Black Dog Blog

Archive for the ‘Profusion’ 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.

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.

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.)

"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?

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…

• Wow, science: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8297467.stm I thought every schoolchild knew the Romanovs had haemophilia! Ra ra Rasputin. #
• Damn, Obama, don't you dare peak too early now. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8298580.stm #
• Graze are trying to win me over with pecans and honey cashews. Bam, headshot. #
• UK fruit and nut lovers, try http://www.graze.com – natural food to your desk. Use this code to get a free box: MDNP1VFL – please RT! #
• Wondering "Has this section already been reviewed, or did I just code it incredibly well in the first place?" From clues, I think latter… #
• Cannot stop listening to http://bit.ly/Xgqx6 – which is particularly stupid because I should be heading home. (wakawaka) #
• I've been saying to the cat things like "Well, you've had a good innings". You should see the look of terror on its stupid face. #

New character. Like her?

• #vss Mags sheathed her rapier and mopped her brow. Her groaning opponent staggered off. He'd hoped her offer of a workout was a euphemism… #
• #vss The perfect marriage. They never spoke; Mags led his troops; he entertained her mother. She'd met his lover. He didn't know about hers. #
• #vss Mags was a mediocre Rockaferry player, but did all right provided she could play as White. Or cheat while her opponent bought drinks. #
• #vss Her cackling laugh earned her the sobriquet 'The Magpie Countess'. Mags obliged by dressing in black and white and laughing often. #

Three new shortish updates since last post. I'm going for little and often so I don't lose the momentum.

In this update:

• The perennial disorganisation of genius!
• Find out what Mistake considers important enough to swear on!
• And, lots of lovely murder!

"And don't try telling me she's suddenly discovered her maternal side, 'cause she hasn't got one."

OMG, the drama reaches lava pitch!

Letters page of Life academic journal, issue 134 [PDF]

A little background material for Profusion. >:)

(SPOT THE SUITOV!)

The 'short' story Roofrats, which I've been writing with Anke, is completed as of a few minutes ago. *does the dance* So I need to write a cleaner summary for the wiki page.

Conclusion: Nico and Weft make an oddly fascinating double act. But if they ever really get to talking, one suspects there will be bitchfights…

We didn't really get into the 'gang war' plot very much; it ended up being a kind of backdrop. Still, it all helped me flesh out Offwhite City and its attitude towards its penal colonies.

Yavu and Nico may return in the sequel, but we don't have concrete plans for that yet.

Guess I know what I'm doing this weekend after all; I'd forgotten until this morning (yay Outlook reminders!) that I'd agreed to help out with DrupalCampUK.

That also answers any questions I might've had about what to do this evening. That's right: get my V6 on and then see if I can get NodeProfile to do what I need it to… namely provide 'child profiles' for main profiles, call them 'character' and 'author' if you will, effectively allowing the author to post in-character. (You see? Everything I do, I do it for you…)

Am now itching for one of these. And a netbook to use it on. I do rather like being technology-lite, being naturally inclined to hold out until direct neural interfaces are available, but the drawbacks of being disconnected from the mothercloudwebnet in the meantime are starting to outweigh the benefits of not being mugged.

What's Weft saying? Suggestions for caption, please.

*readers should not infer from the word "competition" that there will be any 'prizes' beyond the awesome honour of seeing this heartbreakingly awesome work of ART

(First more-than-quarter-assed attempt at a Shade dragon in a SMALL variant of its polar, pedestrian form. Despite being huge, armoured monsters, they're about the only thing alive that can sneak up on a Weft. This is because they are epic.)

Just getting that title pun out of the way so I don't have to use it anywhere else in my writings.

As I understand it, it's normal for creators to be pleased when their creations cause reactions in onlookers. I think that's meant to apply to negative reactions too, sometimes. It certainly does for me in this case.

I was talking to Vespy this morning before leaving for work, and mentioned in passing one of the worlds I built for our little interplanetary ding-dong known as the Twine Wars. The world is called Instar and it's… I suppose you'd call it on the unusual side for generic fantasy, despite being populated by humanoids with pretty few differences from your generic sapiens. They're not especially nice humanoids, but then, humanoids tend not to be, so this is all within the bounds of sensibility.

Anyhoo, I believe the term Ves used to describe lovely little hemispherical Instar was "fucked-up", and in response to further questioning from a fascinated writer he said its inhabitants, and I'm paraphrasing, creep him out. I was kind of surprised, especially as they're somewhat caricatures of a type of animal he likes, but I suppose it's not too surprising on the whole. Ves comes across as a pretty honourable, easy-going and sane sort of chap, while Instarrians, well, produced Weft. (Who is not a typical Instarrian, but rather an extreme worst case scenario.)

I'm rather delighted by this reaction. As long as everyone doesn't feel that way and avoid interacting with them, because then I'll just be sad that the silly-billies are all missing the joke. (Because joke it is. Right now the thing I find funniest is that my ethics force me to view Instar as the good guys for being neutral.)

"Frerene is not a chick," said Suitov icily.

The continuing adventures of Dork Boy and Poochy