jack

Birthday party tomorrow (Sat) evening (c.f. https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1128589.html)

There are a variety of 'rooms' present as zoom breakout rooms, discord channels, and pages in a google sheet.

Zoom link: [see locked post] (online from this evening)
Discord link: [see locked post] (feel free to comment now)
Sheets link: [see locked post] (feel free to post pictures now)

I will make the rooms in a hurry tomorrow, but expect "hang out and chat" but maybe also "post pictures of yourself dressed up", "no politics chat", "the bar area", "hi I don't know anyone", "anyone for games?" etc. Some will be more active in video, some on text and spreadsheet. Feel free to look by earlier, drop in briefly, or hang out all evening.

If you've never used zoom before, you may want to make sure you have it ready (using desktop client, web interface, or mobile app). It's pretty straightforward but the user interface can be weird. If you installed the desktop client six months ago, you may want to download the latest version (5.3 or later).

If you've never used discord before you should be able to use it in the desktop app, desktop web browser, or mobile browser, and use the link to join my server, but you may want to check the link works.

It's my birthday next weekend, please come to my online party!

There will be a mix of different "rooms" in video chat, text chat, and possibly some sort of retro MMPORG designed for a mix of gentle chat, drinks, dressing up, games, as you feel like. I haven't tried this before so I hope it works well! I'll start about 7:30 and go for a few hours, but the time is inherently flexible.

I am sad not to see most of you in person, but glad to do something friends who live further away can potentially join in with.

I will post a link to join a day or so in advance so you have a chance to test it out. If you're not sure what you're doing, that's fine, just turn up.

Anyone I'm mutual with online is welcome to come along, even if you can't usually come! Let me know if there's anyone else you'd like to bring, that's also welcome. And anyone sharing a house with you is automatically welcome.

What happened in 2020? Well, eliding a bunch of pandemic stuff I could swear about for tens of thousands of words:

1. We had dinner at Midsummer House for our anniversary. We'd never been sure if it was quite worth it for vegetarians, but when we did it was very very very nice.

Also we got ourselves a breadmaker, which has been extremely useful all year. We really love having fresh bread on tap.

2. I started a new job at the beginning of the year, and pandemic has made everything kind of tiring and given other ups and downs, but overall it's gone very well.

3. I finished running an 18-month long rolelaying campaign, in the fabled Under-Labyrinth I invented, using DnD 5e rules. I also ran an adventure for our partners and their children set in a village on the back of one of the turtles in a big school-archipelago, where they're mentors to a young small island-turtle. And I ran a one-off for some friends from the ex-heffers rpg group.

I also played in a Descent into Avernus game (dnd 5e goes to mad max hell) run by one of the players from the campaign I was running. And one in a Mediterranean medieval faerie tale world run by an old friend from the Cambridge tolkien society. And one in a giant 3d magicpunk city ran by a nanowrimo friend.

4. I kept organising the Cambridge Poly Meet. It was really hard to keep the group going through lockdown. There's a lot I wished I could have done but didn't manage because my attention was elsewhere. But I kept it going.

5. I kept playing semi-regular bridge with Cambridge and London friends online (and also with other friends, partners, and Rachel's family). Spent a year playing Gloomhaven with Rachel and sometimes other partners. Intermittently returned to a long-running Stellaris game. Played a lot of Fortnite with partners' children and with Rachel. Played Penultima with SGO friends. Lots of so-pretty Hades. Steamworld Dig and other games on the new Switch. Other board games.

TBC.

Cherry Blossom portrait!

I really love how this one turned out, I'm proud of it. The layered leaf effects on the tree look amazing. I like the background too, although I wish I could get it as realistic as the tree with a similar amount of stylisation.

Leather chair

I like the style, I aimed for something I could use for a lightly-stylised style for board game design for "assassins guild annual dinner" game or games with a similar tone, and I think that worked well

Next time I could do shadows better, but this has a good feel

Other art

The other drawings I've been posting this month are on twitter: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media (scroll back to see pictures this month, most are uploaded drawings) and facebook: https://twitter.com/CartesianDaemon/media I love the dinosaur sunset one, but the sketch garden, the basking coo, and the swirly blue ghost are worth looking at too.

I have been doing drawtober all month, trying to adapt to drawing on a computer instead of paper. It's been a strange journey, some things so much easier, some things a lot harder, but I really enjoyed some of my experiments.

Probably the most convenient place to see them is on facebook: Recent uploads and all my art. You should be able to see them without logging into facebook! If not, please comment and I'll have a fiddle. Or if anyone has a recommendation for a more reliable place to store images in albums, please suggest it.

I particularly liked the silhouetted dinosaur at sunset, the cow basking in a field of sunlight, the two superhero figures against dramatic color backdrops, the big wave, and the snowy foggy forest, and the swirly blue mist ghost.

There's some quite different techniques. The wave and forest were from Realistic Paint, a program that aims to simulate physical paints a lot more. The figures were made in Krita, a major open source digital paint program, drawing an outline (freehand or tracing a poser), using a tool to fill, and adding shades and highlights on a new layer which make it pop as a on-flat figure. The cow and dinosaur were made in Krita trying to emulate some of the techniques of realistic paint.

I found an old graphics tablet I never really used and it helped a lot with sketching well. The pressure sensitivity isn't working on this computer yet though, I don't know if that's worth debugging further.

Krita seems to asusme there's no point doing paint-y stuff unless you have a pressure sensitive graphics tablet, which makes sense, but seems strange. The colourful effects I made by using a combination of different brushes to put in colour and then smear it about to make texture, and I'm not sure if that's normal. I assume you CAN make a brush that does something similar to a paintbrush in Realistic Paint, but it doesn't seem to be the default and I'm not sure if I understand why.

But I have a cartoon-y style and paint-y style that both seem to produce results, so the month has been reasonably rewarding.

What superstitions do you have?

I don't actually believe any supernatural things. I do have a certain amount of habits that could be superstition, like not jinxing an outcome by saying it's certain before it's been confirmed.

And I guess, some habits that just make me feel good, like running a set of tests several times, just to feel the reassurance that they're all passing. Or if a new test passes first time, deliberately breaking the code just to make sure the test exists.

What is your favorite pen to write with and why?

I don't have a special special pen that I always like to use, but I like having a plentiful supply of medium to good quality ballpoints so I can always rely on having a decent non-flaky pen when I want to write anything. Getting rid of miscellaneous doubtful pens and keeping a supply of ones I like using has made me feel more comfortable in my life.

In fact, that might be a trend with me. I tend to rarely have special things, perhaps from dislike that they will only last so long, or might get ruined. But I appreciate treating myself to a good baseline by having good ish things as a standard.

The good outcome

When lockdown started I was scared the infection rate was just going to go up and up. I thought the government was likely to just reflexively sleepwalk into a strategy of "go through the motions of lockdown, downplay the problem, bury the numbers, pretend everything is fine" and switch seamlessly to "oh well, completely unforseeable, will of the gods, too late now, no point crying over spilt milk, lockdown failed, lets try to get the deaths over with as quickly as possible".

If everyone gets sick at once would our clockwork supply chains falter? Would we have actual food shortages? This seemed like a real risk. Although a "real risk" can mean anywhere from "not likely, but likely enough to need a plan" to "likely" depending on the type of risk, which I didn't consciously think through. I was torn between a justified status quo balance and a recognition that we had almost no precedent for how we'd deal with a pandemic like this.

But that didn't happen, the infection rate actually DID go down again despite government shilly-shallying. Delaying turned a short lockdown into a long lockdown, and we might yet get another one, but it didn't yet turn it into the worst case scenario, so that was a lot better than it might be.

What else turned out well?

The bad outcome

( Read more... )

1. The middle act should go in a NEW direction that's exciting and surprising, not be "and then some stuff happens you don't really need to know".

2. The character's concerns should be petty (for a comedy) or weighty (for a drama) but they themselves should take them seriously. The characters don't overreact. That would be forced. The characters react very naturally -- given the ridiculous nature of their hang-ups and predicaments.

3. Does the character shape the scene they're in? Does every line push the conversation in a new direction? Can no-one act without caring about what the character will think? Do they act with confidence even if stupidly? If so the character is probably interesting, and you can fit in as many interesting characters as you can.

4. What do you excel at writing? Stuff every scene chock full to the gills with that. What do you endlessly struggle with? Figure out how little makes the story suffer, and how much gets it to the end mostly ok.

5. Does this section sing? Does it make you want to know what happens next? Does it make you fall in love with the characters? Does it set up the events of the next page, the next scene, the end of the play? If not, can it do all those things? Not every scene has to be necessary, but as many as possible have to be great.

What was excellent, kind of a big one:

* A lot of people including me had never really heard of the Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921, when the most thriving black community in America was attacked by a mob, backed by police, with a lot of weapons, and private planes dropping firebombs, and acres of shops and houses were destroyed and a hundred or more people living there killed, but Watchmen brought it to a lot of people's attention.

What else was excellent:

* It projected the sensibilities of the original Watchmen into an alternate present shaped by those events, the international tension, the continuing rains of squid, the effects of Dr Manhattan
* But it didn't retell those concerns, it reflected problems currently in society's awareness like racial violence, employment, etc
* The music and visuals were AMAZING at evoking the feelings, both of gritty reality and magical alternate reality
* It showed what happened to many of the original characters without making them all about what we'd last seen of them. It was amazing to see Laurie move forward with her life without Watchmen. Rorsach's memory had been coopted by white supremacists. Ozymandias changed everything but maybe thought he was more unique in that than he was.
* All the new characters were memorable, Sister Night, Looking Glass, Red Scare, Pirate Jenny, Panda-head guy, tough police chief, rising politician, and reminiscent of the original setting without just repeating a new generation of costumed heroes
* It replicated the balancing act of making the plot about the the interesting characters, but the world-changing effects all due to a small number of things we already know about, rather than inventing a lot more characters with Manhatten-like powers
* When we do find out anything about Dr Manhatten it replicated the balancing act of making him seen human and sympathetic and alien all at the same time

What was questionable, kind of a big one:

* If you're going to make a series about how bad racism in America is, get more people who aren't white to help run it, aim for an audience that isn't mostly white, have more characters who aren't white, and have a lot fewer sympathetic corrupt police characters.

I started this roleplaying game as the first ongoing campaign I ever seriously tried to run over a year ago. It started in Heffers rpg nights, then tried out another venue once or twice, then moved to my house, now online.

Online worked surprisingly well, but does seem to suffer from scheduling being treated more casually than an event you need to physically go to. Hopefully coming close to a climax now, although I hope to meet up with the players in person when I can to reminisce.

They have explored the underlabyrinth, defeated its challenges, communed with the gods. One player, before the very first session, invented a tragic backstory with his character's parents and governess dying and her running away to become a thief, and we eventually brought some of the repercussions forward, his character kept researching the events and uncovered there was more to them than it looked like, and she kept working towards revenge. Various time shenanigans were discovered and the characters parents were discovered to be alive after all.

Then the quest was closing in on the bad guy who'd been involved in the killings, now the annoying corrupt town guard, and a possible additional shenanigan to additionally save the governess (which was rather harder for both practical and paradox reasons). Now they ended up in the past, got ambushed by the bad guy, defeated him before he could run away, got a relevant infodump, snuck into the keep she lived in, planted the known-about message to her parents and tried to leave a message for her governess saying "here, use this to fake your death on day xxxxxx" and... it worked.

It was a learning experience for both of us but I'm really proud of how it turned out. When he originally invented the backstory neither of us expected his parents or governess to be saveable, but when the time shenanigans appeared he suggested it and I thought it could work, and worked out what they'd have to do, and weren't guaranteed success, but pulled it off very well.