![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
timeasmymeasureWe finally published the TTRPG supplement we made with a friend of ours!
Five Kinds of Deception is a US$2 booklet describing different ways people fool each other and how you as a player or GM can use that to help tell better stories in your games.
It's eight pages and three and a half thousand words, including quick-reference tables with mechanical notes and narrative prompts. We hope it is helpful!
There's an interesting arc you can have with studying Toki Pona.
At first, you're learning words and phrases. That "toki" can mean "speech", "communication", "stories", and suchlike. That "pona" can mean "good", "acceptable", "approved of", and similar. That "jan" can mean "people", "characters", "humans", that kind of thing. That "jan pona" can mean "friend" - a person or people you approve of, that you like and endorse. That "insa" can mean "inside", "center", "stomach", and so forth. That "toki insa" can mean "inner monologue" or "thoughts". And learning all these things helps you understand what people are talking about.
And then you start unlearning them. Sort of.
Like, the thing about toki pona is that a lot of its strength is being not specific, is being contextual, is being personal. And you can translate the English word "think" with the toki pona phrase "toki insa", but there's a lot of things that a communication can be within - a house, a community, a back room, standard usage ... a lot of things. And "think" does a lot of work - I think that origami is delightful, but when I say that, I am saying that to me origami is delightful: musi pi lipu sitelen li pona tawa mi.
This isn't actually about Toki Pona - this is about Kyle Kallgren's analysis of the movie "Network", and the cover of "Land of Confusion" it ends with, and the idea of reading classic rock songs as saying something. Saying "things aren't okay, we're being lied to, and we need to stop the damage". Saying "justice for those American Indians who fight against poverty and police violence". Saying "the classist and racist status quo isn't actually a natural state, we can do something about it". Saying "The USA gave us a terrible life, sent us off to kill people who looked different than us, and left us with nothing when we got back, if we even made it back". All these words that got flattened into "angry" or "comforting" or "exciting" or whatever else, they were saying something.
People learn to ignore what a communication means.
Probably because if any of these people were allowed to be understood, we might not be okay with letting the rich get richer as everyone else kills each other.
Howard Beale was saying something. He was saying that you have to get mad because the other option is depression and not caring, and if we have any hope of not taking it any more, not letting all the evil be wrought upon us, we have to care.
And on a personal level, to paraphrase jan Sonja about Toki Pona: if a friend is a "jan pona", a good person? A bad friend is a contradiction in terms.
Words mean things. And caring about what words convey can mean caring about a lot else, too.
A preface: nothing in this post is the fault of Edmund J. Bourne, PhD, author of The Anxiety & Phobia Workbook (fifth edition). That book introduced us to the concept, but we are not psychologists and our interpretations are our own.
That said, we hate most of the posts we can find on the World Wide Web on the technique, so we're writing our own. Hit us up in the comments if you have thoughts on our presentation of it. Content warning for discussion of self-loathing, albeit in a healing way.
( Sometimes your brain comes up with reasons for you to hate yourself. The goal of positive counter statements is to refute those reasons. )"Against Access" by John Lee Clark, on interpreters, descriptions, and the difference between being burdened with objective data and getting help from an accomplice.
I just want to quote the whole thing, but here's a bit that stood out:
( Another thing ASL interpreters habitually do is describe the whole of things... )(Hat tip to fluffy's Notes page on beesbuzz.biz, via the fediverse.)
(Feel free to skip this first section if you're already familiar with the MDA framework - it's mostly just recapping the concept.)
( Let's start with Sensation as an example. )The point here is: if you remember that you want the player's sensations to be delightful, it changes how you do the low-level work. Likewise, if you want the player's attempts to overcome a challenge to be rewarding, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's efforts to discover what's in the world to be satisfying, it changes how you do the low-level work; if you want the player's experience of the game's fantasy to be engrossing, it changes how you do the low-level work. And so on for the other four aesthetics on the list in the original MDA framework paper: Fellowship, Expression, Submission (i.e. zoning out), and...
( ...and actually, I'm not sure Narrative fits in here. )It's not controversial to say that writing in games is better when it's not treated as separate from everything else, but I think that goes deeper than just saying that. It's not just that the game mechanics and the writing both tell stories, it is that the game mechanics and its story both create aesthetics of play. And that changes how you do the low-level work.
I don't think it's very confusing to think of someone who writes out a set of rules to guide the play of a tabletop roleplaying game as a game designer. Their decisions shape everything that happens at the table - what aspects of the experience get focus, what aspects get glossed over, what deserves reward and what that reward looks like ... their role in a tabletop game is very clearly that of a designer.
The idea of a GM as a game designer comes up periodically in GM advice columns. I think we first saw this in the form of blog posts highlighting elements of the Mechanics-Dynamics-Aesthetics (MDA) framework as relevant to GMing, particularly the idea of aesthetics of play; a player who thrives on experiencing discovery at the table is going to want different things out of a session than a player who thrives on performing a role as a character, and GMs are well-served by being aware of what their players want (and what they themselves want) and designing what they create and provide to the players with that knowledge in mind.
A lot less obvious, I think, is that the players design the game as well. Pacing is an element of game design - and the same combat created by the same GM in the same system, for example, can be a tense three hours spent calculating every move to deal with one's opponents as effectively as possible or a single whirlwind hour of snap decisions and adapting plans on the fly, depending on how the players conceive of their roles and how they act within them. Narrative focus is an element of game design - and the same scenario can be a romp from battle to battle or a series of negotiations to muster enough support from all the parties involved to forge a peace, depending on how the players interpret their role within it. Tone is an element of game design - and the same system can produce a lighthearted comedy or a grim struggle, depending on what the players contribute to the story with their choices.
None of the participants in the event of a roleplaying game have full power over it - it is, as everyone always says, a collaborative storytelling - but all of them have some power over it. And I think it benefits all of them to be conscious of that - benefits the authors of systems to know what they want to facilitate, runners of games to know what they want to provide, and players of games to know what they want to do.
From Teen Vogue: We Need to Talk About Digital Blackface in Reaction GIFs: Why is it so common?" by Lauren Michele Jackson.
A good discussion of how racist stereotypes about black people play into and are reinforced by the use of GIFs of black people to represent strong emotions. Short quote under the cut:
( Read more... )Content warnings for discussion of trauma, graphic descriptions of sexual assault, and suicide.
"Can Historians Be Traumatized by History?" from The New Republic.
This paragraph in particular jumped out:
It is bad advice to say that politics, sex, and religion ought to be kept out of polite conversation, but nobody wants you to bring up a genocide at a dinner party. “The extent to which my research is ‘dark’ and therefore not polite dinner conversation means I’m repeatedly isolated in piecing through the material,” Elena Gallina, a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and researcher of sexual violence in wartime, told me.
It makes me think of the equation from that old Tumblr thread about abuse, PTSD, and emotional neglect: "Overwhelming Experience + Isolation + Shame = PTSD".
If historians are expected not to be traumatized by traumatic history? This, we would expect, would make their trauma worse.
"How to bring a language to the future" is a pretty good article about a struggle to stop technological conventions from dismantling a language and its culture.
A quote:
Part of the reason nastaʿlīq [the script used to write Urdu] ran into trouble was because the technology at the time — specifically the typewriter — was built with English in mind. Subsequently, as historian Thomas S. Mullaney notes in his book, “The Chinese Typewriter,” all other languages are seen as permutations from that norm. Hebrew is English but backward. Arabic is English backward and in cursive. Russian: English with different letters. Siamese: English with too many letters. Perhaps the only major language to escape the thumb of Latin hegemony was Chinese, a script that is neither alphabetic nor syllabic, and thus had to be imagined entirely outside the box of existing technology. But nastaʿlīq, presumably not quite significant enough to send typographers back to the drawing board, remained stalled until the 1970s, its mechanical rendering nowhere close to the sweep and flourish of the handwritten script.
PICO-8 does not really have a concept of tempo with regard to music, it has a concept of time.
One PICO-8 music tick is approximately 1/120th of a second.[1] At 60 frames per second, that's about two ticks per frame; at 30 frames per second, that's about four ticks per frame.
This shows up in an SFX two ways:
There is a kind of third way, which is: if you use a custom SFX instrument, that instrument will go through its ticks as long as its note is held. So, for example, a custom SFX instrument at SPD=1 that goes through all 32 lines of its SFX will take two lines of a SPD=16 SFX to finish playing. You can match this kind of thing to the music being created - we've created both staccato and grace notes for a SPD=24 piece by scheduling things within 24 ticks of a SPD=1 SFX, and we've taken a custom drum SFX and set it to loop exactly the right number of lines to do a double-stroke on that drum in a single line of a piece.
While the arpeggio effects (mostly[2]) aren't, a lot of the effects - 1=slide, 3=drop, 4=fade in, and 5=fade out - are based on the SPD of the line where the effect is played. The volume and pitch of the note in a slide will transition linearly from the previous note's at the beginning of the line to the destination note over the length of the line; the pitching-down of a note in a drop will be stretched out over the length of the line; the fade-in and fade-out will be linear between 0 and the given volume over the length of the line. If a slide or fade is too quick, it can be spread out between multiple slides; if it is too slow, there's ... not much you can do, other than make a custom SFX instrument.
But that's basically how it works. PICO-8 sounds are scheduled pitches of specific timbres over periods of time measured in music ticks.
[1] We suspect, but cannot prove, that it is actually 183/22 050 seconds - that is, 183 sample points at 22.05 kHz, the sampling frequency of an exported PICO-8 .wav file. This could be an artifact of exporting, however.
[2] If arpeggios are used in an effect with SPD 8 or less, these times are halved to 2 and 4 and the arps cycle twice as fast.
[3] An exception to this: if multiple lines have the same pitch - say, two lines at C2[4] and two lines at B2 - those notes will hold over and therefore sound slower and longer.
[4] PICO-8's C2 is C4 - middle C - in scientific pitch notation. Because reasons.
[5] There are grids, starting at the start of each SFX, for fast-arpeggios and slow-arpeggios within those SFX. Notes in the arpeggio during a line with an arpeggio effect will be picked based on what lines of that arpeggio's grid they fall on. ...you might just have to try it and see if it works.
We wrote a bunch of words today! A bunch of them specifically in a fediverse thread about obstacles people face to adding image descriptions riffing off the essay "Laziness Does Not Exist" by Devon Price.
...kind of fediverse inside baseball, all things considered, but now our wrists are sending "hey, you might wanna chill a little" signals, so we're not gonna write a lot more here. So you get the link instead. :P
...
Okay, also: if you're using the HTML editor to write your Dreamwidth posts, the key is <img src="[image URL]" alt="[text to display if image doesn't load]" title="[text to display when mouse hovers over image]">. If you use Dreamwidth's image hosting, the HTML it gives you to copy gets auto-filled with the "Title" in the mouseover and the "Short Description" in the alt text.
What can a guitar solo be? by Ben Levin is pretty cool - kind of a weird poetic meditation and experimentation on the theme of guitar solos. Little bit inspiring, really.
And the music throughout is cool. Ben Levin is a good producer as well as guitarist.
(content notes: glitchy and goopy and space-warpy animations, food mention in lyrics, sustained eye contact)
I have started a Patreon account! For some reason! You can find it at https://www.patreon.com/packbat!
I also recorded another teavlog for a Patreon announcement video, this time with a shaky hand-held selfie cam intro!
Forgot to post here, but I've made two more teavlogs over the past two weeks:
...they're fun. Making a vlog while doing something else adds visual interest, gives the vlog a natural stopping point (the tea is done and the kettle refilled), and it's just kind of fun to perform for the camera. And I pick topics I feel capable of speaking extemporaneously about - subjects I've thought through and have a pretty clear idea of what I want to communicate.
I've seen a number of people on Mastodon bemoan the patterns that show up with broadcast-style social media networks (e.g. Twitter, Tumblr, Mastodon, Dreamwidth) and either waxing poetic about Web 1.0* forums or actively promoting their own. There's also the popularity of Discord servers as places for [description of a group of people] to congregate.
...while I was thinking about these things, though, I realized there's a big advantage that broadcast social networks (and IMs and DMs, for that matter) have over membership-based social networks like forums and chatrooms (and Minecraft servers, for that matter): in membership-based groups, you basically have a package deal when it comes to who you connect to.
It's an advantage as well, of course - I've met some truly wonderful people because they were part of a group I became a part of - but I can't help think of the Five Geek Social Fallacies, of the people in groups I participate in who just constantly rub me the wrong way, of the people at risk of losing connection with multiple friends because someone with a vendetta against them joined the group they hang out with these friends in. The group I didn't join because one of the prominent members had just told me that they weren't okay with being followed by an atheist like me on social media.
Going from broadcast social networks to membership ones is not an unambiguous Better™, is what I'm saying.
* There's some dispute about what "Web 1.0" means, but if the image that came to mind when you read the phrase is "phpBB and similar", it's pretty accurate.
