Posted on No Comments on Take me home.

Take me home.

I’ve just finished a first draft of the novelette (I ultimately didn’t go with the restructuring I was hopping to do, because of time contraints) and given it to my weekly writing group for crit, and this morning I was casting about to find something to distract me from “oh dear god did I actually leave all those things in there they are so goofy.”

Bethesda stepped up.

I was gleeful to start with, and then someone pointed out that at 0:29, you can see a date on the PIP-Boy, and that the year is 2102. In-universe, this puts it 25 years after the Great War and 159 years before the first Fallout.

It’s not that I don’t love the Fallout setting, and the way the institutions have grown up over time (and yes, still ridiculously pleased that the Khans survived New Vegas; they’ve been around longer than the NCR!), but I love the Fallout world, too, and am very curious to see what it was like a mere generation after the bombs fell.

I am so very much looking forward to this.

Posted on No Comments on Make it a pome. Real pomes rhyme.

Make it a pome. Real pomes rhyme.

I have rhymes in my head this morning; a little bit of Poe, a little bit of lyrics from the Traveling Wilburys[1], the perpetual stressed-silver-and-dust chime of Bob Dylan’s “Shelter from the Storm”.

I didn’t get as much done as I’d like to have gotten done over the last few days, but on the flipside, it was actually really relaxing. The weekend felt like it was a weekend, not just a recovery period.

Possibly related to this: the light of my life has set up his controller in my office, and I got to play video games again for the first time in a while. There is a bit of a learning curve with the new controls, but it’s definitely a workable solution. At least for Fallout: New Vegas, which is what I have especially been craving lately.

(Also, I cleaned off everything which had slowly accumulated on my desk. Currently my desk is much neater, and I hope to finish sorting the accumulata by the end of the week.)
—
[1] I am constantly astounded that I never heard of them until this year. First, I am really fond of at least two of their songs, and second, their lineup is the kind of thing I would expect to have heard of.

Posted on No Comments on Hectic times

Hectic times

Today’s actually been a really good day. It was a low-pressure morning, I got the tracking information for my incoming shinies, I installed and noodled around on Pillars of Eternity, and I went to go see It Follows with the light of my life. (Who discussed doing science to the monster in the car on the way back.)

Pillars of Eternity is fun; it feels a lot like playing Baldur’s Gate back in the day[1], although I haven’t yet resorted to the tactic of summoning kobolds to fight for me and then looting the short bows for resale when they got killed and disappeared in a puff of smoke. It’s a bit crunchy, it feels fairly linear so far, and it has some gleefully creepy moments that I’ve been enjoying greatly. It’ll be good to play through, I think.

It Follows was… I don’t want to say it was surprisingly good, because I wasn’t expecting it to be bad. (Following under cut due to spoilers–mild ones, but it’s a really solid movie and people should get to watch it without spoilers if they so choose.)  Read more Hectic times

Posted on No Comments on Walking Dead: No Going Back

Walking Dead: No Going Back

(Yes, well, it’s the holidays. I can’t use the mouse too much, but games which are heavily or primarily keyboard-accessible? I am all over those.)

So, I finished Walking Dead: Season 2–the story game, not the TV show, definitely not the Walking Dead™: Survival Instinct game which from what I’ve heard is absolutely terrible–and it was good. (I generally find the Telltale Games stuff to be really good; the only work of theirs I haven’t picked up is the Game of Thrones one, and if they ever do a 100 Bullets game I will probably go missing for several hours at regularly spaced intervals. I find they don’t branch as much as the Choice of Games narrative fiction, but they are very good at inspiring an emotional connection with the characters.)

Anyway, the game’s been out for a year or for four months (depending on whether you count from the first or last episode), but I realize some people may not have played it yet, so I’m putting the rest behind a cut. Read more Walking Dead: No Going Back

Posted on No Comments on Moving pictures. Or static pictures. Or voices on the wind.

Moving pictures. Or static pictures. Or voices on the wind.

So, as I have been reminded, I actually get to nominate works for the Hugos this year.

I think I am okay with coming up for nominations for written work. However, I would love a few more suggestions for art/artists, for graphic story, and for best dramatic presentation[1], both long form and short form.

Will cheerfully take suggestions that are either direct nominations or that are in the vein of “hey, did you know that a whole lot of people are listing their qualifying works over at this webpage?”

(And now I’m going to go have my quiet conniption fit because oh god, I have flight tickets and a hotel reservation and a con membership and it’s all real. Eeeek.)
—
[1] (Usually that’s movies or TV shows, with the 90-minute mark being the divisor, but it also applies to radio, live theater, computer games or music).

Posted on No Comments on Juggling duties.

Juggling duties.

Looking forward to the long weekend.  I wouldn’t say my time’s already booked, but I expect I know how most of it is going to go.  Hoping I can get a couple of hours in to sit down and write, and a chance to goof off and relax so I actually feel up to same.

(Running around an alien mothership without your faithful canine companion: totally relaxing.)

I need to reorganize my office again.  My London-and-Mythos shelf needs to become just a Mythos shelf; with the latest anthology, there’s no more room for them both.  Even if I relocate the London stuff, there’s only about another foot of space, but it’ll last for a bit.

Have work for at least a few months, which is nice, since I just found out that Pelgrane is putting out another sourcebook in the vein of The Dead White World. Mind, I’m not sure I would ever actually get to run anything; all the gamers I know aren’t local or wouldn’t be interested.  I wish gaming books were something you could get at the library; it seems like a waste to buy one and then not do anything with it.  They’re not like most books; they’re not just for reading.  More like recipe collections or knitting books.  Buying them and not doing anything with them is sad, and rather cluttered.

Posted on No Comments on Notes from a dying laptop.

Notes from a dying laptop.

Huh.  822 words in just a bit under 57 minutes.  I think that’s actually pretty close to the “two hundred and fifty words every quarter hour.”  Mind, half of them need to be dragged out and shot, but there are words!

Had an interesting discussion about Dale (of Walking Dead), Glen Bateman (of The Stand), and Bobby (from Supernatural) with John, earlier today.  I was frustrated because I didn’t have quite the right words for them, and couldn’t pin down the common elements.  (Besides, you know, all three of them have made me cry once.  Damn characters.)

It’s hard to get into this without getting into spoilers, and my laptop is telling me “shut it down, dummy, you have 8 minutes left”, but the end result of the discussion was that we started with the idea of father figures and what they mean the hero has to do, and from there went through the concept of homemakers on to culture heros, tricksters, and civilizing influences.  TV Tropes has failed me, and that’s okay, because while it’s a nice thing to check in on occasionally I am actually perfectly fine with opinions that aren’t pre-listed on it.  (Still need a better breakdown of pet monster idea, too.)

4 minutes power left, warning light blinking, more later.

Posted on 11 Comments on First, the hook…

First, the hook…

A brief digression on story hooks.

There’s this thing Fallout does–all four RPGs, I mean.  I can’t speak to Tactics.  You start out with an important goal, and once you’ve done it, the elements of the world you were travelling through coalesce and you have the second bigger goal.  (You find the water chip, but the important thing is now to deal with the Master. You find get the GECK for your village, but the important thing is now to deal with the Enclave. You find out who shot you and why, but the important thing is now the second Battle of Hoover Dam and the ultimate fate of New Vegas.)

What’s important, I think, is that the first goal is not irrelevant; you do not fail at it, you never discover it didn’t matter.  But the process of achieving it results in you learning about the world, and gives you a chance to care about the second goal.  It’s interesting; and as far as I can tell, it’s fairly unique in video games.  I mean, I need to play more of them, but…

I’m not sure the technique would work as well in written stories or movies; the involvement is a bit more distant.  Still, possibly bits of it are adaptable.  Will keep an eye out for examples.

Posted on No Comments on Like one who on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread

Like one who on a lonesome road/Doth walk in fear and dread

Moving into what I guess is close to the last stretch of Fallout: New Vegas – I’ve finished the first three DLCs, and while there’re probably still a ton of quests I am really wanting to see the Battle of Hoover Dam.  (With the Boomers.  I’m actually trying to figure out if I can set the game up to play the final scenes on our TV.)  And after 250 hours, well, I do want to see the end of the game.

So anyway.  I started on the Lonesome Road[1] this weekend.  It’s actually probably my least favourite of all the DLC–I think it might be my least favourite part of New Vegas as a whole–and I finally realized why.

The Mojave of F:NV is a gently rounded post-apocalyptic chunk of the south-western-ish US; generally this means a lot of visual brown, a bottlecap-based economy, a Mad Max fashion sense, and settlements that are mostly still-standing remnants of what went before.  Two hundred years smooths a lot of the jagged edges off, after all.

The Divide may have been like this as well.  But then the bombs went off, and they did that in your lifetime.  Probably no more than twenty years ago at most, and myself I’m getting more of a “maybe seven or eight” feeling.  It’s a hectic, jagged, clashing sort of place–grim and dark and smokey, with you picking your way through jagged gouges in the earth and hurrying through the patches of radiation, hoping not to get shot at, blown up, or chewed on.  It has one of what I think is only two timed events in the game, and the one it has is by far the more dangerous.  Everything’s tilted and falling sideways and off-balance and occasionally chunks of the surroundings fall on you.  It’s a distinctly uncomfortable place to be.  Everything is jarred and shattered.

It’s not a fun environment to play in–really, without ED-E’s story I’m not sure I wouldn’t have headed back out of the DLC–and after a while, I concluded that this is okay.  The fragmented feel makes sense, and I’ll treat it as deliberate, because this is what it’d be like right after.  The Fallout games haven’t ever dealt with this; the earliest one took place over a century after the bombs fell.

It’s interesting.  It really echoes the begin again/but learn how to let go theme that all the DLC have been running with.  And it adds something to the rest of the setting; that tired or miserable as the Mojave can be, holy hell people have come a long way to building things back up.

—
[1] Naming your DLC with excerpts from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is cheating, in terms of marketing, and I am a sucker for it.