Been a long while since I've posted (on this blog, anyway -- I've been busy elsewhere on the internets, but not here), lets see about updating a bit.

Bloggish
I've revised the code on the site a bit to be a bit more small-browser-window friendly and just generally more readable. I've also resurrected average-bear.com as a kind of collective repository of everything I'm posting on all my sites, and updated a bit on Facebook and Flickr.

Writing
I got my 50k words down for NaNoWriMo, but Humorless itself isn't really done, so I expect I'll be going back to that in the new year... once I'm done with the latest round of revisions on Hidden Things, which is my next big to do.

Travel
Just got back from the 1800 mile round-trip to South Dakota to visit family. Very good to see everyone and the little girl made out like some kind of mad toy bandit, so it was all win for her. Plus I got to take my girls to Mount Rushmore, finally. I've been there many many times, but neither of them had, so that was fun. Slight damper on the joys of the season: ear and throat "thing" that I'll be dropping by the doc's this afternoon to pick up medicine for. Ugh... Also, I seem to be carrying five extra pounds of stuffing and pumpkin pie around. Bleh. Time to seriously shop for a replacement for my poor destroyed elliptical.

Recent Reads
Hearts in Atlantis (which I just realized is a terrible terrible pun on the part of the author), one or two of the Witches/Discworld books, and two of the Keys to the Kingdom books by Garth Nix, thanks to the local library's audiobooks section and a very, very long road trip.

Posted at 10:24 AM • Comments (0)

There is a specific type of activity in role playing games (which are, by design, social gatherings) that is importantly and essentially NOT a social activity, and it goes back perhaps to the very start of roleplaying gaming as a hobby.

Speaking broadly, this category of activity encompasses a lot of solo activities that sort of surround the Actual Playing Of The Game, like space trash around the Earth -- as a player, it includes things like writing diaries or journals from your characters point of view, drawing sketches of them or the people they know, painting up a miniature for them, devising complex back stories, or simply sitting around and 'generating' new character after new character ... all of whom will probably never get played, et cetera -- as the person running the game, it involves stuff like the above, as well as developing complex societies, environments, ecologies, history, and various bits of fiction... hell, whole worlds that provided the backdrop for the story of the game... most of which no one but the person running the game would EVER KNOW.

As I said, it's a standard element of classic roleplaying games. Sometime in early 2006, a gamer on the Story-games forum coined a name for this kind of activity, referring to it as "lonely fun".

Before that point in time (and, in fact, long before there were role-playing games), it had a different name: "writing".

I've never been very good at Lonely Fun. Along the same vein, I'm having a hell of a time with my current W.I.P. because, unlike most of the stuff I've done before, I'm writing it alone. (My wife, who has been subjected to various excerpts from the ongoing story, might argue this point, but compared to my previous efforts, writing Humorless has been like working for a solid month inside a sensory deprivation tank.) No partner, no secret-blog that a couple dozen people can read as I go... nothing. My only reader is myself, and the only interaction I get with the story is my own.

I don't care for it much. Frankly, I've created a lot more fiction as part of a group of creative people (read: gaming) than I have solo (read: writing), and that's the activity that pushes all the good endorphin buttons in my brain. Maybe that's because I've conditioned myself to work that way over the last twenty years, but there it is.

Going to take a long time to break that habit.

Posted at 2:14 PM • Comments (6)

Full essay is here.

Steampunk's key lessons are not about the past. They are about the instability and obsolescence of our own times. A host of objects and services that we see each day all around us are not sustainable. They will surely vanish. Once they're gone, they'll seem every bit as weird and archaic as top hats, crinolines, magic lanterns, clockwork automatons, absinthe, walking-sticks and paper-scrolled player pianos.

We are a technological society. When we trifle, in our sly, Gothic, grave-robbing fashion, with archaic and eclipsed technologies, we are secretly preparing ourselves for the death of our own tech. Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth.

It's a really interesting insight into the movement and, thinking about it, I probably agree... though at the same time I still just plain like stuff like zeppelins because they're cool.

But when I think about the story I'm writing in Humorless, and the steampunk/clockpunk tech that shows up, a lot of it (with the exception of the story's namesake) has corollaries in today's technology, and each example has something wrong with it -- flaws that also have a modern corollary.

Is that what I'm writing about? No. ¹ However, I think it's fascinating that, in introducing steampunk elements into the story, my mind naturally bestowed these relics of a technological path-not-taken with the same points of failure as the technology we have today.

Doing that sort of thing is, according to this essay, a kind of definitive part of the steampunk 'thing', and one assumes that that commentary is a conscious effort on the part of the participants. The fact that the same sort of deconstruction happened in my own story without my being aware of this alleged underpinning of the genre implies something even more important: that this knowledge of the oncoming failure of our current technological culture and the way we can/could reflect it in the Brass Mirror of pseudo-Victorian tech-that-never-was is something deeply ingrained in the subconscious.

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¹ - Truth be told, I probably won't know exactly or even generally what I'm writing about until I'm done, or probably well after that -- I know that brothers and sisters seem to be figuring fairly prominently, and that's about it.

Posted at 9:25 AM • Comments (1)