Audience of Strangers

Zero Summer identifies itself (quite honestly) as a wordy Western RPG. It's a free browser-based game, that uses (almost) the Fallen London engine. It's fairly grindy at times, which is usually really not my thing. I cope with it for the writing; I actually think that the amount of text helps me slow down and not click through it all so quickly.

Here's the thing: there are individual stories (as opposed to the repeatable mundane actions) which cannot be repeated. You play them once, you read them once, and then they are gone forever, unless you care to start over again with a new character. So when I run across a step in the story that reads in part (yes, in part; I did say it was wordy):

What does it say? It says: under clear skies and the fresh fingernail moon and the bright brilliant stars when the world was young there was the masterless Dog. And still he howls. His voice freezes the blood. His tongue is warm and wet. His pelt flea-bitten but strong and golden. His ears hung with carved wooden rings. His eyes too-human. His paw outreaches. A mark is left.

Suddenly Jim is on you, wrestling the book away and slamming it back onto the shelf where you found it. Real panic in his eyes. A high unexpected color.

"What did you see?" he says. Demands. "What did you see?"

Under a fingernail moon, there was a hound. Under the clear sky he reached out. Under his paw there came a mark. It itches and burns. It weighs on your heart.

...when I come across that I stop, and reread, because I know there are no save points, no rewinds, no YouTube captures, no wikis, no-one I can ask for an explanation. (Okay. Technically I could go poking around the Failbetter forums and see if anyone had theories, but it's not like sitting around a gaming table and troubling a Storyteller for clarification, you know?)

It's oddly lovely, and no less so for being so transient.

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ETA: Aaaaaaand I just got a message related to that specific storylet. I'll, uhm, be shivering gleefully, visiting the Scrublands, and dealing with the Jackal-Caller now. :D

Proof that it's been a long busy week: I haven't mentioned this yet...

The latest issue of Innsmouth Magazine, available here for free (online or in PDF), and here for $2 (buyyyyyy ittttt... It's $2! When was the last time you got half a dozen good stories for $2?). Enjoy!

The mercury (does anyone actually own a mercury thermometer?) is slowly creeping up from this morning, when it was -17°C (-26°C with the wind chill). Looking forward to Wednesday, when it's meant to get up to 11°C. Not - 11°C. 11°C. Okay, yes, that's the low of one day against the high of another, but that's still a 28 degree difference in two days, ignoring the damn wind.[1]

Oh, March. Aren't you just an interesting time, meteorologically speaking. And I cannot wait for the time when I no longer need to worry about my ereader freezing. Literally.

(Yes, yes, paper books don't freeze. However, the pages get blown around, they fare much less well in precipitation, and turning the pages takes longer, which at the temperature that causes my Kobo to freeze is actually a significant consideration because I do not want my fingers out in that cold. Also, Innsmouth Magazine.)

((Possibly this last could be remedied with knit gloves that had leather patches sewn over the fingerprints? Hmh.))
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[1] That's 1°F, -15°F, 52°F, and a 51 degree difference for those of you using Farenheit.

I am discovering, lately, that there are a whole lot of blogs I like to read. Not all of them have RSS feeds, and there are so many that my webcomic solution (enter links to all comics that update on $WEEKDAY into one folder, open all tabs in said folder on $WEEKDAY) wouldn't work, even leaving aside the fact that they don't all update on a regular schedule or the same schedule or....

How do you guys sort out your blog reading? Is there a really simple Firefox plugin I am missing, or something?

It is so *weird* having a hard schedule that does not include a definite to-do list. I had forgotten.

Anacrusis is being nifty again, with stories about Ashlock. Includes such lines as

All of it fails one night on a simple run for Kirrily’s money laundry. Ashlock loses a finger; Tach loses a year of his life. And in return, they get a number that wants to kill them both.

After nine months, there's actually noise on the Unhallowed Metropolis comm again. Am so wanting to play that again; this may be exacerbated by John recounting traditions of the British Parliament to me this morning before breakfast.

Laptop battery sinking at accelerated if not (perhaps?) exponential rate. Back later.

So. Up at three to let the dog out, found out one of the cats had made a mess, cleaned up, did dishes, threw stuff in the laundry, set the load running... and of course being tired meant this was all in slow motion, so it took me a while to get back to bed. (Although the discussion was part of that, and was fun.)

I did have a chance to check my e-mail, and link-bouncing led me to a fictional transcript and obituary. Also, the first short-short here made me grin, and the second is a rather pleasant take on fairies.

The interview yesterday... really did not go so well. I like to think this was in part because I was thrown for a loop[1], and not because I am naturally disposed to give bad interviews.

Being downtown in the early morning again's interesting. I'd forgotten how awake it seems. Also, I have just realized how many art/readings/band/show flyers there aren't on the telephone poles out in the suburbs.

There was a garden at the corner of MacLaren and O'Connor that I always rather liked. It was really thick with tall grass, flowers that came up to my shoulder, vines on stakes... It's mostly just mowed flat now.
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[1] "What was high school like?" "What did you like about it?" "How did you spend your summers?" "Who were your inspirational figures in high school? In university?" I mean... It was high school, it was last millenium, and it was not a position which required exceptional social skills or a particular adherence to cliques. I refer you, somewhat grumpily, to the sixth panel here.

For the record?

If you are capable of using proper (or at least consistent) punctuation and capitalization and you persistently do not do so, and you are not so stressed that you have for all practical purposes had to give up on other basic niceties of personal presentation (such as showering), and you are presenting your work to other people?

It is possible that someone will hit the metaphorical point where they are only too happy to rip off your metaphorical head and shove a copy of Strunk and White down the metaphorically bloody stump of your neck.

For the record.

I've noticed a pattern; when I get stressed, I cast on a new project. Work announces they might stop existing? I knit John a facecloth. I get told it will take me six weeks[1] for work to get a copy of Dreamweaver? I start knitting a shrug.

I suppose it's productive, at least. (Also, knitting projects have the niftiest names. And I love this yarn. I keep thinking of it as 'stonespun', some weird combination of 'homespun' for it's not-glossy slightly-uneven feel and 'stone' for the colours.)

John sent me a couple of links, too. One is an excellent piece on the pristine purity of language, and why all that nonsense about objecting to "man" to cover both sexes is ridiculous--

For years, Niss Moses, authoroon of the well-known negrist tracts A Handbook of Nonracist Writing and Words and Blacks, has had nothing better to do than go around the country making speeches advocating the downfall of "racist language" that ble objects to. But when you analyze bler objections, you find they all fall apart at the seams. Niss Moses says that words like "chairwhite" suggest to people-most especially impressionable young whiteys and blackeys-that all chairwhites belong to the white race. How absurd! It's quite obvious, for instance, that the chairwhite of the League of Black Voters is going to be a black, not a white. Nobody need think twice about it. As a matter of fact, the suffix "white" is usually not pronounced with a long "i" as in the noun "white," but like "wit," as in the terms saleswhite, freshwhite, penwhiteship, first basewhite, and so on. It's just a simple and useful component in building race-neutral words.

Oh, I'm sorry. It's about why all that nonsense about objecting to "white" to cover all races is ridiculous. My mistake.

(Have I mentioned how acceptable "they" is as a gender-neutral term to refer to the individual? 'm just saying.)

Also, kaigou has something on the differences between mental illnesses, disabilities, and people talking out of their ass.
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[1] And this is after it first came up three weeks ago. Do not even get me started.

Bored.

Library not yet open. Internet access available. ...gah, I don't know. Everyone I'd normally talk to to kill time is AFAICT working or still asleep.

I figure the library will open in twenty, and then the lobby should clear out and I will feel considerably less bad about watching a movie in here while I knit. (Not doing that yet; am sitting on bench, laptop would slip off my knees if not held in place, which makes knitting sub-optimal.) Meantime, my mind's sort of rambling all over the place.

I kind of wish I'd brought Hunter, but carrying a 300-and-change page book on top of the laptop seemed a bit much. May see about grabbing a PDF of it.

Eighteen minutes. Gah. Maybe I'll try writing something. silent_lorelei's review of Legion made it sound pretty much exactly as terrible as I expected--

--ooooh, if I don't hear something by afternoon, I can maybe go grab Alice in Wonderland at the World Exchange--

--but a couple of the ideas were kind of interesting. I did like the ice-cream man in the movie trailer, and the question of why the little old lady demon shrugged off one attack but not the other has me thinking, of all things, about Scott McCloud. You know how in a car accident, you're more likely to say "He hit me!" than you are to say "His car hit my car!"? Something to do with that, with the extension of perception of self to cover objects at hand.

Mhm. I'm rambling. Also kinda wishing that the copy of Slasher I was looking at hadn't been sold. I'm getting that weird itch to run a game again, and Slasher and Hunter are both looking interesting. Mind, I've got core NWoD (or possibly Savage Worlds), not like I need anything else...

Orpheus, dammit. Someday I will run an Orpheus game, and it will cover the metaplot. All of it.