_The Massive_ by Brian Wood

Just a short note to express my pleasure at being able to read volume 3 of Brian Wood's sci fi story _The Massive_.

This series is set in a near future where the ice caps have melted, leading to a worldwide crisis called The Crash. It focuses on a group of Greenpeace-like protestors led by Callum Israel, a former mercenary, who live on their anti-whaling ship _Kapital_ and try to survive in the changed world.

The stories start with a bang, putting characters under stress. And each volume offers tantalizing hints of the past.

The title refers to a sister ship that was lost mysteriously, and which the crew of the Kapital hunts for, sometimes catching her on radar.

That and other surreal elements, the certainly-not-natural character Mary, hint that there is more than just science in the story.

I started reading this series just about a year ago. I eagerly await the next volume.

Learn something about HTML5 via the simplest game

I was thinking, I should learn about HTML5.

I thought, maybe I should look at making a simple game in HTML5 

What's the simplest game? Pong.

So I googled 'pong in html5' and got this:

http://cssdeck.com/labs/ping-pong-game-tutorial-with-html5-canvas-and-sounds

It has a multi-pane window approach and you can see the code results on the right, instantly.

The Fletcher Formula

This fellow seems to have cracked the secret formula to Murder, She Wrote:

http://www.pentadact.com/2014-08-08-the-formula-for-an-episode-of-murder-she-wrote/

Here's a snippet:

POLICE IDIOT stands over DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN’S BODY. JESSICA arrives immediately somehow.

POLICE IDIOT:
Looks like an open-and-shut case, Mrs F. Witnesses heard Shady Contact threatening to kill him, and as a police officer I don’t like to look for further evidence or consider any other possibilities.

JESSICA:
I’m not so sure, Idiot! Can you get me his phone records?

POLICE IDIOT:
OK, for some reason it’s fine for me to share that private data. But I’m telling you Mrs F, this time you’re wrong. I know I have a 0% success rate and you solve all of the 22 murders that happen near you every year, but

ADDENDUM:  This page caused me to skim the Wikipedia page about the show, and there I learned that none other than Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski was a writer for the show in its later years.

My writing process at the moment

Rebecca Schwarz tagged me re: writing about my writing process. My process is undergoing change right now. For a year or more I was happily doing rewrites all the time and would rewrite a short story's text from scratch often. These rewrites might not change much ...wording always changed a little, but the structure of the story often did not. I was heavily biased towards a complete retype of the story to make some small change consistently throughout the story.

I was really proud of these rewrites and they made hitting wordcount goals easy. But I came to believe that they were wasting a lot of my time, and I swung the other direction, often spending many writing sessions working on the outline for a story and not writing any prose.

I'm trying to find the synthesis for those two poles now. I'm still spending a lot of time on planning; I don't like to go into a story without knowing where it is going. But I also find that I can generate ideas for a long time and often can't choose an idea without testing it with some prose.

Most recently, I was unable to decide what to do with a story where there was a magical object, and I couldn't seem to pick any one way to visualize it. The story needed a MacGuffin, but I didn't know whether it should be a magic ring or a magic juice jar or what.

After a couple of days of not writing much, I came back and sat down and just started drafting the middle of the story, and quickly settled on a shape for the object. More and more I'm finding this technique useful: generate lists of ideas, then draft to make a decision.

Okay, those are my thoughts on process today. Now I'll tag Doug Sims.

i'm kind of in love with this article about how the social justice of denmark makes it immune to pick up artists

This article looks at one pick-up artist's review of trying to ply his "art" in Denmark and failing... because enlightened government policies have made women too equal to be easily knocked down by negging and such:

http://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/cockblocked-by-redistribution

_Perfect Dark: Initial Vector_: ignore the cover and the origin and just enjoy a great thriller

Perfect Dark: Initial Vector, by Greg Rucka, is a novel set in the fictional future of the Perfect Dark video game series. I picked up a cheap used copy when I saw that it was by Greg Rucka, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

My favorite Rucka work is his Queen and Country series of graphic novels and regular novels, which focus on a British lady spy. So I was pleased to learn that this book had a spy slant. The world of Perfect Dark is one where corporate power has run wild, and so corporate espionage is more like covert ops. 

What I liked best about the book is that a thoroughly satisfying spy thriller made me think about corporate excess the whole time. 

If I hadn't seen Rucka's name on the book, I would have dismissed it out of hand as a schlocky video game tie-in book. I'm very glad I didn't.

The book didn't require any prior knowledge of the game to enjoy it. 

I'd have liked to learn more about the main character's background and what gave her her special abilities. But in the main I was happy to follow the story's twists and turns.

Redshirts, a game about social media, includes some sexism intentionally

(post edited 7/28/14 for grammar and because I didn't originally include a title)

This article:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/208555/Learning_about_community_and_inclusiveness_with_Redshirt.php
...  describes both an interesting game and an interesting situation that arose because of it: the designer set out to write a game that would comment on social media as a way of interacting with others, but got criticized by a player for some of the -- intentional -- sexist content. The game includes a stereotypically sexy-alien race, which suffers more sexist attention.  The developer's response? Add a trigger warning to that race choice. Which seems eminently reasonable... but she got criticism for THAT action, by those who felt she caved somehow.

Oh, and the game's name is Redshirts, and so it operates as a reaction to the idea of a future utopia, as well.

_Uncertainty in Games_ by Greg Costikyan

I am reading this slim volume right now, and I got the urge to e-mail Costikyan and say good job. But I couldn't find any way to do that. He has a FaceBook page, so that's an easy solution...if you're on FaceBook, but I'm not.

<insert rant about folks who assume everyone is on FaceBook; cite examples of people whose business cards offer no other way to contact them... >

So I'll just post my love here. This book, which is part of a series called 'Playful Thinking', is an attempt to catalog the ways in which uncertainty is important to the design of games of all types. Costikyan makes a strong case for uncertainty being an important part of a great game.

I find this sort of thing exciting, in that it makes you feel like you could design a game. But you don't have to be a game designer to get a lot out of this book; it's a great help in understanding games.

Inventing languges for a living

The show Game of Thrones needed invented languages...several of them, and with full vocabularies. They turned to the community of folks who make up languages for fun, and held a contest. Here's an interview with the winner:

http://www.avclub.com/article/meet-game-thrones-resident-linguist-ki-fin-yeni-205542

I've dabbled with inventing languages, and this is the sort of thing that makes me go, "Awwwww man, I want that job." Except it turns out that inventing a complete language would be work, lots of work. Still, this guy is getting paid to be creative; it's a great story.