Before computer died, I had just finished revising and preparing a post for the Slacktiverse and was about to look for beta readers. After computer meltdown I knew I wouldn't be up for the electronic discourse that beta reading involves, and I didn't want to postpone the post until computer was well since it was originally suggested I make it into a Slacktiverse post two years ago.
I figured it had waited long enough. Thus I posted it without the extra scruitiny I feel a Slacktiverse post generally deserves (the Slacktiverse is, after all, not my personal blog.) Thus it is up now.
So, if you're looking for something from me to read, in this time of primary computer loss, I recommend clicking over to There are normal people, and then there’s you – A post about inequality in language.
This reminds me that I was also supposed to make Under control vs. under control (warning for Frozen and Wreck it Ralph spoilers) into a Slacktiverse post. I even remember looking for the best version of a scene from The Avengers to include because Banner/Hulk also fits.
Definitely not going to happen when I'm bereft of primary computer, but maybe saying it will make it more likely that I get to it eventually.
Wednesday, September 30, 2015
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Bunking together (a superhero story)
[On a meta note, it's like all posts are on a delay now because I'm writing this Monday morning before the post I wrote Sunday night actually posts. Still meta: my computer successfully charged overnight so I have powered time to write this and hopefully actually preform the data migration I was frantically setting up last night.]
[On an "about this fiction fragment" note, this takes place in a universe with a lot of superheroes and supervillians and the population has gotten used to this fact. Think the DC or Marvel main universe, except not subject to someone else's copyright.]
Corv exited her portal on Pent's balcony. Others in her team might have been hesitant to go to A-list heroes for guidance, but she had no such compunctions. She consciously walked with normal footfalls so the sound would alert Pent to her presence.
When Pent turned toward her, Corv realized she'd never seen Pent in a completely casual state before.
Corv knew that Pent's name was after the Penthesilea of myth, and knew that Pent was in fact Amazonian royalty like her namesake. Corv also knew, unlike the movie makers of the present day or the majority of sculptors of old, that Amazons practiced a form of ritual body modification.
It wasn't the coercive stuff of myth, at least not anymore. Now it was done only to the willing, only to those old enough and knowledgeable enough to meaningfully consent, and performed with the best medical technology had to offer.
Still, it was a bit of shock, one Corv suppressed out of respect, when she saw that Pent only had a single breast. In public, in this allegedly civilized part of this world, Pent always appeared to have a right breast as well. It was what was expected, and heroes were especially attuned to what the populace expected to see.
"Welcome to my dwelling, Corvida of the Outland Reach" Pent said. "What brings you here? I hope there are no troubles with your team."
"All is well with my work, Pent progeny of Otrera," Corv said, returning Pent's formal address. "I come here for personal reasons."
"Oh?" Pent asked.
Corv easily recognized that this was a neutral invitation to further explain. Some found Pent's highly nuanced mode of speech difficult to interpret, Corv still didn't understand why. Every word Pent spoke had clear meaning. Often, as now, much clearer meaning than found in the more numerous words of "ordinary" people.
"I would not trouble you with such matters," Corv said, "however, as you know, in our profession it can be difficult to find more traditional help for various matters."
"Of course," Pent said.
"I have additional difficulties as I was raised in relative isolation and am therefore often unprepared for the frequent, nigh constant, social interaction that seems to define earth culture in this area," Cov said.
Pent nodded.
"I do not know with certainty that you can provide me help," Corv said. "But as you come from a warrior culture I thought you were more likely than most others I might contact to have insight on the confusion and complexities that can result from comrades bunking together."
Pent raised an eyebrow, a slight motion, but for Pent it was a clear sign of surprise and being caught off-guard by the topic. "Bunking together?" she asked.
"Just so," Corv responded.
"Perhaps we could discuss this over tea," Pent said, gesturing for them to enter her apartment.
"That would be nice," Corv said. It was rather unlike her normal mode of speech, and she was well aware of the shift and allowed it to happen. She was relieved that Pent was willing to listen to her concerns, and she considered this act of allowing feeling to translate directly into words without being passed through her normal filters and formalizations a signal to Pent of how grateful she was for being given Pent's time.
"This tea is wonderful," Corv said.
"You should say that to Seegserd, it brews it itself," Pent said, gesturing to the mass of flesh and slime that had served them.
"Your tea is excellent, Seegserd," Corv said.
Seegserd gurgled.
"Perhaps it is not that I am too kind," Corv said, "but that you are overly humble, for I do believe this is the finest tea I have ever tasted."
Seegserd made more gurgles.
"You are quite welcome," Corv said.
Seegserd excused itself and left on a trail of mucus in a way that was something between a a slide and a slither.
"I thank you for speaking kind words to Seegserd," Pent said.
"They were simply the truth," Corv said.
"I believe you; I have never known you to speak falsely," Pent said. "However most are put off by Seegserd's appearance."
"While concerns over safety meant I was not permitted outside of the encampment I was raised in," Corv said, "it was near a trade route and I saw, from a distance, many caravans in my youth. By chthonic standards, particularly those of the Outland Reach, Seegserd's appearance is quite normal."
"Would that earth were that accepting of those who look different," Pent said, "but you did not come here to discuss that."
"No," Corv said. "Though I find I don't know where to begin."
"You said that you wished for insight on the experience of comrades bunking together," Pent said. "When and why did this bunking together start?"
Corv sighed. "It started with Aster having insomnia. The reasons were both personal and work related, but they are not mine to share. She initially tried to deal with the problem on her own but met with no success.
"Her non-terrestrial biology meant that local remedies were useless, and her people have not pursued pharmaceuticals outside of the limited areas of antibiotics and anesthetics," Corv said. "Apparently, for all mental afflictions they found that psionic intervention by skilled practitioners was a much more reliable solution."
"But Aster had no access to such practitioners so far from her home," Pent said.
Corv nodded. "After a particularly long and tiring day of work in which we had to deal with a multiplicity of threats to the city with no down time between them, she came to me. She thought that perhaps if she were not in a room alone, she might be able to sleep.
"I was honestly too tired myself to think clearly, simply let her set up a blanket and pillow on the floor because it seemed the path of least resistance," Corv said. "It worked. Though fitful, she was able to sleep that night. It did not, however, magically cure her insomnia."
Pent nodded.
"When it became clear that in order to sleep Aster would need to continue sharing a room for an extended period we attempted multiple solutions, but in the end the only viable long term solution was to let her share my bed," Corv said. "The fitful sleep she had been getting became truly restful, even serene, sleep, and that is where the situation currently stands."
"And the complexity and confusion you mentioned?" Pent asked.
"I don't know whether Aster came to me simply because the other members of our team are male, because she thought that sharing a room with me would be more likely to allow her to sleep than sharing a room with one of the others, or because of a particular desire to be close to me," Corv said.
"You haven't asked her?" Pent asked before Corv could say more.
"I've wanted to," Corv said. "However, my powers are strongly tied to my emotions, Aster's are tied to her own, and thus if things blow up the explosion could be literal --also: possibly quite large. Without knowing her feelings it would be difficult at best to avoid the kind of misstep that might result in such."
"I see the problem which that presents," Pent said. "What makes you think such a conversation might be so emotionally fraught?"
"Aster has had a traumatic history with various forms of rejection, which questioning could be interpreted as," Corv said, "and I am entirely unclear regarding my own feelings on the matter."
"I apologize for interrupting you before you conveyed all of the pertinent information," Pent said.
"You apology is accepted," Cov said, "and your query was entirely reasonable."
"What is the extent of the current situation?" Pent asked.
"Aster has been sharing my bed for over a month," Corv said. "At first I was uncomfortable with the extended physical proximity to another, especially when I was in as vulnerable a state as sleep. I allowed it only to help a friend and colleague, and because the inherent danger in the work we do would be greatly magnified if Aster were in a perpetually sleep deprived state.
"I have since ... changed my opinion on that," Corv said, "but the change itself concerns me because I think it might not be due to the familiarity brought on by time in a new routine but instead by feelings of ..." Corv found she was at a momentary loss for words. "Affection of a sort different from friendship, or perhaps mere attraction.
"This in turn makes me worry that if Aster doesn't feel reciprocal feelings I might be taking advantage of the situation in a way she might see as a betrayal, or at least ... um ... creepy," Corv said. "On the other hand if she does feel romantic affection or attraction toward me, then since I'm unsure of my feelings for her, I might be the one not to reciprocate, which presents its own problems, and neither am I sure how I feel about sharing a bed with someone who might feel that way toward myself.
"Further, even in the event that we both feel the same way toward each other, that could still potentially be devastating because if I broach the subject when we don't actually feel anything other than friendship it could unnerve Aster, and in the other case if two people with superpowers governed by their emotions started a relationship any rough periods, which are inevitable in all relationships, would be potentially calamitous for everyone in the vicinity."
Corv took a deep breath.
"And all of this is surrounded by the things that I do know for sure: if Aster tries to sleep alone she fails, if Aster shares my room but is at a distance she sleeps fitfully, if Aster shares my bed she sleeps well and so do I," Corv said. "In our line of work being well rested can make life or death differences that are quite literal.
"I think that covers all pertinent information," Corv said, "but before you respond I'd like to point out that it would be a very good idea if our community could get one or more therapists who are cleared to know sensitive information and are prepared to have patients ranging from science experiments to Hell-spawn to people out of their time or from civilizations that don't officially exist to aliens such as Aster.
"I'd like it if she were able to work out the core problems at the root of her insomnia with a professional," Corv said, "and I'd certainly have liked it if there were someone I could have talked to about all of this."
"I agree that the lack of care our community provides for mental health is deplorable," Pent said. "I have made some efforts to change it, though I fear they weren't as high of a priority for me as they should have been." Pent looked away for a moment. "It is still something that I intend to work toward, but it is always a difficult and risky proposition to bring civilians into our world."
Corv nodded.
"I can offer you no advice regarding the complications created by your powers being tied to emotion," Pent said, "but that is not why you came to me.
"I do have experience with how bunking together can complicate relationships that seemed simple, and I do understand the confusion such a situation can cause," Pent said. "And primary thing I can tell you is that the two of you need to talk about it, in spite of the danger that entails.
"I am hopeful that such a talk will go well for both of you," Pent said, "but if it does not I am sure that waiting to have it will not make things any easier and may well serve to make them significantly worse.
"If you are concerned about the effects of your powers, perhaps you could arrange to have such a discussion in an isolated area, but there is no shortcut or way around. You have to confront the issue with Aster.
"It would be optimal if you were able to understand your own feelings first," Pent said, "because fairness dictates that you be willing to share your own if you ask her to disclose hers. But don't let trying to understand yourself be an excuse for putting off dealing with things. Also, be prepared for the possibility that she may be as confused as you are."
Corv nodded.
"You simply have to talk to her, there is no other way," Pent said. "And don't worry about your duties. One thing that I have always tried to impress upon others in our line of work, particularly younger ones, is that if you don't take care of yourself you won't be able to help others.
"If things do go badly, and you, Aster, or both of you need some time off, the rest of us can find a way to fill the gap for however long is needed."
Corv nodded and stood, "Thank you. I fear I've taken too much of your time already."
"No," Pent said, "you haven't."
Pent stood herself and visibly made sure to look Corv directly in the eyes. "Some of the others may view themselves as your mentors or your elders, but I've always viewed you and yours as friends. The only reason I won't freely give my time to a friend is if another friend needs it more."
Corv smiled, it was a slight smile but Corv knew that Pent would see it for the expression that it was: the biggest smile she ever gave outside of truly extraordinary circumstances, and bowed. "Thank you again. I will take my leave of you now."
"I do have one final thing to say," Pent said, "if you would like to hear it."
"I would," Corv said.
"You said 'confusion and complexity', both of these are inevitable parts of any relationship," Pent said. "They also both can be addressed in the same way."
"Talking," Corv said.
"Just so," Pent said. "Confusion about another can be addressed by talking to the other. Confusion about oneself can benefit from the insight of another, and confusion about your relationship can be alleviated by discussing it between yourselves. Complexity is often the result of unknowns, which can sometimes become known through conversation about the situation."
Corv nodded.
"Thank you for your time and your words," Corv said.
"Thank you for your company," Pent said.
Corv opened a portal; Pent's apartment was left behind.
Some notes:
This is inspired, unashamedly so, by a story I once read about Raven and Starfire called Sleeping Arrangements. While I consider this to be original and if I ever get to writing more of this situation it will continue to not map onto the inspiration (Aster did not randomly plant a kiss on Corv, for example), I've put references to the origin in as a sort of respectful nod.
Corvids are members of the crow family, which is surprisingly large (blue jays, for example, are part of the crow family) with "Corvidae" being the name of the crow family as a whole. Corvidae is a plural feminine noun. The singular is a "Corvida". Moreover, the word comes from the Latin "Covus" which means "Raven".
"Cthonic" means underground which is the traditional location for Hell. Hell being where the character Raven grew up.
"Aster" means "star". I thought that Asterphlox/Asterpyr (Starfire) would be taking the reference thing too far. Also, for some reason, I liked the principle heroes of this particular ficlet having monosyllabic names. Seegserd gets multiple syllables because it's just an ordinary person who happens to have a job brewing tea for Pent in her sprawling and lavish, but undescribed, apartment which I have just decided is not a penthouse apartment because Pent living in a penthouse would be brain hurty absurdity.
The part of Sleeping Arrangements that most inspired this was Raven going to Wonder Woman, an Amazon Princess, for advice. Hence Pent being Amazon royalty named after the famous Penthesilea.*
Seegserd is entirely of my own invention, because good things shouldn't always be pretty. There's no reason that creatures of nightmare or fever dream can't have hearts of gold. Even when they don't have literal hearts. And why shouldn't a hideous mass brew really good tea?
* Why Pent instead of Penth?
The Ancient Greek theta which we transliterate as "th" was actually closer to how we say "t" than tau, which we transliterate as "t". So the beginning of Penthesilea would actually sound like "Pent"
Why don't we transliterate it that way? Multiple reasons.
The transliterations are traditional and predate the English language so we tend to stick with them.
Additionally tau is an unaspirated stop. It's not that English doesn't have unaspirated stops, it totally does, it's that English is constructed in such a way that English speakers often have difficulty recognizing and reproducing unaspirated stops on a conscious level. Every unaspirated stop is is an allophone to the corresponding aspirated stop with the result that English speakers often can't tell the difference between the two.
We need a way of speaking where we can tell the difference between a tau and a theta so in English speaker pronounced Ancient Greek we pronounce things like theta, phi, and so forth the way that they look to us. The weird exception is chi. Chi we stick with which is why "Chris" (chi-rho-iota-sigma) has an initial sound completely different from "change". The "ch" in change was picked up in Old French and I think you'll find that "ch"s that sound that way generally were, the "ch" in Chris is from the Greek, and I think you'll find that "ch"s that sound that way generally are. But for most Greek letters transliterated as something-h, we knowingly butcher the pronunciation in order to have a language we can speak in a way that makes sense to us.
Sometimes tradition (not conscious choice) leads to things being very fucked up. Neither Greek nor Latin had a soft C. Greek had kappa which became our K, Latin just had C which sounded the same way. It made perfect sense to transliterate K as C to the Romans because the two letters sounded the same.
But now we have Julius Caesar (try Yulius Kaisar instead, you'll be a hell of a lot closer) and Cicero who we pronounce Sisero in spite of the correct thing being Kikero. That's just butchering the Latin. For the Greek that comes through the Latin consider that centaur should be kentaur and cyclops should be kyklops.
Want to have your mind truly blown?
Ancient Greek had no stand alone z sound.
It was zd. Zdeus not Zeus. Do classicists say that? Hell No. We say, "Zeus."
[On an "about this fiction fragment" note, this takes place in a universe with a lot of superheroes and supervillians and the population has gotten used to this fact. Think the DC or Marvel main universe, except not subject to someone else's copyright.]
Corv exited her portal on Pent's balcony. Others in her team might have been hesitant to go to A-list heroes for guidance, but she had no such compunctions. She consciously walked with normal footfalls so the sound would alert Pent to her presence.
When Pent turned toward her, Corv realized she'd never seen Pent in a completely casual state before.
Corv knew that Pent's name was after the Penthesilea of myth, and knew that Pent was in fact Amazonian royalty like her namesake. Corv also knew, unlike the movie makers of the present day or the majority of sculptors of old, that Amazons practiced a form of ritual body modification.
It wasn't the coercive stuff of myth, at least not anymore. Now it was done only to the willing, only to those old enough and knowledgeable enough to meaningfully consent, and performed with the best medical technology had to offer.
Still, it was a bit of shock, one Corv suppressed out of respect, when she saw that Pent only had a single breast. In public, in this allegedly civilized part of this world, Pent always appeared to have a right breast as well. It was what was expected, and heroes were especially attuned to what the populace expected to see.
"Welcome to my dwelling, Corvida of the Outland Reach" Pent said. "What brings you here? I hope there are no troubles with your team."
"All is well with my work, Pent progeny of Otrera," Corv said, returning Pent's formal address. "I come here for personal reasons."
"Oh?" Pent asked.
Corv easily recognized that this was a neutral invitation to further explain. Some found Pent's highly nuanced mode of speech difficult to interpret, Corv still didn't understand why. Every word Pent spoke had clear meaning. Often, as now, much clearer meaning than found in the more numerous words of "ordinary" people.
"I would not trouble you with such matters," Corv said, "however, as you know, in our profession it can be difficult to find more traditional help for various matters."
"Of course," Pent said.
"I have additional difficulties as I was raised in relative isolation and am therefore often unprepared for the frequent, nigh constant, social interaction that seems to define earth culture in this area," Cov said.
Pent nodded.
"I do not know with certainty that you can provide me help," Corv said. "But as you come from a warrior culture I thought you were more likely than most others I might contact to have insight on the confusion and complexities that can result from comrades bunking together."
Pent raised an eyebrow, a slight motion, but for Pent it was a clear sign of surprise and being caught off-guard by the topic. "Bunking together?" she asked.
"Just so," Corv responded.
"Perhaps we could discuss this over tea," Pent said, gesturing for them to enter her apartment.
"That would be nice," Corv said. It was rather unlike her normal mode of speech, and she was well aware of the shift and allowed it to happen. She was relieved that Pent was willing to listen to her concerns, and she considered this act of allowing feeling to translate directly into words without being passed through her normal filters and formalizations a signal to Pent of how grateful she was for being given Pent's time.
* * *
"This tea is wonderful," Corv said.
"You should say that to Seegserd, it brews it itself," Pent said, gesturing to the mass of flesh and slime that had served them.
"Your tea is excellent, Seegserd," Corv said.
Seegserd gurgled.
"Perhaps it is not that I am too kind," Corv said, "but that you are overly humble, for I do believe this is the finest tea I have ever tasted."
Seegserd made more gurgles.
"You are quite welcome," Corv said.
Seegserd excused itself and left on a trail of mucus in a way that was something between a a slide and a slither.
"I thank you for speaking kind words to Seegserd," Pent said.
"They were simply the truth," Corv said.
"I believe you; I have never known you to speak falsely," Pent said. "However most are put off by Seegserd's appearance."
"While concerns over safety meant I was not permitted outside of the encampment I was raised in," Corv said, "it was near a trade route and I saw, from a distance, many caravans in my youth. By chthonic standards, particularly those of the Outland Reach, Seegserd's appearance is quite normal."
"Would that earth were that accepting of those who look different," Pent said, "but you did not come here to discuss that."
"No," Corv said. "Though I find I don't know where to begin."
"You said that you wished for insight on the experience of comrades bunking together," Pent said. "When and why did this bunking together start?"
Corv sighed. "It started with Aster having insomnia. The reasons were both personal and work related, but they are not mine to share. She initially tried to deal with the problem on her own but met with no success.
"Her non-terrestrial biology meant that local remedies were useless, and her people have not pursued pharmaceuticals outside of the limited areas of antibiotics and anesthetics," Corv said. "Apparently, for all mental afflictions they found that psionic intervention by skilled practitioners was a much more reliable solution."
"But Aster had no access to such practitioners so far from her home," Pent said.
Corv nodded. "After a particularly long and tiring day of work in which we had to deal with a multiplicity of threats to the city with no down time between them, she came to me. She thought that perhaps if she were not in a room alone, she might be able to sleep.
"I was honestly too tired myself to think clearly, simply let her set up a blanket and pillow on the floor because it seemed the path of least resistance," Corv said. "It worked. Though fitful, she was able to sleep that night. It did not, however, magically cure her insomnia."
Pent nodded.
"When it became clear that in order to sleep Aster would need to continue sharing a room for an extended period we attempted multiple solutions, but in the end the only viable long term solution was to let her share my bed," Corv said. "The fitful sleep she had been getting became truly restful, even serene, sleep, and that is where the situation currently stands."
"And the complexity and confusion you mentioned?" Pent asked.
"I don't know whether Aster came to me simply because the other members of our team are male, because she thought that sharing a room with me would be more likely to allow her to sleep than sharing a room with one of the others, or because of a particular desire to be close to me," Corv said.
"You haven't asked her?" Pent asked before Corv could say more.
"I've wanted to," Corv said. "However, my powers are strongly tied to my emotions, Aster's are tied to her own, and thus if things blow up the explosion could be literal --also: possibly quite large. Without knowing her feelings it would be difficult at best to avoid the kind of misstep that might result in such."
"I see the problem which that presents," Pent said. "What makes you think such a conversation might be so emotionally fraught?"
"Aster has had a traumatic history with various forms of rejection, which questioning could be interpreted as," Corv said, "and I am entirely unclear regarding my own feelings on the matter."
"I apologize for interrupting you before you conveyed all of the pertinent information," Pent said.
"You apology is accepted," Cov said, "and your query was entirely reasonable."
"What is the extent of the current situation?" Pent asked.
"Aster has been sharing my bed for over a month," Corv said. "At first I was uncomfortable with the extended physical proximity to another, especially when I was in as vulnerable a state as sleep. I allowed it only to help a friend and colleague, and because the inherent danger in the work we do would be greatly magnified if Aster were in a perpetually sleep deprived state.
"I have since ... changed my opinion on that," Corv said, "but the change itself concerns me because I think it might not be due to the familiarity brought on by time in a new routine but instead by feelings of ..." Corv found she was at a momentary loss for words. "Affection of a sort different from friendship, or perhaps mere attraction.
"This in turn makes me worry that if Aster doesn't feel reciprocal feelings I might be taking advantage of the situation in a way she might see as a betrayal, or at least ... um ... creepy," Corv said. "On the other hand if she does feel romantic affection or attraction toward me, then since I'm unsure of my feelings for her, I might be the one not to reciprocate, which presents its own problems, and neither am I sure how I feel about sharing a bed with someone who might feel that way toward myself.
"Further, even in the event that we both feel the same way toward each other, that could still potentially be devastating because if I broach the subject when we don't actually feel anything other than friendship it could unnerve Aster, and in the other case if two people with superpowers governed by their emotions started a relationship any rough periods, which are inevitable in all relationships, would be potentially calamitous for everyone in the vicinity."
Corv took a deep breath.
"And all of this is surrounded by the things that I do know for sure: if Aster tries to sleep alone she fails, if Aster shares my room but is at a distance she sleeps fitfully, if Aster shares my bed she sleeps well and so do I," Corv said. "In our line of work being well rested can make life or death differences that are quite literal.
"I think that covers all pertinent information," Corv said, "but before you respond I'd like to point out that it would be a very good idea if our community could get one or more therapists who are cleared to know sensitive information and are prepared to have patients ranging from science experiments to Hell-spawn to people out of their time or from civilizations that don't officially exist to aliens such as Aster.
"I'd like it if she were able to work out the core problems at the root of her insomnia with a professional," Corv said, "and I'd certainly have liked it if there were someone I could have talked to about all of this."
"I agree that the lack of care our community provides for mental health is deplorable," Pent said. "I have made some efforts to change it, though I fear they weren't as high of a priority for me as they should have been." Pent looked away for a moment. "It is still something that I intend to work toward, but it is always a difficult and risky proposition to bring civilians into our world."
Corv nodded.
"I can offer you no advice regarding the complications created by your powers being tied to emotion," Pent said, "but that is not why you came to me.
"I do have experience with how bunking together can complicate relationships that seemed simple, and I do understand the confusion such a situation can cause," Pent said. "And primary thing I can tell you is that the two of you need to talk about it, in spite of the danger that entails.
"I am hopeful that such a talk will go well for both of you," Pent said, "but if it does not I am sure that waiting to have it will not make things any easier and may well serve to make them significantly worse.
"If you are concerned about the effects of your powers, perhaps you could arrange to have such a discussion in an isolated area, but there is no shortcut or way around. You have to confront the issue with Aster.
"It would be optimal if you were able to understand your own feelings first," Pent said, "because fairness dictates that you be willing to share your own if you ask her to disclose hers. But don't let trying to understand yourself be an excuse for putting off dealing with things. Also, be prepared for the possibility that she may be as confused as you are."
Corv nodded.
"You simply have to talk to her, there is no other way," Pent said. "And don't worry about your duties. One thing that I have always tried to impress upon others in our line of work, particularly younger ones, is that if you don't take care of yourself you won't be able to help others.
"If things do go badly, and you, Aster, or both of you need some time off, the rest of us can find a way to fill the gap for however long is needed."
Corv nodded and stood, "Thank you. I fear I've taken too much of your time already."
"No," Pent said, "you haven't."
Pent stood herself and visibly made sure to look Corv directly in the eyes. "Some of the others may view themselves as your mentors or your elders, but I've always viewed you and yours as friends. The only reason I won't freely give my time to a friend is if another friend needs it more."
Corv smiled, it was a slight smile but Corv knew that Pent would see it for the expression that it was: the biggest smile she ever gave outside of truly extraordinary circumstances, and bowed. "Thank you again. I will take my leave of you now."
"I do have one final thing to say," Pent said, "if you would like to hear it."
"I would," Corv said.
"You said 'confusion and complexity', both of these are inevitable parts of any relationship," Pent said. "They also both can be addressed in the same way."
"Talking," Corv said.
"Just so," Pent said. "Confusion about another can be addressed by talking to the other. Confusion about oneself can benefit from the insight of another, and confusion about your relationship can be alleviated by discussing it between yourselves. Complexity is often the result of unknowns, which can sometimes become known through conversation about the situation."
Corv nodded.
"Thank you for your time and your words," Corv said.
"Thank you for your company," Pent said.
Corv opened a portal; Pent's apartment was left behind.
*
**
***
**
*
**
***
**
*
Some notes:
This is inspired, unashamedly so, by a story I once read about Raven and Starfire called Sleeping Arrangements. While I consider this to be original and if I ever get to writing more of this situation it will continue to not map onto the inspiration (Aster did not randomly plant a kiss on Corv, for example), I've put references to the origin in as a sort of respectful nod.
Corvids are members of the crow family, which is surprisingly large (blue jays, for example, are part of the crow family) with "Corvidae" being the name of the crow family as a whole. Corvidae is a plural feminine noun. The singular is a "Corvida". Moreover, the word comes from the Latin "Covus" which means "Raven".
"Cthonic" means underground which is the traditional location for Hell. Hell being where the character Raven grew up.
"Aster" means "star". I thought that Asterphlox/Asterpyr (Starfire) would be taking the reference thing too far. Also, for some reason, I liked the principle heroes of this particular ficlet having monosyllabic names. Seegserd gets multiple syllables because it's just an ordinary person who happens to have a job brewing tea for Pent in her sprawling and lavish, but undescribed, apartment which I have just decided is not a penthouse apartment because Pent living in a penthouse would be brain hurty absurdity.
The part of Sleeping Arrangements that most inspired this was Raven going to Wonder Woman, an Amazon Princess, for advice. Hence Pent being Amazon royalty named after the famous Penthesilea.*
Seegserd is entirely of my own invention, because good things shouldn't always be pretty. There's no reason that creatures of nightmare or fever dream can't have hearts of gold. Even when they don't have literal hearts. And why shouldn't a hideous mass brew really good tea?
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* Why Pent instead of Penth?
The Ancient Greek theta which we transliterate as "th" was actually closer to how we say "t" than tau, which we transliterate as "t". So the beginning of Penthesilea would actually sound like "Pent"
Why don't we transliterate it that way? Multiple reasons.
The transliterations are traditional and predate the English language so we tend to stick with them.
Additionally tau is an unaspirated stop. It's not that English doesn't have unaspirated stops, it totally does, it's that English is constructed in such a way that English speakers often have difficulty recognizing and reproducing unaspirated stops on a conscious level. Every unaspirated stop is is an allophone to the corresponding aspirated stop with the result that English speakers often can't tell the difference between the two.
We need a way of speaking where we can tell the difference between a tau and a theta so in English speaker pronounced Ancient Greek we pronounce things like theta, phi, and so forth the way that they look to us. The weird exception is chi. Chi we stick with which is why "Chris" (chi-rho-iota-sigma) has an initial sound completely different from "change". The "ch" in change was picked up in Old French and I think you'll find that "ch"s that sound that way generally were, the "ch" in Chris is from the Greek, and I think you'll find that "ch"s that sound that way generally are. But for most Greek letters transliterated as something-h, we knowingly butcher the pronunciation in order to have a language we can speak in a way that makes sense to us.
Sometimes tradition (not conscious choice) leads to things being very fucked up. Neither Greek nor Latin had a soft C. Greek had kappa which became our K, Latin just had C which sounded the same way. It made perfect sense to transliterate K as C to the Romans because the two letters sounded the same.
But now we have Julius Caesar (try Yulius Kaisar instead, you'll be a hell of a lot closer) and Cicero who we pronounce Sisero in spite of the correct thing being Kikero. That's just butchering the Latin. For the Greek that comes through the Latin consider that centaur should be kentaur and cyclops should be kyklops.
Want to have your mind truly blown?
Ancient Greek had no stand alone z sound.
It was zd. Zdeus not Zeus. Do classicists say that? Hell No. We say, "Zeus."
Monday, September 28, 2015
I give up. I can't fucking take this shit
I had two things to do today. One was to get stabbed in the arm and drained a bit so tests could be run to check that my endocrine system is endocrining well.
I've never liked needles, I've never liked any process that involves my blood leaving my body, and I've had one catastropicially bad experience getting blood drawn that was so horrible it overshadows every experience since then which have all uniformly been not-that-bad.
So that's not exactly something fun for me.
The other was to bring my computer into Best Buy so it could be sent out for repairs and I'd have a working primary computer again.
Those two things are not remotely in the same direction. That was a lot of walking I was going to have to do but then it turned out that someone could give me a ride. That meant I'd get three out of four legs of the journey taken care of for me, with the only walking being walking back home.
At around 6:30ish I arrived at Best Buy, computer under one arm, the other arm with a fresh blood drawing hole covered by those gauze pad things they tape over the hole.
My ride had to leave to do her stuff, but that was ok, I'd dealt with the Geek Squad before for computers and cameras and they'd always been good.
That all was about to change.
But before we get to that, this computer, the greatest of all secondary computers and by best hope of not becoming completely disconnected from the internet, is so damned slow. I'd forgotten how slow it is. Oh my fucking god is it slow. It took so long to get me to blogger I was worried that it wasn't even connected to the internet at all and my habit of doing multiple things at once in multiple tabs is near fucking impossible.
Don't get me wrong, I love that I have this computer because without it my next best shot is the one where where I have to twist the power-cord just so and whisper prayers to arcane gods just to have it open for more than a few minutes without it abruptly turning into a paperweight. After that is the one that cannot be charged or plugged in so I have to use it in battery long increments, remove the battery, shove it into another computer that doesn't function as a computer in any way, plug in that non-computer computer, wait for the battery to charge, move the battery back to the first computer, and use it for another battery long increment.
The list gets worse from there.
So I very much like having this computer as a fall back, but falling back to it is not fun.
Anyway, what I just looked up (which is what made it so clear that using multiple tabs at once taxes this computer) is how old the computer I brought in is.
It's nine months old TO THE FUCKING DAY today. Asshole behind the desk told me that because it was over a year old (I didn't know off the top of my head) it wasn't under warranty. I paid to have an extended three year warranty. I paid extra to have it cover accidental damage in addition to part failure and defects.
Asshole behind the desk told me that it was accident to the exclusion of ordinary failures. So apparently if I'd said that I was trying to post an image from my camera to Stealing Commas while a friend was jumpstarting a car and we accidentally switched the wires that would be covered but since I admitted that I didn't know how it overheated to the point of melting and he could clearly tell just by looking at the outside that it was obviously an equipment defect, it wasn't covered.
Asshole behind the desk told me that they're not repairing that model anymore anyway. That was the first thing asshole behind the desk said that made sense. I know this. It's how I ended up with the computer in the first place.
I'd had a computer that was very much to my liking and it was acting up a bit, then the weasels were alone in the house for a bit and when I came back they'd broken the damned monitor off at the hinges. That didn't concern me. The hinges are hunks of metal attached to other hunks of metal and greased. They're purely mechanical and even I can fix them. It isn't pretty when I do it, but they're not the computery parts of the computer and thus easily fixable by anyone with a drill, some metal shit, appropriate screws, and a hacksaw.
Hell once I replaced an entire laptop monitor case with a wooden and plexiglass construction I'd made to fit on the existing hinges and house the existing LCD and backlight. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.
The parts of a computer that concern me are the computery bits because those are complex electrionc shit and I can't fix them.
As it turned out it didn't matter. Hinges or computery bits, that model wasn't being repaired anymore. No one understood why, but it was the way of things, the way of the force.
So they fucking replaced it. Sort of. I had the option to take a step somewhat down for free or a step slightly up for additional cost. And either way I lost the ability to play bluray.
And thus I ended up with the computer I brought into the store today.
So, where did this do not repair order leave us. Did I again go looking to find a laptop as close to the one I'd brought in as possible?
No.
Apparently it meant that the only thing that could happen is the computer, which no longer works, will be sent to tech support to determine what is wrong with it, and then whatever is wrong with it will not be fixed.
Um ... causawha?
There is still hope. After spendng too much time in the slow that is this computer looking up how old primary is, it occurred to me to check the documentation I'd been given in exchange for my single most valuble possession in all the world. While asshole behind the desk might have claimed it was more than a year old when he could see the data on Best Buy's system and I couldn't, the documentation knows it's only just turned nine months old.
Asshole behind the desk isn't the one who will be looking at it.
There's hope.
But it didn't feel that way at the time. I took my folder and walked away from the desk despondent. I looked at their laptops and noted that I could never afford to buy one. I can't even raise money for home, dentist, and internet access. Where could I get the money to buy a new computer? The reason that primary computer was such a good computer was that it was supposed to be able to last a long time before it became obsolete. It was an investment.
Apparently it wasn't one that paid off in the end, but I don't regret making that investment because the time spent with the original and then the replacement was time well spent. I'd never have been able to play things like Alien: Isolation, that I so recently talked about, if I hadn't invested in a computer that was so far above my usual however long ago it was that I got the primary computer before the one I just brought in.
It's hard to say what games mean to me. Not hard to understand, hard to express in words. They occupy a place that books once did. I've lost my taste for books. One of the things that really drove home how bad my depression was in its depths was standing in a bookstore and feeling nothing. Nothing at all. Once I would have gone from shelf to shelf wanting to read all the books (but not really because my tastes are fairly provincial, I don't give a fuck about artistic quality, I want likable characters, a non-traumatic experience, and an up ending) wanting to buy ALL THE BOOKS (but again, not really.)
I've never experienced a "kid in a candystore" feeling, but I think the phrase is meant to describe what I once felt in a bookstore or library.
I lost that, and I mourn its passing.
I was once the person who read a novel for a short story project because I was given time to read in fucking school and good god I used that time.
But I lost that.
And somehow, into the void, crept games with plot. I think King's Quest VI was the first game with plot I had. Nothing like Donkey Kong or Burger Time from the Commodore 64 days, nor anything like what we had on the TI that sat next to the 64, this was a game with characters who had faces and voices and stuff. Plus we eventually ended up getting a game guide for it, while the entire family sucked at Stellar 7.
My love of Star Wars brought me to my first love in games. Dark Forces, in which you played as Kyle Katarn, with Jan Ors as your mission officer, and were going up against an Imperial plot potentially more dangerous than the Death Star.
The head of the project had opposed the Death Star. On moral grounds? Of course not. No, he had read his Heinlien and knew that the power to destroy a planet was insignificant compared to the power to send troops onto a planet to kill only those people you actually wanted killed while leaving everything else intact and he was trying to make the god damned mobile infantry in Star Wars. Not the version from the movies, the stuff from the book because he read his damned Starship Troopers and, gosh darn it, he internalized it.
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had Kyle become a Jedi. Mysteries of the Sith, which featured Kyle and Mara Jade working together, followed. Then Jedi Outcast, and finally Jedi Academy where, as Kyle's student, I can save the galaxy in a skirt as a Twilek who favors a Wookie crossbow because FUCK YEAH that's why.
But before those games were made I was given Lucas Arts collections (they each featured six CDs) so I also met Rebel Assault (one and two), the Monkey Island series, The Dig, Full Throttle, and so forth.
Resident Evil 2, which I came to sideways, would introduce me to the wonderfully convoluted world of Capcom conspiracy that the movies utterly fail to convey.
It was in Deus Ex that I would find my true love in gaming. It called to me before I had a computer capable of playing it (I misread the system requirements on the box because I was in a hurry) and it waited for me to get something that could actually support it.
I don't remember what I expected, but whatever it was was far surpassed by the game. I cannot help but compare every other game to it in my mind. Even if I never consciously think of Deus Ex it's still there, shaping my sense of possibility.
Deus Ex was sadly never equaled. The sequel ignored canon, the prequel was hostile to it, and too few things are willing to take its iconoclastic approach to game genre. In Deus Ex the player told the game what kind of game it was by playing it the way they felt it should be played, while most games insist on forcing the player into playing how they think they should be played even when that doesn't make sense.
Deus Ex is fifteen years old now and it was quite constrained by the limitations of the day, modern games are more often limited by the limited imaginations of their creators. But that doesn't mean there's not been anything worthwhile since then. Far from it.
While the first Aliens vs. Predator was ok for what it was, AVP II was a masterpiece of interwoven storytelling. It couldn't allow the same freedom of approach as Deus Ex because it had to have three simultaneous stories going on each of which profoundly affected the others. You can't do that if you don't know the details of any given story until the player plays it.
In more recent years I have dashed across rooftops to save my sister Kate, and I have waded through a flooded plague infested city to save an 11 year old whose only crime was being heir to the throne.
I've come home from Europe to an empty house in 1995 to and pieced together my sister's variously wonderful, heart breaking, and triumphant love story with a girl she met while I was away.
I've gone on a quest to save my little brother only to become a dragon riding world saver instead.
I've visited the future of 1979.
I've done so much more.
Games don't just fill a void that my loss of interest in books left inside of me. They also provide a much needed escape.
For all of the problems of Alien: Isolation, at least it gave me time during which I was Amanda Ripley trying to stay alive and make a difference (the inability to actually do the second is the single biggest problem) instead of chris the cynic worried about an inability to pay bills and having difficulty coping with life.
The ability to go back to the nameless city of Mirror's Edge and simply run like Hell (which runs quite fast, apparently) has taken the edge of some pretty bad developments I've had to face in real life.
This computer can't take me to those worlds. It can't let me live those lives. It doesn't have the power.
If I can'r get primary computer repaired or replaced, I lose those horizons. (Though the pixelated 2.5-D world of Dark Forces where people and objects are represented by 2-d sprites will always be availible for as long as there are DOS emulators, though getting it onto this computer, which lacks a CD drive, would be complicated.)
But moreover, this just isn't primary computer. It's always been secondary computer because it is slow, it's a literal and figurative lightweight that was struggling earlier to load a web page or two. And this is by far the best I have without primary.
If this is the best I can have, which it is if primary can't be repaired or replaced, then I can't fucking take it. I want to give up.
I walked through the mall despondent after turning in my computer. I didn't even notice as I left through the wrong exit. I ended up pointed at a McDonalds and I went there and probably ingested more calories than I've had in the past week.
I drank my soda slowly and sadly. I drank it as if it would magically become a hard drink and innebriate me out of my state of mind. I walked home in the darkness. I think it took two hours. On the way I tried to cultivate rightious indignation at Asshole behind the desk because it would have been better than what I was feeling.
I failed. I wanted to let all my muscles go limp and collapse on the ground there and then. Which happened to be outside of an Airforce recruiting center surrounded in barbed wire topped fence that gives me a serious case of WTF.
A recruiting center is supposed to draw people in, surrounding it in barbed wire seems to send the wrong message. Mind you it could be worse. The barbed wire was angled to keep people out, if it had been angled to keep people in, to keep them from escaping, that would be a much worse message for a recruiting center to send.
Eventually I made it home and I started typing this. It's now well passed my bed time, which is especially bad considering I stayed up for the moon to darken last night.
As much as I want to give up, want to curl up in a ball and have the world go away. I'll wake up tomorrow, disturbingly early because I need darkness to sleep and the sun has some kind of anti-darkness campaign going on, and face the day. It's possible, though unlikely, I might even write a post.
You'll have a post to look forward to regardless though. I've already written one (this morning, when I still had primary computer and it had a charge) and it's scheduled to go live at 9 AM.
I'm more uncertain than ever about what the future holds.
I've never liked needles, I've never liked any process that involves my blood leaving my body, and I've had one catastropicially bad experience getting blood drawn that was so horrible it overshadows every experience since then which have all uniformly been not-that-bad.
So that's not exactly something fun for me.
The other was to bring my computer into Best Buy so it could be sent out for repairs and I'd have a working primary computer again.
Those two things are not remotely in the same direction. That was a lot of walking I was going to have to do but then it turned out that someone could give me a ride. That meant I'd get three out of four legs of the journey taken care of for me, with the only walking being walking back home.
At around 6:30ish I arrived at Best Buy, computer under one arm, the other arm with a fresh blood drawing hole covered by those gauze pad things they tape over the hole.
My ride had to leave to do her stuff, but that was ok, I'd dealt with the Geek Squad before for computers and cameras and they'd always been good.
That all was about to change.
But before we get to that, this computer, the greatest of all secondary computers and by best hope of not becoming completely disconnected from the internet, is so damned slow. I'd forgotten how slow it is. Oh my fucking god is it slow. It took so long to get me to blogger I was worried that it wasn't even connected to the internet at all and my habit of doing multiple things at once in multiple tabs is near fucking impossible.
Don't get me wrong, I love that I have this computer because without it my next best shot is the one where where I have to twist the power-cord just so and whisper prayers to arcane gods just to have it open for more than a few minutes without it abruptly turning into a paperweight. After that is the one that cannot be charged or plugged in so I have to use it in battery long increments, remove the battery, shove it into another computer that doesn't function as a computer in any way, plug in that non-computer computer, wait for the battery to charge, move the battery back to the first computer, and use it for another battery long increment.
The list gets worse from there.
So I very much like having this computer as a fall back, but falling back to it is not fun.
Anyway, what I just looked up (which is what made it so clear that using multiple tabs at once taxes this computer) is how old the computer I brought in is.
It's nine months old TO THE FUCKING DAY today. Asshole behind the desk told me that because it was over a year old (I didn't know off the top of my head) it wasn't under warranty. I paid to have an extended three year warranty. I paid extra to have it cover accidental damage in addition to part failure and defects.
Asshole behind the desk told me that it was accident to the exclusion of ordinary failures. So apparently if I'd said that I was trying to post an image from my camera to Stealing Commas while a friend was jumpstarting a car and we accidentally switched the wires that would be covered but since I admitted that I didn't know how it overheated to the point of melting and he could clearly tell just by looking at the outside that it was obviously an equipment defect, it wasn't covered.
Asshole behind the desk told me that they're not repairing that model anymore anyway. That was the first thing asshole behind the desk said that made sense. I know this. It's how I ended up with the computer in the first place.
I'd had a computer that was very much to my liking and it was acting up a bit, then the weasels were alone in the house for a bit and when I came back they'd broken the damned monitor off at the hinges. That didn't concern me. The hinges are hunks of metal attached to other hunks of metal and greased. They're purely mechanical and even I can fix them. It isn't pretty when I do it, but they're not the computery parts of the computer and thus easily fixable by anyone with a drill, some metal shit, appropriate screws, and a hacksaw.
Hell once I replaced an entire laptop monitor case with a wooden and plexiglass construction I'd made to fit on the existing hinges and house the existing LCD and backlight. It wasn't pretty, but it worked.
The parts of a computer that concern me are the computery bits because those are complex electrionc shit and I can't fix them.
As it turned out it didn't matter. Hinges or computery bits, that model wasn't being repaired anymore. No one understood why, but it was the way of things, the way of the force.
So they fucking replaced it. Sort of. I had the option to take a step somewhat down for free or a step slightly up for additional cost. And either way I lost the ability to play bluray.
And thus I ended up with the computer I brought into the store today.
So, where did this do not repair order leave us. Did I again go looking to find a laptop as close to the one I'd brought in as possible?
No.
Apparently it meant that the only thing that could happen is the computer, which no longer works, will be sent to tech support to determine what is wrong with it, and then whatever is wrong with it will not be fixed.
 |
| Glory felt her stomach drop Like a bubble just went pop |
There is still hope. After spendng too much time in the slow that is this computer looking up how old primary is, it occurred to me to check the documentation I'd been given in exchange for my single most valuble possession in all the world. While asshole behind the desk might have claimed it was more than a year old when he could see the data on Best Buy's system and I couldn't, the documentation knows it's only just turned nine months old.
Asshole behind the desk isn't the one who will be looking at it.
There's hope.
But it didn't feel that way at the time. I took my folder and walked away from the desk despondent. I looked at their laptops and noted that I could never afford to buy one. I can't even raise money for home, dentist, and internet access. Where could I get the money to buy a new computer? The reason that primary computer was such a good computer was that it was supposed to be able to last a long time before it became obsolete. It was an investment.
Apparently it wasn't one that paid off in the end, but I don't regret making that investment because the time spent with the original and then the replacement was time well spent. I'd never have been able to play things like Alien: Isolation, that I so recently talked about, if I hadn't invested in a computer that was so far above my usual however long ago it was that I got the primary computer before the one I just brought in.
It's hard to say what games mean to me. Not hard to understand, hard to express in words. They occupy a place that books once did. I've lost my taste for books. One of the things that really drove home how bad my depression was in its depths was standing in a bookstore and feeling nothing. Nothing at all. Once I would have gone from shelf to shelf wanting to read all the books (but not really because my tastes are fairly provincial, I don't give a fuck about artistic quality, I want likable characters, a non-traumatic experience, and an up ending) wanting to buy ALL THE BOOKS (but again, not really.)
I've never experienced a "kid in a candystore" feeling, but I think the phrase is meant to describe what I once felt in a bookstore or library.
I lost that, and I mourn its passing.
I was once the person who read a novel for a short story project because I was given time to read in fucking school and good god I used that time.
But I lost that.
And somehow, into the void, crept games with plot. I think King's Quest VI was the first game with plot I had. Nothing like Donkey Kong or Burger Time from the Commodore 64 days, nor anything like what we had on the TI that sat next to the 64, this was a game with characters who had faces and voices and stuff. Plus we eventually ended up getting a game guide for it, while the entire family sucked at Stellar 7.
My love of Star Wars brought me to my first love in games. Dark Forces, in which you played as Kyle Katarn, with Jan Ors as your mission officer, and were going up against an Imperial plot potentially more dangerous than the Death Star.
The head of the project had opposed the Death Star. On moral grounds? Of course not. No, he had read his Heinlien and knew that the power to destroy a planet was insignificant compared to the power to send troops onto a planet to kill only those people you actually wanted killed while leaving everything else intact and he was trying to make the god damned mobile infantry in Star Wars. Not the version from the movies, the stuff from the book because he read his damned Starship Troopers and, gosh darn it, he internalized it.
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II had Kyle become a Jedi. Mysteries of the Sith, which featured Kyle and Mara Jade working together, followed. Then Jedi Outcast, and finally Jedi Academy where, as Kyle's student, I can save the galaxy in a skirt as a Twilek who favors a Wookie crossbow because FUCK YEAH that's why.
But before those games were made I was given Lucas Arts collections (they each featured six CDs) so I also met Rebel Assault (one and two), the Monkey Island series, The Dig, Full Throttle, and so forth.
Resident Evil 2, which I came to sideways, would introduce me to the wonderfully convoluted world of Capcom conspiracy that the movies utterly fail to convey.
It was in Deus Ex that I would find my true love in gaming. It called to me before I had a computer capable of playing it (I misread the system requirements on the box because I was in a hurry) and it waited for me to get something that could actually support it.
I don't remember what I expected, but whatever it was was far surpassed by the game. I cannot help but compare every other game to it in my mind. Even if I never consciously think of Deus Ex it's still there, shaping my sense of possibility.
Deus Ex was sadly never equaled. The sequel ignored canon, the prequel was hostile to it, and too few things are willing to take its iconoclastic approach to game genre. In Deus Ex the player told the game what kind of game it was by playing it the way they felt it should be played, while most games insist on forcing the player into playing how they think they should be played even when that doesn't make sense.
Deus Ex is fifteen years old now and it was quite constrained by the limitations of the day, modern games are more often limited by the limited imaginations of their creators. But that doesn't mean there's not been anything worthwhile since then. Far from it.
While the first Aliens vs. Predator was ok for what it was, AVP II was a masterpiece of interwoven storytelling. It couldn't allow the same freedom of approach as Deus Ex because it had to have three simultaneous stories going on each of which profoundly affected the others. You can't do that if you don't know the details of any given story until the player plays it.
In more recent years I have dashed across rooftops to save my sister Kate, and I have waded through a flooded plague infested city to save an 11 year old whose only crime was being heir to the throne.
I've come home from Europe to an empty house in 1995 to and pieced together my sister's variously wonderful, heart breaking, and triumphant love story with a girl she met while I was away.
I've gone on a quest to save my little brother only to become a dragon riding world saver instead.
I've visited the future of 1979.
I've done so much more.
Games don't just fill a void that my loss of interest in books left inside of me. They also provide a much needed escape.
For all of the problems of Alien: Isolation, at least it gave me time during which I was Amanda Ripley trying to stay alive and make a difference (the inability to actually do the second is the single biggest problem) instead of chris the cynic worried about an inability to pay bills and having difficulty coping with life.
The ability to go back to the nameless city of Mirror's Edge and simply run like Hell (which runs quite fast, apparently) has taken the edge of some pretty bad developments I've had to face in real life.
This computer can't take me to those worlds. It can't let me live those lives. It doesn't have the power.
If I can'r get primary computer repaired or replaced, I lose those horizons. (Though the pixelated 2.5-D world of Dark Forces where people and objects are represented by 2-d sprites will always be availible for as long as there are DOS emulators, though getting it onto this computer, which lacks a CD drive, would be complicated.)
But moreover, this just isn't primary computer. It's always been secondary computer because it is slow, it's a literal and figurative lightweight that was struggling earlier to load a web page or two. And this is by far the best I have without primary.
If this is the best I can have, which it is if primary can't be repaired or replaced, then I can't fucking take it. I want to give up.
I walked through the mall despondent after turning in my computer. I didn't even notice as I left through the wrong exit. I ended up pointed at a McDonalds and I went there and probably ingested more calories than I've had in the past week.
I drank my soda slowly and sadly. I drank it as if it would magically become a hard drink and innebriate me out of my state of mind. I walked home in the darkness. I think it took two hours. On the way I tried to cultivate rightious indignation at Asshole behind the desk because it would have been better than what I was feeling.
I failed. I wanted to let all my muscles go limp and collapse on the ground there and then. Which happened to be outside of an Airforce recruiting center surrounded in barbed wire topped fence that gives me a serious case of WTF.
A recruiting center is supposed to draw people in, surrounding it in barbed wire seems to send the wrong message. Mind you it could be worse. The barbed wire was angled to keep people out, if it had been angled to keep people in, to keep them from escaping, that would be a much worse message for a recruiting center to send.
Eventually I made it home and I started typing this. It's now well passed my bed time, which is especially bad considering I stayed up for the moon to darken last night.
As much as I want to give up, want to curl up in a ball and have the world go away. I'll wake up tomorrow, disturbingly early because I need darkness to sleep and the sun has some kind of anti-darkness campaign going on, and face the day. It's possible, though unlikely, I might even write a post.
You'll have a post to look forward to regardless though. I've already written one (this morning, when I still had primary computer and it had a charge) and it's scheduled to go live at 9 AM.
I'm more uncertain than ever about what the future holds.
My computer is screwed over, no idea what this will mean for the future
I knew that my computer was having problems, I knew that I'd need to send it out for repairs at some point, but I didn't realize how bad it was until its connection with the power cord went from intermittent to "Doesn't work unless I hold the power cord in an odd position.
This prompted me to take a closer look and discover that the plastic is warped and shows signs of having melted a bit where the power cord plugs in.
I think it's getting worse even as I type this. I can smell the plastic, and that's definitely new. I'm trying to shut down everything even remotely ongoing, tie up every conceivable loose end, and prepare to be without this thing for an extended period of time since it generally takes weeks for repairs to be done even if they're relatively simple.
The good news is that I haven't had it for that long and I'm pretty sure I got a decent warranty.
The secondary good news is that I have secondary computers. As you may recall, I have no desktop. Well, there's a thing in the other room under a pile of junk that I sometimes turn on for brief periods if I'm looking for information that might have been stored on a then-mostly-working computer ten to fifteen years ago, but in general I operate off of a laptop.
The secondary computers are themselves laptops and netbooks. None of them are exactly in proper working order since they tend to be other people's cast offs (or even ones of my own that require arcane rituals to boot up and never last for an extended period.)
The only one that seemed to be a fully functional computer in its own right has recently demonstrated severe problems when it comes to holding a charge or, indeed, not utterly crashing to deadness when not plugged in (also, no disk drives of any kind.) Hopefully this will not worsen, and thus it will continue to function when plugged in. "Hopefully" because that's my best bet for having a non-intermittent connection to the world outside while this thing is being fixed.
This post is actually being written on Sunday night, but I figured I'd let the Alien: Isolation image post have a bit of time so I'm setting it to post Monday morning. On Monday I will try to migrate anything I'll need in the next few weeks to the hopefully least unstable secondary computer, then trudge this thing over to the store so they can send it to the service place.
Right now I'm trying to get everything I might need in the next few weeks for an as-quickly-as-possible dump onto an external hard drive when I'm awake enough to accomplish such a thing (and hoping it'll actually start again on Monday to allow for said thing.)
Also, the moon is beginning to be eaten by the shadow of the earth as I write this.
I know from experience that this will turn the moon red, and I know from SCIENCE! that this is because we have an atmosphere here and thus light scattering and thus incomplete shadow. We do not cast full black shadows, at least not on things as distant as the moon.
On a side note, even as I try to make sure that any and all loose ends are tied up for the next several weeks, I'm also trying to figure out how to take a picture because my camera has settings for sunsets and waterfalls and landscapes and such, but nothing for, "I want to focus on the brightest light source around, but still catch the surface details on said light source, and --because said light source is off in the distance a bit-- would therefore would like to set my focus to be optimal for something 238,900 miles away, give or take."
So I'm fiddling with manual settings that I generally never fiddle with.
This prompted me to take a closer look and discover that the plastic is warped and shows signs of having melted a bit where the power cord plugs in.
I think it's getting worse even as I type this. I can smell the plastic, and that's definitely new. I'm trying to shut down everything even remotely ongoing, tie up every conceivable loose end, and prepare to be without this thing for an extended period of time since it generally takes weeks for repairs to be done even if they're relatively simple.
The good news is that I haven't had it for that long and I'm pretty sure I got a decent warranty.
The secondary good news is that I have secondary computers. As you may recall, I have no desktop. Well, there's a thing in the other room under a pile of junk that I sometimes turn on for brief periods if I'm looking for information that might have been stored on a then-mostly-working computer ten to fifteen years ago, but in general I operate off of a laptop.
The secondary computers are themselves laptops and netbooks. None of them are exactly in proper working order since they tend to be other people's cast offs (or even ones of my own that require arcane rituals to boot up and never last for an extended period.)
The only one that seemed to be a fully functional computer in its own right has recently demonstrated severe problems when it comes to holding a charge or, indeed, not utterly crashing to deadness when not plugged in (also, no disk drives of any kind.) Hopefully this will not worsen, and thus it will continue to function when plugged in. "Hopefully" because that's my best bet for having a non-intermittent connection to the world outside while this thing is being fixed.
This post is actually being written on Sunday night, but I figured I'd let the Alien: Isolation image post have a bit of time so I'm setting it to post Monday morning. On Monday I will try to migrate anything I'll need in the next few weeks to the hopefully least unstable secondary computer, then trudge this thing over to the store so they can send it to the service place.
Right now I'm trying to get everything I might need in the next few weeks for an as-quickly-as-possible dump onto an external hard drive when I'm awake enough to accomplish such a thing (and hoping it'll actually start again on Monday to allow for said thing.)
Also, the moon is beginning to be eaten by the shadow of the earth as I write this.
I know from experience that this will turn the moon red, and I know from SCIENCE! that this is because we have an atmosphere here and thus light scattering and thus incomplete shadow. We do not cast full black shadows, at least not on things as distant as the moon.
On a side note, even as I try to make sure that any and all loose ends are tied up for the next several weeks, I'm also trying to figure out how to take a picture because my camera has settings for sunsets and waterfalls and landscapes and such, but nothing for, "I want to focus on the brightest light source around, but still catch the surface details on said light source, and --because said light source is off in the distance a bit-- would therefore would like to set my focus to be optimal for something 238,900 miles away, give or take."
So I'm fiddling with manual settings that I generally never fiddle with.
There is now a chipmunk in my house and a hole in my right middle finger
I have a post I wrote last night scheduled to go up in less than an hour. Normally I wouldn't break chronological order like this especially since it could be potentially confusing as that post is about how this very computer I'm writing on is fucked.
So, good news first: I got a charge overnight which means that all of the prep work I did trying to desperately get things ready for transfer to an external hard drive before the power went out, work that required me to hold the power cord in a strange and possibly unsafe, certainly untenable, position, might not have been in vein. We'll see if I get enough useful time to actually make the transfer.
Oh thank god, she got it again, I carried her out of the house, and got her to let go in a way that didn't lead to her dropping it somewhere that it could get into the house.
Speaking of said overnight charge, I also have another post intended to go up tomorrow in which I use the charge to write a ficlet that formed while I was trying to get to sleep last night after the moon turned red (I sure as fuck wasn't going to stay up until it turned white again.) I'm partway through writing that at the moment.
This seemed like it was immediate enough to justify breaking chronology.
My cat was making a sound that generally means she has a mouse in her mouth and is therefore unable to vocalize properly.
I've gotten used to this. I can deal with it by partially opening the door, blocking the cat's entrance with my own body, and giving her a light bop on the head to make her open her mouth enough to drop the mouse and have it scurry away, assuming it isn't dead yet.
If it is dead she generally loses interest and I can later pick it up with a paper-towel separating me from mouse germs and give it a proper mouse burial (which means throwing it into the narrow place between the fence and the garage where it can be disposed of by scavengers --wild mice practice open air funerary rituals, after all-- and saying a prayer for the safe delivery of its soul to somewhere where it hopefully won't suffer the trauma of being killed by a domestic cat.)
The whole thing is fairly mundane and no cause for alarm.
This time it was a chipmunk. Here's what I didn't count on: those fuckers are a lot bigger than mice.
A bop on the head doesn't cause the cat to open her mouth enough to release. I'm not willing to harm my cat, she may not be particularly affectionate but we live together and I happen to love her even if the feeling isn't mutual (and for all I know it might be, she isn't one to really show clear emotions so it's possible, if not probable, that she loves me too.)
So I couldn't get her to release it with the usual bop on the head, because the bop is about causing a minor reflex or slight distraction or something. It doesn't seem to actually hurt her, and it definitely doesn't stun her into going slackjawed. It only makes her open her mouth a tiny bit more than necessary to hold a mouse.
I needed to improvise. How to get her to open her mouth widely enough to release a chipmunk while causing her as little discomfort as possible?
There was no clear way. It seemed like getting her to let go was going to require doing things that would require more force than I ever want to use on her.
What I did not think, in all of this, was that since this was new territory I couldn't treat it as if it were a casual "get the mouse to drop" situation and I should, in fact, move to full lockdown procedures where the cat and I were both outside and the door to the house was well and truly closed.
I didn't think of that at all.
I want to pause to note that problems such as this wouldn't exist if the cat didn't insist on trying to bring outside animals, generally live (she doesn't pick up dead ones so I'm forced to assume that the dead ones are ones that she killed while she was holding them in her mouth) into the house.
She's not a damned barn cat. Her job is not to control vermin in the vicinity. Her job, her only job, a job on which I hold no evaluations and never punish her for failing to preform (because she never preforms it), is to control vermin inside the the house in order to keep the house vermin free. She is a house cat. A free range house cat, but a house cat none the less. I don't know much of her lineage (or, you know, anything except how she came to be my cat) but I do know that her mother was a house cat too.
The only time she's ever done her job of controlling vermin inside the house was things went horribly, horribly wrong and she needed to hunt for food to keep from going hungry when she was trapped in the house, and no one checked on her, while I was away for an extended period.
I don't plan on letting things go horribly, horribly wrong EVER AGAIN, I mean that was seriously a two-horribly situation and should never have been allowed to happen. It was a serious moral failing on my part and one that I now guard against consciously because I'm now aware that I can seriously fuck up that extremely.
So back to the chipmunk. It was too big, her mouth had to open too far for her to drop it for the usual measures to work. I had to take drastic action. I had to pry her mouth open.
This is something that one should never do, but one should also never abandon a live animal to the kind of wretched death that being in a house cat's mouth tends to lead to, and a chipmunk should never be allowed to enter my house.
I didn't like it, I didn't feel good about it. and I tried to use my knowledge of getting horses to open their mouths with minimum discomfort to see if, in spite of the vast unrelatedness between horses and house cats, I might do something similar to my cat.
I also made sure that I interacted with her mouth primarily on the side that the chipmunk's mouth wasn't on, because I didn't want to get bitten by that that thing. At least I know where my cat has been. Actually I don't. I have no idea. She could be regularly chowing down on nuclear waste topped with smallpox at the Rabies Я Us food troth and I would have no idea.
Still, she's not a wild chipmunk. (Is there any other kind?)
So I pried my cats mouth open.
She dropped the chipmunk --which ran into the fucking house-- and then clamped down in a failed attempt to catch it before it fell that did managed to leave a gash in my finger.
The chipmunk scurried all the way down the hall, into the kitchen, and behind the microwaves. Yes, we have two. Long story. The microwaves sit atop the ice box. What is an ice box? Well in days long ago there was no such thing as a refrigerator so you put stuff that needed to be kept cool in a wooden box with ice in it.
Who did you think Kristoff sold ice to for a living?
Mine is one of these:
It's not in as good repair as that one. The two of the latches are missing along with one of the things the latches latch onto. Also one of the doors is broken but you can't see that it's broken because what's broken is an interior piece of wood that holds the door together, all of the parts visible from the outside are fine and you don't realize that particular door is broken until you open it and the door falls apart.
Behind the ice box is a hole in the wall likely chewed by the mice in the house that the cat refuses to deal with. Someday I want to find where that hole leads and fix both the hole there and every single other exit point, but that's rather low on my list of things to do since before repairs of that nature to the actual house are made, a lot of fucking cleaning within the house will need to be done to make the repair project viable.
I was worried that the chipmunk might have made it into the hole and thus gotten away for good, but I still pulled the icebox, and a small endtable type thing next to it away from the wall, in hopes the cat might recapture it. I additionally told the chipmunk that I was leaving the door open (the door opens onto an elevated porch that has little of interest; wild animals never approach it willingly) so it should get out of my fucking house.
Then I started to write this post. Almost an hour ago.
Pulling the ice box out actually led to oh my fucking god those things can climb! because the chipmunk hadn't gone through the hole. I'd forgotten about this at the time, and just now had to check to see if it was/is true, but the discovery of the hole was not met by total negligence on my part: I blocked the hole with a big heavy board of the type that has those holes in it you can use to hang pots on. Two of them actually.
They haven't been chewed through and no mouse or chipmunk can fit through a hole with a diameter of less than a centimeter.
But that is not the point because I wasn't even thinking about the fact that the boards were there to block the hole.
Let's get back to "Oh my fucking god, those things can climb!" When I think climbing rodent of the outdoor variety I think, "Squirrel." Squirrels are a different beast entirely.
"Squirrel" is a word that comes to us from ancient Greek, through normal Latin, then Vulgar Latin, then Old French, then Anglo-Norman until it finally hit English-proper in the Middle English period.
"Chipmunk" is an alternation of an Ojibwa word that means squirrel but --presumably though I know precisely zero about Ojibwa-- doesn't have the "giant fracking tail" connotation of the word "squirrel". [Added] Yup, "Chipmunk" apparently comes from a word meaning "one who descends trees headlong" which has nothing about tail size.
Like I said, different beasts entirely.
Chipmunks are ground animals that sometimes climb trees, and I so rarely see them climbing trees that I often forget that they do climb trees. I was certainly unprepared when that thing shot up the fucking wall to the height of the icebox when I moved said icebox.
Preumably the reason it stopped at the height of the icebox is that that's where the shaved brick facade*, which serves no apparent purpose and produces reactions of "Wha?" if noticed, happens to end. The fact that the facade is about the same height as the ice box is a matter of pure coincidence, though the ice box being there might be to hide the downright strange facade.
Anyway, it dropped down to the ground and out of sight after that.
But while I was intermittently starting to write this post I decided to also check on whether the cat was trying to re-catch the chipmunk.
This resulted in additional moving of the icebox and surrounding stuff because I hadn't initially made enough space for the cat to maneuver well. She could get in there, but not to much more than walk in a straight line.
After doing that, I returned to this post which was then only a few sentences long.
Also, at some point before most of this. Probably immediately after moving the icebox the first time, I put a band aid (genuine band-aid brand no less, I was in a hurry when I bought them and didn't have time to look for the generic) on my middle finger where the cat gouged it.
By the time was two paragraphs long the had re-caught the chipmunk. Picking her up and carrying her out of the house was a gamble. If she had a mouse that would have caused her to drop it, but as already established, getting her to drop the chipmunk was a more difficult procedure entirely.
I did manage to get her to drop it, off of the porch, without further injury on either of our parts. though, honestly, the cat never gets injured in dealings with me. She does get injured, something damaged one of her ears once (the big leathery skin part that sticks out and makes for distinctive looking cat ears, not the sensitive inner workings) so I know that she's not impervious to harm and can in fact bleed, but if the participants are myself and her, it's a sure thing that if anyone gets injured it will be me, not her.
I apologize to the five people, who may be bots or crawlers or something, who read this post in its original form where it abruptly cut out in the vicinity of the oh my fucking god those things can climb! part. When I started writing it, which is now more like an hour and a half ago, I figured it'd be quick and fall before the post about the computer naturally. I think that's the preferable order because while this post may be more interesting, that post is more important in terms of the near future of Stealing Commas because what happens to the computer has a very real effect on what happens to the blog and if one of these is going to have front of the blog time I think it should be the one that's letting people know about serious developments in the future of the blog.
Why? Because I don't know what's going to happen after I take this computer to be repaired today. If the blog does go dark (I hope it doesn't and am planning on preventing it via secondary computers) I want people to have seen a heads up on why that might happen.
Also, I figure that most people will be more likely to read a post about a chipmunk and a hole in my finger even if it isn't at the top of the blog than they would be to read about computer problems which are fairly standard for me (where do you think most of the semi-working secondary computers came from? Once the warranty expires a computer is doomed to quickly become unviable as a primary because electronics will break in my vicinity), have frequently been covered here, and in fact run in the family.
My family tends to be pretty tech literate, though I must admit that we've all started to fall behind in recent years, but from my father comes a tendency to have things fail as if by magic. My dad is the most tech savvy on a mechanics of how computers work of all of us, but it is an extremely bad idea to let him so much as touch anything more advanced than a pocket calculator. If he so much as breathes on it, the gods of technology will be perturbed.
He's the sort of person who you might call for advice only to end up saying, "No, for the love of god don't come over and look at it! Just tell me how to fix it over the phone," even if you, like me, loathe phones.
He once called tech support with an error number only to find that no end user in history had ever gotten that error and it was widely believed in tech support that it was impossible to get the error without actually trying for it as part of a rigorous testing regime.
It's not that he does anything wrong to electronics. He handles them with more care than I do, it's just that some sort of thing that science cannot explain causes his mere presence to make them go wrong.
My mother has no such curse. She was actually a computer programmer before anyone knew what the fuck that was, and probably could have made the family billionaires if she'd had the self confidence to stick with that career. Then again, I'm of the opinion that if she'd pursued her playing of acoustic guitar, and the accompanying singing she did, as more than a hobby she could have been successful (probably not famous or rich, but enough to live on) there too.
My mother's lack of self esteem is tragic. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have prevented her from living a fairly happy life.
But, yeah, tech stuff. Important to let people know about in case, in spite of the efforts I make to the contrary, not having this computer during repair time makes it so I can't keep Stealing Commas updated.
Hence me posting this before it was finished. I could have used scheduling to make it listed as going up before the other post (thus letting the other post have top of the blog placement) even though it was posted now which is now almost two hours after I started writing making it almost an hour after the other post went up (do you see how slowly I write?) but it was easier for me to just post the incomplete post early and then finish it as an update.
* They're real bricks, but cut so that they're only about half a centimeter deep. The result is that, if the facade weren't aged and falling apart, you'd think the chimney was made of brick, along with part of the wall next to it. Why part of the wall next to it? No fucking clue. No other place in the house pretends to be brick.
So, good news first: I got a charge overnight which means that all of the prep work I did trying to desperately get things ready for transfer to an external hard drive before the power went out, work that required me to hold the power cord in a strange and possibly unsafe, certainly untenable, position, might not have been in vein. We'll see if I get enough useful time to actually make the transfer.
--
Oh thank god, she got it again, I carried her out of the house, and got her to let go in a way that didn't lead to her dropping it somewhere that it could get into the house.
--
Speaking of said overnight charge, I also have another post intended to go up tomorrow in which I use the charge to write a ficlet that formed while I was trying to get to sleep last night after the moon turned red (I sure as fuck wasn't going to stay up until it turned white again.) I'm partway through writing that at the moment.
This seemed like it was immediate enough to justify breaking chronology.
* * *
My cat was making a sound that generally means she has a mouse in her mouth and is therefore unable to vocalize properly.
I've gotten used to this. I can deal with it by partially opening the door, blocking the cat's entrance with my own body, and giving her a light bop on the head to make her open her mouth enough to drop the mouse and have it scurry away, assuming it isn't dead yet.
If it is dead she generally loses interest and I can later pick it up with a paper-towel separating me from mouse germs and give it a proper mouse burial (which means throwing it into the narrow place between the fence and the garage where it can be disposed of by scavengers --wild mice practice open air funerary rituals, after all-- and saying a prayer for the safe delivery of its soul to somewhere where it hopefully won't suffer the trauma of being killed by a domestic cat.)
The whole thing is fairly mundane and no cause for alarm.
This time it was a chipmunk. Here's what I didn't count on: those fuckers are a lot bigger than mice.
A bop on the head doesn't cause the cat to open her mouth enough to release. I'm not willing to harm my cat, she may not be particularly affectionate but we live together and I happen to love her even if the feeling isn't mutual (and for all I know it might be, she isn't one to really show clear emotions so it's possible, if not probable, that she loves me too.)
So I couldn't get her to release it with the usual bop on the head, because the bop is about causing a minor reflex or slight distraction or something. It doesn't seem to actually hurt her, and it definitely doesn't stun her into going slackjawed. It only makes her open her mouth a tiny bit more than necessary to hold a mouse.
I needed to improvise. How to get her to open her mouth widely enough to release a chipmunk while causing her as little discomfort as possible?
There was no clear way. It seemed like getting her to let go was going to require doing things that would require more force than I ever want to use on her.
What I did not think, in all of this, was that since this was new territory I couldn't treat it as if it were a casual "get the mouse to drop" situation and I should, in fact, move to full lockdown procedures where the cat and I were both outside and the door to the house was well and truly closed.
I didn't think of that at all.
I want to pause to note that problems such as this wouldn't exist if the cat didn't insist on trying to bring outside animals, generally live (she doesn't pick up dead ones so I'm forced to assume that the dead ones are ones that she killed while she was holding them in her mouth) into the house.
She's not a damned barn cat. Her job is not to control vermin in the vicinity. Her job, her only job, a job on which I hold no evaluations and never punish her for failing to preform (because she never preforms it), is to control vermin inside the the house in order to keep the house vermin free. She is a house cat. A free range house cat, but a house cat none the less. I don't know much of her lineage (or, you know, anything except how she came to be my cat) but I do know that her mother was a house cat too.
The only time she's ever done her job of controlling vermin inside the house was things went horribly, horribly wrong and she needed to hunt for food to keep from going hungry when she was trapped in the house, and no one checked on her, while I was away for an extended period.
I don't plan on letting things go horribly, horribly wrong EVER AGAIN, I mean that was seriously a two-horribly situation and should never have been allowed to happen. It was a serious moral failing on my part and one that I now guard against consciously because I'm now aware that I can seriously fuck up that extremely.
So back to the chipmunk. It was too big, her mouth had to open too far for her to drop it for the usual measures to work. I had to take drastic action. I had to pry her mouth open.
This is something that one should never do, but one should also never abandon a live animal to the kind of wretched death that being in a house cat's mouth tends to lead to, and a chipmunk should never be allowed to enter my house.
I didn't like it, I didn't feel good about it. and I tried to use my knowledge of getting horses to open their mouths with minimum discomfort to see if, in spite of the vast unrelatedness between horses and house cats, I might do something similar to my cat.
I also made sure that I interacted with her mouth primarily on the side that the chipmunk's mouth wasn't on, because I didn't want to get bitten by that that thing. At least I know where my cat has been. Actually I don't. I have no idea. She could be regularly chowing down on nuclear waste topped with smallpox at the Rabies Я Us food troth and I would have no idea.
Still, she's not a wild chipmunk. (Is there any other kind?)
So I pried my cats mouth open.
She dropped the chipmunk --which ran into the fucking house-- and then clamped down in a failed attempt to catch it before it fell that did managed to leave a gash in my finger.
The chipmunk scurried all the way down the hall, into the kitchen, and behind the microwaves. Yes, we have two. Long story. The microwaves sit atop the ice box. What is an ice box? Well in days long ago there was no such thing as a refrigerator so you put stuff that needed to be kept cool in a wooden box with ice in it.
Who did you think Kristoff sold ice to for a living?
Mine is one of these:
It's not in as good repair as that one. The two of the latches are missing along with one of the things the latches latch onto. Also one of the doors is broken but you can't see that it's broken because what's broken is an interior piece of wood that holds the door together, all of the parts visible from the outside are fine and you don't realize that particular door is broken until you open it and the door falls apart.
Behind the ice box is a hole in the wall likely chewed by the mice in the house that the cat refuses to deal with. Someday I want to find where that hole leads and fix both the hole there and every single other exit point, but that's rather low on my list of things to do since before repairs of that nature to the actual house are made, a lot of fucking cleaning within the house will need to be done to make the repair project viable.
I was worried that the chipmunk might have made it into the hole and thus gotten away for good, but I still pulled the icebox, and a small endtable type thing next to it away from the wall, in hopes the cat might recapture it. I additionally told the chipmunk that I was leaving the door open (the door opens onto an elevated porch that has little of interest; wild animals never approach it willingly) so it should get out of my fucking house.
Then I started to write this post. Almost an hour ago.
Pulling the ice box out actually led to oh my fucking god those things can climb! because the chipmunk hadn't gone through the hole. I'd forgotten about this at the time, and just now had to check to see if it was/is true, but the discovery of the hole was not met by total negligence on my part: I blocked the hole with a big heavy board of the type that has those holes in it you can use to hang pots on. Two of them actually.
They haven't been chewed through and no mouse or chipmunk can fit through a hole with a diameter of less than a centimeter.
But that is not the point because I wasn't even thinking about the fact that the boards were there to block the hole.
Let's get back to "Oh my fucking god, those things can climb!" When I think climbing rodent of the outdoor variety I think, "Squirrel." Squirrels are a different beast entirely.
"Squirrel" is a word that comes to us from ancient Greek, through normal Latin, then Vulgar Latin, then Old French, then Anglo-Norman until it finally hit English-proper in the Middle English period.
"Chipmunk" is an alternation of an Ojibwa word that means squirrel but --presumably though I know precisely zero about Ojibwa-- doesn't have the "giant fracking tail" connotation of the word "squirrel". [Added] Yup, "Chipmunk" apparently comes from a word meaning "one who descends trees headlong" which has nothing about tail size.
Like I said, different beasts entirely.
Chipmunks are ground animals that sometimes climb trees, and I so rarely see them climbing trees that I often forget that they do climb trees. I was certainly unprepared when that thing shot up the fucking wall to the height of the icebox when I moved said icebox.
Preumably the reason it stopped at the height of the icebox is that that's where the shaved brick facade*, which serves no apparent purpose and produces reactions of "Wha?" if noticed, happens to end. The fact that the facade is about the same height as the ice box is a matter of pure coincidence, though the ice box being there might be to hide the downright strange facade.
Anyway, it dropped down to the ground and out of sight after that.
But while I was intermittently starting to write this post I decided to also check on whether the cat was trying to re-catch the chipmunk.
This resulted in additional moving of the icebox and surrounding stuff because I hadn't initially made enough space for the cat to maneuver well. She could get in there, but not to much more than walk in a straight line.
After doing that, I returned to this post which was then only a few sentences long.
Also, at some point before most of this. Probably immediately after moving the icebox the first time, I put a band aid (genuine band-aid brand no less, I was in a hurry when I bought them and didn't have time to look for the generic) on my middle finger where the cat gouged it.
By the time was two paragraphs long the had re-caught the chipmunk. Picking her up and carrying her out of the house was a gamble. If she had a mouse that would have caused her to drop it, but as already established, getting her to drop the chipmunk was a more difficult procedure entirely.
I did manage to get her to drop it, off of the porch, without further injury on either of our parts. though, honestly, the cat never gets injured in dealings with me. She does get injured, something damaged one of her ears once (the big leathery skin part that sticks out and makes for distinctive looking cat ears, not the sensitive inner workings) so I know that she's not impervious to harm and can in fact bleed, but if the participants are myself and her, it's a sure thing that if anyone gets injured it will be me, not her.
I apologize to the five people, who may be bots or crawlers or something, who read this post in its original form where it abruptly cut out in the vicinity of the oh my fucking god those things can climb! part. When I started writing it, which is now more like an hour and a half ago, I figured it'd be quick and fall before the post about the computer naturally. I think that's the preferable order because while this post may be more interesting, that post is more important in terms of the near future of Stealing Commas because what happens to the computer has a very real effect on what happens to the blog and if one of these is going to have front of the blog time I think it should be the one that's letting people know about serious developments in the future of the blog.
Why? Because I don't know what's going to happen after I take this computer to be repaired today. If the blog does go dark (I hope it doesn't and am planning on preventing it via secondary computers) I want people to have seen a heads up on why that might happen.
Also, I figure that most people will be more likely to read a post about a chipmunk and a hole in my finger even if it isn't at the top of the blog than they would be to read about computer problems which are fairly standard for me (where do you think most of the semi-working secondary computers came from? Once the warranty expires a computer is doomed to quickly become unviable as a primary because electronics will break in my vicinity), have frequently been covered here, and in fact run in the family.
My family tends to be pretty tech literate, though I must admit that we've all started to fall behind in recent years, but from my father comes a tendency to have things fail as if by magic. My dad is the most tech savvy on a mechanics of how computers work of all of us, but it is an extremely bad idea to let him so much as touch anything more advanced than a pocket calculator. If he so much as breathes on it, the gods of technology will be perturbed.
He's the sort of person who you might call for advice only to end up saying, "No, for the love of god don't come over and look at it! Just tell me how to fix it over the phone," even if you, like me, loathe phones.
He once called tech support with an error number only to find that no end user in history had ever gotten that error and it was widely believed in tech support that it was impossible to get the error without actually trying for it as part of a rigorous testing regime.
It's not that he does anything wrong to electronics. He handles them with more care than I do, it's just that some sort of thing that science cannot explain causes his mere presence to make them go wrong.
My mother has no such curse. She was actually a computer programmer before anyone knew what the fuck that was, and probably could have made the family billionaires if she'd had the self confidence to stick with that career. Then again, I'm of the opinion that if she'd pursued her playing of acoustic guitar, and the accompanying singing she did, as more than a hobby she could have been successful (probably not famous or rich, but enough to live on) there too.
My mother's lack of self esteem is tragic. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to have prevented her from living a fairly happy life.
But, yeah, tech stuff. Important to let people know about in case, in spite of the efforts I make to the contrary, not having this computer during repair time makes it so I can't keep Stealing Commas updated.
Hence me posting this before it was finished. I could have used scheduling to make it listed as going up before the other post (thus letting the other post have top of the blog placement) even though it was posted now which is now almost two hours after I started writing making it almost an hour after the other post went up (do you see how slowly I write?) but it was easier for me to just post the incomplete post early and then finish it as an update.
-
* They're real bricks, but cut so that they're only about half a centimeter deep. The result is that, if the facade weren't aged and falling apart, you'd think the chimney was made of brick, along with part of the wall next to it. Why part of the wall next to it? No fucking clue. No other place in the house pretends to be brick.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
What the future used to look like (Alien: Isolation) (image post)
[If you want to skip the introduction and go straight to pretty pictures, click here.]
I want to be able to recommend the game Alien: Isolation because it's a visual masterpiece in terms of set building and that could have been worth the price of admission in itself if the gameplay and story weren't such crap.
I would argue that it would have been a far better game if it had taken after Gone Home and actually had you isolated in a place where your objective is to explore, find notes, messages, documents and such, and learn the story by putting stuff together on your own in a place devoid of others.
Why it would have been good, which is different from what made Gone Home good, is why I so very much want to be able to recommend the game, and am so disappointed that I can't.
In Gone Home the point was to learn the story, primarily of your sister, but also of your parents and, in general, why you arrived to an empty house. That could have been good in Alien: Isolation too since the crap parts of the story weren't the things you learn via the emails, logs, and recordings scattered around the station, that was actually well done, the crap parts were everything that happened around your character during the actual game.
The reason that Alien: Isolation would have been great as an exploration game, though, isn't about story but instead about setting. The setting is amazing to see and wonderful to stroll around in.
You see, Alien: Isolation is a sequel to the first movie of the franchise: Alien itself.
I'm not saying that it ignores, disregards, or contradicts the later movies. It just takes place before them. There's a time skip in there, recall.
The second movie, Aliens, takes place decades after the first and during those decades things changed. The signal being broadcast from the derelict space ship with the alien eggs stopped for unknown reasons, the planet with said space ship was teraformed and colonized, synthetics/artificial people had a programming upgrade that changed them from complete monsters who would do whatever The Company told them, no matter the cost in human lives, to compassionate individuals who were programmed not to fucking harm human beings, Ripley's ten year old daughter (Ripley promised to be home in time for her eleventh birthday) grew up and eventually died at the age of sixty-six, Gateway Station was constructed. Probably other stuff too.
The game follows movie-Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she goes on a mission to look into the first clue about her mother's disappearance in 15 years since it happened. Thus game-Ripley is 25 years old during the game. It also means that the game is 15 years after Alien and 43 years before Aliens. Thus Alien: Isolation is closer to Alien than any other movie in the franchise.
Hence me saying that it's a sequel to the first movie.
Here's the thing about the first movie: it came out in 1979. That means it has Zeerust. What is Zeerust? It's a town in South Africa. Seriously. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd collaborated on two small dictionaries which operated on a simple premise: There are lots of definitions that need words; there are lots of words (specifically the names of places) that are lazing about without definitions.
Thus in The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff Adams and Lloyd took those words off of signs and gave them definitions. Zeerust was given this definition: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic.
A lot of things pull utter bullshit when dealing with how they relate dated visions of the future in their cannon. See Enterprise, which never tried to have a pre-Original Series vision of the future except for that one alternate universe episode where evil Hoshi became evil empress of the evil empire by taking control of a ship of the same class as the Original Series Enterprise (but even then they weren't trying to deal with it, more just pretending it didn't need to be dealt with) or see Human Revolution the nominal prequel to Deus Ex which (oddly) rebelled against the lack of Zeerust in the original and added a metric fuckton to the the thing that was supposed to come between the present day and the not-Zeerusty future.
Alien: Isolation takes a different tack. It's a sequel to Alien, it knows it, and for fuck's sake it's going to to look like it.
Stepping into Alien: Isolation is stepping into what the future looked like in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The vision of the future given to us in 1979 by the film Alien is lovingly recreated and expanded.
Instead of using the 15 years between Alien and Alien: Isolation to justify Zeerust reducing aesthetic changes the entire game is set aboard old things to justify keeping more or less the exact same Zeerust. First there's a brief introduction on-board a transport ship that's not much newer than the ship from Alien (and was thus able to be bought cheaply as a near-wreck by the current owner and then be repaired over time into a decent ship) then the entire rest of the game is set on an old station that's in the process of being decommissioned and shut down.
Thus the creators of the game have plausible in-universe reasons for the setting to have pretty much the same look as seen in Alien. And it's fucking wonderful.
Before I start the pictures I should point out that they all look worse than they do in the game itself. The game uses film simulation effects that you usually don't notice unless you see a lens flare because the non-lens-flare component, a constant low level film-grain effect, actually does a pretty good job (I'm not sure if it's intentional or not) of simulating how human eyes deal with low light situations, BUT when you take a still, regardless of lighting, that low level film-grain effect becomes unmissable and annoying.
That caveat aside, let me introduce you to the future of the past, it's just down the hall and through the door.
This is a fairly standard work station on the station:
That doesn't look too odd, which is a large part of what's so great about the game, they took the 1979 future and made it fucking work, but there are some things that give us some flashbacks to the years before I was born. That light on the right seems to come from a different aesthetic, and those joysticks . . . well you can't really see them that well because of the scaling down I had to do, let's get a closer look:
I remember those! But, I don't know much about space tech, maybe they still use them on the space station that's in orbit right now. I'm almost entirely sure they don't, but not absolutely sure.
What we really need to look at are computers, right? They're what shows age. Other than the NSA being able to be blackmailed because they broke their charter by working to spy on Americans (something they now do constantly with no push-back in spite of it still being illegal) the only thing that dates the 1992 movie Sneakers (now over 20 years old) is the computers in it.
Well that and occasional oblique references to the fall of the Soviet Union.
So let's look at some computers.
Well, actually first another workstation picture because the desk toy is taken directly from the movie Alien and it does get us a nice look at a keyboard and a microphone which are also things that change with time.
The loss of detail was so annoying that I didn't scale that one (I did crop it some), though blogger probably did so automatically, even so, if you click on it you should get a larger image than the one you see without clicking.
Points of interest:
Whatever the hell it means to be lovingly machine-rolled.
And I've just noticed that there's something else in the image with the ashtray that I can expand on, I took a closer shot of the keyboard and joystick and then completely forgot I had done so. So here:
In the future there will be markers. I'm not totally satisfied with the view of that totally futuristic keyboard, so let me do a closely cropped shot so you can see it in mildly better detail:
Future keyboards have shapes and shit instead of letters. Also note the fun lights that serve no purpose we provincial people in the early decades of the 21st century can understand. There's a lot of lights whose purpose we cannot hope to understand about, but I said we'd get to computers.
So, here's a computer:
That's what computers will look like in 2137 AD/CE. They will be bulky, their screens will generally be green only, they won't have pictures or graphics (except for one video message that happens to be one of the few places where they throw consistency aside) their interface will be extremely basic, and yet ... and yet they fit so God damned well into the aesthetic that it won't fuck with your sense that you're on a space station orbiting a distant gas giant more than a hundred years after the present day in the least.
Actually, honestly, the second one looks like a better fleshed out version of the first but that's not the point. The point is that in the future of the past we'll have computers we can walk around with that have a number pad and little dials and stuff.
There will also be these things:
Which... I honestly don't know what they are. You only ever use them to playback audio recordings of transmissions made by people on the ship from the movie Alien before shit went wrong.
But the future will not just be about workstations, computers and smoking. People will spend time sitting at tables and eating or talking or conferencing or playing cards or whatever it is that people do when sitting at tables. So I give you a non-scientifically determined, not rigorously random but not created with specific intent either, collection of tables from the future:
Wait, was that a boombox in the back?
Why yes it was. Here's another:
They're not just decoration.
In a game where you'll be hunted by a bulletproof Alien (it seems that the game creators forgot that the reason you can't shoot them is because shooting makes them bleed and the blood is acid so powerful it could eat right through the hull which is less than ideal when you're in space), variously threatened and hunted by evil uncanny valley androids (to distinguish themselves from the company an alternate company said, "Isn't it creepy when you don't know if someone is a human or a synthetic? We make sure ours are recognizable on sight," the marketing strategy failed but they were manufactured on the station where the game takes place so there are tons of them) and also in danger from amoral humans who shoot first and ask questions never, something that makes distracting noise can be useful.
Mind you, as I noted, the game-play and plot weren't very good, so it's more interesting to us for aesthetic reasons. It's boombox in the most traditional sense: it combines big speakers with a radio and a cassette player. So there must be audio cassettes, right?
Yup:
They aren't just found in boxes, they're also found laying around solo or in small groups.
Random note about the audio cassettes:
This is the loading screen from Gone Home, the exploration game I mentioned repeatedly in the introduction:
I actually had to go online to find that because for some reason my copy is crashing. That's ... distressing. Regardless, I bring that up because this is the saving icon in Alien: Isolation:
Not exactly a huge connection, but I think it's the platonic ideal of the game reaching out and saying that it wants to be more like Gone Home.
Also in music, though I don't have any nice shots, there's at least one harmonica and a few wooden acoustic guitars scattered about.
I'm not sure about the harmonica, but I think it's still the case that a near-centuries future without wooden acoustic guitars is pretty unbelievable.
The instrument family has been in style for over five thousand years at this point (and that's just what we know of) and while it's hard to place exactly when older guitars sufficiently like modern guitars to be considered guitars without qualification, it's several centuries at least with no signs of the trend having peaked, much less started to decline.
Anyway, back to the world of Alien: Isolation.
Even before a killer creature started screwing things up, the station was in the process of being decommissioned, the businesses on it shutting down, the inhabitants trying to secure some form of future for themselves elsewhere, so forth, but it originally housed all of those businesses which employed all of those people and while I didn't take any shots of the arcade, the bar, the air-hockey tables, or that sort of thing, I do have one shot of a reception desk:
A thing that I'll continue harping on (guitaring on? luting on?) is the fact that the giant fracking cathode ray tube monitors there (and elsewhere) don't jump out at you and scream, "This is not the future!" There's a decent chance you didn't even take notice of them when you looked at the picture, though I don't pretend to know for sure how any given person will process any given image.
The Zeerust isn't a problem for immersion. This is, to me, a bit surprising. But it's also (again: to me) really neat.
I never showed the first shot I took of a workstation, so have a look at it now:
Did you catch that? No, not that there was one of these:
Though I did decide that they were important enough to quickly boot up the game, find the nearest one (which was, unfortunately, in a badly lit area, hence the crap quality of the image) and take a shot of one so you could have a better look.
No, I was wondering if you noticed the magnetic tape computer in the background?
I actually think it was noticing that (as in that one, right there) that really caused me to realize the game was fully embracing the vision of the future from 1979. It didn't make me feel any less like this was a plausible future space station, but it did help me realize that there were no half measures in recreating the future of Alien (which I'd already been impressed with the faithfulness of anyway.)
Now I don't want to make it sound like magnetic tape is a thing of the past because it very much is not. Some really powerful computers still run on magnetic tape, and magnetic tape has never been abandoned (and is still being improved upon) as a computer storage medium. However, computers that run on magnetic tape you can see in reel-to-reel format? That's dated.
We don't do that anymore (for non museum-esque purposes, that I'm aware of.)
In case you did miss it, here are two more examples without a lot of crap in the way:
That's the sort of thing that this post is all about. This is what the future used to look like but doesn't anymore. Many people would be concerned with such a thing being in their source material and thus try to pretend it wasn't there; covering it up through omission or adaptation.
Alien: Isolation doesn't do that. Don't get me wrong, it's not in your face about it either. There's nothing forcing a player to stop and take notice of these things. You have to take notice because you're currently reading a post in which I'm basically only including Zeerusty stuff, but a player of the game doesn't.
It's unapologetic about being a same-technology-level sequel to a 1979 sci fi movie, but that lack of apology doesn't show up in it coming out and shouting, "I'm not ashamed of what I am!" instead it comes out in the game being secure enough in its own existence to simply be what it is.
And that quality, that state of being a sequel Zeerust and all, means that the Zeerust doesn't make it feel dated. You don't play it and think, "Damn is this a 1979 future," you play it and are able to fully believe that it's a space station in 2137 and, when taken at a meta level, that's a metric fuckton more impressive than something made with the aesthetics of the future today, rather than the 1979 future, presenting a convincing setting of a space station in 2137.
Because cassette tapes and reel to reel computers and bulky CRT monitors and all sorts of other things are already past so how could they be future? But they are. They are the future because it turns out that even dated visions of the future can feel like the actual future when they're presented as part of a consistent and well thought out aesthetic.
And that is the wonder of Alien: Isolation, you're transported into a different world where you can fully accept that this is the kind of ad you might see on a space station one hundred and twenty two years from now:
A future where people still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea (because they are):
Didn't get a good enough look there? How about here:
Random other shots from yesterday's future:
As I said up there somewhere, there's no way I can adequately convey how unexpectedly awesome it was to be walking through this world that was covered in Zeerust but somehow not marred by it. Unfortunately the game makes it so you're doing it while trying to hide from an alien that will kill you with insta-death if you make too much noise or look around in one place for too long, surrounded by innocent people who are all damned to die for the crime of not being the main character, shot at by jerks who have taken social Darwinism to it's maximum gun wielding extent, on the run from killer androids because: "Why not?", and locked into a plot that's really craptastic on multiple levels.
You can, as I did, download a third party program that makes it so stopping to take a nice look around will not get you brutally impaled or otherwise dead, but unfortunately having the giant piles of "We named the game 'Isolation' so we're surrounding you with people and things that want you dead so you'll never be isolated for long," simply not notice you when you're standing right in front of them breaks the immersion in a way that an unashamedly 1979 era vision of the future never could.
Hopefully some day someone will make a game like this that's the exploration game this so desperately cried out to be.
That day is, unfortunately, not today.
I want to be able to recommend the game Alien: Isolation because it's a visual masterpiece in terms of set building and that could have been worth the price of admission in itself if the gameplay and story weren't such crap.
I would argue that it would have been a far better game if it had taken after Gone Home and actually had you isolated in a place where your objective is to explore, find notes, messages, documents and such, and learn the story by putting stuff together on your own in a place devoid of others.
Why it would have been good, which is different from what made Gone Home good, is why I so very much want to be able to recommend the game, and am so disappointed that I can't.
In Gone Home the point was to learn the story, primarily of your sister, but also of your parents and, in general, why you arrived to an empty house. That could have been good in Alien: Isolation too since the crap parts of the story weren't the things you learn via the emails, logs, and recordings scattered around the station, that was actually well done, the crap parts were everything that happened around your character during the actual game.
The reason that Alien: Isolation would have been great as an exploration game, though, isn't about story but instead about setting. The setting is amazing to see and wonderful to stroll around in.
You see, Alien: Isolation is a sequel to the first movie of the franchise: Alien itself.
I'm not saying that it ignores, disregards, or contradicts the later movies. It just takes place before them. There's a time skip in there, recall.
The second movie, Aliens, takes place decades after the first and during those decades things changed. The signal being broadcast from the derelict space ship with the alien eggs stopped for unknown reasons, the planet with said space ship was teraformed and colonized, synthetics/artificial people had a programming upgrade that changed them from complete monsters who would do whatever The Company told them, no matter the cost in human lives, to compassionate individuals who were programmed not to fucking harm human beings, Ripley's ten year old daughter (Ripley promised to be home in time for her eleventh birthday) grew up and eventually died at the age of sixty-six, Gateway Station was constructed. Probably other stuff too.
The game follows movie-Ripley's daughter, Amanda, as she goes on a mission to look into the first clue about her mother's disappearance in 15 years since it happened. Thus game-Ripley is 25 years old during the game. It also means that the game is 15 years after Alien and 43 years before Aliens. Thus Alien: Isolation is closer to Alien than any other movie in the franchise.
Hence me saying that it's a sequel to the first movie.
Here's the thing about the first movie: it came out in 1979. That means it has Zeerust. What is Zeerust? It's a town in South Africa. Seriously. Douglas Adams and John Lloyd collaborated on two small dictionaries which operated on a simple premise: There are lots of definitions that need words; there are lots of words (specifically the names of places) that are lazing about without definitions.
Thus in The Meaning of Liff and The Deeper Meaning of Liff Adams and Lloyd took those words off of signs and gave them definitions. Zeerust was given this definition: the particular kind of datedness which afflicts things that were originally designed to look futuristic.
A lot of things pull utter bullshit when dealing with how they relate dated visions of the future in their cannon. See Enterprise, which never tried to have a pre-Original Series vision of the future except for that one alternate universe episode where evil Hoshi became evil empress of the evil empire by taking control of a ship of the same class as the Original Series Enterprise (but even then they weren't trying to deal with it, more just pretending it didn't need to be dealt with) or see Human Revolution the nominal prequel to Deus Ex which (oddly) rebelled against the lack of Zeerust in the original and added a metric fuckton to the the thing that was supposed to come between the present day and the not-Zeerusty future.
Alien: Isolation takes a different tack. It's a sequel to Alien, it knows it, and for fuck's sake it's going to to look like it.
* * *
Stepping into Alien: Isolation is stepping into what the future looked like in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The vision of the future given to us in 1979 by the film Alien is lovingly recreated and expanded.
Instead of using the 15 years between Alien and Alien: Isolation to justify Zeerust reducing aesthetic changes the entire game is set aboard old things to justify keeping more or less the exact same Zeerust. First there's a brief introduction on-board a transport ship that's not much newer than the ship from Alien (and was thus able to be bought cheaply as a near-wreck by the current owner and then be repaired over time into a decent ship) then the entire rest of the game is set on an old station that's in the process of being decommissioned and shut down.
Thus the creators of the game have plausible in-universe reasons for the setting to have pretty much the same look as seen in Alien. And it's fucking wonderful.
Before I start the pictures I should point out that they all look worse than they do in the game itself. The game uses film simulation effects that you usually don't notice unless you see a lens flare because the non-lens-flare component, a constant low level film-grain effect, actually does a pretty good job (I'm not sure if it's intentional or not) of simulating how human eyes deal with low light situations, BUT when you take a still, regardless of lighting, that low level film-grain effect becomes unmissable and annoying.
That caveat aside, let me introduce you to the future of the past, it's just down the hall and through the door.
This is a fairly standard work station on the station:
I remember those! But, I don't know much about space tech, maybe they still use them on the space station that's in orbit right now. I'm almost entirely sure they don't, but not absolutely sure.
What we really need to look at are computers, right? They're what shows age. Other than the NSA being able to be blackmailed because they broke their charter by working to spy on Americans (something they now do constantly with no push-back in spite of it still being illegal) the only thing that dates the 1992 movie Sneakers (now over 20 years old) is the computers in it.
Well that and occasional oblique references to the fall of the Soviet Union.
So let's look at some computers.
Well, actually first another workstation picture because the desk toy is taken directly from the movie Alien and it does get us a nice look at a keyboard and a microphone which are also things that change with time.
The loss of detail was so annoying that I didn't scale that one (I did crop it some), though blogger probably did so automatically, even so, if you click on it you should get a larger image than the one you see without clicking.
Points of interest:
- Top Left: drinking bird perpetual motion machine that appeared in Alien (though I didn't remember it because, honestly, why would I?)
- Right: microphone the likes of which we no longer use.
- Bottom Center Rightish: another type of joystick. I also remember those. We had at least one when I was a kid.
- Bottom Center: keyboard with the nice big fat keys that seem to be on the way out (though are by no means gone) because people prefer (apparently) the smaller keys developed for laptops or even having touchscreens that do away with keys entirely (which: oh my god, what the fuck?)
- Bottom Left: Is that ... an ashtray?
Why yes, it is an ashtray, because in the future of the past people smoked in space. Sometimes they still do in the future of the present, but not as often. Back in the future of 1979 everyone smoked in space. It went without question.
Nick Naylor: So cigarettes in space?Ashtrays are everywhere, as are packs of cigarettes, and this can be found on a wall:
Jeff Megall: It's the final frontier, Nick.
Nick Naylor: But wouldn't they blow up in an all oxygen environment?
Jeff Megall: Probably... but it's an easy fix, one line of dialog, "Thank God we invented the ... you know, whatever device."
- Thank You for Smoking (2005)
 |
| KOORLANDER lovingly machine-rolled for YOUR pleasure |
And I've just noticed that there's something else in the image with the ashtray that I can expand on, I took a closer shot of the keyboard and joystick and then completely forgot I had done so. So here:
In the future there will be markers. I'm not totally satisfied with the view of that totally futuristic keyboard, so let me do a closely cropped shot so you can see it in mildly better detail:
Future keyboards have shapes and shit instead of letters. Also note the fun lights that serve no purpose we provincial people in the early decades of the 21st century can understand. There's a lot of lights whose purpose we cannot hope to understand about, but I said we'd get to computers.
So, here's a computer:
That's what computers will look like in 2137 AD/CE. They will be bulky, their screens will generally be green only, they won't have pictures or graphics (except for one video message that happens to be one of the few places where they throw consistency aside) their interface will be extremely basic, and yet ... and yet they fit so God damned well into the aesthetic that it won't fuck with your sense that you're on a space station orbiting a distant gas giant more than a hundred years after the present day in the least.
This is what the future once looked like. This is the world that Alien: Isolation immerses you in, and the experience is amazing to the point that I cannot possibly convey it in this post and, unfortunately, it's completely ruined by the game-play and plot really, really sucking, so as much as I want to be able to, I can not in good conscience recommend paying money for the game. Maybe if someone makes a mod for it where they turn it into a pure exploration game, but I don't even know if it's modable.
So that's your bog standard desktop. There are other types of desktops but if your interacting with a computer in a place that doesn't look like NASA's mission control from the Apollo missions, then you're going to be dealing with one if these, not one of those.
But wait! Not all computers are desktops. Surely we will have tablets in the future, right?
Why yes we will:
See, there's one right there on that desk. Maybe you can't see that well, here:
And it's not like there's just one kind of tablet, look at this one:
So that's your bog standard desktop. There are other types of desktops but if your interacting with a computer in a place that doesn't look like NASA's mission control from the Apollo missions, then you're going to be dealing with one if these, not one of those.
But wait! Not all computers are desktops. Surely we will have tablets in the future, right?
Why yes we will:
See, there's one right there on that desk. Maybe you can't see that well, here:
And it's not like there's just one kind of tablet, look at this one:
Actually, honestly, the second one looks like a better fleshed out version of the first but that's not the point. The point is that in the future of the past we'll have computers we can walk around with that have a number pad and little dials and stuff.
There will also be these things:
Which... I honestly don't know what they are. You only ever use them to playback audio recordings of transmissions made by people on the ship from the movie Alien before shit went wrong.
But the future will not just be about workstations, computers and smoking. People will spend time sitting at tables and eating or talking or conferencing or playing cards or whatever it is that people do when sitting at tables. So I give you a non-scientifically determined, not rigorously random but not created with specific intent either, collection of tables from the future:
Wait, was that a boombox in the back?
Why yes it was. Here's another:
They're not just decoration.
In a game where you'll be hunted by a bulletproof Alien (it seems that the game creators forgot that the reason you can't shoot them is because shooting makes them bleed and the blood is acid so powerful it could eat right through the hull which is less than ideal when you're in space), variously threatened and hunted by evil uncanny valley androids (to distinguish themselves from the company an alternate company said, "Isn't it creepy when you don't know if someone is a human or a synthetic? We make sure ours are recognizable on sight," the marketing strategy failed but they were manufactured on the station where the game takes place so there are tons of them) and also in danger from amoral humans who shoot first and ask questions never, something that makes distracting noise can be useful.
Mind you, as I noted, the game-play and plot weren't very good, so it's more interesting to us for aesthetic reasons. It's boombox in the most traditional sense: it combines big speakers with a radio and a cassette player. So there must be audio cassettes, right?
Yup:
They aren't just found in boxes, they're also found laying around solo or in small groups.
Random note about the audio cassettes:
This is the loading screen from Gone Home, the exploration game I mentioned repeatedly in the introduction:
I actually had to go online to find that because for some reason my copy is crashing. That's ... distressing. Regardless, I bring that up because this is the saving icon in Alien: Isolation:
Not exactly a huge connection, but I think it's the platonic ideal of the game reaching out and saying that it wants to be more like Gone Home.
Also in music, though I don't have any nice shots, there's at least one harmonica and a few wooden acoustic guitars scattered about.
I'm not sure about the harmonica, but I think it's still the case that a near-centuries future without wooden acoustic guitars is pretty unbelievable.
The instrument family has been in style for over five thousand years at this point (and that's just what we know of) and while it's hard to place exactly when older guitars sufficiently like modern guitars to be considered guitars without qualification, it's several centuries at least with no signs of the trend having peaked, much less started to decline.
Anyway, back to the world of Alien: Isolation.
Even before a killer creature started screwing things up, the station was in the process of being decommissioned, the businesses on it shutting down, the inhabitants trying to secure some form of future for themselves elsewhere, so forth, but it originally housed all of those businesses which employed all of those people and while I didn't take any shots of the arcade, the bar, the air-hockey tables, or that sort of thing, I do have one shot of a reception desk:
A thing that I'll continue harping on (guitaring on? luting on?) is the fact that the giant fracking cathode ray tube monitors there (and elsewhere) don't jump out at you and scream, "This is not the future!" There's a decent chance you didn't even take notice of them when you looked at the picture, though I don't pretend to know for sure how any given person will process any given image.
The Zeerust isn't a problem for immersion. This is, to me, a bit surprising. But it's also (again: to me) really neat.
I never showed the first shot I took of a workstation, so have a look at it now:
Did you catch that? No, not that there was one of these:
Though I did decide that they were important enough to quickly boot up the game, find the nearest one (which was, unfortunately, in a badly lit area, hence the crap quality of the image) and take a shot of one so you could have a better look.
No, I was wondering if you noticed the magnetic tape computer in the background?
I actually think it was noticing that (as in that one, right there) that really caused me to realize the game was fully embracing the vision of the future from 1979. It didn't make me feel any less like this was a plausible future space station, but it did help me realize that there were no half measures in recreating the future of Alien (which I'd already been impressed with the faithfulness of anyway.)
Now I don't want to make it sound like magnetic tape is a thing of the past because it very much is not. Some really powerful computers still run on magnetic tape, and magnetic tape has never been abandoned (and is still being improved upon) as a computer storage medium. However, computers that run on magnetic tape you can see in reel-to-reel format? That's dated.
We don't do that anymore (for non museum-esque purposes, that I'm aware of.)
In case you did miss it, here are two more examples without a lot of crap in the way:
That's the sort of thing that this post is all about. This is what the future used to look like but doesn't anymore. Many people would be concerned with such a thing being in their source material and thus try to pretend it wasn't there; covering it up through omission or adaptation.
Alien: Isolation doesn't do that. Don't get me wrong, it's not in your face about it either. There's nothing forcing a player to stop and take notice of these things. You have to take notice because you're currently reading a post in which I'm basically only including Zeerusty stuff, but a player of the game doesn't.
It's unapologetic about being a same-technology-level sequel to a 1979 sci fi movie, but that lack of apology doesn't show up in it coming out and shouting, "I'm not ashamed of what I am!" instead it comes out in the game being secure enough in its own existence to simply be what it is.
And that quality, that state of being a sequel Zeerust and all, means that the Zeerust doesn't make it feel dated. You don't play it and think, "Damn is this a 1979 future," you play it and are able to fully believe that it's a space station in 2137 and, when taken at a meta level, that's a metric fuckton more impressive than something made with the aesthetics of the future today, rather than the 1979 future, presenting a convincing setting of a space station in 2137.
Because cassette tapes and reel to reel computers and bulky CRT monitors and all sorts of other things are already past so how could they be future? But they are. They are the future because it turns out that even dated visions of the future can feel like the actual future when they're presented as part of a consistent and well thought out aesthetic.
And that is the wonder of Alien: Isolation, you're transported into a different world where you can fully accept that this is the kind of ad you might see on a space station one hundred and twenty two years from now:
A future where people still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea (because they are):
Didn't get a good enough look there? How about here:
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| A New Dawn of Precision Digital Watches |
As I said up there somewhere, there's no way I can adequately convey how unexpectedly awesome it was to be walking through this world that was covered in Zeerust but somehow not marred by it. Unfortunately the game makes it so you're doing it while trying to hide from an alien that will kill you with insta-death if you make too much noise or look around in one place for too long, surrounded by innocent people who are all damned to die for the crime of not being the main character, shot at by jerks who have taken social Darwinism to it's maximum gun wielding extent, on the run from killer androids because: "Why not?", and locked into a plot that's really craptastic on multiple levels.
You can, as I did, download a third party program that makes it so stopping to take a nice look around will not get you brutally impaled or otherwise dead, but unfortunately having the giant piles of "We named the game 'Isolation' so we're surrounding you with people and things that want you dead so you'll never be isolated for long," simply not notice you when you're standing right in front of them breaks the immersion in a way that an unashamedly 1979 era vision of the future never could.
Hopefully some day someone will make a game like this that's the exploration game this so desperately cried out to be.
That day is, unfortunately, not today.
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