Things Lost

 In the early Naughties, I was a... well, about an average fan, actually... of the Magical School created by That Person who turned out to be a TERF. Her position, as well as the rather shabby treatment she gave the one identifiable East Asian character in her books, as well as... well, her just turning out to be a generally shitty person, has cooled me on her world.

And in a way, that's a shame. Because back then, I could identify myself to those who Knew The Code. I could say, "yes, I am a member of the House of the Eagle," and they could say, "ah, okay; you think you're smart, and you're a bibliophile." and they'd be right. Now, though, there's so much shade involved with even mentioning That Person's name and admitting to having enjoyed her books, that it's easier to just bypass the whole issue.

In a similar vein, a friend of mine once admitted that in a way, he missed the cold war. During the cold war, he said, everything seemed so clear. It was Us vs. Them, and it was a struggle of Good vs. Evil; Right vs. Wrong. Viewing the Olympics, for instance, through that lens let him see it as symbolic trial by combat, and every time one of Ours  triumphed, it was proof that we were the best! Every time one of theirs triumphed, well, they had to get lucky sometimes.

Now? The world is all shades of gray, we can't tell who our friends are, or if we actually even have friends, and the Olympics? Is just another sportsball competition which can safely be ignored.

The Watch Store of Doom

In a certain city there is a shop. Lettering on the plate glass window at the front of the shop says simply, "watch." Not watches; just "watch." If one were to look through that window, or indeed, step within the shop, one would find that, indeed, the stock is watches. Only mechanical watches, both hand-wound and automatic. Watches both new and vintage are for sale within the shop, with one case containing exclusively Swiss and Japanese pocket watches dating to the Nineteenth Century.

If one were to observe the shop over time -- and there are those who do -- one would notice certain anomalies about it. For instance, while it does business, and those who are in the know about watches cite it as the very best place to purchase watches within its nation, perhaps in the world, it does not seem to do enough business to justify its location just off a very upscale shopping district. 

Then there is the matter of the staff. There are always between two to four women working within the shop, ranging in apparent age from twenty to sixty years. They wear a shop uniform of a white lawn blouse and pleated, knee-length skirt in a very particular, not to say peculiar, shade of blue which borders on violet. None of them wear name tags, but all of them wear very expensive watches. These women never leave the store, though after closing hours the shop appears empty. 

A customer is always greeted by a woman of their own ethnicity when they arrive. If more customers arrive than the count of staff which has been observed, a new sales associate will enter the shop from a door in the rear moments before the customer enters. After four customers have entered, the shop door will be locked until one has exited. After the fourth customer has exited, if a new fourth customer enters, they will still be greeted by a sales associate of their own ethnicity, even if their ethnicity is different from that of the customer who departed.

Very occasionally, a woman will enter the shop who is not a customer. The woman will have a conversation with the oldest member of staff, who will escort her through the door in the back wall. She will never be seen again. Even more rarely, the door in the back of the shop will open, and a woman not dressed as a sales associate will emerge. She will smile and nod at the staff, walk to the street door, and emerge onto the street. She will not return to the shop.

Carasynthia Doom

 Okay, okay, the character's family name is actually Dune, but that doesn't fit the theme of the blog.

I was awake at an unreasonable hour this morning, and watched The Mandalorian Season 2, Episode 7, "The Believer." No spoilers are forthcoming; the episode was just the catalyst for my thoughts to coalesce and for me to realize that those thoughts needed to be expressed.

Carasynthia Dune, AKA Cara Dune, AKA Marshal Dune, is exactly the sort of woman I fall for.  Cara is loyal to her friends, protective of innocents, strong of arm and sharp of aim. She's a hero. I want her to look at me the way she looks at the series' titular character when she accepts the duffle bag from him.

But note that I'm writing here about the character, not the actress Gina Carano who plays the role.

Actresses. 

Once upon a time, I was an actress. I trod the worn boards of my high school stage, declaimed my lines with some minimum of skill and talent, and when my time in high school was done, so was my time as an actress. Before that, however, I had learned enough about what drove people to want, to need to act that it became one of my Rules for a Happier Life: Don't Date Actresses.

When I was in that phase, it was a dark age. We knew nothing about the figures we saw on the screen except for what we saw on that screen. It was years before we knew that Princess Leia's actress got addicted to drugs. We didn't know that the creator of Star Trek raped one of the actresses on set. We didn't know that our heroes had feet of clay.

In the movie Moulin Rouge... the 1952 version with Zsa Zsa Gabor, not the one with Obiwan Kenobi... the artist Henri de Toulouse Lautrec is given the line, "One should never meet a person whose work one admires; What they do is always so much better than what they are!"

And yet, we now live in an age of social media. It has become indispensable for public figures to be able to give their hot-takes on all the issues of the day, and for their fanciers to absorb those hot takes. I speak, in particular, of Ms. Carano here, though my issues might well include Ms. J. K. Rowling and numerous others.

During the prolonged aftermath of the recent election, Ms. Carano apparently tweeted out that she supported recounts, and that she believed the incumbent deserved to win the election. This statement, this opinion, resulted in howls of anguish from fans of the series. The role of Cara should be recast, or better yet, the character should be killed off. When Pedro Pascal, the actor who portrays the titular character of the series, praised her acting, people reacted negatively.

This behavior is insane. It's the kind of behavior which led John Boyega, Oscar Isaacs, and Daisy Ridley to declare they had no further interest in participating in Star Wars projects in the future. It's the kind of behavior which led Harrison Ford to demand that Han Solo be killed off as part of the price for participating in The Force Awakens.

We, as consumers, as fans, have to let it go. There's a line between Ms. Carano saying that she supports a politician supported by nearly half of the American public, and Gene Rodenberry raping Grace Lee Whitney on set. The former may lead to tsks and headshakes of disagreement; the latter rightfully deserves anger and ire.

My point here is that though there is no going back to the days when all we knew was what we saw on the screen, we should carefully judge which parts of the creators' behavior are subjects of disagreement, and which are worth getting up a torch-and-pitchfork mob about.

In the meantime, I'll be over here watching my dream girl, Carasynthia Dune, punch out armored stormtroopers with her bare hands. 

I'm Not Dead (Yet)!

 So, um.  

It has been more than a year since I last posted something here. Sorry about that.  

I'm doin' alright, but not very well. Mostly, I'm hiding in my blanket fort and reading trashy novels. Looks like I'm going to hit four hundred this year.

... and that's about all the news.

The Roles We Play in Our Own Doom

I started playing Role Playing Games (RPGs) in 1980 or '81. Like many of my generation, my gateway was Dungeons and Dragons. At that time, trying to convince my friends to play with me, I described the game as being "like playing Barbies, but with rules for settling disputed outcomes." It rarely succeeded in winning converts, though I still think it an apt description.

In the late '80s and early '90s, I was a teetotaling sailor stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. Not being interested in bars, but still being interested in RPGs, I spent a great deal of time in a friendly local game shop called Campaign Headquarters. There, I played a great many different game systems, with a fair number of people, many of whom were also sailors stationed in Norfolk.

Nor did I give up on table-top RPGs after I became a civilian again. I lived here, there, and everywhere, and in most cases, found people with whom I could play. Most of them were good folk, with whom I became friendly outside the game environment. Some of them were jerks I barely tolerated at the table.

I remember one particular night with a group I often attended: the Game Manager (GM) was my uncle, Thomas (who lived in a trailer early in life, but never, so far as I can tell, a cabin). We were having one of the periodic spats and disputes to which geek packs are prone, and Tom went around the table, saying what he thought each of us got out of the gaming experience. This fellow used it as a substitute for tactical wargames, and was unhappy if the GM played fast and / or loose with the rules. That fellow's wife was mostly there for companionship and connection to other Humans. This fellow wanted to be able to make mistakes without real life consequences. And Jenny? Jenny just wanted to be someone else for a couple of hours each week.

And he wasn't wrong. But over time, I came to realize that there's a fundamental split in gamers, and what we want out of the games. Because of our social roles and expectations, I'm going to label this split as masculine / feminine. 

The masculine gamer (who may not always be male) wants Action and Adventure. This gamer is there to get the dice on, to have a Walter Mitty moment of being an action hero doing daring deeds with a smile while never spilling a drop of their martini. Anything which does more than linking those scenes of action and adventure together is superfluous, boring, and wasted.

The feminine gamer (who may not always be female) is looking for connection, community, and belonging. Scenes of conflict are fine, if they serve the purpose of establishing camaraderie, but kicking in the door, slaying the monster, and adjudicating the treasure is not their style. Storytelling is never wasted; emotions are involved in play.

And like most dichotomies, this split is exaggerated here. Most people fall on a spectrum somewhere between these extremes. As a GM, you have to know your players, know what they want out of gaming, and strive to provide each person what they want -- which can be a tricky balancing act, and is part of why the aforementioned group had regular flare-ups and spats.

Why was I thinking about this, enough to sit down and use energy to put it all into words, and freeze it into web-published words? Because, since I became disabled, the majority of my role playing experience has been through coöperative fan fiction writing in the Star Trek universe. In such circles, each person has a primary character for whom they write. They work with other writers to produce scenes in which their characters interact, and over the course of time, the scenes create an overall narrative.

I got involved a few years ago with Starbase 109, one of those coöperative writing games, because my oldest and dearest friend mentioned that it was starting up, and it would be nice to have someplace to write together. After about a year, the founding GM dropped out, and my friend and I, along with a third woman, ended up accepting the GM role as a triumvirate. For the last couple of years, we've been cruising along, telling our stories and having a good time.

Every once in a while (twice in the last year) we get a new writer who is very much a masculine gamer. They're there to be Jim Kirk or Johnny Rico, to get in fights with bug eyed monsters and seduce their women. At best, these guys only skim other writers' posts. They don't really care about all that touchy-feely stuff, or about the plotlines. They just want to shoot something, gorram it!

And that's really not the kind of game Starbase 109 is. Everything is more complicated than that; problems can't generally be solved at the point of a phaser, or in a burst of torpedo fire. Espionage happens, but it's not the James Bond type of thing; it's quieter, subtler.  Conflict happens, but it's on a personal level. Coming in and insisting that you can solve everything by waving your, er, gun around is Just Not On. But they want to.

Which stresses me out, because as a gamer, I want to provide everyone in the group with the kind of experience they want. As a writer, I want continuity. But as previously mentioned, these guys (and it usually is guys) don't care about your storyline. They think it's boring and superfluous. They know everything about Star Trek, and you, silly little girl, are wrong -- just go over there and play with your Barbies, and let the Mens charge their light brigades into the torpedos!

And I'm burned out with dealing with those conflicts. I don't think I want to be the personnel GM anymore. Currently, I'm on hiatus, with the other two members of the triumvirate guiding the game and taking care of administration. I'm not sure I intend to go back. It's been a while since I felt much joy from writing there.

I get the impression that the three of us are the only ones who care about the overall story. I get the impression that many... perhaps most... of my posts get skimmed, or skipped altogether. I get the impression that most of our players aren't really involved in the game. And I wonder... why am I doing all this, again? 

Saturday Scene, 15 September 18

It's a frustratingly short #SaturdayScenes excerpt from my WiP Smokey and the Monkey Girl. Now here's your snippet!

Dallas follows Jessica silently. The pair walk up the hill and cross the street to a parking lot, where Jessica makes a beeline for a car under a tarp. Dallas rolls her eyes. “You’re one of those people?” she asks rhetorically.

Jessica just raises an eyebrow, and pulls out her phone. She taps on it for a moment, and there’s the sound of a lock opening, and the bottom edge of the tarp falls loose. Another moment, and she’s swept the cover off, dramatically, revealing… Dallas isn’t sure what she’s looking at. A car, that’s certain. Yup… four wheels, two doors, headlights, turn signals. A car. A very, very sporty looking car. And even in the twilight, it’s clearly a very, very blue car with shiny silver accent stripes on the nose and down the sides. “What is it?”

“It’s a 2017 McDowell Spyder,” Jessica grins, leaning over to tap the word “Spyder” in cursive chrome lettering just in front of the driver’s side door. “Well. I guess it’s kind of a 2013 through 2017 Spyder?” She laughs at the confused look on Dallas’ face. “I built it. Mostly in Auto Shop in high school.”

“Oh,” says Dallas, watching as Jessica opens the driver’s side door and touches something inside. The trunk pops open and the roof of the car folds itself, withdrawing into the trunk. After a moment, the trunk closes again with an audible thunk.

Jessica walks around to the passenger side, opens the door. “M’lady.”

“Thank you,” Dallas says, taking a seat and glancing around. The seats are patterned on racing buckets, but they are comfortably padded and upholstered in blue and white leather. The dashboard is one solid slab of black glass -- unless it’s obsidian? The steering wheel looks more like the control yoke of an aircraft, and the logo in the center is an M in an irregular octagon, with eight legs sprouting out of the long sides.

“Buckle up,” Jessica directs, sliding into the driver seat. “For this ride, you shouldn’t need the fifth belt, but do pull the shoulder and lap belts tight.” She illustrates the comment, and Dallas follows suit, making sure everything is tight and nothing is twisted.

“Power up, James.” The dashboard lights from inside, forming a bewildering array of indicators and gauges. “It’s not instant power,” Jessica explains, watching the gauges. “It’s a Stirling cycle engine -- a hydrogen fired, external combustion engine which uses heat differential to generate power. So it has to come up to temperature before we can take off. The engine is tied to an ultra-compact nested pulley infinitely variable transmission. I put in a drive-by-wire system with inverted recurve suspension.” She looks at Dallas and laughs. “Sorry.”

“At what point in there did you just start making up words?” Dallas quips.

Fragment brought back from a dream

Two eight year old girls stand on the shore. "You need water," Rihoko said, frowning at the crumbly mound of sand.

"Water?" Jane asked, scrunching up her nose and turning to look at the ocean from under the brim of her straw hat.

Rihoko nodded. "My dad told me the Roamin's made the best roads the world has ever seen, by mixing water, sand, and limes."

"We don't have any limes," Jane pointed out, sounding Very Practical. "Or even any lemons."

"Well, we don't want it to last a thousand years. Just today. So maybe sand and water will do."