Who goes where
Nov. 23rd, 2018 04:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI have a feeling that's like Hungry but for thinking. It isn't Bored, not exactly, because reading or listening or watching doesn't seem to fix it. And it might be about Writing instead, which is almost the opposite of Hungry really, since it is about making stuff.
But I also have a sort of wading through treacle feeling about my brain, which is very unhelpful when one attempts to fix anything. Everything is heavy and slow and just not the thing anyway, and it frustrates.
So, trying to Ideas.
Started with a portal story, where there are doors out of one world and into another. ... have quite a few of those lurking. It's Stargate, only different. Or Narnia, obviously. Or an entire genre of portal fantasy.
But like Stargate has a particular set of people that would go through the gate, and those are The Best. Even with Atlantis where they're the subset of The Best which their countries could live without in the event of a one way trip, including the really annoying ones or the ones on their last warning. To get through the gate you have to be the sort of person who could do anything else they decide to do too.
Which is a bit boring. I mean, it's one set of stories, like Starfleet is staffed by excellence and only the best can even cadet, that's fun, watching people be The Best really competently and have things work out. But it is not, on the whole, the sort of situation this one can imagine oneself in. I mean, it's not relatable. I? The Best? At what? Not very many.
So there's other setups. Like GURPS, where the Banestorm swoops in, swaps you and however much of your world you paid the points for, and swoops out again.
... now I want to pause and figure out what kind of point value it would be for your entire detached house and possibly farm. Small factory? I guess if you pay for Bruce Wayne levels of wealth you do in this case get to take it with you. Small model village? How much wealth can one afford as a 250 point character with 50 points of disadvantages? Not that that's the only set of numbers one could play, I was just reading the Dungeon Fantasy rules tother day. Hmm, 75 points gets you the lowest level of multimillionaire, which is 1000 times starting wealth, and in TL8 ie now that is $20,000. So you would have $20,000,000 to spend, though "Realistically, if you have a settled lifestyle, you should put 80% of your starting wealth into home, clothing, etc., which leaves only 20% for 'adventuring' gear." And any reasonable multimillionaire is going to think $16,000,000 on your home and contents is pretty restrained.
... that much money could buy so many minions. Why doesn't everyone just buy money and IQ and sort everything out with that?
So if Stately Wayne Manor gets swept up in the Banestorm, you're going to be pretty well stocked. Maybe not as well stocked as someone deliberately colonising another planet on that amount of money, but, Stuff, You Can Has.
However, the Banestorm is random, so it tells you nothing about what kind of people are in the adventure. Like, it's any kind, that's the point. Which is grand, but not currently helpful.
So I was thinking, what people would choose to go through a portal? A very poorly researched or even unknown portal? A one way trip?
And that narrows it down a lot. People who think they know what they're doing, and, people who want to be Anywhere But Here.
Foolish and desperate.
So then I'm looking at my DVD collection and, like, every Doctor Who companion makes that choice, only with a tiny, tiny bit more predictability and reasonable expectation of a two way trip in some incarnations. The Doctor says Anywhere, All of Time And Space, and people go with. Because that's the best ever adventure, right?
So, Adventurers, the Foolish and the Desperate.
And, also, people who fancy the Doctor and think getting to know them is worth all the running around.
But most Companions expect to go home eventually, and kind of figure the Doctor knows what he's doing, so you get a happier filter than the one you'd get from an actual one way Gate. I mean, if it's one way, you can't know for sure it goes anywhere at all. Quite a lot of anywheres are the vacuum of deep space, after all.
... really and sincerely desperate, then.
Or, like, who would sell portal access? The Stargate is controlled by the US military, with orders from their civilian government, except most of the government doesn't know it exists. If travel between worlds is more of a magic back door gig, it could be controlled by ANYone, with ANY agenda. ... which, again, blank slates the story, that doesn't help. But, like, if they were people from the far side of the portal in the first place, they could be selling the trip home, and you'd just have to wonder why they, personally, do not take it. If the answer is 'no internet' then that is a fair and complete answer a lot of the time.
... people who go through the portal want out more than they want internet. woah. not relatable.
... I mean, people who want knowledge and getting to know new people could just go on the internet forever. there is so much internet. why would you ever portal?
... says I, who is bored, with the internet in front of me.
People staying here for the data don't give you many guidelines on who they'd sell door access to. If they have some kind of nefarious purpose that gets much more fun. Who would you want to send to your original world? Disruptive influences from here? Politicians? People who could get in the way of Conquering The World?
Or maybe they just need to use the gate to keep it open, so they'll happily send anyone, but they have Concerns about being caught and shut down, since if they miss a feeding day they're stuck here Forever.
Again, you are left wondering why they themselves do not nip home.
I have answers lined up for the character I was planning to write. Going to follow family, gate only allows one way travel because of awkward placement, people guarding the gate don't on the whole care who goes through, as long as it's someone.
But that still leaves the first family member to travel through as needing a reason. Looking for a fresh start, I reckon.
But looking over my DVD collections we have ever so many people who might run through a portal on accident while needing to get away from something, and quite a few who would take the gate to get away from things even if they didn't know what was on the other side, because they had a pretty good idea what was here. Telepaths in B5 for instance, we saw them take off for a whole new world because of oppression back home. Mutants, obviously, whatever the local idiom. Anywhere post apocalyptic.
... actually most of the stories wouldn't just take off through a portal, because they're trying to make a community better. Possibly a small one, but, mostly they'd want to see what help they cold get for their people. It's a rare TV character who at any point has none people. Most of them are Trying To Get Home if they currently have none people. Is different.
You could get entire communities who needed out. At several points in history, now included, you could very easily get that.
GURPS has roads between worlds that only open up for the right kind of people. Sometimes that kind is the desperately in need. Refugee roads, that leave an Yrth type patchwork world inhabited entirely by the lost. Reckon I've writ that down before. You just go through history and instead of taking the archetypal, which usually means the conquerors, you take the ones they conquered, and give them a fresh start. Entire continents full of people and ecosystems otherwise lost.
Plus orcs and so forth, apparently.
Because orcs are the persecuted and the lost on many worlds?
I dislike what most stories do with orcs. They just have an evil race of hungry shouty people, and don't notice the Problematic. Blue Rose has a previously enslaved race trying to make a place for themselves in an untrusting world, and probably notices the metaphor, but it's still really awkward. Orcs in most stories are the ones pushed to the edges and left to scrabble for survival on the wastelands, and then they get blamed for being primitive and violent. I mean, you come and hunt on the hunting grounds that just barely support the families already on them, you get a Reaction, you know? I don't see why they're an Evil Race and not just an economically disadvantaged group with prejudice painting a hat on them. ... I mean, obviously because in universe they just Are, but you know what I mean.
All these groups in SF which are hated and feared, the oppressed in this week's metaphor clothes, you could give them their own world each. And there would still be Story because now the problem is trying to manage without all the infrastructure currently maintained by seven billion people, plus all the problems that arise because people is people and suddenly they've got to be self governing. Even if you give them a replicator and no food pressure (or a magic item and same), you've got a group that's used to being brought together by outside pressures, suddenly released from those pressures, given freedom to figure out if they in fact have anything in common.
I mean the fun of any Colony story can be like 'We thought we left behind all the stuff that Sucks but it turns out we Suck too'. ... only in the middle, you have to fix it too or it gets boring. Like, we know humans are Like That, story is supposed to get out the other side.
So it's like going on a long holiday with your family, and to start with it's great, and then it is Less Great, and then you realise that barring new laws of physics (magic) these are the only people you will ever see ever again.
... varying degrees of Not Great At All.
Like, if there's less than ten thousand people then there's problems with genetic viability, and forty thousand is better. Wonder if that's why one of CJCherryh's books is forty thousand in gehenna? It's a colony. ... googled a bit and found many reviews but nothing about the number.
Gehenna is about humans meeting aliens and adapting. A lot of Cherryh's work is. Seems to me it's about how human is a very contextual idea. Put humans in new contexts and they'll change the definitions, and become alien to each other. Got to learn to learn people. Every shape of people.
A lot of the time I don't feel like colony stories need an alien other. Just put them somewhere empty and see what happens. That's a bit like post apocalyptic stories, but without the handy leftovers. Blank slate the world for people, see what they do.
... if my current state of mind is anything to go by, blue screen on the infinity of options, try and impose previous patterns however little use they become, hope someone else comes up with a good idea...
I mean it's bad enough when my science fiction group is basically one dude and my monthly conversation is all of five hours. What would you do if you went somewhere nobody wanted to talk about Doctor Who?
... portal adventures sounding less good...
Though of course you could take the Word of Who to new places. An e reader, an excellent memory, possibly even a few hard drives and some display devices, you could bring story to people who utterly lacked the shared context we take for granted.
... I liked the bit in one of the Han Solo books where he thinks he's running a cinema but finds he has accidentally started a religion...
... come to think, given my reaction to reading about Golarion's gods was 'become one', there'd be no 'accidentally' about it. I'd bring Pratchett and Duane and Doctor Who and see what kind of morality we can cobble together from these excellent parts. McGuire and Wynne Jones too. And probably Mickey Zucker Reichert, since they're the shortest explanation of the much more sensible angles on order/chaos/neutrality. Huff is good reading but I don't know if is good religion. Buffy too, there's so many baked in problematic assumptions it's meant to be challenging and instead kind of tweaks a little. Argh, how much of my DVD collection would I want to show...
... it's not really practical as The Good Book, I know, but it's where the arguments have been happening.
Highlander, romantic talmudic discussion with swords.
Anything ever about superheroes, with great power comes great responsibility... though would you really want to bring the x-men stories if you might be going somewhere that didn't have those prejudices?
I keep looking around and thinking of more books. Gemmell's got some good ideas. And Bujold. And... it would be easiest, obviously, to just pay some points and bring my whole library, but it isn't a very practical way to do the religion thing. I mean consider how difficult it is to sell someone on a new fandom even in these time rich days where everyone can access their own copy of the text. If you're trying to start something in a more fantasy world setting, you would have to start by explaining how watching Star Trek from the beginning is in fact worth their while, and that's no easy sell.
You'd want a condensed Good Bits Version to be your good book.
... tricky. Very tricky.
But human portable, possible to copy, and spread the word.
If you were importing fiction to use as a basis for a new religion on an alien or fantasy world, which fictions would you take?
Combine this with the previous questions about who exactly would go through a portal and you get an answer I've come to before: people who care about their stories more than is possibly good for them. I've had a plot bunny for ages about people who discover a Stargate and use it to run an SF convention off world. I mean, you might not go, but then again you might. Especially if you didn't believe it to start with. You'd just go for the usual reasons and wonder what the funny fx in the middle were about.
Being a deliberate missionary of the Word of Pratchett though... oh he'd hate that. I mean, new readers, yaay, but trying to tell people to Believe in him is a whole other thing.
I mean if I was approaching a novel problem I would draw solutions from available data, which is pretty heavily Star Trek and F&SF and especially Doctor Who. But it's different, having a story for all occasions, than just going out there to make other people fit your story.
If you're not doing as much listening as talking, you are part of the problem.
I think.
I mean sometimes the people doing the talking in these fantasy books are pretty pro killing everybody, and one feels one does not need to hear much of that to quite thoroughly understand it, but then again, the Hesper. Hope can be hiding in the darkest places. Anywhere there's people, there's people who are trying their best. So you've got your stories, but to choose the right stories for the right audience, the how about we try not killing people stories, you have to know your audience.
Is no good just telling stories about the group they're planning to kill. Either they'll ignore them or it'll be like that quote went by on tumblr today about how everyone watching Dumbo empathises with Dumbo, thinks they are Dumbo in their own stories, even if they're the biggest bullies. If you present a figure they can empathise with, there'll be a connection, but you still don't know what they're drawing from the story.
Still. Don't really want to listen to the Evil Kill Everyone people.
Must define Listen carefully so it is clear it doesn't mean Agree.
People who would take a one way trip with an unknown ending either think they know enough, or think there's no outcome they'd object to. Story people would probably be option one, thinking they know. It'll be just like their favourite things!
... like Dairine becoming a wizard and expecting an adventure to be All About Her as soon as she starts to travel. It is embarrassing when it is not. Many travellers would be Seeking their Fortune and going off to Be a Star, and expecting to Be Discovered pretty much straight away. So you're either telling that sort of story where the universe conspires to make them the centre, o you are not. Dairine fixes it by doing a spell so she would go where she in particular is in fact needed, but not everyone has access to that fix.
Landing in Narnia and being exactly the white kids the world needed is kind of creepy. Best not.
Ugh, I am just rambling here, hoping a story thread will catch.
Well, it's words, it's just not story yet.
I'll go do something else.
But I also have a sort of wading through treacle feeling about my brain, which is very unhelpful when one attempts to fix anything. Everything is heavy and slow and just not the thing anyway, and it frustrates.
So, trying to Ideas.
Started with a portal story, where there are doors out of one world and into another. ... have quite a few of those lurking. It's Stargate, only different. Or Narnia, obviously. Or an entire genre of portal fantasy.
But like Stargate has a particular set of people that would go through the gate, and those are The Best. Even with Atlantis where they're the subset of The Best which their countries could live without in the event of a one way trip, including the really annoying ones or the ones on their last warning. To get through the gate you have to be the sort of person who could do anything else they decide to do too.
Which is a bit boring. I mean, it's one set of stories, like Starfleet is staffed by excellence and only the best can even cadet, that's fun, watching people be The Best really competently and have things work out. But it is not, on the whole, the sort of situation this one can imagine oneself in. I mean, it's not relatable. I? The Best? At what? Not very many.
So there's other setups. Like GURPS, where the Banestorm swoops in, swaps you and however much of your world you paid the points for, and swoops out again.
... now I want to pause and figure out what kind of point value it would be for your entire detached house and possibly farm. Small factory? I guess if you pay for Bruce Wayne levels of wealth you do in this case get to take it with you. Small model village? How much wealth can one afford as a 250 point character with 50 points of disadvantages? Not that that's the only set of numbers one could play, I was just reading the Dungeon Fantasy rules tother day. Hmm, 75 points gets you the lowest level of multimillionaire, which is 1000 times starting wealth, and in TL8 ie now that is $20,000. So you would have $20,000,000 to spend, though "Realistically, if you have a settled lifestyle, you should put 80% of your starting wealth into home, clothing, etc., which leaves only 20% for 'adventuring' gear." And any reasonable multimillionaire is going to think $16,000,000 on your home and contents is pretty restrained.
... that much money could buy so many minions. Why doesn't everyone just buy money and IQ and sort everything out with that?
So if Stately Wayne Manor gets swept up in the Banestorm, you're going to be pretty well stocked. Maybe not as well stocked as someone deliberately colonising another planet on that amount of money, but, Stuff, You Can Has.
However, the Banestorm is random, so it tells you nothing about what kind of people are in the adventure. Like, it's any kind, that's the point. Which is grand, but not currently helpful.
So I was thinking, what people would choose to go through a portal? A very poorly researched or even unknown portal? A one way trip?
And that narrows it down a lot. People who think they know what they're doing, and, people who want to be Anywhere But Here.
Foolish and desperate.
So then I'm looking at my DVD collection and, like, every Doctor Who companion makes that choice, only with a tiny, tiny bit more predictability and reasonable expectation of a two way trip in some incarnations. The Doctor says Anywhere, All of Time And Space, and people go with. Because that's the best ever adventure, right?
So, Adventurers, the Foolish and the Desperate.
And, also, people who fancy the Doctor and think getting to know them is worth all the running around.
But most Companions expect to go home eventually, and kind of figure the Doctor knows what he's doing, so you get a happier filter than the one you'd get from an actual one way Gate. I mean, if it's one way, you can't know for sure it goes anywhere at all. Quite a lot of anywheres are the vacuum of deep space, after all.
... really and sincerely desperate, then.
Or, like, who would sell portal access? The Stargate is controlled by the US military, with orders from their civilian government, except most of the government doesn't know it exists. If travel between worlds is more of a magic back door gig, it could be controlled by ANYone, with ANY agenda. ... which, again, blank slates the story, that doesn't help. But, like, if they were people from the far side of the portal in the first place, they could be selling the trip home, and you'd just have to wonder why they, personally, do not take it. If the answer is 'no internet' then that is a fair and complete answer a lot of the time.
... people who go through the portal want out more than they want internet. woah. not relatable.
... I mean, people who want knowledge and getting to know new people could just go on the internet forever. there is so much internet. why would you ever portal?
... says I, who is bored, with the internet in front of me.
People staying here for the data don't give you many guidelines on who they'd sell door access to. If they have some kind of nefarious purpose that gets much more fun. Who would you want to send to your original world? Disruptive influences from here? Politicians? People who could get in the way of Conquering The World?
Or maybe they just need to use the gate to keep it open, so they'll happily send anyone, but they have Concerns about being caught and shut down, since if they miss a feeding day they're stuck here Forever.
Again, you are left wondering why they themselves do not nip home.
I have answers lined up for the character I was planning to write. Going to follow family, gate only allows one way travel because of awkward placement, people guarding the gate don't on the whole care who goes through, as long as it's someone.
But that still leaves the first family member to travel through as needing a reason. Looking for a fresh start, I reckon.
But looking over my DVD collections we have ever so many people who might run through a portal on accident while needing to get away from something, and quite a few who would take the gate to get away from things even if they didn't know what was on the other side, because they had a pretty good idea what was here. Telepaths in B5 for instance, we saw them take off for a whole new world because of oppression back home. Mutants, obviously, whatever the local idiom. Anywhere post apocalyptic.
... actually most of the stories wouldn't just take off through a portal, because they're trying to make a community better. Possibly a small one, but, mostly they'd want to see what help they cold get for their people. It's a rare TV character who at any point has none people. Most of them are Trying To Get Home if they currently have none people. Is different.
You could get entire communities who needed out. At several points in history, now included, you could very easily get that.
GURPS has roads between worlds that only open up for the right kind of people. Sometimes that kind is the desperately in need. Refugee roads, that leave an Yrth type patchwork world inhabited entirely by the lost. Reckon I've writ that down before. You just go through history and instead of taking the archetypal, which usually means the conquerors, you take the ones they conquered, and give them a fresh start. Entire continents full of people and ecosystems otherwise lost.
Plus orcs and so forth, apparently.
Because orcs are the persecuted and the lost on many worlds?
I dislike what most stories do with orcs. They just have an evil race of hungry shouty people, and don't notice the Problematic. Blue Rose has a previously enslaved race trying to make a place for themselves in an untrusting world, and probably notices the metaphor, but it's still really awkward. Orcs in most stories are the ones pushed to the edges and left to scrabble for survival on the wastelands, and then they get blamed for being primitive and violent. I mean, you come and hunt on the hunting grounds that just barely support the families already on them, you get a Reaction, you know? I don't see why they're an Evil Race and not just an economically disadvantaged group with prejudice painting a hat on them. ... I mean, obviously because in universe they just Are, but you know what I mean.
All these groups in SF which are hated and feared, the oppressed in this week's metaphor clothes, you could give them their own world each. And there would still be Story because now the problem is trying to manage without all the infrastructure currently maintained by seven billion people, plus all the problems that arise because people is people and suddenly they've got to be self governing. Even if you give them a replicator and no food pressure (or a magic item and same), you've got a group that's used to being brought together by outside pressures, suddenly released from those pressures, given freedom to figure out if they in fact have anything in common.
I mean the fun of any Colony story can be like 'We thought we left behind all the stuff that Sucks but it turns out we Suck too'. ... only in the middle, you have to fix it too or it gets boring. Like, we know humans are Like That, story is supposed to get out the other side.
So it's like going on a long holiday with your family, and to start with it's great, and then it is Less Great, and then you realise that barring new laws of physics (magic) these are the only people you will ever see ever again.
... varying degrees of Not Great At All.
Like, if there's less than ten thousand people then there's problems with genetic viability, and forty thousand is better. Wonder if that's why one of CJCherryh's books is forty thousand in gehenna? It's a colony. ... googled a bit and found many reviews but nothing about the number.
Gehenna is about humans meeting aliens and adapting. A lot of Cherryh's work is. Seems to me it's about how human is a very contextual idea. Put humans in new contexts and they'll change the definitions, and become alien to each other. Got to learn to learn people. Every shape of people.
A lot of the time I don't feel like colony stories need an alien other. Just put them somewhere empty and see what happens. That's a bit like post apocalyptic stories, but without the handy leftovers. Blank slate the world for people, see what they do.
... if my current state of mind is anything to go by, blue screen on the infinity of options, try and impose previous patterns however little use they become, hope someone else comes up with a good idea...
I mean it's bad enough when my science fiction group is basically one dude and my monthly conversation is all of five hours. What would you do if you went somewhere nobody wanted to talk about Doctor Who?
... portal adventures sounding less good...
Though of course you could take the Word of Who to new places. An e reader, an excellent memory, possibly even a few hard drives and some display devices, you could bring story to people who utterly lacked the shared context we take for granted.
... I liked the bit in one of the Han Solo books where he thinks he's running a cinema but finds he has accidentally started a religion...
... come to think, given my reaction to reading about Golarion's gods was 'become one', there'd be no 'accidentally' about it. I'd bring Pratchett and Duane and Doctor Who and see what kind of morality we can cobble together from these excellent parts. McGuire and Wynne Jones too. And probably Mickey Zucker Reichert, since they're the shortest explanation of the much more sensible angles on order/chaos/neutrality. Huff is good reading but I don't know if is good religion. Buffy too, there's so many baked in problematic assumptions it's meant to be challenging and instead kind of tweaks a little. Argh, how much of my DVD collection would I want to show...
... it's not really practical as The Good Book, I know, but it's where the arguments have been happening.
Highlander, romantic talmudic discussion with swords.
Anything ever about superheroes, with great power comes great responsibility... though would you really want to bring the x-men stories if you might be going somewhere that didn't have those prejudices?
I keep looking around and thinking of more books. Gemmell's got some good ideas. And Bujold. And... it would be easiest, obviously, to just pay some points and bring my whole library, but it isn't a very practical way to do the religion thing. I mean consider how difficult it is to sell someone on a new fandom even in these time rich days where everyone can access their own copy of the text. If you're trying to start something in a more fantasy world setting, you would have to start by explaining how watching Star Trek from the beginning is in fact worth their while, and that's no easy sell.
You'd want a condensed Good Bits Version to be your good book.
... tricky. Very tricky.
But human portable, possible to copy, and spread the word.
If you were importing fiction to use as a basis for a new religion on an alien or fantasy world, which fictions would you take?
Combine this with the previous questions about who exactly would go through a portal and you get an answer I've come to before: people who care about their stories more than is possibly good for them. I've had a plot bunny for ages about people who discover a Stargate and use it to run an SF convention off world. I mean, you might not go, but then again you might. Especially if you didn't believe it to start with. You'd just go for the usual reasons and wonder what the funny fx in the middle were about.
Being a deliberate missionary of the Word of Pratchett though... oh he'd hate that. I mean, new readers, yaay, but trying to tell people to Believe in him is a whole other thing.
I mean if I was approaching a novel problem I would draw solutions from available data, which is pretty heavily Star Trek and F&SF and especially Doctor Who. But it's different, having a story for all occasions, than just going out there to make other people fit your story.
If you're not doing as much listening as talking, you are part of the problem.
I think.
I mean sometimes the people doing the talking in these fantasy books are pretty pro killing everybody, and one feels one does not need to hear much of that to quite thoroughly understand it, but then again, the Hesper. Hope can be hiding in the darkest places. Anywhere there's people, there's people who are trying their best. So you've got your stories, but to choose the right stories for the right audience, the how about we try not killing people stories, you have to know your audience.
Is no good just telling stories about the group they're planning to kill. Either they'll ignore them or it'll be like that quote went by on tumblr today about how everyone watching Dumbo empathises with Dumbo, thinks they are Dumbo in their own stories, even if they're the biggest bullies. If you present a figure they can empathise with, there'll be a connection, but you still don't know what they're drawing from the story.
Still. Don't really want to listen to the Evil Kill Everyone people.
Must define Listen carefully so it is clear it doesn't mean Agree.
People who would take a one way trip with an unknown ending either think they know enough, or think there's no outcome they'd object to. Story people would probably be option one, thinking they know. It'll be just like their favourite things!
... like Dairine becoming a wizard and expecting an adventure to be All About Her as soon as she starts to travel. It is embarrassing when it is not. Many travellers would be Seeking their Fortune and going off to Be a Star, and expecting to Be Discovered pretty much straight away. So you're either telling that sort of story where the universe conspires to make them the centre, o you are not. Dairine fixes it by doing a spell so she would go where she in particular is in fact needed, but not everyone has access to that fix.
Landing in Narnia and being exactly the white kids the world needed is kind of creepy. Best not.
Ugh, I am just rambling here, hoping a story thread will catch.
Well, it's words, it's just not story yet.
I'll go do something else.