons, and the natural history of the area, but this is largely about NORAD. There are excursions to another bit of Cold War history, the Strangelovian "Project Pluto," and to the tiny idiosyncratic would-be island nation of Sealand, as well as passing mention of Semipalatinsk, Tsar Bomba, Bluegill Prime et al, but the star is NORAD, that underground city behind giant blast doors. The action in this level is a long climb in very much the style of the games.
As for literary purposes, I am most happy with a little scene that came out of thin air. I wanted a little excitement before Lara went into the mountain, and I threw some local punks at her. And then in the middle of writing the scene discovered the unexpected and comedic resolution.
The level I'm most proud of is Prague. I feel like I almost had a good grip on the whole mix here; the mystery and McGuffin, the historical background, the scene-setting, the Tomb Raider style action. It also accomplishes the "layers" which is part of my favorite levels in the various games. In this case the team visits modern-day Prague (with some short side conversations about occupations of World War II and the following Communist take-over), goes into the Gormenghastian Prague Castle, then has to struggle past booby-trapped passages left by the SS to get to where secrets of alchemists and seers were hidden, at last solving a 17th-century puzzle...and encountering the Golem of Prague in a neolithic cave.
In almost all of the games Lara's home is an optional level. So I sent some of my cast there to explore the Abingdon Estate, wrapping that sequence up with a big fight. The archaeological revelations, if you could call it that, is expressed in a long bull session concentrating mostly on the period of transition between Egyptian pre-history and the first recorded dynasties. Side lines included various and sundry artifacts on display in the manor, with passing mention of events as varied as Gallipoli and the Siege of the Legations.
The next "level" is essentially the American Southwest, focusing on pre-Columbian archaeology, but with a secondary emphasis on particular bits of 1950's ephemera; Roswell and the "Gray" aliens, Route 66 with the usual roadside attractions of giant lumberjack statues, and Trinity with the first atomic bomb. So far the big discovery has been a paleolithic site in New Mexico, and the action has been a little run-in with a heavily jimmied solar power facility.
And from the looks of it, I'm going to conclude at Mount Shasta, bringing in as archaeology mostly clearly false nonsense about Atlantis and Mu and the Shaver Mysteries, but also tying in an ancient alien engineering project that had been the background threat of a stand-alone sequence I did on Thera during the height of the Minoan civilization.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
Bunny of the Week
The Great Pyramid of Cholula.
Under a 14th century Spanish Colonial church (a major pilgrimage destination) and covered with so much earth and other structures it looks like nothing more than a tall and regular hill lies a massive pyramid.
Begun somewhere around 200 BCE and built in stages over a thousand years, this elaborate pyramid complex is half a kilometer per side, larger in base and volume than the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the largest monument in the world. Tunnels and passages wind through the structure; archaeologist have uncovered over six kilometers of passages so far. It is of course richly decorated, including fantastic murals, elaborate stone carving, and there are also multiple human burials.
And it is built on top of a cenote. Which, to add just that extra level of fantastic (something else I learned within the last couple of days) the distinctive cenote of Mexico's Yucutan Peninsula (deep circular pits where the surface has collapsed into massive limestone caves) are concentrated in a ring of shocked and fractured limestone that is itself a remnant of the Chicxulub Impact (the probable cause of the K-T extinction event of 68 MYA). These cenote are often connected in strings of caves, following the flows of an underlying aquifer which extends all the way to the sea.
Oh, yes, and just to put the Ancient Aliens firmly in the mix, an old name for the site is Acholollan (Nahuatl) meaning "place of flight." And, yes, the suggestion has been made that mysterious older inhabitants did just that. Perhaps their planet needed them.
So. Largely un-excavated (although quite well known and, like any ancient monument you've heard of, a major tourist destination), layered down through history from Spanish Colonization to late pre-contact to the height of the Mayan Empire to truly ancient caves to a catastrophe from tens of millions of years ago. Extending deep underground from the modern excavations to excavations by treasure hunters and seekers after building materials back through the Colonial age at least, to deep passages to natural tunnels to deep underground rivers stretching all the way to the sea.
And my only question is; why hasn't Lara Croft already been there to raid it?
Under a 14th century Spanish Colonial church (a major pilgrimage destination) and covered with so much earth and other structures it looks like nothing more than a tall and regular hill lies a massive pyramid.
Begun somewhere around 200 BCE and built in stages over a thousand years, this elaborate pyramid complex is half a kilometer per side, larger in base and volume than the Great Pyramid of Giza, making it the largest monument in the world. Tunnels and passages wind through the structure; archaeologist have uncovered over six kilometers of passages so far. It is of course richly decorated, including fantastic murals, elaborate stone carving, and there are also multiple human burials.
And it is built on top of a cenote. Which, to add just that extra level of fantastic (something else I learned within the last couple of days) the distinctive cenote of Mexico's Yucutan Peninsula (deep circular pits where the surface has collapsed into massive limestone caves) are concentrated in a ring of shocked and fractured limestone that is itself a remnant of the Chicxulub Impact (the probable cause of the K-T extinction event of 68 MYA). These cenote are often connected in strings of caves, following the flows of an underlying aquifer which extends all the way to the sea.
Oh, yes, and just to put the Ancient Aliens firmly in the mix, an old name for the site is Acholollan (Nahuatl) meaning "place of flight." And, yes, the suggestion has been made that mysterious older inhabitants did just that. Perhaps their planet needed them.
So. Largely un-excavated (although quite well known and, like any ancient monument you've heard of, a major tourist destination), layered down through history from Spanish Colonization to late pre-contact to the height of the Mayan Empire to truly ancient caves to a catastrophe from tens of millions of years ago. Extending deep underground from the modern excavations to excavations by treasure hunters and seekers after building materials back through the Colonial age at least, to deep passages to natural tunnels to deep underground rivers stretching all the way to the sea.
And my only question is; why hasn't Lara Croft already been there to raid it?
Thursday, November 3, 2016
The Qualopec Solution
I've been stumped on my fanfic for far too long. Every time I thought I'd managed to clarify just what had happened in the past, it made it even more plain it didn't happen in New Mexico. Where I'd put my characters as of the previous chapter.
So back to primary sources. I watched all the Tomb Raider: Anniversary cutscenes. And oh my. Apparently the White Sands area was a seat of power for Qualopec. Complete with Mesoamerican-style pyramid, surrounded by (!!) what look like Olmec heads. Cripes.
So I'm going out on a Doylist limb here. These aren't flashbacks, after all; they are visions Lara is granted when she assembles the Atlantean Scion. So call them a little confused, the way visions are. Oh, and the opening scene? It's obviously wrong already -- there was only one atomic test in 1945, it wasn't at Los Alamos itself, and it most certainly did not include the buildings of a mock-up town getting blown down. But, hey, the cutscene starts in black and white anyhow. So call it a documentary, with some fudging of the facts for better dramatic impact. And Natla did not fly, burning, out of the crater whilst the mushroom cloud was still growing.
This is far too tempting a road to travel further and further, of course. I'm strongly leaning towards deciding that re the Stargate universe, nothing is canonical that hadn't been shown by the end of Season 4. So I don't have to stick with some of the really absurd stuff about Merlin, for instance.
One is further tempted to assume that everything you've seen about Lara's adventures actually comes out of one of the highly dramatized fan magazines (or ghost-written accounts, before she decided the publicity wasn't actually helping). So Atlantean script looks half-way like a reasonable language, and not like the crazy hodgepodge of cabalistic signs and ersatz hieroglyphics shown on screen during the game. And maybe it wasn't really a t. rex. Ah, but that way lies madness.
Part of the fun of the fanfic game is sticking with what was actually in the original, and making an effort to explain it (or at least make it seem to make sense).
But when you get down to it, as fascinating as the question is of what the Ancients were up to prior to 2 MYA and after 10 KYA (the dates the show gives for their two sojourns on Earth), particularly their interaction with human (and homo neandertalis) migration, the neolithic revolution, etc., the schema I have for my story isn't going to allow any of the characters to actually figure it all out. It's going to be a mystery to them. It might as well be a mystery to the reader as well.
Trouble is, I do sort of have to know myself. Because I'm still trying to figure out what the hell Natla was trying to dig up in New Mexico (it can't have been the infamous UFO, despite this taking place not far from Roswell). Or why there's a History Channel group of pseudo-archaeologists there now with their video cameras. Or why Amanda was there, and why the heck she thinks Lara Croft would soon follow!
So back to primary sources. I watched all the Tomb Raider: Anniversary cutscenes. And oh my. Apparently the White Sands area was a seat of power for Qualopec. Complete with Mesoamerican-style pyramid, surrounded by (!!) what look like Olmec heads. Cripes.
So I'm going out on a Doylist limb here. These aren't flashbacks, after all; they are visions Lara is granted when she assembles the Atlantean Scion. So call them a little confused, the way visions are. Oh, and the opening scene? It's obviously wrong already -- there was only one atomic test in 1945, it wasn't at Los Alamos itself, and it most certainly did not include the buildings of a mock-up town getting blown down. But, hey, the cutscene starts in black and white anyhow. So call it a documentary, with some fudging of the facts for better dramatic impact. And Natla did not fly, burning, out of the crater whilst the mushroom cloud was still growing.
This is far too tempting a road to travel further and further, of course. I'm strongly leaning towards deciding that re the Stargate universe, nothing is canonical that hadn't been shown by the end of Season 4. So I don't have to stick with some of the really absurd stuff about Merlin, for instance.
One is further tempted to assume that everything you've seen about Lara's adventures actually comes out of one of the highly dramatized fan magazines (or ghost-written accounts, before she decided the publicity wasn't actually helping). So Atlantean script looks half-way like a reasonable language, and not like the crazy hodgepodge of cabalistic signs and ersatz hieroglyphics shown on screen during the game. And maybe it wasn't really a t. rex. Ah, but that way lies madness.Part of the fun of the fanfic game is sticking with what was actually in the original, and making an effort to explain it (or at least make it seem to make sense).
But when you get down to it, as fascinating as the question is of what the Ancients were up to prior to 2 MYA and after 10 KYA (the dates the show gives for their two sojourns on Earth), particularly their interaction with human (and homo neandertalis) migration, the neolithic revolution, etc., the schema I have for my story isn't going to allow any of the characters to actually figure it all out. It's going to be a mystery to them. It might as well be a mystery to the reader as well.
Trouble is, I do sort of have to know myself. Because I'm still trying to figure out what the hell Natla was trying to dig up in New Mexico (it can't have been the infamous UFO, despite this taking place not far from Roswell). Or why there's a History Channel group of pseudo-archaeologists there now with their video cameras. Or why Amanda was there, and why the heck she thinks Lara Croft would soon follow!
Monday, September 19, 2016
Burke and Heir
Okay, that was bad. Really, really bad. "Heir" because my plan for Chapter 22 is road trip across America, with Lara doing some soul-searching and recapping about her life, including the nasty little inheritance battle she got involved in after Lord Croft vanished while on expedition.
And "Burke" for James Burke, of the Connections television show, because I'm following every trail off in whatever random direction they go.
There's three good reasons to close out this fanfic within the next few chapters. One is that it was shaped as a three-act structure and we've passed that critical Act II-III break (also, it's up over 100,000 words now and that's plenty for a one-joke story).
Another is that I should put this down and free up time to do other things. To do work that pays (even if the prop work doesn't pay much). Or if I'm to write, to go back to attempting to write for publication. Any lingering traces of the writer's block I had after sending out Shirato is gone now.
Lastly, it is that I didn't plan and it doesn't really come together properly. I could blame the sources for that; the Stargate universe is internally inconsistent, and it doesn't mesh as smoothly as it might with the Tomb Raider universe. My intent in starting out was just to have fun with the clash of characters. Unfortunately I realized shortly in that I cared about making the history right, and it became an increasingly onerous exercise in trying to reconcile these two ridiculous canons with something resembling our own world.
And even putting that aside; I have dangling plot lines that could be properly treated, but to really do justice to the history of the Ancients on Earth -- and especially to harmonize with Natla and the Atlantean Triumvirate -- I'd need a lot more pages. Enough perhaps to justify an entire sequel, especially if I simultaneously send Daniel Jackson to Syria to track down a Sumerian artifact that's passed through the hands of multiple conquerers through the tangled history of the ancient world.
But that's too much good money to throw into the bad of the ridiculous and bloated mess the source material already provides (not to mention my own confusing contributions).
And, yes; if I think of the current story in terms of Try-Fail structures, it looks right that the current arc is going to result in another failure for our heroes, another increasing of the stakes, and another full act of material as they go on for the big final try.
Except I don't really see it that way any more. Although I originally wrote this as "Tomb Raider and SG1 join forces to stop a villain" it actually reads more -- and I think will work better as -- "Tomb Raider and SG1 join forces." Full stop.
That is to say, the dramatic thrust is all about Lara finding out about SG1, losing their trust, then earning it back/becoming part of the team. It's the plot to every time a new character joins an existing cast, or two comic book titles meet (in the words of The Tick, "First we fight, then we are friends.") The template looks a lot like that of a Rom-Com.
So I don't actually have to save the world. I don't even have to stop the villain I introduced during the story. All I have to do is have Lara do something useful that will mend the temporarily broken fences between her and Stargate Command.
(She was brainwashed by a Goa'uld into letting him onto the base. That doesn't go down real well. Then the NID asked for her custody and she broke out. Also doesn't look that good. But the worst problem is she really doesn't know who she is now or where she is heading. She's having a mid-tomb crisis here.)
So only question now is, can I set Mount Shasta to ticking, get everyone else assembled there in time for a big showdown, and introduce some nice extra complications.....without going all Umberto Eco on Chief Victorio, the Silver Purchase Act, Solar Power, the Solutrean Hypothesis.........
And "Burke" for James Burke, of the Connections television show, because I'm following every trail off in whatever random direction they go.
There's three good reasons to close out this fanfic within the next few chapters. One is that it was shaped as a three-act structure and we've passed that critical Act II-III break (also, it's up over 100,000 words now and that's plenty for a one-joke story).
Another is that I should put this down and free up time to do other things. To do work that pays (even if the prop work doesn't pay much). Or if I'm to write, to go back to attempting to write for publication. Any lingering traces of the writer's block I had after sending out Shirato is gone now.
Lastly, it is that I didn't plan and it doesn't really come together properly. I could blame the sources for that; the Stargate universe is internally inconsistent, and it doesn't mesh as smoothly as it might with the Tomb Raider universe. My intent in starting out was just to have fun with the clash of characters. Unfortunately I realized shortly in that I cared about making the history right, and it became an increasingly onerous exercise in trying to reconcile these two ridiculous canons with something resembling our own world.
And even putting that aside; I have dangling plot lines that could be properly treated, but to really do justice to the history of the Ancients on Earth -- and especially to harmonize with Natla and the Atlantean Triumvirate -- I'd need a lot more pages. Enough perhaps to justify an entire sequel, especially if I simultaneously send Daniel Jackson to Syria to track down a Sumerian artifact that's passed through the hands of multiple conquerers through the tangled history of the ancient world.
But that's too much good money to throw into the bad of the ridiculous and bloated mess the source material already provides (not to mention my own confusing contributions).
And, yes; if I think of the current story in terms of Try-Fail structures, it looks right that the current arc is going to result in another failure for our heroes, another increasing of the stakes, and another full act of material as they go on for the big final try.
Except I don't really see it that way any more. Although I originally wrote this as "Tomb Raider and SG1 join forces to stop a villain" it actually reads more -- and I think will work better as -- "Tomb Raider and SG1 join forces." Full stop.
That is to say, the dramatic thrust is all about Lara finding out about SG1, losing their trust, then earning it back/becoming part of the team. It's the plot to every time a new character joins an existing cast, or two comic book titles meet (in the words of The Tick, "First we fight, then we are friends.") The template looks a lot like that of a Rom-Com.
So I don't actually have to save the world. I don't even have to stop the villain I introduced during the story. All I have to do is have Lara do something useful that will mend the temporarily broken fences between her and Stargate Command.
(She was brainwashed by a Goa'uld into letting him onto the base. That doesn't go down real well. Then the NID asked for her custody and she broke out. Also doesn't look that good. But the worst problem is she really doesn't know who she is now or where she is heading. She's having a mid-tomb crisis here.)
So only question now is, can I set Mount Shasta to ticking, get everyone else assembled there in time for a big showdown, and introduce some nice extra complications.....without going all Umberto Eco on Chief Victorio, the Silver Purchase Act, Solar Power, the Solutrean Hypothesis.........
Sunday, September 11, 2016
Holoback
The hypercube works:
I created a 2" cube of white translucent acrylic and propped the lighting circuit inside that. (Actually, the picture shows the cube being illuminated by one of my 3 watt Cree). It looks very nice now. More, the diffusion works so well I'm no longer forced to bend the LEDs around to try to get 360' coverage (although the construction of the cube and support means the underside of the circuit board, where the holocron lid is anyway, is going to be less than properly illuminated).
While I was lasering that, and doing the final tweaks-and-tests for the revised circuit board supports and inner layer pieces, I also ran off a test of an idea I'm calling the Imperial Archives Holocron:
This is actually done with 1/16" translucent white mated up with identically-outlined 1/16" opaque black acrylic. Unfortunately I don't have a holocron-sized white light source, and this photograph is using a Maglight Solitaire propped up on a roll of solder.
The circuit is routed as well. Just needs the silkscreen cleaned up.
Is funny; I felt like hell all week (longest four-day week ever) but after getting some sleep managed to crawl out to the shop for the lasering above, plus put down the next thousand words on my Tomb Raider/SG1 crossover.
Well, I've got some problem-solving to do before the latest chapter is complete. Because I've put Checkov's Concentrator Solar Power Plant up on the Mescalero Escarpment mantlepiece, and I need to figure out why it is about to go off...
I created a 2" cube of white translucent acrylic and propped the lighting circuit inside that. (Actually, the picture shows the cube being illuminated by one of my 3 watt Cree). It looks very nice now. More, the diffusion works so well I'm no longer forced to bend the LEDs around to try to get 360' coverage (although the construction of the cube and support means the underside of the circuit board, where the holocron lid is anyway, is going to be less than properly illuminated).
While I was lasering that, and doing the final tweaks-and-tests for the revised circuit board supports and inner layer pieces, I also ran off a test of an idea I'm calling the Imperial Archives Holocron:
This is actually done with 1/16" translucent white mated up with identically-outlined 1/16" opaque black acrylic. Unfortunately I don't have a holocron-sized white light source, and this photograph is using a Maglight Solitaire propped up on a roll of solder.
The circuit is routed as well. Just needs the silkscreen cleaned up.
Is funny; I felt like hell all week (longest four-day week ever) but after getting some sleep managed to crawl out to the shop for the lasering above, plus put down the next thousand words on my Tomb Raider/SG1 crossover.
Well, I've got some problem-solving to do before the latest chapter is complete. Because I've put Checkov's Concentrator Solar Power Plant up on the Mescalero Escarpment mantlepiece, and I need to figure out why it is about to go off...
Saturday, September 10, 2016
Raider of Blue Highways
The Tomb Raider fanfic is still going. One of these days I'll take what (I hope!) I've learned and try and write a marketable book again.
And I've given up on trying to make a lean narrative. I've decided it is a travelogue. (I thought there was another term for this: a term for a book that is nothing but a bunch of set-pieces interesting in themselves that don't actually go anywhere. I thought the term might be a "Picaresque" but reviewing the definition it seems to require a sort of aimless -- if not amoral -- rascal that doesn't seem to describe any of my protagonists.)
I have Lara Croft in New Mexico, hiding from the NID, and looking for Natla. Jaqueline Natla, one-time Atlantean Queen, who was freed from her ten-thousand year prison by "an atom bomb test in 1945" as the game put it. Well, there was only one atom bomb tested in New Mexico in 1945.
So I just scribbled 800 words of what will be about a 1200 word scene on the Trinity test. With excursions into Admiral "Amazing Grace" Hopper, the peculiar humor of George Gamow and the eccentricities of Fermi and Feynman, Luiz Alvarez and the iridium clue that has bloated into the "asteroid killed the dinosaurs" meme, and I'm not even sure what else besides.
There is an overwhelming wealth here. I've got her started in Roswell because I simply could not resist the giant coffee cup over a diner there. Or as much other Roadside America I can work in, from Mystery Spots to Cadillac Ranches. And that's Roswell, with little green men, in a universe where the little grey Asgard are real and are a thing. And a 50's diner, and she'll be going road trip in a sort-of replica of the Landmaster from the pre-Mad Max post-atomic war epic Damnation Alley. So we're full-on Atomic Cafe. Plus aliens.
(Carter already got into the act last chapter, explaining about raycats.)
New Mexico just by itself is fascinating enough, with a mix of cultures and very much still there questions of cultural identity, appropriation, and institutionalized racism. Historically fascinating of course. And wealthy in pre-history as well, right back to Clovis and the questions surrounding the first human migrations through the New World. (And it leans on, although the connections are light, the even more spectacular early history of Central and South America).
So I started her where she can dig for some clues in the neolithic for Natla's previous identity, and simultaneously mine for what the heck Natla was doing in 1945. And the dig she's checking out is being run by someone who puts a face to the whole Ancient Aliens hyperdiffusionism epic (which still seems to filter down to the same place it started with back in the 1800's; "anyone but the native Americans.") This person is strong on the giants/nephelium part of a very messy Venn Diagram, meaning there's tentacles here leading out towards fundamentalist evangelicals, creationists -- sorry, "cdesign proponentists" -- white supremacists, even David Ickes royal lizard family fearers.
And I just realized through a happy accident (listening to a random program from Dan Carlin, and one of the bloggers I follow googled the wrong mountain by mistake) and I've realized I can send her next to Victorio Peak and talk about the Apache and the lost gold treasure and a few other things in that particular mix. And if she gets a longing for a proper tomb crawl, there's some ridiculous caves around the state as well.
Honestly, this is all going so James Burke (aka, his great show Connections). The guy in the ladder story (crazy stunts copying Akkadian inscriptions from a cliff face) was also involved in the deadly retreat from Kabul. George Smith (who shares with Howard Carter a working-class background unlike many of the big names -- Carter's financial backer, Lord Carnevon, whose death gave new life to the existing "mummy's curse" meme* -- oddly enough, his house is the one used for Downton Abbey) anyhow, he was the one who found the Flood story in among the epic of Gilgamesh. He'd been brought in by Budge, who was moving on from Egyptian into harder puzzles like Akkadian (no Rosetta Stone there) and Budge is the one who tells the story of George getting super-excited about the work he is translating and, in the middle of the library of the British Museum, begins to disrobe...
And I've given up on trying to make a lean narrative. I've decided it is a travelogue. (I thought there was another term for this: a term for a book that is nothing but a bunch of set-pieces interesting in themselves that don't actually go anywhere. I thought the term might be a "Picaresque" but reviewing the definition it seems to require a sort of aimless -- if not amoral -- rascal that doesn't seem to describe any of my protagonists.)
I have Lara Croft in New Mexico, hiding from the NID, and looking for Natla. Jaqueline Natla, one-time Atlantean Queen, who was freed from her ten-thousand year prison by "an atom bomb test in 1945" as the game put it. Well, there was only one atom bomb tested in New Mexico in 1945.
So I just scribbled 800 words of what will be about a 1200 word scene on the Trinity test. With excursions into Admiral "Amazing Grace" Hopper, the peculiar humor of George Gamow and the eccentricities of Fermi and Feynman, Luiz Alvarez and the iridium clue that has bloated into the "asteroid killed the dinosaurs" meme, and I'm not even sure what else besides.
There is an overwhelming wealth here. I've got her started in Roswell because I simply could not resist the giant coffee cup over a diner there. Or as much other Roadside America I can work in, from Mystery Spots to Cadillac Ranches. And that's Roswell, with little green men, in a universe where the little grey Asgard are real and are a thing. And a 50's diner, and she'll be going road trip in a sort-of replica of the Landmaster from the pre-Mad Max post-atomic war epic Damnation Alley. So we're full-on Atomic Cafe. Plus aliens.
(Carter already got into the act last chapter, explaining about raycats.)
New Mexico just by itself is fascinating enough, with a mix of cultures and very much still there questions of cultural identity, appropriation, and institutionalized racism. Historically fascinating of course. And wealthy in pre-history as well, right back to Clovis and the questions surrounding the first human migrations through the New World. (And it leans on, although the connections are light, the even more spectacular early history of Central and South America).
So I started her where she can dig for some clues in the neolithic for Natla's previous identity, and simultaneously mine for what the heck Natla was doing in 1945. And the dig she's checking out is being run by someone who puts a face to the whole Ancient Aliens hyperdiffusionism epic (which still seems to filter down to the same place it started with back in the 1800's; "anyone but the native Americans.") This person is strong on the giants/nephelium part of a very messy Venn Diagram, meaning there's tentacles here leading out towards fundamentalist evangelicals, creationists -- sorry, "cdesign proponentists" -- white supremacists, even David Ickes royal lizard family fearers.
And I just realized through a happy accident (listening to a random program from Dan Carlin, and one of the bloggers I follow googled the wrong mountain by mistake) and I've realized I can send her next to Victorio Peak and talk about the Apache and the lost gold treasure and a few other things in that particular mix. And if she gets a longing for a proper tomb crawl, there's some ridiculous caves around the state as well.
Honestly, this is all going so James Burke (aka, his great show Connections). The guy in the ladder story (crazy stunts copying Akkadian inscriptions from a cliff face) was also involved in the deadly retreat from Kabul. George Smith (who shares with Howard Carter a working-class background unlike many of the big names -- Carter's financial backer, Lord Carnevon, whose death gave new life to the existing "mummy's curse" meme* -- oddly enough, his house is the one used for Downton Abbey) anyhow, he was the one who found the Flood story in among the epic of Gilgamesh. He'd been brought in by Budge, who was moving on from Egyptian into harder puzzles like Akkadian (no Rosetta Stone there) and Budge is the one who tells the story of George getting super-excited about the work he is translating and, in the middle of the library of the British Museum, begins to disrobe...
Thursday, August 18, 2016
Sam I Am
I need another project -- or a story idea -- like I need a thing that is not needed. But try telling that to the Plot Bunnies.
Like the bunny that came this afternoon muttering, "No one leaves!" in archaic Japanese. I just can't seem to leave Yamatai alone. Well, here's the latest wild idea; leave Lara Croft home. So this becomes Samantha's story...and the rest of this meandering sketch-in-progress goes below the fold.
Edit to add; I went ahead and started it, and I just put up Chapter Five. The changes from the game get larger and larger from this part in, though, which I assume means I'll have to spend longer on each chapter as I try to figure out how to make things work properly.
Like the bunny that came this afternoon muttering, "No one leaves!" in archaic Japanese. I just can't seem to leave Yamatai alone. Well, here's the latest wild idea; leave Lara Croft home. So this becomes Samantha's story...and the rest of this meandering sketch-in-progress goes below the fold.
Edit to add; I went ahead and started it, and I just put up Chapter Five. The changes from the game get larger and larger from this part in, though, which I assume means I'll have to spend longer on each chapter as I try to figure out how to make things work properly.
Sunday, August 14, 2016
Yamatai II (fanfic thoughts)
I've written before about my issues with the reboot "Tomb Raider" (2013). I'm left with no firm idea of how one could have made it a better game. However -- and topical in that a movie is apparently about to enter production -- one can put aside questions of playability and game balance and ask only what would make a better narrative.
And this is another rambling ranting essay, so the rest is below the fold.
And this is another rambling ranting essay, so the rest is below the fold.
Thursday, August 11, 2016
Box of Plot Bunnies
I've been reading Mass Effect fanfiction and thinking again about all the missed opportunities of the Tomb Raider (2013) game.
Had some trivial thoughts about the Harry Potter universe as well. Main one; the story is hermetic. It is about magic versus magic. Neither the magic system nor the entire Magical World as presented are ever intended to interact with anything outside of magic and the magical world. Thus to my mind cross-overs and most fixfics are non-starters; magic is an out-of-context problem to any other setting, and the muggle world (be it our world or the world of Darth Vader) is an out-of-context problem for the magic world. It makes as much sense as asking whether a Checker can put a King in check, or how many spaces a domino advances in Monopoly.
The other is that the magical world is Britain between the wars. They lost so many in the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, they simply can't deal with the threat of a second one. They don't want to believe it possible, and they can't bring themselves to commit to planning against it, they don't even want to talk about it. Thus the ineffectual and even counter-productive actions by so many of the adult characters, and the willful ignorance they impose on the young characters.
And that led to the first thought; perhaps the best way to break the pattern of what happens to Lara Croft on Yamatai is to pick a character who comes to their interactions with the world from an entirely different context. Say, Sherlock Holmes. First Bunny here; Holmes and Watson on Yamatai, with the Endurance expedition taking place in the late Victorian age. A lot more deduction, a lot less shooting (well, unless you cast the Robert Downey version).
Flipping that, though, since the story of Lara on Yamatai is about growing from a scared kid into a survivor...switch up and put Lara in Shepard's shoes. In the Mindoir origin. Given the way the events of Yamatai unfolded, I'd say it would be a bad day to be a Batarian.
(There's another Bunny lurking here; given that the archaeology of Liara T'soni is what gives the first good clues to the nature of the Reapers, some of the tools used to defeat Sovereign, and in one of the outcomes of the third game leads to the only really decent resolution, one could make an argument that an adventure archaeologist makes as much a fitting protagonist for the story as does the universe's most persuasive soldier-hero since Darth Revan.)
From a completely un-quantified survey of Fanfiction.net, about a third of the Lara Croft stories are set in the 2013 reboot continuity (almost another third are in the original continuity, post Angel of Darkness, and include Kurtis as a character), and of those the majority are post-Yamatai and of that number the majority are Lara/Sam fics. There's also a sizable contingent of Amanda fics, and just enough of a sampling to be statistically significant of Lara/Natla fics.
Of the Harry Potter fics that have attracted my eye, most have turned out to be fixfics. Either crossovers or introduction of out-of-context elements like dragonriders or unexplained new powers or just plain Harry-gets-a-clue, they almost inevitably reveal the rest of the magical world as a bunch of dopes. To my mind, it never really works (as much fun as a snarky bit of "take that!" can be).
What few Mass Effect fics I've looked show the following trends; generally through all three games or set post, inevitably femshep (aka Commander Shepard is female), and she most often romances Garrus (I agree -- I was happy enough to leave Kaiden on Virmire.)
The vast majority of SG1 fics are Jack/Sam. But there's a statistically significant trend for builder fics, in which the Stargate Program is managed differently, with different methods, gear, etc. The best of which so far is one set in the late 40's, with an Ernest Littlefield who remembers to take a radio along.
And mostly unrelated: the title music to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (which opens with Lara's old mentor Werner von Croy getting killed in Paris) reprises the main theme from Tomb Raider: Revelations (in which that character was strongly featured.) So I'll definitely see if I can work a reference to that theme in the Tomb Raider: Legacy title track I'm tinkering up!
(Which will be multi-tracked with a little pennywhistle and violin from your's truly. The violin is I'm afraid going to have to track itself into string sections, though. I am years from being able to do a soulful solo on that instrument.)
Had some trivial thoughts about the Harry Potter universe as well. Main one; the story is hermetic. It is about magic versus magic. Neither the magic system nor the entire Magical World as presented are ever intended to interact with anything outside of magic and the magical world. Thus to my mind cross-overs and most fixfics are non-starters; magic is an out-of-context problem to any other setting, and the muggle world (be it our world or the world of Darth Vader) is an out-of-context problem for the magic world. It makes as much sense as asking whether a Checker can put a King in check, or how many spaces a domino advances in Monopoly.
The other is that the magical world is Britain between the wars. They lost so many in the first Wizarding War against Voldemort, they simply can't deal with the threat of a second one. They don't want to believe it possible, and they can't bring themselves to commit to planning against it, they don't even want to talk about it. Thus the ineffectual and even counter-productive actions by so many of the adult characters, and the willful ignorance they impose on the young characters.
And that led to the first thought; perhaps the best way to break the pattern of what happens to Lara Croft on Yamatai is to pick a character who comes to their interactions with the world from an entirely different context. Say, Sherlock Holmes. First Bunny here; Holmes and Watson on Yamatai, with the Endurance expedition taking place in the late Victorian age. A lot more deduction, a lot less shooting (well, unless you cast the Robert Downey version).
Flipping that, though, since the story of Lara on Yamatai is about growing from a scared kid into a survivor...switch up and put Lara in Shepard's shoes. In the Mindoir origin. Given the way the events of Yamatai unfolded, I'd say it would be a bad day to be a Batarian.
(There's another Bunny lurking here; given that the archaeology of Liara T'soni is what gives the first good clues to the nature of the Reapers, some of the tools used to defeat Sovereign, and in one of the outcomes of the third game leads to the only really decent resolution, one could make an argument that an adventure archaeologist makes as much a fitting protagonist for the story as does the universe's most persuasive soldier-hero since Darth Revan.)
From a completely un-quantified survey of Fanfiction.net, about a third of the Lara Croft stories are set in the 2013 reboot continuity (almost another third are in the original continuity, post Angel of Darkness, and include Kurtis as a character), and of those the majority are post-Yamatai and of that number the majority are Lara/Sam fics. There's also a sizable contingent of Amanda fics, and just enough of a sampling to be statistically significant of Lara/Natla fics.
Of the Harry Potter fics that have attracted my eye, most have turned out to be fixfics. Either crossovers or introduction of out-of-context elements like dragonriders or unexplained new powers or just plain Harry-gets-a-clue, they almost inevitably reveal the rest of the magical world as a bunch of dopes. To my mind, it never really works (as much fun as a snarky bit of "take that!" can be).
What few Mass Effect fics I've looked show the following trends; generally through all three games or set post, inevitably femshep (aka Commander Shepard is female), and she most often romances Garrus (I agree -- I was happy enough to leave Kaiden on Virmire.)
The vast majority of SG1 fics are Jack/Sam. But there's a statistically significant trend for builder fics, in which the Stargate Program is managed differently, with different methods, gear, etc. The best of which so far is one set in the late 40's, with an Ernest Littlefield who remembers to take a radio along.
And mostly unrelated: the title music to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness (which opens with Lara's old mentor Werner von Croy getting killed in Paris) reprises the main theme from Tomb Raider: Revelations (in which that character was strongly featured.) So I'll definitely see if I can work a reference to that theme in the Tomb Raider: Legacy title track I'm tinkering up!
(Which will be multi-tracked with a little pennywhistle and violin from your's truly. The violin is I'm afraid going to have to track itself into string sections, though. I am years from being able to do a soulful solo on that instrument.)
Wednesday, July 6, 2016
For want of a Niall
I'm taking a couple of sick days off from the Holocron. Mostly resting, but also working on the fanfic. This is a big fight at Croft Manor, which was originally thrown in to put a little action into a chapter of archaeological discussion. But said chapter ran long, kicked the fight scene into its own chapter, and so that had to grow larger as well.
In the original Legend/Underworld canon (aka, the first trilogy of games produced by the studio Crystal Dynamics) Amanda sends the Doppleganger into Croft Manor to steal back the Wraith Stone. My head canon is Amanda tried earlier but was stymied by the house security (one of the in-game excuses for using Doppie is that she passes for Lara on a retinal scanner).
And in my fic, this first attack takes place while members of SG-1 are visiting.
See, this is what is exciting about cross-overs. Like AU stories, you've established a change. It may be a small change (there are a large number of fanfics in which "Harry" Potter is born a girl. And for whatever reason, many of them get rather lemony as well -- usually involving Hermione. But nevermind!)
The fun is that changes cascade. It is almost never a matter of replacing each occurrence of one name or gender or hair color or whatever but otherwise retelling the same story. Instead, events diverge, proceeding inexorably from that first change.
Of course one reason is that fanfics are by their nature fix fics; they are an author's response to another's work, and they may chose to comment on or to change elements of that work. This ranges from exposing some of what one might consider poorer choices in the original, to completely changing the spirit. (This may be why in, say, Harry Potter fanfics, Voldemort rarely survives much past the Triwizard Tournament.)
This is a dialog that happens within original works as well; many works of science fiction and fantasy were written to ridicule or overturn existing genre conventions. Or to introduce elements that had been previously lacking (c.f. feminist science fiction, the New Wave, etc., etc.)
The other reason is because this is the fun. The fun of all the alternate history and What If stories. Make one change, whether it is Lee victorious at Gettysburg or the Enterprise showing up in orbit around Caprica, and see what follows.
(Personally, for me this is practically the point. The original canon Harry Potter universe is all about how special magic is and how useless muggles are. Making Harry...err...Amaryllis Potter the (other) young ward of Bruce Wayne means that muggle skills and muggle ways proceed to kick ass.)
Unfortunately I'm not really doing this. There's no specific linkage of events that causes my Amanda to send a full team of mercenaries to get the Wraith Stone back. If this does come out of anything, it is from something that far predates Lara's awareness of the Stargate program.
It comes from the fact that in this universe, both canons are true. At least, as much as is possible to reconcile them. The Stargate and the Goa'uld have always been part of Lara Croft's universe, waiting for her to explore the right tomb to find them. And Amanda and the Wraith Stone, Excalibur and Mjolnir and Natla have always been part of the Stargate, SG1 universe; again, just waiting for the heroes of that show to discover them.
Oh, and one other thing. In my particular universe, the fusion I've chosen for this specific work of fiction, people aren't idiots. Actually, in the SG1 universe military people are surprisingly competent (of course "by TV standards" is a low bar, but still). And so are scientists, by and large. What's been the biggest problem for me in the majority of the fic is my efforts to admit history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, evolutionary biology, etc., etc. to the competence club; to assume that archaeologists would probably have noticed if, say, the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza had gone flying around the galaxy ca 3,000 BC.
In any case, this chapter brings the general military competence of the SG1 universe, as well as my general slant towards improved realism (but only when and if compatible with telling a good story) to an armed attack on Croft Manor.
It ain't going to be Home Alone. Stupid tricks don't actually work against even poorly trained gunmen (well, not often enough to risk). And you don't fire off automatic weapons indoors without someone getting hurt. I mean to maim one of my cast before this is done.
Ah, but sigh; I have no real battle plan, no good overall flow. Just a bunch of character "bits" I want to do. Half of which are, well basically, those same Home Alone kinds of gags. The cake is getting divided at least four ways here.
So none of this is unfolding organically from the original assumptions. Instead my choices are thoroughly constrained. I'm leveraging the architecture of the manor itself for every bit of plot convenience I can get from it, and as well forcing each essentially isolated encounter to fall the way I want it to fall instead of developing in any logical way.
One day. One day I will write a proper AU/cross-over, in which I really do defend how each battle came out different because of my original nail.
In the original Legend/Underworld canon (aka, the first trilogy of games produced by the studio Crystal Dynamics) Amanda sends the Doppleganger into Croft Manor to steal back the Wraith Stone. My head canon is Amanda tried earlier but was stymied by the house security (one of the in-game excuses for using Doppie is that she passes for Lara on a retinal scanner).
And in my fic, this first attack takes place while members of SG-1 are visiting.
See, this is what is exciting about cross-overs. Like AU stories, you've established a change. It may be a small change (there are a large number of fanfics in which "Harry" Potter is born a girl. And for whatever reason, many of them get rather lemony as well -- usually involving Hermione. But nevermind!)
The fun is that changes cascade. It is almost never a matter of replacing each occurrence of one name or gender or hair color or whatever but otherwise retelling the same story. Instead, events diverge, proceeding inexorably from that first change.
Of course one reason is that fanfics are by their nature fix fics; they are an author's response to another's work, and they may chose to comment on or to change elements of that work. This ranges from exposing some of what one might consider poorer choices in the original, to completely changing the spirit. (This may be why in, say, Harry Potter fanfics, Voldemort rarely survives much past the Triwizard Tournament.)
This is a dialog that happens within original works as well; many works of science fiction and fantasy were written to ridicule or overturn existing genre conventions. Or to introduce elements that had been previously lacking (c.f. feminist science fiction, the New Wave, etc., etc.)
The other reason is because this is the fun. The fun of all the alternate history and What If stories. Make one change, whether it is Lee victorious at Gettysburg or the Enterprise showing up in orbit around Caprica, and see what follows.
(Personally, for me this is practically the point. The original canon Harry Potter universe is all about how special magic is and how useless muggles are. Making Harry...err...Amaryllis Potter the (other) young ward of Bruce Wayne means that muggle skills and muggle ways proceed to kick ass.)
Unfortunately I'm not really doing this. There's no specific linkage of events that causes my Amanda to send a full team of mercenaries to get the Wraith Stone back. If this does come out of anything, it is from something that far predates Lara's awareness of the Stargate program.
It comes from the fact that in this universe, both canons are true. At least, as much as is possible to reconcile them. The Stargate and the Goa'uld have always been part of Lara Croft's universe, waiting for her to explore the right tomb to find them. And Amanda and the Wraith Stone, Excalibur and Mjolnir and Natla have always been part of the Stargate, SG1 universe; again, just waiting for the heroes of that show to discover them.
Oh, and one other thing. In my particular universe, the fusion I've chosen for this specific work of fiction, people aren't idiots. Actually, in the SG1 universe military people are surprisingly competent (of course "by TV standards" is a low bar, but still). And so are scientists, by and large. What's been the biggest problem for me in the majority of the fic is my efforts to admit history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, evolutionary biology, etc., etc. to the competence club; to assume that archaeologists would probably have noticed if, say, the Great Pyramid of Cheops at Giza had gone flying around the galaxy ca 3,000 BC.
In any case, this chapter brings the general military competence of the SG1 universe, as well as my general slant towards improved realism (but only when and if compatible with telling a good story) to an armed attack on Croft Manor.
It ain't going to be Home Alone. Stupid tricks don't actually work against even poorly trained gunmen (well, not often enough to risk). And you don't fire off automatic weapons indoors without someone getting hurt. I mean to maim one of my cast before this is done.
Ah, but sigh; I have no real battle plan, no good overall flow. Just a bunch of character "bits" I want to do. Half of which are, well basically, those same Home Alone kinds of gags. The cake is getting divided at least four ways here.
So none of this is unfolding organically from the original assumptions. Instead my choices are thoroughly constrained. I'm leveraging the architecture of the manor itself for every bit of plot convenience I can get from it, and as well forcing each essentially isolated encounter to fall the way I want it to fall instead of developing in any logical way.
One day. One day I will write a proper AU/cross-over, in which I really do defend how each battle came out different because of my original nail.
Tuesday, June 7, 2016
A Perfect Crash
I'm finishing up the Holocron PCB; it should go out to the fab house Wed or Thursday. So no time to write fiction. (And no time to make short, clear, interesting blog posts, either).
But I was browsing random images today and ran into one end of a perfect string of what I need to do with the second next chapter of the fanfic. The picture was of one of the UFO-themed eateries in Roswell, NM. And an expansion of an existing search turned up petroglyphs not far away. And a glance at the map confirms New Mexico makes a lot more sense as the start of a road trip to Northern California from someone who started in Colorado (well, more sense than Raleigh, NC, which is where I had her before!)
And one of the bloggers I follow has just recapped an older post he had about the claims of medieval Europeans in Arizona by one of the two people who inspired the character Lara Croft will be encountering. So everything points towards the Four Corners, generically.
I'm going to miss the chance to check out the Indian Mounds of the Mississippian culture but I should be able to do all the stuff I want to about the racist underside of hyper-diffusionism and the actual (and impressive) cultures of North America, and the strange bedfellows between weird strains of American evangelicalism, UFO belief, and Atlantis...the way the need to believe that a Greek/Jewish/White European culture was behind the Pyramids, the bronzework of Benin, or Indian Mounds, which grew and morphed with much help from Theosophy to a "Atlanteans/Space Aliens were the seed of all world culture" (which in recent years has been re-costumed yet again with the influence of pre-millennial dispensationists and the like as "Atlanteans/Space Aliens/Angels" -- fused into a hybrid concept often given the name "Nephilim.")
I've always loved the desert -- took road trips out to Lassen and into Death Valley before, trained in that area as well -- and Roswell NM is just such a weird place in that American Roadside Attraction way it will be a lot simpler to make some memorable visuals as backdrop to the (also thematically very appropriate) long-distance road trek of the Damnation Alley- like "Ark III" they'll be riding in.
And I'm afraid I'm going to have to push back a little on the directions "Colonel" Newberry was moving. I still think he is wicked smart, and probably knows a lot of the pseudo-archaeology he's pushing is bullshit, but really he has two important jobs to do in the narrative. One is to be a foil, a devil's advocate; someone who can argue intelligently for the, shall we say, non-mainstream views. But the other and in my mind more important task is to amplify on my peculiar take on just what the relationship is between Lara Croft and real archaeology (for the purposes of this story, note. I firmly believe there are multiple valid takes one could make).
Basically, it is that her world is very close to ours. Almost every legend and myth and tall tale, almost every Bigfoot sighting and Coso Artifact and so forth are exactly what they are in our world; mistakes and hoaxes. Very, very rare are those things that are actually true. Lara has the seemingly magical talent (or maybe just sheer luck) to have found more than one of them. And in my construct, once you find one, your chances of finding others goes up. The Colonel is Lara Croft without that luck. He's smart, he's physically fit, he's got the money and the gear, the smarts and the determination....the only thing he lacks is one of those tremendously handy "tombs" to raid.
But I was browsing random images today and ran into one end of a perfect string of what I need to do with the second next chapter of the fanfic. The picture was of one of the UFO-themed eateries in Roswell, NM. And an expansion of an existing search turned up petroglyphs not far away. And a glance at the map confirms New Mexico makes a lot more sense as the start of a road trip to Northern California from someone who started in Colorado (well, more sense than Raleigh, NC, which is where I had her before!)
And one of the bloggers I follow has just recapped an older post he had about the claims of medieval Europeans in Arizona by one of the two people who inspired the character Lara Croft will be encountering. So everything points towards the Four Corners, generically.
I'm going to miss the chance to check out the Indian Mounds of the Mississippian culture but I should be able to do all the stuff I want to about the racist underside of hyper-diffusionism and the actual (and impressive) cultures of North America, and the strange bedfellows between weird strains of American evangelicalism, UFO belief, and Atlantis...the way the need to believe that a Greek/Jewish/White European culture was behind the Pyramids, the bronzework of Benin, or Indian Mounds, which grew and morphed with much help from Theosophy to a "Atlanteans/Space Aliens were the seed of all world culture" (which in recent years has been re-costumed yet again with the influence of pre-millennial dispensationists and the like as "Atlanteans/Space Aliens/Angels" -- fused into a hybrid concept often given the name "Nephilim.")
I've always loved the desert -- took road trips out to Lassen and into Death Valley before, trained in that area as well -- and Roswell NM is just such a weird place in that American Roadside Attraction way it will be a lot simpler to make some memorable visuals as backdrop to the (also thematically very appropriate) long-distance road trek of the Damnation Alley- like "Ark III" they'll be riding in.
And I'm afraid I'm going to have to push back a little on the directions "Colonel" Newberry was moving. I still think he is wicked smart, and probably knows a lot of the pseudo-archaeology he's pushing is bullshit, but really he has two important jobs to do in the narrative. One is to be a foil, a devil's advocate; someone who can argue intelligently for the, shall we say, non-mainstream views. But the other and in my mind more important task is to amplify on my peculiar take on just what the relationship is between Lara Croft and real archaeology (for the purposes of this story, note. I firmly believe there are multiple valid takes one could make).
Basically, it is that her world is very close to ours. Almost every legend and myth and tall tale, almost every Bigfoot sighting and Coso Artifact and so forth are exactly what they are in our world; mistakes and hoaxes. Very, very rare are those things that are actually true. Lara has the seemingly magical talent (or maybe just sheer luck) to have found more than one of them. And in my construct, once you find one, your chances of finding others goes up. The Colonel is Lara Croft without that luck. He's smart, he's physically fit, he's got the money and the gear, the smarts and the determination....the only thing he lacks is one of those tremendously handy "tombs" to raid.
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Chapter Adverse
Not the PCB itself; I have some realism! I need to play with heat profiles and thermal vias, double-check footprints, and of course clean up the silkscreen...and I haven't even routed the board yet.
So of course I'm taking a short break to think about the next chapter in the fanfic.
If I had a proper outline, I'd have a pretty good idea what had to happen in each chapter. The same exercise, after all, takes place fractally within each chapter, within each scene, down to the line of dialog or sentence of description.
As an example, in my last chapter I had a "bit" I wanted to do; Alister gets talked into learning how to shoot, but unexpectedly turns into one of those gun collector types who go into raptures about Broad Arrows and Suicide Sears. This framed out as a series of snapshots where he brings more and more unusual guns out to the shooting range. A number of "beats," to use that useful bit of theater terminology. I needed Alister getting a bad start, Alister trying a different gun, Alister bringing out the first unusual gun, and finally Alister talking glibly about his latest unusual gun. As it worked out, I built those beats around several specific handguns; a SIG-sauer P226, a Colt Police Positive, a Whitney Wolverine, and a Nambu Type 14. With a Gyrojet for the payoff gag later.
Between those scenes would be more dry history lesson, so I'd planned to send some mooks into the manor and have a nice knock-down fight to finish the chapter on a high note. Except that this parallel structure, in which each Alister scene was followed by three other scenes, drove my page count too high.
This is the problem of writing serial style. I know where I'm going and approximately how long it is going to take, but the details I'm figuring out only a chapter or two ahead.
So now the exercise is looking at how many "beats" there are in the fight, and seeing if these stretch out to fill a chapter, or if I have to add other business. And there's another problem. Once the fight is over I've got several revelations I can make, and that will pad out the page count, but I don't want the climax of the chapter to occur around the middle.
For pacing reasons, then, I'm contemplating having the discussion of who the heck Amanda is while the armed men she has sent are still crawling around the manor looking for the Wraith Stone. And there's the planning at the moment. I have "bits," but I don't have beats. Daniel has to talk a mook down. Teal'c has to show off his mastery of the manor's hidden passageways, and the gyrojet needs to be taken down from the mantlepiece and fired a few times.
Once I've broken it into beats, and arranged and interleaved them in a way that supports the overall arc of the chapter, I can do a little division and see how close I will make it to my target word count this time.
And it is midnight, and I still feel awful, but the schematic is almost finished -- just need to add the resistor ladder for the function buttons, the resistor for the capacitance sensor, and a couple more decoupling and power smoothing capacitors. Oh, yeah, and figure out a footprint for the mercury tilt switch I managed to score on eBay.
Monday, April 11, 2016
An Oblique Approach
Came up with a couple of ideas to try on the Holocron lighting. Had some pink "Cree" LEDs left over from the Raygun project
so I was able to throw together a lighting test of back-to-back Crees with a PCB and LiPo between them. And it looks okay with the only complete Holocron innards I have to work with at the moment.
Another alternative I came up with was to use four NeoPixels (as I did for the first one) but use through-hole ones or find some right-angle headers so they could be easily slipped into place on the PCB without a lot of fiddling about. This is mechanically a better idea, and a simpler circuit, but I want to keep exploring the Cree infrastructure...plus the NeoPixels are 20ma a channel versus 300 for the Cree.
Anyhow, test pans out. The lighting coverage is acceptable even without additional diffusors for the LEDs (something I'm still tinkering with, however, since it would be simple to incorporate a sheet of material and some stand-offs within the existing "spider" support for the circuit board.)
Not as much progress on the Wraith Stone. I got out my Sculpy and made an extremely rough test model. It showed me the outer envelope for scale (at 3-3/4 inches long), told me something about the shape of the total artifact (possibly arrowhead, more likely flat-backed), and also gave me a sense of what it would be like to carve by hand (painful but not impossible...but also, understructure is mandatory).
This did lead to some new questions, however. The big one being, what is this thing? Was it made from scratch and then given the power to communicate with/control the Unknown Entity, or did it start as a natural object with those powers and get carved/incorporated into a more elaborate shape?
It is plausible this thing is Atlantean technology, like "Excalibur" and the Galali Key, in which case the shape is simply whatever Natla's people thought made a cool-looking housing. But there's an intriguing irregularity about some of the depictions I've seen around, an irregularity that speaks of a found object that has been hand-shaped to try to bring out certain shapes (like the skull/face) but only within the limits of the existing material/artifact.
And while the depiction I'd been looking at is smooth and precise, I like the idea of something that's a lot more worn and "been around a while" looking. Which is all a way of saying that half-melted, off-center and "primitive" is a lot more interesting to me than seeing it as a machine-neat bas-relief carving.
And speaking of the Atlanteans. I realized two things about my Tomb Raider/SG1 fanfic.
Another alternative I came up with was to use four NeoPixels (as I did for the first one) but use through-hole ones or find some right-angle headers so they could be easily slipped into place on the PCB without a lot of fiddling about. This is mechanically a better idea, and a simpler circuit, but I want to keep exploring the Cree infrastructure...plus the NeoPixels are 20ma a channel versus 300 for the Cree.
Anyhow, test pans out. The lighting coverage is acceptable even without additional diffusors for the LEDs (something I'm still tinkering with, however, since it would be simple to incorporate a sheet of material and some stand-offs within the existing "spider" support for the circuit board.)
Not as much progress on the Wraith Stone. I got out my Sculpy and made an extremely rough test model. It showed me the outer envelope for scale (at 3-3/4 inches long), told me something about the shape of the total artifact (possibly arrowhead, more likely flat-backed), and also gave me a sense of what it would be like to carve by hand (painful but not impossible...but also, understructure is mandatory).
This did lead to some new questions, however. The big one being, what is this thing? Was it made from scratch and then given the power to communicate with/control the Unknown Entity, or did it start as a natural object with those powers and get carved/incorporated into a more elaborate shape?
It is plausible this thing is Atlantean technology, like "Excalibur" and the Galali Key, in which case the shape is simply whatever Natla's people thought made a cool-looking housing. But there's an intriguing irregularity about some of the depictions I've seen around, an irregularity that speaks of a found object that has been hand-shaped to try to bring out certain shapes (like the skull/face) but only within the limits of the existing material/artifact.
And while the depiction I'd been looking at is smooth and precise, I like the idea of something that's a lot more worn and "been around a while" looking. Which is all a way of saying that half-melted, off-center and "primitive" is a lot more interesting to me than seeing it as a machine-neat bas-relief carving.
And speaking of the Atlanteans. I realized two things about my Tomb Raider/SG1 fanfic.
One is that (due to starting without a plan and basically just working it out as I go) it reads a lot more like a serial. Episodic, really. Which is to say, the overarching story is just the MacGuffin or the linking element to connect practically stand-alone sequences like the Giza chapters, her infiltration of Stargate Command, or the Prague adventure. Or the completely independent-but-parallel adventure of Major Carter on her first independent command. Which means I can basically just keep writing new ones until I get bored.
(There's no chance of running out of ideas. There's way too much interesting archaeology in the real world -- even if not all of it lends its way in obvious ways to the climbing-and-shooting approach of the archaeologist least likely to gain tenure since Indiana Jones.)
Anyway. The other realization is I already gave away the Asgard plot. The Frost Giants are simply not enough of a revelation for my final act. So I might as well pretend the effort to stop Horus' plan was going to turn into a sideline all along as I explode some of the illusions about the Ancients and what they were up to around the Dawn of History.
Monday, March 28, 2016
Wrong Soapbox
I've gone and written myself into a corner again on my TR/SG1 fanfic.
Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.
I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.
Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).
On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.
About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).
Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.
Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....
Well, sort of. The plot will proceed just fine. But I may have made it impossible to indulge in the polemics I had planned.
I've got Lara somewhere between the midwestern states and northern California; somewhere where I can preferably look at relics of the Mississippian culture. And I was going to go off a little on hyperdiffusionism; I originally created "Colonel" Newberry to not just be arguing that Vikings or Egyptians or one of the lost tribes of Israel were responsible for the creation of the spectacular burial mounds, but to wander even further afield into Giants, Nephilim, bits of biblical literalism and even some Young-Earth Creationism.
Two problems, though. One is that the Colonel's character is rapidly evolving on me; he is turning into someone more intelligent and competent and perhaps a nicer person as well. The other is that at this juncture Lara is undercover (or, rather, she thinks she is) and not in position to make the scientific and rationalist arguments. Worse, though, is this; when you think about it, her whole career has been based on the reality of some kind of hyperdiffusionism. In her world, there were gods/aliens who gave gifts of advanced technologies to primitive cultures. She's held the real relic -- an alien weapon -- that gave rise to the legend of Excalibur. She's met at least one of the rulers of Atlantis (and shot her in the face...but Natla got better).
On the other side of the pond, I'm sending Daniel Jackson to Croft Manor so Alister can let him know Atlantis was real and start him on the right track to bring all my mice up to the right spot for the climax. Thing is, Daniel is hardly one to harp on the obvious problems with the Atlantis myths. He spent his career arguing that the Egyptian gods were aliens from space, and has very, very good proof that he was right. Those very "gods" shot him in the face (Daniel also got better). And later in the official SG1 canon he not only searches for Atlantis on his own impetus, he finds it.
About the biggest wriggle room I've got here is that Alister could chose to put one on, and bring up the counter-arguments. Also, of course, the one he knows is not the one Daniel later finds (or so they think...I'm not sure anyone but Lara is actually going to realize over the course of this particular story just what the Ancients/Lanteans have been up to).
Well, losing polemics is probably good. Although without the chance to talk about the Mad Hatter logic that led from a Mayan codex to the continent of Mu, or the social trends that disinherit people from the accomplishments of their own culture, I may have to work harder to fill my 8,000 words.
Well, I did just do a little reading on climate cycles, and I am very, very tempted to do another long aside -- similar to the Ariadne vignette -- of Seh and her family, early agriculturalists in that moment where even their god can't project them from a shift (some 8,000 years ago) in the flood patterns of the Nile....
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