Stream of Thought - Fantastic Mundanity

"Don't teachers realize that it's important to let students know about the hazards of cutting off hydra heads and how two will take the place of each one cut? What are they teaching, math?" - Dan Shive

BRAINSTORM/CRAZY THINKINGS TIME/WHATEVER

Okay, so in stuff like Harry Potter et al. The world they live in is magical, but the magic is only mundane to a select group, whereas the approach I'd like to go with is that the fantasticalities (if it's not a real word, it SHOULD be!) are ALL mundane. People are taught the riddles of the sphinx as much for personal safety as for fun, and lessons on irregular verbs may be delayed on account of some manner of beast breaching the walls, and where dungeons might indeed expand themselves under the earth, drawn towards populace. The idea of sentient or at the least living architecture is a lot of fun really.

At the moment we're kinda going for what, then? Magic and dungeons and beasts are mundane to everyone, but so is electricity and mechanics, as well as potential combinations thereof.
...That'd probably be somewhat difficult considering science and magic are like order and chaos.
Maybe you can "trick" magic? Like the whole thing where Mike and Jerry refuse to analyse Penny Arcade because they believe it shouldn't have worked, and that analysing it will dispel whatever IS keeping it aloft.

Magic's a tricksy thing at the best of times, it's probably fond of working when it's least likely to, entirely out of spite.

So, this is the sort of world we'd like to make to live in. How do we explore it?
The obvious route from the quote that set this off is of course to set it IN a school, but a) Harry Potter did it better and b) It's tacky, like how Airplane! seems tacky now because everyone else beat their style of comedy into the ground and then people forgot that they practically pioneered it. Like how things would go if people forgot who created Pythonesque humour. Luckily that one's built into the name. ANYWAY. We'll put "school" on the metaphorical docket anyway because it might be possible to eke something out of it with sufficient exploration of the concept.


This sprang to mind shortly after reading the original quote.

Another route could be to explore this world through the eyes of a family man (or woman? Maybe, though I've not tried writing a female protagonist...), but yeah. Then we could explore the perspective of an adult trying to make a living in this world. Problem is that a family man has a lot of ties, making it difficult to put him into any sort of adventure. Perhaps the severing of those ties is what drives him TO the adventure? *Docket++*

Hmm, who or where else might it be interesting to explore this from... a position of power MIGHT work, though that's inherently difficult due to it adding a need to explore the position as well as the world, and frankly with power comes politics, and writing political drama is one of the darker circles of hell.


---
Will probably start writing and exploring this some later today, either blogging about it later or a day or two from now. In any case, this is a thought process, be afraid, be very afraid, etc etc

Also if anyone has ideas, tell me? It's fun playing around with a concept, especially when there's multiple people on the ball.

Chronicle - Dissonance of Values

Neon lights filter through the rain, each heavy droplet refracting a technicolor universe, as the rumbling of thunder announces to the blackened sky just how long it plans to stay. A lone figure, wearing garb from an era long passed even in our own time, steps dilatorily down a hard gray path, the echoing wooden clack of her gata smothered by the sky falling, an innumerable amount of drops all finding their natural resting state all at once. The park trees, once lush with sakura blossom, given away with such poetically charged abandon in these months, now lay bare, clutching jealously the few leaves that haven't flown the coop, thin delicate branches like so many clawing fingers. A thin smile crosses her face at the irony of something so beautiful looking so sinister once laid bare, as she tightens the grip on her umbrella, the pale domesticated wood striking contrast with the dark and free branches looming overhead. Her smile disappears as quickly as it arrived as the reminder that there is work to be done rumbles overhead.

She reaches a clearing, the clack of each step all but choked by splashing now as she looks to the moon, a comforting constant, as unchanging as she. An earth-shaking thud robs the sakura of the last of their leaves, and a roar that is altogether not thunder pierces the natural harmony.
There is work to be done, she repeats to herself, as the glint of steel between the halves of her umbrella reflects the looming neon so far above.

In which all the volumes are turned up.

Rally-Ho, all you pointy-hats out there, and time-specific salutations to the rest of you. Today's blogpost, following my Oh-So-Very-Fleeting attention span, may or may not cover what I've been playing recently, plans to do some D&D writing, and how rusty I am at programming. Possibly my thoughts on finally getting around to watching SatAM at an age that I can actually recall and appreciate things such as "plot".

Okay, because I've been playing a LOT recently we'll try space things out. First off the bat, I've been going back through Warioware: Touched! (I'm sorry, the Nintendo marketing department already beat you to EVERY "touch me" joke going years ago, deal with it.) and it's still as awesome as I remember. For those of you not hip to the gist of it, Wario, evil counterpart of Mario who somehow avoids being considered a recolour unlike Sonic's counterpart, Shadow (maybe because he practically predates colour, his debut being on the Game Boy, or maybe because he actually plays totally differently to Mario) sees the DS and decides that because it has two screens, making a game for it will net him twice as much money as a GBA game (the GBA Warioware game was also "made" by Wario) (Holy crap what's with all the brackets today? Geez) and puts out yet another collection with his friends and acquaintances. So it's an excuse plot. What this means for you is that you'll be playing a series of "microgames", short minigames, many of them taking less than 5 seconds each, with increasing difficulty and speed. It's madcap, and can get tough in places, especially when you're not sure what you're meant to do at first and end up losing as a result, but it's damn fun and the game never takes itself seriously. Ever. We're talking about a game where a "boss game" might have you moving the Earth around space dodging meteors and bullets before going toe-to-toe with several celestial bodies. It's totally worth picking up, if not this then the GBA title(s) or the Gamecube, or if you're pretty sure you'll like it/have the money to risk it/find it cheap, there's also WarioWare: Smooth Moves, though I've not played that personally and can't comment on whether or not the the Wiimote controls are painfully bad as usual.

Okay, next item on the agenda, D&D writing. I can't recall whether or not I've mentioned on here before that I'm into D&D... *checks*

Wow. I didn't. Huh. Well, I'm into D&D, there you go.

So, anyway. I got the 4E core rulebooks a while ago in anticipation for a friend's birthday party and though they didn't get put to use (PROTIP: when asking your sister for help, make sure the glue she offers for affixing maps to isn't dried up and lumpy. Urgh.) I've been considering doing some more writing ever since. Well, I've been reading Wil Wheaton's blog, messing around with D&D Online (actually pretty damn cool, though I think it still has a ways to go if it has aspirations of dethroning WoW) and playing a few games that've been giving me ideas (maybe I'll mention them lower down) and if I don't get SOMETHING out there soon I may simply explode. Which would be messy, and nobody wants to clean up a Philshroom cloud. Of course then I hafta find someone to actually PLAY with. I'm considering going into more detail about my D&D 4E experiences, but let's leave that for a time when I don't have a whole bunch of things on my to-mention list.

ANOTHER GAME! After I got all silvers on Warioware (you NEED them to go for gold, I'm not slacking :P) I turned my attention to Custom Robo Arena. I'm not all the way through yet, far from it, but so far it's pretty damn cool. I'm reminded of Sonic Battle (GBA) with the whole customisation element, but I think the key teaching here that Custom Robo succeeds at when Sonic Battle failed, is that battling is never a grind. At the start of Sonic Battle, when you have no "parts" to customise your character (Emerl, a sophisticated and ancient robot that may or may not have destroyed the civilization that created it), it SUCKS to play as him, which you are forced to do to advance the plot. And I'm not understating. I have a high tolerance for sucky gameplay, which may be why these reviews are usually so positive, and they were just a drag, a test I was forced to endure because super awesome character customisation is a form of crafting system. And it was awesome once you had lots of parts. Just not until then. Custom Robo, on the other hand, starts at awesome and works its way up. This makes you feel like the enemies ARE actually getting harder rather than you shaking your fist and saying "Oh, if only the Random Number Gods would bless me with an ability to walk more than half a pixel per second, I'd show you what for!". I've far from mastered the battle system, but it's pretty intense, both in combat speed and in terms of how much ballistics can fill the screen at any given time, and it's very satisfying to charge into an opponent, juggle him into the air and dash away before he has a chance to recover. I won't say whether it's worth getting or not because I've not finished the main game yet, but I'm having a lot of fun with it.


Speaking of Sonic-related stuff, I watched SatAM the other week while wracked with some sort of lurgy, which probably did reduce my appreciation a little, what with the flitting in and out of lucidity but nonetheless it was pretty damn awesome. It does have the nasty side effect of making me want to give Sonic X a fair go though, an affliction perhaps even more fatal than my lurgy, but I'm willing to pay that price. The show has a pretty heavy anti-industry message flowing through it, but then again the classic games do the same, just with a mute protagonist. That's not saying that the world of the games is the same as the SatAM world though, oh no. This is a Mobius, but not the one from any of the other media, with the exception of the Archie Sonic comics, which I'm pretty sure I'd have to pay through the nose to get over here (they're in Forbidden Planet, where I believe the de facto currency is appendages or similar paraphenalia) and as such what you see in the twentysomething episodes released is entirely what you get, no back catalog needed. It's also somewhat interesting how while Sonic is definitely in the protagonist role, his supporting cast are all well developed, and they even managed to fit a romance in there for the older audience, though since we're talking SONIC here I'm not sure WHAT audience they're looking for that isn't going to be screaming "cooties!" or "furries!".

I have more games to talk about, but I've got a scrollbar now so they can wait. Have fun y'all. I should write some actual FICTION on here again? Remember when this place was gonna be for FICTION? Wow that takes me back.