The Ramble

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Truncated 30 days of World-building…

In browsing the NaNoWriMo forums, I came across a link to Stephanie Bryant’s 30 Days of World-building.  I decided “Huh, that could be interesting” — especially in light of one of the two ideas I have for my NaNoWriMo project this year (the project that parallels the colonization of the Americas is sounding more and more attractive the more I think about it versus “Universe,” a project that’s going to require a lot more research and thought since it takes place in a much, much nearer future and deals with MMORPGs, MMORPG culture, computer/gaming technology, ect).

So, that having been said, I’m going to do some world-building for the terraformed planet colonists have begun to settle–one a war will be fought over–for one of the potential projects, since the other is pretty much Earth about ten or so years in the future.

 

Day 1 of world building involved making a list of climates and feelings of climates; I’m skipping it, really.

Day 2 – “Jot down ten plot devices that relate to weather, and what you think they do to the story”

– Nor’easter – A sudden cold blow off the coast ravages settlements along one of the coastlines, wrecking some of their precious wind-catchers (which provide ecologically sustainable power for the settlements).

– Spring floods – The spring melt out of the mountains wasn’t ancitipated to be quite this quick or this large–some of the hydroelectric dams are overwhelmed, which cause flooding.

– Major earthquake leads to fires and coastal flooding–and a tsunami that wipes out an island settlement twenty miles off the coast. Some people will lose loved ones in the ensuing mess.

– Drought – east of a mountain range, alluevial plains suffer a major drought, causing food shortages throughout the colonies. This may cause some debate over whether it’s a good idea to build some irrigation devices or not — and still maintain ecological stability.

– Dust storms – the summer dry season (drier than anticipated) results in dust-storms. Some people will pick up and leave, others will become sick because of the dust and what’s in it (bacteria, ect).

– Hurricane – The terraformed world of one of the invading congloms has never experienced a hurricane–they think it’s just a big thunderstorm. While the locals have battened down the hatches and riding out the storm, the conglom sends down landers full of troops–most of which crash either along the coast or in the ocean.

– Long winter – An unusually long winter causes food shortages and stresses the communities on the colony world. Cannibalism will NOT happen, but there’s always the spectre of it.

– Summer storms – Sudden summer thunderstorms sweep down out of the mountains and bring down trees and wind-catchers. Some of the colonists (especially the newer ones) have never seen anything like it and have to depend on second and third generation settlers to help them figure out how to deal with these wild storms — and, more importantly, how to predict them.

– Tornado – A major settlement is completely obliterated by a tornado, and no one realizes what hit the settlement until later. It may have been an educational center that’s hit, which would cost the colony some major brainpower.

– Wind shears – these can easily wreak havoc with landers of any kind, which could work both for and against the colonists. The colonists come to understand their weather, whereas any invaders might well not have any idea how to handle it.

Day 3: “Close your eyes and think about what kind of feeling you like to have when you write or read.  Write down four words that fit into that feeling: two adjectives, a verb, and a noun.”

Tenuous
Dark
Imperiled
Hope

These are supposed to match up with a climate for day 1.  I skipped Day 1, and these terms are really very limiting anyway, so…moving on!

Day 4 will be tackled tomorrow….Day 4 involves geological history.  It’ll be fun times.

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Torg update – Session of 1 October 2009

Ren is a very, very upset kitten right now.  But no one gets to see her cry.

Here we were after last week, thinking that everything was fine, we’d killed the Hunter and he couldn’t hurt us anymore.  We all walked in thinking that all that had to be resolved in the facility was Grace getting Rosebud (the Wraith calls it “Void” — I think I like “Rosebud” better) out of the weird science machine that was masking its presence and then we could leave.  Sufficient to say, we were more than a little bit wrong there.

The Hunter decided it was going to take some of us with it to the grave and quite literally exploded.  Most of us dodged the worst of the blast, but things very quickly went from bad to worse.  The Hunter had decided it was going to take out one of the tanks with it–a tank full of industrial acid.  Most of the others had dodged away from it.  Ren had the misfortune of dodging toward it.  And trying to dodge falling acid.  And getting shoulder-checked out of the way.

By the time she turned around, the only thing she could see where Grant must have been was a very large hole in the ground.

She froze up.  I’m not sure anyone realized she completely froze up, but that’s pretty much what happened.  Christian and Mable jumped down the hole to look for (whatever was left of) him.  By the time they managed to get a little ways away from the hole, Ren managed to recollect herself enough to shine her flashlight down, trying to give them a little more light.

Christian found Grant, but didn’t actually see what had happened to him.  Just a figure, heard a voice that sounded awful telling him to stay back.  Grant was scribbling something on some paper.  Then he looked up toward Christian.

 Grant: “Tell them both I’m sorry.”

And then he ran.  Christian and Mable tried to find him, to no avail.  Ren is, in a word, devastated.  But at least he’s still alive.

About that time, before we got Christian and Mable out of the hole, DeSoto comes back carrying Mei, who is quite literally chewing on his cyberarm.  Ren starts muttering a few choice words and gives Mei some happy drugs (mostly a sedative so she stops gnawing on Fred).

While all of this is going on, we can all feel something, and that something is Void interrogating Grace and trying to figure out what’s what.  Grace ends up getting at least part of Void/Rosebud back for long enough to prove to it that her (and our) intentions are honorable.

We pull Christian and Mable out of the hole.  Christian tells Fred and Ren what Grant said, since the message was for the two of them.  And then they tell us about the paper.  There’s a single word written on it.

Legacy.

None of us are sure what it means. Mable has it. Ren might take it from her–Ren doesn’t have anything of Grant. She never did.  Of course, she might not.  She might quietly nurse the hurt and the hope that he’s okay, somehow, somewhere, and that he’ll come back.

Ren ended up punching DeSoto in the chest (he was the closest thing to punch) in frustration and pain.  He invited her to keep doing it if it helped.  But in turning toward Fred, Ren spotted something else that could be a good vent for her wrath.

The Wraith.

The grabs him by his collar and stares at him and starts yelling.  No one interferes in her screaming, though several want to.

Ren: How is it that bad things like that happen to good people, but you’re still here?  Why?  Why?

It was all pretty downhill from there.  Ren ended up with a gun to his head but couldn’t pull the trigger.  She did the Tom Hanks Twitch (from A League of Their Own — I’ll have to find a clip of it on YouTube) and backed off.

And then we started to make our way out of the facility.  When we’re all tramping out the door, we hear something behind us.  Mei goes running back in with weapons out while Christian is yelling for the squishie folk to get the hell out (which we do; there’s a comical image in my head of Ren, Grace, and Mable just kind of standing outside the door to the facility looking at each other funny).  And what does Mei turn her weapons on?  A cowering diplomat decked out in North Face who’s been looking for us–for Amaeren Colby (who isn’t a sergeant, dammit, she’s a Captain, get it right!) because she was connected to Amarant (why he was looking for Amarant, we’ve reallynot quite gotten a good answer on).  Ren’s mask of leadership goes back on and she’s in command of herself, at least for the moment.  We take the guy along (Alexander; he says he was working at one of the Italian embassies but Ren is definately suspecting otherwise, given the sniper rifle he has in his possession) and head to where Wraith stashed some vehicles–it’s an interesting question, is he on our side or is he not?  What game is he playing?

He said he made a promise to Mariah, a promise he kept.  That’s why he’s doing what he’s doing.  And he’s afraid of her.  Afraid of whatever she’s fragmented into.  That much is almost certain.

So we pick up a pair of armored vehicles and then we turn back south again to pick up some of Xander’s gear from his Volvo that he left parked somewhere.  Mable cannibalized part of it for components for a new helmet for Mei.  Mei is looking forward to having a new helmet.

We camped for the night shy of the storm front between Core Earth and Tharkold.  We relaxed for a little while–Ren went off and had a good cry in private, Christian and Fred sparred a little, Mable worked on the helmet.  Everyone that night except for Mei had disturbing, twisted, frightening dreams (which David left up to our imaginations–Ren’s were definately about Grant and Bad Things, Christian’s were about being powerless to stop Bad Things from happening to his children, ect ect).  Ren’s pretty sure that someone aimed that at the group, but she’s not sure who, or how.  It wasn’t normal for that sort of thing to happen near a storm front–realities don’t reach beyond their boundaries like that.  At least, not that she knows of.

In the morning, we passed through the storm front and into Tharkold.  And that’s where we left it for the evening.  Ren has plans to talk to Fred about some things–the sort of things that Grant could never tell her, but maybe Fred knows something.  And maybe between the two of them they can figure out what “legacy” means.

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Waxing philosophical on paper coffee cups

I am hopelessly addicted to caramel macchiatos.  I’ll admit it.  I have been for nine years, since I was an undergrad at Grand Valley State and discovered them there.  Since leaving GVSU, I’ve found the best at Starbucks–which is to say I can find them at all.  Coffee Beanery and Caribou Coffee don’t make them.  God only knows why.

I know I could make them at home, but I don’t.  Probably because I’m too lazy to steam milk and we don’t have an espresso machine.  Which is okay.  I’ll willingly fork over my $3-$4 a pop and stimulate the economy for my nirvana in a cup.  I drink other things, too (white mochas, peppermint mochas, pumpkin spice lattes, and the “London Fog”–an earl grey latte, all of these among other things) but I generally default to a caramel macchiato.  I can walk into my “usual” Starbucks at John R and 16, or the one at the mall, and they generally know what I’m going to order–and they know me by name, rather than by my drink.

The past couple days on the way to the university, I’ve stopped at another Starbucks, the one at Rochester and South.  I looked at my cup today and got to thinking.  At that Starbucks, they print up a label for your cup and slap it on there and hand it to the barista making the drinks.  At the other Starbucks I go to, they take a marker and write it on your cup.  For some reason, I like that way better.  Maybe it’s because it feels more hand-crafted, with the half-intelligible symbols for a drink scribbled on the cup.  More leisurely, more old-timey (as if Starbucks could feel “old-timey”).  I don’t know.  I just like it better.  Maybe I’m strange.  Maybe it’s just…one of those things, a little quirk.  But that’s what I think I like better than this little printed label that says in plain English what I’ve ordered.

So give my my arrows and my three letter codes for what I’ve asked for.  I know what an upside down caramel macchiato looks like on my cup.  And any self-respecting Starbucks customer should know what their code looks like, too.

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On Google books…

Checking my university e-mail is always an adventure, in part because of the RSS feed that gmail automatically puts at the top of my e-mail list (Oakland University’s e-mail is powered by gmail).  Today, I hit a link about the continuing controversy over Google Books and the negotiations, concerns, and the like brought up by its existence.  That link led me to this one, which just begged to be shared.

The author of the article, working on a book right now about green technology, is a visiting scholar at the University of California.  And he makes some good points.  Library catalogue software as it stands these days is limited, though it’s come light years since card catalogs (yes, I remember those, and moreover I remember how to use them–I worked in my high school’s library for the equivelant of two years).  Keywords don’t tell you what’s in a footnote, or an index–and the index doesn’t always tell you what’s in a book, if the book has an index at all.

That’s where things like Google Books come in.  A completely searchable engine for books, especially those out of copyright?  I’ve become in the past year an avid user of the Internet Archive, which has been all but invaluable to my research.  Google Books, in its limited capacity, has become equally useful to me when dealing with older tomes and even primary documents such as the Rolls Series and collections of Welsh poetry–even works by William of Malmesbury and Geoffrey of Monmouth are to be found between the two.  This sort of thing is invaluable to a researcher.

Publishers and authors are concerned about the fate of the publishing industry and having enough funds to keep it going–and I can understand and sympathize with this.  Traditional libraries are concerned because they may become very quickly obsolete (I pray this never happens–there’s something about actually having the book in your hands).  But at some point, the cost-benefit analysis has to match up with the reality of the situation as well as examining who’s using the service–and for what.  I imagine that a lot of the people who have been using Google Books are in fact researchers, writers, and scholars working on their next project using a combination of all the resources available to them–databases like JSTOR and FirstSearch, the Internet Archives, their local and university libraries, and Google Scholar and Google Books.  It’d be  a very sad thing if Google Books was shut down for good, and would set back the ability for researchers to do their work by miles.

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Torg update – Session of 24 September 2009

So, it was confirmed.  The subbasements?  Probably the place where Bad Things happened to Mei (Sorry Mei!).  Ren is disturbed by this.

What’s worse?  The Hunter was lairing down there, we found out.  We uncovered some files in the computer systems that hadn’t been totally gutted in the complex that gave us some information on the D.E.A.M.O.N. project.  As previously stated:  Ren is disturbed.

On top of that, the Hunter set traps for us.  We made our way through the first sub-basement and didn’t find nearly as much as we’d hoped.  From there, the only way down was an elevator shaft that we had to climb down the service ladder of.  It was probably a trap, we knew it was probably a trap, but damn Ren’s medical ethics and her desire to be a do-gooder (she keeps thinking if she can understand what was going on, she can reverse it, or at least mitigate its effects).  We went down.  Down to what was probably the seventh subbasement, where we found a mainframe (at least I think it was pretty close to the mainframe) and found out even more disturbing information.

And then we busted through a wall and found a room with ceilings about thirty feet high and twenty to twenty-five foot tall propane tanks (they weren’t actually propane tanks, they just looked like propane tanks standing on end.  In the middle was a Mad Science device like two we’d seen in Egypt–one in the place where we rescued the Mystery Men, the other when we stopped a sacrifice outside of Cairo.  Of course..the Hunter was waiting for us.  So while Mei tried to taunt it out into the open and the others tried to help her kill it, Ren and Grace headed for said mad science device–hopefully to decipher what it’s all about.

Enter the Sorrow, Grace’s nemesis, a Church Executioner.  But not.  Suspicisions have been confirmed: it was The Wrath all along.  Ahh, Alexander, what are we going to do with your sorry arse?  He baited a trap for us, and not a bad one–but one that might work out to our advantage.  Grace’s symbiote, “Rosebud” is in the Mad Science device.  Ren decided that Grace was more than capable of handling Wraith and headed toward the sounds of violence to help the rest of her cohorts.

Not that they really needed her help.  At best, she distracted the Hunter so it could ultimately be killed.  At worst, she was useless.

But the effect of Mei’s Playing for the Moment was epic.

In the past, I’ve been the only one who’s played for the moment–I’ve done it twice, once when I called my first reality storm (Frog God, grrr, frog god) and then a second time while we were in what was left of the United States.  It was almost the end of the chapter, so it was a good time for Mei to try her luck.

So, epic pwning of the Hunter.  Ren started shooting at it, which distracted it.  Mable got the beast with a molotov cocktail.  Christian and Fred rushed in and got a couple of solid blade hits on the beast.  Grant knocks its helmet off.  And Mei leaps out of her armor suit, kneels on its shoulders, and unloads her gun arm into its head as it flailed around on fire.

I think it’s pretty cooked, now.  I’m okay with this.

And that’s pretty much how it ended, since by that time it was 11 and poor Liz had to be to work before the crack of dawn today.  Mike’s new character still hasn’t appeared.  Çest la vie.  We’ll see what happens.  The resolution on Grace, the Wraith, and Rosebud is going to be first thing next week, probably followed by destroying the installation.  But we shall see.  Sometimes, things just end up getting in the way.

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Torg update – Session of 17 September 2009

So, we were without one of our tanks to start the session last week, which…could have gone worse.  We were, in fact, attacked by some sort of sky pirates from Nile who Mable happens to have a serious grudge with (the leader was responsible for her fiancee’s death).  The battle resulted in some anti-climax, since Mable didn’t actually get to blow up her nemesis and we couldn’t stop the zepplin from crashing–but at least Frederico DeSoto’s awake now!

From the crashed airship we made our way to the D.E.M.O.N. complex where Ren used to work.  We didn’t manage to get too deep into the ruins of it (the place had been wrecked by something from the outside) before we called it a night (combat takes a long time, especially with us).  Of course, in the sub-basement we walked into is a set-up like the one where Mei was experimented on.  Ren is suddenly very glad her security clearance wasn’t that high, because she doesn’t think she has the stomach for that shit (and really doesn’t want to find out if she really does or not).

Oh, and Grant and Ren are having yet another fight.  Sigh.  Par for the course, I suspect.

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Reconnecting with my research

It’s no secret to a lot of people who know me–in the wake of not getting one last little bit of feedback from my late advisor at the end of the Winter 2009 semester, I took a long break from my thesis work.  It was something I probably shouldn’t have done, but I kept expecting to get somethingfrom him after I sent one last update to him this past April.  But nothing.  We corresponded via e-mail about some housekeeping things regarding my thesis and he said he would get to the submission, but he never got back to me.  In some morbid way, I wonder if it’s sitting there on his hard drive with a mess of fantastic comments just waiting to never be sent.  But I suppose I’ll never know.

For the past week since I heard about his death, I’ve been avoiding really trying to work on my thesis, instead focusing on a paper I need to submit for the Great Lakes History Conference, deadlined in mid-October.  But the research overlaps a bit when I start reading about Edward I, and that’s tripped synapses in my brain that have pointed me back toward my thesis.  This is dangerous, considering that I don’t even know that I’ll even have this be my thesis come next week, or come the end of the OUAAUP strike, whichever happens first (personally, I’m hoping it’s settled after negotiations today so I won’t actually miss any of my classes this semester).  It’s in part hinging on a conversation I need to have with Karen Miller, the head of the history department here at Oakland University.  But in the end, I don’t know what’s going to happen other than I have a pile of research and information floating around in my brain that may turn into a book someday, regardless of whether or not it becomes my master’s thesis.  I’m sure if I have to change gears and start another project, I can find something.  I’m just not sure at this point what.

When I went to Dr. Finucane a couple years ago to talk about potential thesis ideas, I brought with me a short list of potential topics.  I’d originally wanted to do something with the Crusades, but I don’t speak French or Arabic (to be honest, even my Latin is shaky at best, though I’m working on that) so it would be very difficult for me to do that sort of research.  So changing gears, I brought the following list: 

–          Impact of the War of the Roses on English society

o       Potentially limited to women, church, or the aristocracy?

–          Hundred Years War

o       Religion and politics

–          Folk beliefs and spirituality in late medieval England

o       Mysticism in England?

o       English Saints?  Shifting views of what was seen as evidence of the divine working through a person or related to a person? (ties into witchcraft, ect)

–          Kingship and royalty in England, late medieval

o       Touches on the political and diplomatic; alliances through marriage, blood claims to “foreign” territory – importance of women in this context?

o       Political legitimacy and the tools used to convince people of such

–          The Black Death

o       Impact on cultural norms and religion

–          Mystics and miracles in late medieval England

–          Pilgrims and saints

–          Left field: Arthurian mythos and its impact on English culture orthe historical evolution of the Arthurian mythos

o       Use of the Arthurian mythos by English royalty

o       Folklore and stories of medieval England

 

 

I had hesitated to even bring to him that last topic–about the Arthurian mythos.  But I’ve been fascinated with it for easily ten years, so I put it on there, never dreaming that he would look at that and say “Hm.  That’s interesting.  Why didn’t you think you could do that, again?”  Necessary cutting brought the project down to a manageable size and focus, bringing me to where I am now, looking at the uses of the Arthurian legend under (and mainly by) Edward I and Edward III (and consequently the failure to use it by Edward II).  Looking back, I think I’d write on any of those subjects, except for perhaps the Black Death–which is fine, since the Plague has been done to death (no pun intended).  But if I have to change my thesis topic, would I be able to do any of those?  The Hundred Years War, perhaps, since my second reader is a specialist in French history.  But this having been said, I don’t read or speak French (though I have to learn).  It would be a difficult project to gather primary source material for.

The medieval period is something I’m fascinated by and would rather write about than the Renaissance, which I have a feeling would be the period I would end up having to write about, simply based on the makeup of the department.  But we’ll have to see.  I was blessed to work under one of the most preeminent medieval historians of the past thirty years, but cursed to lose that mentorship before my thesis was complete.  Only time will tell what’s going to become of the work I began under his tutelage.