Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘creative’ Category

In which (three short updates) we see a little glimpse of Young Suitov's values. Wait, he has what now?

Suitov was currently standing at the top of the steps, in the early morning light, raking the gravel of the driveway. This was accomplished without touching it physically. When one is fifteen and a new mage, one tends to do things the flashy, inefficient way for the sake of it.

One Dog Night continues. (I really need to find a better name. They've been together for, what, a couple of days now, and the story's continuing for at least another couple.)

N.B. There is an overlap of a sentence at the end of some posts. That's just to do with where I break off writing. Will be fixed in a final edit.

Man grows pea plant inside lung.

Past cases like this inspired me to a particularly silly (and possibly icky, depending on your tastes) piece of worldbuilding. Fiction based on real life weirdness, especially medical, is always the more WTFish for it, I find. Fun times, fun times.

Anke (who's currently tinkering with PmWiki in a quest to get us an integrated system on which to run Profusion 2.0 – yay Anke!) reminded me of this quotation from Suitov:

If I lived in your era, I'd be – in the chess club. Editor of the school magazine. Head of the drama society. Picked second last for cricket and rugger, just ahead of the asthmatic girl in bottle-end glasses. But I live in my own context, and I'm employing what are essentially Phys Ed teachers to shout my troops into order. If you don't find that boggling, you're stronger-minded than I.

Which I'd completely forgotten writing, but it strikes me that yes, of course he would say "rugger" (a very posh-schoolboy way of saying "rugby").

Anyhow, current Pro members, you may be able to test the working version soonish, whenever Anke's ready.

"You look ill, Rige," Lottir understated.

"Really? Where does it show?" asked Lord Suitov of Applestone, who was sweating bucketfuls, trembling slightly, breathing so hard he was almost panting, and apparently undecided about whether or not to throw up.

Heatstroke

Just about universally requested by my readers, when I asked what I should post more of, were fiction excerpts. That made me happy, so here you are.

In this one we get to see both more of Suitov as a young man, and more of the drawbacks of those atavistic Nordic genes of his.

It's not particularly hot here at present, but I've had the image of… well, what he does at the end… in my mind for a long time.

I write like
J. K. Rowling

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

This is the source material. Do I really write like JKR? :S

edit: I pasted in a previous blog entry and it told me I write like Dan Brown! Revolver, noose or pills, blog-readers?

edit 2: I pasted in my subsequent blog post and now I write like Douglas Adams. That I can live with. Seriously, I wonder how on earth it judges these things. Length of words? Number of times the term "subcutaneous" is used?

Updates from my Twitter feed don't seem to be being crossposted here for some reason. I don't know why that could be yet.

As far as important updates blog readers may have missed, @cubicgarden is improving slowly and able to receive visitors.

also,

The prize for the answer is braggin' rights. Nowt else.

Complaint

My mistress bids me wait in durance stern.
With ignorance she blocks my path to joy;
Unjust delays are wrought at every turn,
My every plea set back by falsehoods coy;
Or else she seems to wilt, or then relent,
Yet in the granting, buck my earnest wish
With pale commital, watered-down assent –
A day-old tin of bleak and joyless fish.
Such cheapest chicken wafted at my face
That any cat would balk to call a meal!
There's gravy when I wanted jellied plaice
Or tuna when I becked for curried veal!
That witch! that crone! a wight with no remorse!
I shan't be coming back for second course!

Question

What colour is the cat who writes this complaint, AND WHY? No marks will be given for an incorrect reason. (Hint: You don't need any foreknowledge of my household to work this out.)

Comments will be screened for a couple of days to let everyone guess.

Speciesist character generator had no "dog" option.

An important step in making sure you have a rounded character instead of a Mary Sue, or so I've read, is making sure your little puppet is not omniscient, isn't correct about everything and is sometimes pretty failtastic at telling important information from unimportant.

Recently, in the interest of characterisation and hopefully the occasional plot idea, I've been mentally listing ways in which my characters are wrong about other characters. I don't mean factual things here, but rather those impressions that you form of people for whatever trivial reason and, thanks to confirmation bias, are hard to dislodge.

Some of them are secret for the sake of spoilers (although, for the record, even Suitov thinks Weft is gay), but here are some examples.

Suitov is wrong about:

Malfina: "It's a pity her gameplan for her life could never involve me. I gave up asking her the question; I imagine she was bored of hearing it."

Jaina: "She is emotionally fragile and I have to protect her. She couldn't cope with knowing about everything in which I'm involved; I'm not sure I could rely on her understanding."

Basaltine: "He will come to regret giving up his lifespan to match mine."

Sebastian: "The man is a ridiculous fraud playing a game of his own devising and not caring a whit for those around him. Sounds like a lot of fun, actually."

Himself: "I am not 'evil'. I am not cold-hearted. I feel as deeply as others do. That nickname 'Iceheart' is just a silly reputation on which I capitalise. I do have principles, some of which I will not break for any reason."

(Suitov has quite a balanced personality overall, and is intelligent and well-informed, but that doesn't protect him from sometimes being plain wrong, sucka.)

Weft is wrong about:

Sebastian: "He can do anything! Everything he says is true. In fact, I'm not worthy to hang around with the servant of a goddess. I wouldn't be surprised if he despises me."

Nico: "She has an irrational grudge against my organisation. Either that or our enemies have been telling her lies. She thinks I'm weak and she probably despises me."

Jaina: "She luuuuuurves Suitov so much that she won't listen to anything against him. They could never be happy together. I try to warn her off and she despises me."

Himself: "I'm worthless. Anything I try to do on my own initiative will end disastrously. Everyone I ever love will die horribly and it's my fault. I ruin everything I touch and I deserve to be despised."

(Classic example of an attitude problem saying more about the perpetrator's attitude to himself.)

Basaltine is wrong about:

Sylvie: "She could be my girlfriend. It could so work! We'd be awesome!"

Ferrl: "And she could be my girlfriend too. I'm her type!"

Helmine: "She so wants me!"

(Basaltine has a definite advantage in nosing out lies and motives, but hey, even a doggy character needs silly self-deception. A good-natured and hopelessly optimistic doggy personality provides that in spades.)

Background for any lucky foreigners in the audience:

The Daily Mail is a tabloid newspaper sold in the UK, aimed at people with low-to-average reading ages and low-to-zero tolerance for a non-white face. The Mail hates gays, foreigners, criminals, gays, lefties and mouthy wimmin (i.e. ladies who have ambitions towards careers*). It is a middle-class paper that demonises the lower classes, teenagers, single mothers and immigrants while idolising the Royal Family and celebrities. It's also notorious for running frequent stories about things that give you OMG CANCER.

"Maddie" is Madeleine McCann, a British toddler who was kidnapped in 2007. A lot of the newspapers publicised the case at the time and since. Maddie hasn't been found, but the story is occasionally dug up for the sake of increasing circulation.

(The post title is a legendary Mail headline.)

*edit: This post previously said the Mail features topless models on Page Three. I misremembered there; Page Three girls are in The Sun and other UK tabloids.

"Rigey, tell me a story!"

"What do we say when we ask for things?"

"Pleeeeease!"

"Oh, all right then. One story."

Bedtime

Heheh. You like?

A Southern Finnish chap speaking English (from here, found via OngoingWorlds)

Pretty. I wish they had more Finns; they don't have any Northern English accents either, just Scottish ones.

Nevertheless, I will repeat what I often say: if you're writing out your foreign character's accent in "asc er to Bring Deez Tings widh her from-de-stoar" style, YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. The source Finn will probably grunt in hysterical amusement at deir dialog being wridden in appairant Yamaican, while the English-speaking readers are just going to skip your posts rather than having to wade through patois the consistency of muesli.

Anything that interferes with the fluency of written English immediately gives your reader's concentration span a knock. In the case of accents, the least intrusive policy is definitely "tell, don't show".

(Shout out to this groovy South Dakotan because dude can enunciate.)

With help and prompting from Anke, I've made our IRC channels private so we don't get any more botlike people (or personlike bots) coming in, saying "/me *" and then disappearing.

They didn't really bother me, but hey, if I can spend minimal effort removing a negligible annoyance, why not?

For those who don't know, the Profusion channel is on irc.starchat.net, channel #proelium (for legacy reasons). I also maintain #profusion on the same server. Drop in. It's not members only.

Turns out you can't create multiple accounts on a Drupal site using the same OpenID identity (including if you stay logged in to your OpenID provider while trying to create/log into another account).

This is a Good Thing for Pro 2.0. We'll be enforcing the "one account, many character sub-accounts" model. You won't need separate accounts¹, and they won't be allowed.

This isn't how it's done among the old Viners who liked to pretend to be different people, but we're more about openness (no secret admin accounts, for example) and ownership of our own work – which is why our copyright rules are as they are. I try to keep those values in mind when making decisions.

¹ This software limitation does mean that I can't easily create a separate superuser account, as would be recommended practice, but I'm used to using messageboard software with the same limitation…

Electroshock collars banned in Wales. Ha! In your FACE, Cesar Milan!

Sheepies in the snow

Taking home leftovers from work parties can be bad for you, Ancient Egyptians find.

Stemming blood flow to the arm protects heart during attack. Not sure if I'd dare do this as part of my first aiding…

Naughty tigie behaviour. Remind anyone else of The Life of Pi?

'Most unfortunate names' revealed. How I adore puns.

Personally, I've come across the name Pritti Mistry – which is quite sweet, actually – and know of a Jane Eyre in my family history. Of late, I have persuaded a Ms Robson of my acquaintance to call her first son Jerome. (Luckily, I'm sure she'll forget long before she should have this opportunity.)

And as a Baskerville, don't think I have considered adopting a Howard or Howell. Not that a wolfhound would understand the intricacies of wordplay, so it wouldn't be cruel.

Is Switzerland a hotbed of "Zionism and foreign aggression", then?

Children 'over-exposed to sexual imagery'. I saw Dr. Papadopoulos interviewed on breakfast news this morning. Amazingly, it was a good interview (though dumbed-down, as usual). I can't see that clip online; here's another video report on early exposure to sexualised imagery.

No, I'm not talking about gay boys, although you could say I am something of a fairy in that sense (and vaguely proud of it), and also sometimes quite boring.

No, I mean the other fairies. The little winged gobshites.

So some people love cute little fairies. Some other people are into the dark, sinister side to fairies (which, when you think about it for more than a second, ARE bloody scary).

I just don't engage with the concept of fairies/faeries/fae/fairfolk on any level. They bore me and – well, they do repulse me, but in an unemotional way (since even hating or being scared of them would still be some kind of reaction, whereas they don't grab me in any way).

I suppose it's partly the "small humanoid" angle that totally turns off any sympathy, interest or engagement that I would have in abundance for any animal creature. I don't know. I've just never had any interest in fairies.

I actually stopped reading the Harry Dresden books because they degenerated into "whee, fairies fairies fairies and more bloody fairies I'm so cool, oh and just to turn Mutt completely off, let's add a knight prat who's so pure and Has Faith and wields a Magic Sword of Faith". (Well, that and it got boring seeing Harry get beaten half to death every book without fail and still pull some magic whupass out of his arse.) Shame, because the writing in the books is really pretty OK, the wisecracks are excellent and I do like the hardboiled genre.

But yes, fairies. They don't do it for me. I tend to hate anything with them in. The one exception I've found is Pratchett's Lords and Ladies, which is at least a very complete and competent treatment of the idea, explicitly drawing them as personalityless (an important angle for me) as well as the usual cruel, feline flibbertigibbets.

(Next time, maybe: why Tolkien-D&D-style elves are boring. Or maybe why prats with swords are boring. Then, that selection probably leaving basically nothing in the genre of fantasy for me to read, I'll have to think of some sci-fi things I find hackneyed.)

(Oh, and just in case: I don't actually expect other people to change their interests/writing styles based on my opinion. Hell, somebody go off and tread some genuinely new writerly ground with the idea and I promise I'll be happy you've made boringness into a topic that I can actually enjoy…)

Milli-grandiloquent
Herm 'Hellmutt' Baskerville,
Having a crack at a
new form of verse,

Blames double dactyls for
brashly inciting a
sesquipedalian
poet to worse.

Interesting form. Can't say it's one I'd normally have tried… although it looks like it'd be great for comic nonsense poetry, my favourite genre.