beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I wasn't thinking in anniversaries but tumblr posts reminded me it has been
twenty years on the 22nd since the first broadcast of Torchwood.

... it's actually easy to look then in my DW...
https://beccaelizabeth.dreamwidth.org/763228.html
seems I liked it from the start.

I had a bunch of feelings about this time interval that are not strictly speaking about Torchwood.
Compare and contrast sort of feelings.
It has not been a fun set of feelings.

My life has been somewhat easy to summarise since 2013 and that has not been on the whole a good thing. Nor have my efforts to improve on that got very far. Tiny tiny steps.

But Torchwood itself is of the good, or at least fascinating.
And Big Finish just announced that the Legacy audios next year will be available on CD after all, presumably because a consistent number of us still buy them, so I can tell there's at least that many audio Torchwood fans left.

The thing is Torchwood is a story of good dedicated people doing everything wrong, much of the time. Being slotted into a Lawful Evil system and getting really good at helping their mates who are also in the Lawful Evil system and therefore fitting right in. Being required to act in secrecy and from that alone doing all sorts of awful things for the secret. Which everyone a bit knows anyway. It's all sharp edges and contradictions and people being their most fucked up selves.

It's brilliant.

... it's varying qualities of brilliant at all times, but it's so much more fun to take big swings and miss than it is to be tidy.

Very messy show.

I should rewatch some on the TV. ... honestly the little app for audios is so much easier to fit in my day I have been living in audios lately. But I never actually watched Miracle Day so technically there is more (ambitious, flawed) Torchwood waiting for me any time...

Today... well, the previous awake time started on Tuesday, so I did Tuesday tasks just before midnight, then I thought hmmm, I shall just finish the Smile in Wrath of the Righteous.

... sixteen hours later...

I did indeed finish the Smile, and all the way up to the Chapel, though not all of it.

Hard is very hard and I am increasingly unconvinced I built anyone right.

I have played Wrath of the Righteous for over two thousand hours, which would be more impressive if character build screens didn't count, or if I wasn't always playing turn based. I have no idea how people win the other way.

Somewhere in there I achieved minimum standards through Wednesday but I am not impressed with me. Today is for Not Playing Computer Games Actually.

Which gets harder because the iplayer stopped working on my apparently too old to update TV so I have to use the games box if I want to watch Doctor Who. ... games have been winning over video Doctor Who. Possibly because I can put audios on in the boring bits in theory...

I sat down to double check when Kingmaker and Wrath start (4710 and 4715)
and ended up playing a whole day of Wrath of the Righteous
just trying to clear the Smile.

I am getting my butt kicked so hard. Over and over. It sucketh.
No one is making their saves against gibber or drone, including the guy in the headband that ought to make him immune. I have Iron Will and Improved and it is still not working. Unbreakable heart works fine but last seconds.

I have been back to camp twice to swap spells and personnel.

And tactics that worked just fine on Core are not working no more because we can't blooming hit things, like at all.

... the demons can't hit us neither, until they do and we are paste, but mostly we are standing there trading futility.

Lann needs his true strike before he hits things. Lann! I must have built him wrong this time.

Or, Hard is so hard.

... I am stubborn and likely to continue playing but it is not as much fun as when the difficulty is more balanced.

Today - the awake that started Sunday but had also finished earlier Sunday - I did a fair proportion of Sunday tasks, plus laundry and dishwasher, so I should feel pretty okay about my achievements.

Then today - the actual part since midnight - I think I got hold of a plot bunny that unstuck my story. The story is still too much a mess. But I think I have parts that can make it go.

Of course the parts make a tidier two person horror story connected only by the same building, but I am working on that. That part can happen and the other part can be the solve. Possibly.

I need better research sources, which is to say any that are not wiki or the google making things up. I need to think of better searches for the not google pages. I still like the feeling of the google telling you things you don't know you don't know but every single time it includes some obvious and very glaring falsehoods so what is the use of that? No use. But when I try and follow links from wiki it is all paywalls and websites that don't do things and academic books the library don't got that cost giant money and I can't tell from here how much is relevant. And I have no research patience lately, I just hare off after the next interesting bit.

I started the afternoon looking up Witchcraft Acts, Henry VIII and the Dissolution of the Monasteries. It's all fascinating but pretty soon you whoosh past a couple of centuries of horrible violence and it's ... there are many things that I could use for story parts but it seems to trivialise the problems they lived through. But if I find the right thread this is exactly the stuff that horror comics drew on that felt proper deep and resonant. Find the right connections and it is about fear and factions and social break down in ways one hopes would never be relevant.

I like the idea that Torchwood or the Forge or SHIELD or UNIT all encode a particular relation of power both within Britain and between nations, and then add aliens and magic. It's kind of like time travel via institution. The ideas that founded them set their agenda.

So other eras of British history would do something equally distinctive to the organisations they shape.
( Read more... )

And I know way too little about laws and politics to figure out how magic would layer into them.

But the magic is the vehicle for telling stories about relations of power so you are saying
What if Seperate religious laws in religious lands
What if families that buy the right land have power
What if just promising to never use power again and keeping it all in restricted books
What if working for the legal but unpopular boss
What if oaths were binding
What if service was compulsory
What if we trampled over the rights of our own people and then took that show global
... what can we learn about never doing it again?



What if I get some sleep before I have to get up again.
... the math is not on my side on that one.

But I keep finding out so many things I could usefully learn and such complicated systems where all the parts have to work right together always or Horrible Consequences and it is all fascinating
without being immediately useful.

Ah well.

I got like two hours sleep before I had to wake up for Cleaner Day so I have been noodling Pathfinder 1e as background for Pathfinder Earth 2026.
Because there are two options, and one goes wildly AU after 1918 when Golarion and all its gods knows about Earth. But the design philosophy of the 1918 adventure was that it was all true background for This Earth, just somehow only happening in the shadows and gaps.
Which makes no sense! If you have a planet of low level characters like this one then the entire predatory ecosystem of the outer planes becomes Very Interested. You have to get to here now without that ever making a Worldwound or a noticeable Cheliax.

You can get there via BtVS and Angel if you buy the whole 'not working despite us, working for us' framing Wolfram and Hart tried to sell. ... which is a specific kind of depressing.
And certainly Pathfinder Earth has the actual devil and his archdevil hierarchy playing here, because they play everywhere. But why not more openly? Why nothing that is not deniable?

It's all sneaky cold war stuff with different Powers acting around each other instead of openly against like they do in the Cage. Why?

one layer of answers says someone Lies Sleeping and they don't want to wake him up

but I am having fun with the idea that: it is paradox avoidance.
There is a specific future date that someone travelled back from (probably the Knight Commander of the Fifth Crusade because I play that game so many hours and because they are a soul plucked from the great beyond in a story with a god of paradox in the DLC)
until they reach that date the majority of the heavy hitters are actively trying to stay hidden (the god of paradox would obviously not, but the DLC has them in extra planar prison or dead again, so they are taking a time out)
after that date it is Open Season

I want to set up a magic school with end game gold to back it and change the Earth to be all post scarcity possibility

but

What are the other teams doing?

the answers i can come up with are
Everything I can think of but for different reasons

that's a lot of things.

And the world is in Pathfinder terms ignorant or disbelieving so vulnerable to like Legends of Tomorrow and the EYES app signing up for Some Things.

And I would want to use Pathfinder style magic to set up a Stargate style future where you can just go live on other planets because simples.
... but promising that with a different agenda ie dropping people into the abyssal breeding planes for mortal slaves? So Much More Simples. They don't have to do the complicated parts of finding viable homes and making them good to live in, because they don't want it to be good and they can drop you in their own back yards.

Mage the Ascension paradigm wars except it's a lot of demons trying to persuade you demons aren't real so they can do goa'uld shit on an Earth population scale.

And they have potentially been here more than a century setting this up! They wouldn't have to build from scratch, just go public!

... so this is a pretty plot heavy plot bunny but it gets difficult thinking up Counters for it. Telling the truth and offering a future made of hard work and freedom has to be made more appealing somehow...

Everything one high level adventurer could do let loose on Earth, all the factions of Golarion have had incentive to do for over a century, and the outer planes residents can get there to do it.

To look even vaguely Earth adjacent at that point takes *work*
but logically builds out a number of urban fantasy horror worlds from parts...

I started today idly wondering how far north I would have to move to get back to the weather I remember from thirty years ago (probably goth Whitby would work for a while), and then I ended up mildly frustrated once again at how John Constantine's house in Legends of Tomorrow isn't something you are likely to be able to place on a map in Britain.

Also someone is paying the council tax on that thing and that is going to be So Much Money.
So much.

I acknowledge it is cool and pointy and looks like the House of Mystery in the comics, but as someone who just read through over ten years of Hellblazer comics omnibus, I feel like this is just signs of how comics only refer to themselves now.

I am a grumpy, obviously.

The thing is though in those comics omnis John's income is precarious and intermittent, and when he gets chucked out of his flat because breakup he ends up homeless for a bit. Or before that when he went home and found some nasty murders he was a suspect for and took up with travellers and learned to bend a tent. His is a life with actions and consequences and occasionally being implied to be sleeping with someone primarily because it is warm with a solid chance of breakfast. That's a specific type of guy, right?

But then he isn't in Vertigo any more, he gets swept into the sliding timeline, Thatcher has ever less to do with his personal experience, and instead of a specific economic reality, he is whooshed off into suoerhero world. In superhero world people have a place to live because the story says so. Even going broke means they've only got their arrow cave to live in and a steady source of income so they don't have to quit their night job. The square footage stretches to television rules, and suddenly you have to wonder how rich Constantine is, if he ever converted it back to money. You can contrast the comics where he's forever scrounging, finding things to sell, trying to find somewhere that will take a bet, with even the half season of his own show, where he sends Chas out to make some bets once and now nobody in the show has to think about money ever again. Money ceases to be relevant, let alone a problem. They change his entire implied social class!

They erase the foundational difference between him and the non trenchcoat mages. They drag him out of his political framing. He ceases to be the same guy.

I mean from that perspective I actually like when they change the house into being a pocket dimension. A scooped out bit of hell to live in keeps things focused on the Deal, at least potentially, and not the bank balance. Which makes it really dodgy everyone else is so easy about using it.

A house with enough rooms for the Legends to stay in without sharing is a seriously swish house.

You go from a guy who grew up in a terraced house, to a guy with a mansion, and there is So Much Politics in just that decision.

But no, it looks cool, it looks like the House of Mystery, the story moves on.



Watching Torchwood I can see from the visual language of set dressing and what they out in the kitchen what kind of social background class background money a given character is meant to have. I can read those signs. I am aware I cannot translate the American version.

But this is more annoying, because everything communicates, but it doesn't make sense.




Okay, I should go have lunch. Also breakfast. At tea time.
... yes i am a grumpy indeed...

My town has a bookshop I had not been to because it faces the car park so someone always walking has to go down the alley on purpose. It is also an art gallery and coffee shop and the art is on the stairs and the coffee is where the main door is but there is another door for the bokks. I bought one of the cheap books from the apparently random assortment upstairs, but they said they can order anything, so I am going to go back with a list of Doctor Who books I've been meaning to get.

Bookshops are good.

Pretty good day.

Today I listened to Doctor Who The Beginning on BBC Sounds, which is I think https://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/doctor-who-the-companion-chronicles-the-beginning-756 but they don't mark it as a companion chronicle on the BBC.

It was fun. The Doctor and Susan accidentally change the entire course of evolution on The Earth by making it more chaos. As they would.

They also accidentally kidnap someone as their very first act leaving Gallifrey. Also as they would, but meaner.

The Sounds app is going to stop working on my TV and isn't showing up on my xbox where I moved the iplayer, so I guess Sounds is only for my phone now, which is annoying.

Also I started the xbox to watch the iplayer, had to do an update, got distracted and ended up playing Wrath of the Righteous on Hard again some more. Which is fine, I am up to collecting Woljif and Finnean, against the advice of the guides that say how to get maximum xp fast, but I did all the talking bits at the pub except Camellia and am ready to hit Kenabres next time I play. Instead of actually watching Doctor Who like I planned. Which I suspect is very likely to happen every time.

Things should just keep working with perfect efficiency and security forever.

But today was fun too.

It isn't just the flattery
it is that absolutely anything can be about my Special Interest.
Planning permission, taxes, immigration law, it is all Pathfinder Torchwood School now.


... I mean in my head it always was but the computer is playing along now...

I google for a pathfinder 1e magic weapon designer
google shows me the base rules and say it can design things noooo problem
i end up spending... well it doesn't matter how many minutes, they were all wasted
pointing out it has hallucinated every suggestion so far.

I mean a rule system where you have to note which book you got Liberating from because they named things the same thing is obviously not the easiest thing to learn
but the google answers has such confidence it has learned it real good

it reminds me of a small child with a bucket on its head wielding an empty wrapping paper tube as a lance
and not in the good way neither



no i am not impressed with me bothering to answer back. embarrassed and Got again, not impressed at all.

i should stick to books and spreadsheets

So the thing is Torchwood was right about AI
because there is a story where the Archive appears as several different holo versions of simulated team Torchwood, for the purpose of persuading someone to do a thing.
and most people seem to think that bit is cute because we get to hear the team again
but
we don't
we get to hear an AI exploit
where our monkey brains find it more convincing to hear something in multiple 'voices'
and can be talked into going along with the majority
even when the entire majority is
imaginary
or fake.

I do not like how chatty google search is now. I do not like how obvious the manipulation is. How brilliant I am if I just talk to the AI enough.

I should relisten the AI related Torchwood instead.

I am still writing pages. I restarted it in first person with a less fanfic cast so now I have limited the potential readers a lot, but writing has occurred.
... I like things I managed in third person plus also stuff in first person so likely another version awaits where I cunningly try and glue them together and mess it up again.

I keep circling around a set of thoughts about Pathfinder's Golarion and how much their trade goods are listed at. And the thing is Pathfinder, in a possible excess of being clever, already set an adventure path section on Earth. I haven't played it but as I understand it you travel in a dancing hut on chicken feet and meet Rasputin. Also all your spells and class features work. So we have a Pathfinder Earth. And it has been a while since Rasputin, but that doesn't mean travel got impossible. So you already have all the ingredients in canon Pathfinder to travel back and forth, with artefacts or high level spells but, sitting right there.

AI has introduced me to the word arbitrage. I don't quite get what it means yet but it seems to use it whenever I'm trying to do stuff like figure out how to math the problem
Pathfinder Golarion gold and platinum have a fixed value relative to each other, but earth has two wiggly lines. at current market values on Earth how much of your gold do you have to change into platinum on earth and into gold again on Golarion before you have the same amount of gold in each set?
And the answer is apparently 4% of your gold, because platinum here is 2.4 platinum to one gold, but there it is ten gold to one platinum, so you make 24 gold with one gold. ... okay I am tired and forgot the something something solve for x it showed me, but. 24 gold made with one gold. You take 24 gold and put it in a pile and do the thing with the platinum to only one gold and now your 25 gold is 24 and 24 gold. It is so many!

The absolute messes you would make of the economy.

And you can't just ignore this after you introduced historical Earth into your game! I mean you can keep it away from characters who can't Gate but once they know Earth is there the rest is thaumatology.

... you can obviously ignore this and almost everyone do, but...

There is a Pathfinder Earth where Pathfinder magic works. Either you go full AU since Rasputin or you make this magic very rare indeed.

And the gold to platinum hack isn't even the most money you can make, that one is diamond dust. Synthetic diamond and diamond dust break the baseline assumptions. You either need to start moving quantities it takes to make a spell go in a market responsive way or moving how much Earth gold it takes to restore, resurrect, or work miracles.

Which would make just a few changes!

Trade in Salt or Saffron and you have two more ways to break the economies of both planets.

"Arbitrage is the practice of buying an asset in one market and instantly selling it in another market at a higher price to make a risk-free profit" says the google.

So okay, the only way you don't trash both worlds current economies and economic systems is to introduce risk and delays somewhere. Make interstellar trade harder. ... I haven't read Starfinder but I presume this is a feature.

But the risk from travel is itself going to change both worlds. Earth has to deal with Old Ones in Pathfinder anyway, and messy planar engineering, so it isn't new, but the more likely it gets, the more our population is going to resemble Golarion's and not this Earth. So probably pretty rare. So what happens when a new gate between worlds starts getting attention?

If Golarion prices start moving around the game math breaks. It's all calculated as a fraction of wealth by level and as how much number go up magical gear you can afford. Make it all market wibbly and the math go boom. But it already goes boom for characters stuck on or originating on Earth.

But after Wrath of the Righteous I so want to do a trade where you introduce Sarkoris and their druids to everything Earth knows about biotech and fixing up wrecked ecosystems. Sure you need magic to remove Abyssal Contamination, but every other thing about the Scar is just, here is an ecosystem that actually relied on pollution but the tap is shut. So what is all that life going to do? And coming up with surviveable answers seems like a good time to go up a tech level or few with Earth tech.

But you bring back to Earth as much Numerian tech as you can scavenge. Sure everyone seeing the stuff on Earth will drive themselves nuts looking for the crash site, but they won't think magic or portals, because it is very clearly a crashed spaceship. The age would break a few paradigms but so far so cool.

So far so Torchwood obviously, with a dash of Stargate and accompanying colonialism problems.

Trying to avoid wiping out Sarkorian culture while dedicated to saving Sarkorian lives: the problem Gundrun was wrestling with already, and we just added more corners.

Even if the only connection at the time of Pathfinder canon is to the 1920s the problem remains compelling. Sarkoris is the work of generations to revive.

... just down the road has its own problems too, but.



I haven't read Starfinder. These may be Starfinder shaped thoughts. Interplanetary trade should be fun.

Interplanetary trade for the price of a Teleport Circle is Stargate with needing one gate per planet, and we know the elf gates don't even have that limitation. It's then Stargate but with no dialling codes only figuring out which objects it is keyed on.


Mostly I loop back to a long list of Ressurections a character could then afford, but, it is fascinating to see a problem with so many moving parts, in a rule system that would try and make them stuck as fast as possible.

I have been writing :-)
It is not good :-/
I have not yet told myself what the story is about so it is about the kitchen sink and everything :-(
also i have forgotten how to write a conversation where both people talk :-(((
but!
this is what a first draft is for :-D

i even know how to fix the conversation problem. once i know what the story is about i know why they are both there and what they both hope to get out of the interaction. then i distil the rambly half and turn the mind's eye around so the quiet one tries to make their thing happen. simples.



i have so many rambly ugh pages :-(

but I have pages for the first time in ages :-D