magistrate

AO3-savvy friends, help me out here. Suppose that I have a long multi-chapter work which I would like to blame on gift to another user. If I set it up as a gifted work when I started posting, would they be hit with a notification email every time I posted a new chapter? If I didn't want someone to be pestered every week (or whatever) for •mumble• weeks, would it be wiser to just post the thing through and then gift it at the end?

Any insight is appreciated. I have really not been posting enough on AO3 recently to know the ins and outs of these things.

Since my last post, I've spent a very stressful time trying unsuccessfully to launch a career change, discovered a number of new old new and exciting psychological landmines, gone through a number of bizarre interview processes involving all manner of new technologies, started a new job, been commended at a new job, entirely forgotten how to write, slowly rediscovered how to write, gotten hooked on both Inscryption and Crusader Kings 3, learned how to make some pretty bangin' meatballs, played my first board game in a long time (King of Tokyo!), acquired my first new card game in a long time (Muffin Time!), given actual people actual fanart of their actual characters (which was received far more appreciatively than its quality warranted), successfully climbed a bunch of walls (up to a 5.10C!), served on the admin team for a 6-month intensive workshop, dragged a hapless new friend into the wilds of 镇魂 / Guardian, accidentally started a dive into Buddhist philosophy, and started going through a number of trainings from The Consent Academy.

I still have not managed to drag anyone into playing Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes with me, but I have mostly memorized the NATO phonetic alphabet just in case. Also, I'm currently on a 3-game win streak for Blood on the Clocktower, which is pretty nice, because I think I racked up three wins total in 12-ish games last year before I got too overwhelmed with life to seek out additional social interaction.

I got a profoundly kind and moving comment on one of my scrappy, ridiculous unfinished braintics a while back, which nice because I had worked myself into a deep funk of the "I haven't put anything out in so long," and "why do I think anyone would be interested in the weird mishmash of stuff I scrape out of the bottom of my Id," and "all my stuff is so unfinished and might always be unfinished; where's the use in that?" varieties. Spontaneous validation that, no, sometimes some weird old unfinished idfic is just what someone out there needs... was a lovely little gift from the universe. Possibly I should make more of an effort to throw my ancient unfinished idfic out into the world. That follows, right? Sure. That follows.

As part of my re-training my brain to understand that words are things that we can, indeed, put together into sentences and paragraphs and chapters and narratives and the like, I'm taking a good run at finishing the currently-326,000-word RDR2 fanfic which was supposed to be 30K-40K long. My last update was in January of 2021. Fanfic readers are saints for putting up with this sort of nonsense.

I feel like it's the recurring theme of my life that I'll make a plan, whether a plan about a specific project or a plan for my next year or five years or for anything beyond a month, do considerable prep work, aim confidently for Point C, and arrive at Point थ. Point थ is frequently a perfectly fine point in its own right, but I do wish I knew the secret of the people who can actually accomplish what they set out to do, instead of just accumulating unrelated experiences like a drunken Katamari.

I'm not angry. I'm just disappointed bemused.

I did finally convince myself to join an online game for Blood on the Clocktower, largely because the Unofficial Discord started doing beginner-focused games.

It was utterly overwhelming, and a ton of fun! I enjoyed it so much more than I thought I would, given how confusing and fast-paced it felt. My team won, and I was actually instrumental in my team's victory, but that was more to do with some stunning good luck than actual skill or strategy. XD I wandered bass-ackwards into victory, but it still felt very good.

( I don't expect anyone to follow this story; I'm mostly jotting it down for myself. )

And that was my first game of Blood on the Clocktower! I currently have a 100% win record, which I expect will quickly and dramatically go off the rails forthwith.

I found it hectic and confusing and stressful, but in a eustress kind of way. I was surprised at how little anxiety I felt around the social aspects; talking to strangers is typically an intensely awkward experience for me, but I think the fact that we were all there to have a fun time and untangle a big puzzle took the focus off "These people are going to JUDGE MY WORTH AS A HUMAN BEING and I will FOREVER LABOR UNDER THE WEIGHT OF THEIR REGARD". I did freeze up a couple times; a couple times completely blanked on how words and communication functioned. But, unusually for me, I managed not to dwell on having done so.

All in all, I had a great time.

If you'd asked me half a week ago, when I'd first learned of it, what Blood on the Clocktower was, I'd have said it was basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of catastrophe. That was when I first encountered it, wandering unprepared into a Twitch stream by someone who'd accidentally left their stream game listed as "Vampire Survivors", a relatively mindless swarm survival game where you just walk around an infinite map and attack hordes of monsters automatically.

If you asked me today, I would say that Blood on the Clocktower is basically a game of Mafia (or Werewolf) but overcomplicated to the point of UTTER HILARITY.

( Read more... )

In conclusion, I hated this game on sight, I was unable to escape its gravitational pull, and now I love it. And I both hate and love that I love it.

I have more thoughts on Blood on the Clocktower and ludo-narrative dissonance, but that has to go into its own post, because I've almost hit 2,000 words on this one.

I was watching a YouTube video of a guy installing an antique hand pump well, and at one point he mentioned "I'm not sure exactly how to do this, but I'll figure it out as I go along." And I was like, "Man, if that were me, I would have researched the shit out of it before I got started."

Later, one of my housemates was trying to work out why our washer seemed unbalanced when it ran, when the washer itself was level and the drum wasn't offkilter. She was down on the floor examining the undercarriage with a flashlight, and my second or third thought was "Man, if I'd ruled out the obvious causes, I feel like my next stop would be some exhaustive internet research." And then I was like "I feel like I have this thought a lot. Maybe I just really like researching things."

And then I paused, and I was like "...oh. Wait. That... explains a lot."

I am the sort of person who really misses physical dictionaries because 20% of the satisfaction of looking up a word is in learning what it means, and the other 80% is the friends we made along the way discovering new words as one pages through looking for the word I'm actually looking up.

The computer game that's been soaking up my time lately – Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead – is one where I tend to tell interested friends that it's the sort of game where you have to be able to enjoy playing it with reference material open for the first many hours, so you can look up things including but not limited to crafting recipes, early-game strategies, skill prerequisites and implications, dozens of hotkeys, and basic game mechanics.

One of the things that chuffs me the most about my ridiculously huge incomplete RDR2 fic is the fact that I spent so much time researching horse behavior and riding/training interactions that multiple equestrians have assumed that I'm also an equestrian. (I have ridden a horse once. As a touristy thing. That is the extend of my IRL interactions with horses.)

I yesterday spent a considerable amount of time learning about 1800s "portable soup" in support of a braintic I most likely will never write, and will most likely never share with anyone if I do. Also, at least an hour reading reviews of equipment I will most likely never purchase, because I like knowing things.

I just... do genuinely enjoy seeking out information. I'm not going to claim that I'm particularly skilled at it – at least, no more than any other denizen of the internet – but the fact that it's an actual source of pleasure or engagement is a fact about myself which has been largely subliminal until now.

Maybe I should have gone into library science.

1. Here is an instrument I've never encountered before: the cas cas.



Having seen a clip of this, I felt as though there were one or more instruments being played offscreen. Nope; there are beans or pellets inside the balls which produce the faster rhythms, and hitting the balls together produces the loud clacks.



Clearly the instrument for people who possess the rhythmic chops of a polyrhythm drummer and the manual dexterity of a nunchaku master.


2. Here is a map of Finland's bear population, rendered in adorable cartoon bears. (direct image link)

I want to invite everyone to join me in appreciating that the last color on the legend represents 6.1 - ∞ bears per thousand square kilometers.

I choose to take this as evidence that there are portions of eastern Finland with infinite bears.

Friends, let me tell you about San Francisco.

There were three things that I, as a Midwestern transplant, had trouble adjusting to when I moved to San Francisco.

One was the lack of any basements, anywhere – it was over a year before I convinced my hindbrain not to freak out when there were no basements to be found, ready and waiting to be hidden in, in the event of a tornado. (There are no tornadoes here. The need is not, shall we say, acute.)

Another was how drastically different San Francisco's neighborhoods are, how sharply delineated, and how small and stuck-together. This is a place where walking two blocks will frequently make you think you've stepped through some kind of warp in spacetime and ended up in an alternate version of your city.

And the third was that, compared to the midwest's dramatic 120°F yearly temperature variations, San Francisco does not appear to have seasons, or weather.

The temperature in this city varies a little by neighborhood microclimate, but for the most part, it's in the 60s (all temps in Fahrenheit), and sunny or vaguely cloudy. In winter, its most dramatic dips tend to be into the high 40s, overcast and rainy – though what's considered a storming deluge here would be a steady, moderately heavy rain by Lincoln, NE or Iowa City, IA standards. In the summer, temperatures may hang out in the mid-70s for days at a stretch. When it reaches 80, the city starts sending out alerts about knowing the signs of heat stroke and checking on your elderly neighbors. Thunderstorms are, if not totally unknown, an every-few-years kind of thing. I think there have been two or three since I first moved to the Bay Area about a decade ago.

Now let me tell you about this week.

Over the weekend, we had a heat wave. Temperatures started off in the 80s and climbed into the 90s. At one point I looked at my phone, and it reported the weather in SF to be 98°F. This lasted through Monday, about; yesterday was a still-distressing-for-SF high 70s, but notably cooler.

Yesterday we also got enough ash from the wildfires that the sun rose neon-red.

I tried to get so pictures of it, but my phone refused to capture the color. It was deeply disturbing: a baleful red orb in a yellowy-green sky. (I keep trying to look at the sky and dissociate it from the pea-soup green of tornado weather. I'm having limited success.) I was at work when I noticed it – I tend to walk to work when it's still dark out – and I stared at it for a good 30 seconds before I realized that I was looking directly at the sun and I should probably not. But there was enough ash between me and the sun that it took me that long to notice and correct.

We didn't have a blood-red sun today, which was good.

Instead, we got the ninth plague: darkness.

For most of the morning, it looked like the sun had simply failed to rise. By midmorning there was a dim orange haze to the sky; we were stuck in twilight all morning. By 3:00, when I walked home, there was a bit more ambient light, but it was all a sluggish yellow color; all the cars on the street still had to use their headlights.

My phone camera is once again useless at capturing the actual sense of the day, but to picture it, imagine taking a photo of a nice, normal day. Swap out the sky with a blank grey. Then apply a sepia filter. Fade that filter to somewhere between 50% and 70% opacity, and that's reality, right now.

Blue wavelengths of light are a thing of the past. (Hopefully also the future, but it's 2020 and I'm not counting on anything.)

Apparently – what I've heard – is that we're under the marine layer at present, which is why the air yesterday and today hasn't smelled like smoke despite the apocalyptic appearances of the outside world. (This is at least a change from late last month, where it smelled like a campfire every day, and I got a second air purifier for my apartment so I could have one in each of the major rooms.) Though even with our protective barrier of air, little flecks of ash keep drifting down, blowing in through open windows and collecting on cars, sidewalks, the tent villages, and people.

Who wants to bet on what's going to happen tomorrow?

I think I have, at this point, re-read Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan books an average of 4 times each. I keep trying to get my brain to accept new reading material, any new reading material, and it just gives me a doleful look much like the one I imagine Gregor gives Aunt Alys when she's inflicting eligible Vor maidens on him.

I feel like I'm weathering the entire trashfire of 2020 fairly well, in that I'm upright and functional and feel relatively safe. And not at all well, in that I feel like the external functionality of keeping myself fed, showered, dressed, and going to work is pretty much the only thing I have going for me at the moment. ( Emotional bleh. )

As part of my campaign to ease my brain back into experiencing emotions, I've dipped my toe into media that's more accessible to my focus-depleted brain than books. I've been listening to the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, which I've been enjoying; it reminds me a little of doing Speech & Debate in highschool, where the governing ethos for our informational speeches was basically "Take something everyone overlooks, and make it interesting." (Memorable topics included "dust".) I also watched The Umbrella Academy, which was fun even if it did nearly buck me in the first five minutes (nonconsensual pregnancy is a massive squick for me), started Community (which was fun in a popcorn sort of way; I enjoyed the time spent watching it, but it didn't stick with me at all), and watched the John Mulaney program Kid Gorgeous at Radio City, home of the excellent horse in the hospital sketch.

I've been informed that I ought to watch Nanette, but I'm very concerned that it will take more emotions than I possess at the moment.

Incongruously, in my ongoing lack of brain bandwidth, the game I've been playing most obsessively is an open-source roguelike called Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, which is quite possibly the most fiendishly in-depth and complicated game I've ever played. To give you an example of just how complicated, one of the numerous challenges I faces was constructing a vehicle from salvaged parts which would have a recharger for a specific kind of power supply, which I modded a food vacuum sealer to use, so that I could salt and preserve vegetables in salvaged plastic bags, because I knew that I was heading into a long winter where none of my crops would grow, and I needed to build up a food stockpile with enough nutritional diversity to not give me a bunch of deficiency diseases. And then I had to scramble to get enough solar panels to actually power my vehicle and all its assorted electronics (including recharger, minifridges, lights, security camera system, welder rig, metal forging rig...) because as the days shortened, less sunlight was available, so my power supply was falling behind.

This is a game where, in order to learn how to play it, you need to be willing to stop frequently to look up external resources on everything from complex game mechanics to basic controls.

I have been eating it up with a spoon.

I have no excuse.

Because, as humans, we tend to start counting with "1" and not "0", 2020 is technically the last year of this decade and not the first year of a new decade. But because, as humans, we like seeing larger changes (like the two-digit shift from "19" to "20" and not the one-digit change from "20" to "21"), yeah, the end of the decade is upon us. It's like how tomatoes are a botanical fruit and a culinary vegetable, or how Pluto is now a generational thing.

Anyway. Left to my own devices, I generally don't go in for temporal landmarks, because no matter how you slice them they're all arbitrary. Plus, New Year's stuff tends to come burdened with a whole lot of cultural baggage that I don't find awfully conducive to how I want to live my life.

At the same time, the sheer weight of that cultural baggage makes it hard to ignore, and it ends up taking on a kind of significance beyond my ability to sweep away, so I feel like I should mark it in some way.

So here's what I'll say: the past decade has been an awfully weird one. I've had a lot of challenges, a lot of failures, and a lot of triumphs. Most of the things I thought I'd manage, I didn't; most of the things I have managed, I would never have imagined. I'm in a good place now and I don't have any desire to leave it in the immediate future, but I also don't think I want to stay here forever, and that's okay. I've learned a lot, I've grown a lot, and I've taught a lot, and long may that continue.

And, as per most years, I'm going back to re-memorize Richard Wilbur's poem, Year's End. Despite the fact that there is no snow here.

I just watched this video, on what games are like to people who don't play games, which was a much less-clickbaity and much more thoughtful video than I expected it to be. It basically focused on invisible conventions in game design, how they influence the ways that experienced gamers approach games, and how alienating they can be to people who don't come in with that user-interface vocabulary.

It put me in mind of Sumana Harihareswara's post on inessential weirdnesses in communities – that being, those things which are foreign to people outside that community, but which are not in and of themselves things that help to define a community's common purpose.

Two angles on the same general topic, I think.

...

That's it. That's the post.