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prettylittlelyres · 3 years

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My Year in Writing (2020)

Hello and Happy New Year! I thought it might be nice to share with you all an overview of what I've written in 2020.

First of all, let me say that I haven't written nearly as much as I wanted to, but that's OK, and it's OK if the amount you've written feels or looks pretty similar. The point is, it looks some way (I daresay pretty) because you've taken up the pen and put some words on a page.

I don't want to gloss over how bad aspects of my 2020 Writing Year have disappointed me, because that would be as silly as casting a damper on the whole thing by focusing only on the trickier bits. What I'm aiming for here is a balanced review - even if it's a rather informal one - of my achievements, and my feelings about my writing this year. In the interest of balance, let's start with something GOOD!

Right at the beginning of the year - around January - I started redrafting a rather fabulously dark fantasy romance, of which you've probably seen a little bit on this blog: Songs from the Crypt Forest, which I dropped after 9,800 words, because I wanted - and needed to work on my first dedicated book, and on my Year Abroad Research Project.

I managed to write about 17,000 words of the dedicated book in its original form before I realised that it wasn't quite working, and that I ought to try a different tack. The story I was telling there is a story I still want to tell, but I just wasn't ready to write it at the time. I'm hoping to pick it up properly in 2021.

I realised I needed to try getting back into the world I wrote in 'Violins and Violets', by writing something set around the same time and involving some of the same characters. In March, I started writing 'Book J', for which I didn’t have a proper title until I was nearly done with its first draft! I gave it the working title 'Book J', because I was writing it for my friend Jenny. By the time summer came round I had 52,000 words, and a first draft that was as complete as I think it ever will be.

Lockdown hit my life quite hard in Spring 2020, and I lost my language assistant job in France when all schools closed, and I had to come back to the UK to live out the academic year with my parents. Nevertheless I had to carry on working with my Year Abroad Research Project, Which I was able to hand in by 18th May, having squeezed all my findings into a dissertation of 6,000 words.

Now that my YARP was out of my way, and I had no more work to do for university, I started redrafting Jenny's book, now called 'Vogeltje', and cut it down to 44,000 words, which I polished until August... when I had copies printed for Jenny, so that she could read a book written especially for her. I would have given it to her in person in France, but lockdown happened, and I ended up posting her copies from one part of South England to another. A rather typical outcome for a meetup planned in 2019 for 2020, I suspect!

During lockdown, I also trained as a proof-reader and copyeditor, and did some volunteer work for a company that needed translators. Online training courses have been a godsend, and I've particularly enjoyed a novel writing course and a travel writing course that I've been following. The novel writing course has pushed me to flesh out plans for a number of books, including more detailed and cohesive outlines for 'Songs from the Crypt Forest' and 'The Night Has Teeth' (two books I want to write in a similar universe), along with my on-again-off-again WIP 'The Manylove Quarter' - and the plans for these three alone come to 7,850+ words!

I moved back to Southampton in July, and took August to start drafting 'The Manylove Quarter ', but that ended up petering out with about 19,200 words of prose on the page. Still, I spent a lot of time querying, and got plenty of reading done, so - especially considering the heatwaves in my area and a pretty enormous academic crisis in my record (fixed in November, after writing a LOT of letters and reports!!! So, this is where I send a million hugs to my lecturers and tutors for all the help they've given me, thank you, thank you, thank you all SO MUCH!!!) - I still felt fairly well-accomplished at the end of the month. I also did quite a bit of painting.

In August and September, I started typing up the journal I've been keeping since the beginning of April, once I'd settled back into life in the UK, to keep track of my feelings about the pandemic and my reactions to what I've seen or heard in the news. I write an average of 6,000 words per month, so I'm coming up to 50,000 words on the whole thing (but have yet to type up November or December). One day, I'll use it to write some extremely illustrious memoirs about how much fun, I had stamping up and down the stairs in my parents' house in order to get my steps in! (I really did get quite fit, though, and I want to get back to it in the New Year!)

At the start of September, I published a 2,500-word travel log my university's "study abroad" blog, all about how much I came to love the French city of La Rochelle, where I spent my 3rd year working. I think I will polish it at least a little before I post it here, but I would love to post a redrafted version on this blog!

My final year of university (BA Modern Languages, French and German) started in October, so all my reading and writing that month - or so it felt - was linked to my course. However. I've lost count of how many pieces I've translated between English, French and German, just to prepare for each class. I love my course, but it doesn't leave much energy for anything else!

Welcome to November, when all my graded assignments were due at once, and the associated stress started taking its toll. Luckily, my tutors were there to help me get extensions for work I couldn't hand in on time because my brain had turned into mashed potato. By the middle of December, I ended up with a 300-word translation and 300-word scripted scene for French, a 1,000-word commentary on a translation into English, a 2,500-word essay for French History, and a 2,000-word short story for German, which I've translated into English, and will post here any day.

This has really been a big year for letter-writing, especially since I came back from France. My cousin and I love writing longhand letters to each other, as I love writing them to my grandmothers, and, as such, I've written about one hundred letters this year! My cousin and I have kept every letter we've ever sent each other, and these collections have approximately doubled in size since the start of 2020.

I keep trying to redraft the first chapters of 'The Manylove Quarter', but never seem to get very far. With about 3 redrafts started since Autumn, I'd say l have about 1,000 words typed up. I can probably say the same of the story I'm trying to write as a kind of Standalone, kind of Sequel to 'This Still Happens' and 'Curls of Smoke', except that I'd put those around the 2,000-word mark.

If my Mathematic capabilities still stand up, I estimate I've written about 210,000 words in total this year (not including text messages, letters, emails and entries in my regular diary (which I keep separately to my pandemic journal)), which. honestly, makes me feel a little like I've failed myself.

That's why l'm making this post, actually, to address that feeling - because | know it's not rational, so I'm not going to call it "that fact" - and to tot all my work up in one place, so that I can see my achievements as one big hulk. Looking at my 2020 in terms of projects l've actually finished, it's disappointing! But to look at 2020 as a final wordcount makes me feel an awful lot better. My sister just pointed out that "210,000 words" is "nearly a quarter of a million words", and, put in that way, it's much easier to feel like I've accomplished something of which I can - and Should - feel proud. I've written a lot this year!

Now l'm asking all of you who feel like you've "not done enough work in 2020" to reassess the way you're looking at it all, and to see that:

Productivity shouldn't define how much you feel you're worth, no matter how productive you've been. Please don't fall into the capitalist trap of thinking you're only "doing the right thing" if you're working! You're worth a huge amount and you deserve to be proud of yourself!

You've achieved a lot more than you first thought, whether in the projects you've finished, the number of words you're written, the ideas you've had, the research and planning you've done, the time you've put in, the skills you've honed... OR THE FUN YOU'VE HAD! It all counts, and it's all important, and you can be proud of all of it, just like you can be proud of yourself.

If you don't feel like you've done enough, find a new angle from which to look at what you have done. I'm willing to bet someone out there can see how brilliantly you're doing already. Try to see yourself through that someone's eyes!

#writeblr #blog #writer's life #writing about writing #2020 in writing #motivation #positivity

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sunnysideofsaturn · 4 years

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2019, oh how you’ve destroyed me.

basically i’ve seen a ton of posts like this, especially by one of my best interweb pals (lookin at you, C @hey-im-pan ) and it’s inspired me to make one of my own! i journal a LOT but it’ll be interesting to try and sum everything up in little synopsis.

*side note: i struggle with anxiety, depression, insomnia, and ocd, so those and their effects may be mentioned. be cautious. This also doesn’t include a lot of the more personal instances, so don’t take it as an accurate representation of what it is like living with these issues*

January:

Honestly, not much happened. I went on a college visit trip with a few of my friends to my dream school, which was stressful but informative, and my anxiety attacks were far and in-between. Sleep schedule was wack (has been since 7th grade), but i was functioning. Dysphoria (i’m nonbinary, but hadn’t really even come out to myself then) was pretty high this month in particular for some reason, so i finally started trying to convince my mom to let me cut my hair off. (I had like 2.5 feet it was a mess)

February:

Finally came out to one of my close friends as pan, kinda accidentally but she was chill with it :) My grandma had a weeklong sickness that scared the shit out of me, but she got better for the time being. I was constantly pushing myself academically and physically at practice, but my grades were taking a bit of a nosedive because i didn’t have the capacity to deal with everything, but i bottled it up because i hate feeling weak. I continued to explore my sexuality, and started to research the gender spectrum.

March:

School and Crew (rowing sport) were the only things on my mind at all times. I started having more anxiety attacks again, and decided it was time to talk to my doctor about going back on meds after 3 years off them. IB was kicking my ass, but i’m so grateful for all of my teammates for giving me an escape on the water. Started to accept I was non-binary.

April:

A month full of good vibes i really needed. Got my drivers license on 4/20. I hiked my grades up with the help of extra credit, held a “wedding” in a Dillard’s try-on section, and spent a few days of spring break at the beach with two friends. I finally cut my hair off!! That feeling was literally incredible and i try to get a haircut every other month to actually keep up with it now. Saw endgame, died inside, and competed in an art show! I was doing really well, so I went off my meds again (don’t do that without a doctors permission like me).

May:

BAdddd time to be off meds, anxiety and depression were dropping my health and IB finals kicked my ass and the class i had been most excited about taking had become my worst at this point, but I got through the exams without missing any. Went to Jr. Prom though! We actually used going to Jr. Prom as a coverup to throw a surprise birthday party for my best friend. I still have no idea how she didn’t figure it out. I also started talking to one of my internet buds, Rosie. She’s helped me through so much she doesn’t even know about, and it such a beaut inside and out <3

June:

MADE IT TO PRIDE MONTH!! I finished my actual finals with minimal panic attacks, and join a Parkner discord! That was short lived, but from it was born… The What the Actual Fuck Fam, whom i love dearly. You guys still crack me up, and i know i’ll always have people to fall back on ( or help me commit murder.) Turned 17 and watched Monty Python (again.) Was forced into not one, but tWo bible camps, but also went to my first pride in my city! I have never felt so loved by so many people i don’t know :)

July:

Depression hit me HarD. I was constantly in a bad mood and taking it out on other people and myself, and I was losing even more sleep. Went back on meds for a bit. I got to see Far From Home, but pretty much isolated myself from anyone in my real life. July is always hard for me to get though for some reason. On a happier note, I started talking to @winterrs-child , who I now love dearly and @exbrodokills , which started out by exchanging memes but i think we can now call a friendship :D

August:

More depression, yayyyy, but Rosie and my irl friends helped me through it so much, even if they didn’t know it was happening. I finally came out to my parents and grandma as pan. They honestly took it pretty well, even if my grandma thinks it’s a ‘phase’. Also came out to C, B, and T as non-binary. Ya’ll were the first people I told after a YEAR omg <3 developed a huge celebrity crush on a cosplayer i won’t name even though they’ll never see this :’) Also fell back into the kiribaku pit after finally stabilizing my Parkner obsession. Also, joined a sapphic server which is basically a big gay support group :) (thanks to Rosie)

September:

Started my senior year of high school. So far, it’s pretty much been one big panic attack but i’m managing. I’m a mentor on the crew team this year and have adopted pretty much every underclassmen on the team. I love them all equally (except for my favorites) Cut my hair even shorter! I love it! Got back into writing poetry and short stories after an intense writer’s and reader’s block that lasted for almost a year. Went off my meds again (I should stop doing that, ik) Went to a Harry Potter fest, which was great, but started building up major anxiety for planning the rest of my life.

October:

SPOOP MONTH. October is my favorite month, so I was determined to make it good. Went on a couple more college tours, but also celebrated fall and halloween with my favorite people. Came reallllly close to stabbing my IB Bio teacher, but he’s survived, so far. Cosplayer mentioned earlier followed me on insta, cue gay panic. i also accidentally created a huge cuddle pile of 30 girls on my team in the captain’s backyard. It was as amazing as it sounds :0 Applied for 6 colleges

November:

CAVETOWN omg. I was also murdered with a bent hammer (don’t ask) and my mental health was pretty stable. I joined yet another server created by the cosplayer, and have made so many friends through it, plus gained a new dad figure :). Contemplated buying a binder on black friday, didn’t and deeply regret it (planing on getting one with the christmas money i get from my homophobic grandfather we pretend doesn’t exist) Discovered the goodness of Baby Yoda. Did pretty much no spanish homework. Solid 7/10

December:

Honestly, school wise december has been the most stressful month of this year so far, and the 2nd worst depressive episode. I’ve written 6 essays and done 5 projects this month and that was not a good time for the already low seratonin levels. i got waitlisted for the school i mentioned earlier, but was accepted into the other 5 :) I got to see an Of Monsters and Men concert, and I’m trying to push thorough til break, but my grandma has been getting sick more and more frequently over this year and now she’s been in a lot of pain for over two weeks and in and out of emergency care 6 times. Just hoping to make it to 2020 with everyone in tact and healthy :) I’m doing a secret santa with my friends im looking forward to. My friends have been amazing support through all of this mess, even if ii didn’t tell you about it, and i love you all!!

special mentions:

@donnaschaunamanon

@dawdlzdoodles

@harleykeenerprotectionsquad

@bumbblebeeeeee

@lykkesw

@chai-studying

@hey-im-pan

@pumpkinparkner

@everyone’s users i don’t know/remember

#2019 #get to know me #recap #2029 is not a real year #i don't have 2020 vision

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rasoir-national · 4 years

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How to lose to a duck

The celebrations are over and you’re still stuck with family members ? Looking for a way to avoid them ? I’ve got just the thing for you ! Ever wondered if someone could write a 5000 words essay on a technical legal case and make it interesting ? Well... I don’t... know if I did that (and you ask yourself weird question, hypothetical reader I made up for this intro), but you can judge by yourself.

So here’s the story of a case I’ve been thinking about for over a year now. It’s about Justice, mental illness, and duck poop. It’s called : How to lose to a duck.

Enjoy.

Let’s talk about the spectacle of Justice. Even way back in the days of arrest letters, when the real decisions were happening behind closed doors, Justice has always had an element of publicity to it. People flocked to public executions like one goes to the movies ; the events had their own popcorn vendors, who sold souvenirs and belongings of questionable origin of the deceased to be. This federative aspect of these executions is, in many ways, what most people at the time considered to be Justice : society rallying as a whole to punish the failing individual.

Nowadays, the publicity of Justice is written as a statement of intent in the founding texts of most countries : for Justice to be just, Justice has to be public. Justice is rendered in the name of the people, therefore it is up to the people to show up at any trial they want to witness the justice that is served in their name. And if you’ve never gone to a courtroom on an idle day to contemplate the supreme grandeur of justice in action, let me tell you, you are missing out. Whether or not you consider the spectacle to be in good taste, it is indeed a spectacle, with its decorum, its assigned roles and its pathos. Just ask the busload of retirees who storm the petty crimes courtroom every Wednesday instead of watching Lifetime.

Here in France, there is however one type of justice that usually remains quite out of sight : the administrative courts. The French judiciary is separated in two main branches : the civil courts, which concerns disputes between individuals – including disputes between an individual and society, which is to say penal justice – and the administrative court, which rules on disputes between individuals and the state. Simply put for my American readers, challenging a state regulations, which in the US happens before the same courts as civil disputes, is in France the exclusive jurisdiction of administrative courts. However, regulation has to be understood in the broadest of terms. France’s Supreme Court has direct jurisdiction over any challenging of national decrees, meaning administrative courts only have jurisdiction over… everything else. You were denied a tax deduction. The city lets cars park in front of your garage entrance. Your visa application to vacation in Paris was rejected. You teach at a public school and you were moved to a different town. Any time any administration in the country tells you “no” or takes any decision that prejudices you in any way, you are entitled to challenge this decision before an administrative court. And unlike civil courts, cases aren’t dispatched between judges based on their perceived importance ; in the same hearing, judges can hear a dispute concerning a public contract worth millions of euros, and then immediately after a disgruntled couple who wants their rural town to clean up the dung due to herd traffic in their street.

Now there are several reasons why this type of justice doesn’t attract the attention of the masses : as previously mentioned, the flashiest cases happen only in Paris in front of the Supreme Court. It is also an extremely technical type of dispute, from tax law to urban planning law. But perhaps most importantly, the procedure is essentially written. All arguments must be communicated in writing before the hearing, or risk being declared moot. The presence of the parties at the hearing isn’t required, and when attorneys are present, they usually only stand up for a second to confirm they maintain their written arguments.

Now parties without representation, that’s another story. In most cases, you aren’t required to have an attorney before administrative court. That’s part of the appeal : no matter your means, you can challenge the state at no cost. But of course, usually the cost of that is losing your case. Representing yourself is generally a bad idea, but in administrative law, where arguments have to fit in certain pre-established categories and where there are dozens of procedural rules to follow to present your case, it’s more often than not a fatal idea. I can’t tell you how many individuals without attorneys I’ve seen stroll in hearings expecting to be able to present their case, only to look abruptly disarmed when the judge only ask them one question before reserving judgement.

What these individuals don’t know, and what is the dirty secret of administrative justice, is that when they enter the hearing courtroom, their ruling is usually already written. It would take an extraordinary event for this ruling to be modified in any way by what is said during the hearing. I know that because for six months, I was one of the interns writing them.

Being an intern is rarely glamorous, but if you’re like me, getting to write “In the name of the French people” in front of your work is probably the height of achievement. I’ve worked on millions-worth litigation cases in-between petty neighbouring disputes. Through their writings, I’ve gotten to know some truly angry people, confused people, miserable people. I’ve worked for a month on calculating damages for a man who had gone through an experimental knee surgery that had gone wrong. I’ve tried for days to find the nicest possible way to reject a case from parents of a mentally disabled child who had been kicked out of an institution due to violence problems. And then, for two months, I’ve worked on the Duckman.

Given that at this point, I’ve probably read more from him than anyone else on Earth, it is surprising how little I truly know about this man. I’ll call him the Duckman because that’s how I came to refer to him while relating the case, but also because his actual name is already so strange and peculiar that I couldn’t possibly find a pseudonym that would do it justice here. I know he was of retirement age, although he wasn’t retired. I know he was white, of either Dutch or German origin, and had a nobility title. I know he was also the proud owner of a beautiful 19th century castle situated in a little village in Southern France, which happened to fall within the jurisdiction of the administrative court I was interning at. I know that in 2013, the village delivered a building permit regarding a portion of land bellow the castle to a young farmer who projected to build a duck force-feeding plant there. But as far as the Duckman goes, this is where my knowledge stops and speculation begins.

Getting to know people through their writings is an uncanny experience. On the one hand, it is clear that you don’t really know anything about the people whose case you’re reading. But on the other hand, there is something there about them that you get to understand faster than anyone who actually knows them. The complexity of the legal procedure and the confusion it provokes strips people bare in some way. It can be something as small as an exclamation point, or as huge as the case file my internship supervisor gave to me on a November morning.

The folder was bursting with pages. In and of itself, not necessarily a bad sign. Some cases do take up a lot of space, whether you want it or not, especially when it concerns land in any way. No, the bad sign was on the folder cover itself, in the guidance notes : “DIFFICULT PERSONALITY” entered in all caps by a court clerk, the only people who actually come in contact with claimants during the investigation phase.

Another bad sign revealed itself to me when I checked the case history : at some point, either the claimant had fired his lawyer or his lawyer had fired him. Now, a lot of people would be entitled to fire their lawyer. Just like with any profession, the vast majority of them are mediocre. But finding a lawyer is in itself such a stressful and confusing process, and it’s so difficult to know whether or not you made the right choice, that a person firing their lawyer has become a classic red flag for judges. In accordance with the sunk cost fallacy principle, people tend to stay committed to their mistakes.

On top of everything else, the case touched upon both urban planning law and environmental law, two of the most specialized and technical types of litigation out there. But at this point, my supervisor had already decided she trusted me with pretty much anything, and I’d already decided any case could be worked the same as long as you did things rigorously and step by step. Law is before anything else a type of reasoning ; once you understand it, all that’s left is research.

What was the case about ? It was a compensation claim, meaning the tail end of the dispute process. This was usually the part that came after the illegality had occurred, after the person had suffered harm, and things were now headed toward the state’s cash register. To avoid being influenced early on, I didn’t check past claims concerning the case and directly read the demand. The case itself seemed fairly standard, and potentially well-founded : a duck force-feeding factory, complete with an open duck excrement pit had been built 300 meters (about a thousand feet) away from a beautiful 19th century castle, spoiling the view and more importantly ensuring the entire castle park smelled of duck poop all year round. According to the claimant, the building permit had been delivered illegally, therefore compensation was to be paid to the castle owner and the plant to be demolished. That’s when I fired up my computer and looked up past disputes concerning this situation, and when I got my first inkling that something was very wrong.

The dispute dated back over five years, and had been kept alive through a dozen of individual claims. The castle owner had fought the implantation of the plant at every possible step. When the permit was first delivered, he had it suspended. Another modified permit was issued, which was also suspended. Then the administrative court ruled that second permit lawful, so construction was able to begin. However, the castle owner contested that ruling in front of the Appellate Court, which also ruled the permit lawful. He then contested that ruling in front of the Supreme Court, which elected not to hear the case. In the meantime, another claim had been introduced, this time to force the city to file a report of observation due to the fact that the plant owner hadn’t respected the prescriptions of the building permit – which the castle owner was still challenging. Finally, two claims were introduced, which were the ones on my desk : compensation claims from both the city which had issued the permit, and the county prefect who was surveying this type of factory. The claim concerning the respect of the building permit was actually still under investigation by another chamber of my administrative court, and both this chamber and mine were looking to purge these disputes simultaneously.

From this load of information, I deducted two things : first, this was someone with the means and the time to fixate on such an issue, and second, this was someone who was indeed utterly fixated on this issue. Now as someone who has lived next to horrible neighbours before, I had my sympathies for this man, and I was more than ready to believe that having a dung fosse next to your property couldn’t have been fun. But the law doesn’t work that way. The state’s purse is more tightly shut than the North-South Korea border, and even if you are suffering from an established nuisance, you have to jump through a considerable number of hoops to ever see some compensation.

As someone who was working solely on that part of the dispute, my position was an uneasy one. I could technically say that all those courts that had ruled time and time again that the permit was lawful were wrong and that the Duckman was entitled to compensation, but then I would have been disagreeing with the Supreme Court itself. That’s not really something judges do in administrative law, where court hierarchy is strictly enforced. Luckily, the state is never out of ideas when it comes to avoiding recognizing they screwed up. So what I could do was establish the state had acted perfectly legally, but the consequences suffered by the Duckman still merited compensation. So I set out to do just that.

This proved harder than anticipated. For one thing, the lawyer, for the time he’d been there, was indeed of the mediocre type, and only gave me the bare minimum to work with. For someone whose client clearly had the resources to fully back up their case, there was surprisingly little for a file so huge : every map, every report, seemed to always miss just the piece of information I needed to tie it all up together, leaving me to try and superpose multiple maps found online to measure the necessary distances. When you start off in law, they never tell you it’s going to involve math.

So because of that deficit of information, I did what I usually avoided doing, that is look up what had been given in other cases related to this situation. And this is where, fittingly enough, I fell not so much into the rabbit hole as into the duck poop hole.

From the moment he had parted from his lawyer, the Duckman had handled every communication with the courts himself. I started uncovering dozens upon dozens of additional letters that contained what could not really be described as an argumentation, although it clearly believed itself to be so, and was only one step removed from the proverbial doomsdayer street corner rambling. What started as a strange, but not necessarily unique showcase of anger against the injustice with which he was faced, devolved month after month into an unhinged charge against the system as a whole, from unironically uncovering “conspiracies” to accusing the Supreme Court of being in on it. As I mentioned, it wasn’t rare for people representing themselves to adopt this sort of tone. But the language was different : usually, behind the rightful anger was a desperately obvious crushing feeling of powerlessness and incomprehension before a genuinely complex system that seemed deaf to their human pain. But it wasn’t the case with the Duckman. The Duckman didn’t doubt – he knew. He wasn’t desperate – he was outraged. He’d go on these pages-long displays of attempts at making legal arguments so deeply misguided that correcting them would involve teaching multiple college courses. This was someone who didn’t doubt for a second his ability to understand the law better than the administration, his lawyer, or the multiple judges that had already weighed on his case. Most people, when the justice system doesn’t come to their aid, might go through different stages of grief, but they invariably end up on a befuddled shrug at the unfair complexity of the system, and move on, as much as possible. Not the Duckman. The Duckman, in the end, pursued this case not so much to right his personal wrong, but to expose to everyone the full corruption of the system. Midway through the collection of letters, any reference to what he was going through, to the case itself, progressively disappeared to make room for phrases such as these : “I wish the [redacted]th chamber Strength, Courage and Honour as we continue to unravel this excellent case study of the corruption of the system”. It was that expression that first struck me : “excellent case study”. I was the intern. I was the one going through case studies. And even I, when I had started working at the tribunal, had been plagued by prolonged episodes of panic at the thought that behind each of my files were real people whose life might be on the line. And here was this man, who seemed as detached from his own case, kept alive with his own time and money, as if it had jumped out of a textbook. Which is not to say the whole wasn’t important to him ; clearly, the problem was that it was way too important. But it was important in the wrong way ; in the way that would never give him an answer with which he would be satisfied. Each and every time a figure of authority disagreed with him, he’d run to the next brandishing the answer of each previous one as evidence of their incompetence or corruption, usually both. From the mayor, he’d gone to the county inspection board, then the prefect, then the courts, then the superior courts, and all the way to the top. And each time, giving dates, referring to people by name. There was no way he wasn’t going to suffer consequences for this behaviour, I told myself.

He already had.

In an older case, I found out that some of the health inspectors he had complained against in one of his multiple ventures had lodged a complaint against him. He had been charged with defamation and insult, and condemned in criminal court. He had appealed the decision, and during the Appellate Court session, behaved so poorly, screaming against a supposed “SLAPP suit” that the judges ordered for him to be removed from the courtroom. In all my years going to court sessions, I have only seen that happen once. Needless to say, the condemnations were confirmed.

The reason I found out all that was not through court communication – the Duckman told me himself, in minute details, in one of his endless letters that were always numbered, and always came in several parts, from three to five or six. All of this, all of this hardship, to him, was apparently nothing less than additional proof of the scope of the conspiracy of which he was the victim. There was almost glee in those letters ; exultation at the idea of being able to present such sound evidence of the state of corruption of our nation.

My mother is a psychiatrist, and I grew up bathed in psychoanalytical lingo. My armchair diagnosis didn’t take long : paranoid personality disorder expressed via a persecution complex. A carrot would have come to the same conclusion, and it would have had exactly the same value. But what this man might be suffering from was not my problem. My problem was what I was going to do with this case.

It was easy to worry about other things : long cases like those always came after the hundreds of cases that demanded a quick response. Deportation challenges, requests for emergency shelter – the dreaded winter months were there – all of which had to be dealt with quickly and efficiently, and all of which felt it mattered considerably more in the grand scheme of things that some poop smell in a castle park. Still, I came back to this case as often as possible, refining my reasoning, backing up my legal points, trying to make sure this case was the last time any court would hear of this case. The solution I ended up with, for legal reasons that aren’t necessary to expose here, was to reject the request. I was satisfied with my choices, and I ran my work by multiple senior judges to make sure there was nothing to legally object to. But I was also relieved from a human perspective. This man was hurting himself and others through years of proceedings : money, time, social circles – he had been expelled from every association in town – criminal record even, were only some of the things this obsession had cost him so far. The last thing he needed was any kind of kindle to his fire. Don’t get me wrong : if the law had dictated for me to rule in his favour, I would have ; but I am fairly certain that the worst thing anyone could do for this man at this point was to tell him he was right.

And then the court told him he was right.

As you might not remember since this story is already way too long, there was a second case related to this situation in the works in another chamber of the tribunal, concerning the city’s refusal to issue an infraction report to the farm’s owner for violation of the building permit. The judicial assistant handling the case, if she hadn’t gone as deep in the case as I had, had done her job faultlessly, and had ended up finding out one instance of permit violation among the multiple alleged ones. It was a tiny victory, almost a pyrrhic one, yet it had the potential of sending the whole case spiralling again. Thankfully, it didn’t directly influence my own solution. I pushed my supervisor for our case to be heard as soon as possible, before more claims could be launched.

We weren’t fast enough. The week after the judgement in the other case was rendered, I received another delightful letter from the Duckman. I expected gloating, Watergate-level paper-waving. But of course it wasn’t. No, it was another rant against every instance in which the other court had disagreed with him. That small, small victory, the only one he’d had since starting the case over five years before, and it didn’t make him happy. Not even a tiny bit. Had thunder descended from the sky to individually strike down each and every duck on the farm, I’m not sure he would have managed to get any enjoyment from it at this point. If this case was an addiction, we had reached the stage where it didn’t matter whether the fix brought him joy or not, it only mattered that it was there.

The court date approached. Slowly, first once every month, then once every week, a new letter arrived. In the last two weeks before the hearing, I started receiving one every day. By the eve of the hearing, he’d reached part fourteen of his exposé, and he promised we’d hear more at the hearing. Before that, the chamber had held a reunion to decide the best way to handle this particular man in court – unlike criminal courts, we didn’t have police officers. The only time they showed up at the courthouse was to make sure migrants couldn’t make a break for it in that tiny courtroom whose door and windows were locked if the judge ruled against them, a baby under their arm and a six-years old playing with a toy truck on the carpet. Three armed border officer for each migrant, that was the rule. But that’s a topic for another time. Eventually, we decided to hear the duck case last, so most of the public would have already left the room, and there was less of an opportunity to turn his intervention into a spectacle, all while giving him the possibility to make his case, which he deserved just as much as anyone else.

I showed up to the courtroom early and sat in the back, as interns usually did to watch hearing on cases they’d worked on while disturbing the room as little as possible. The room was even more deserted than usual. As I said, administrative justice isn’t popular entertainment. Aside from the lawyers, recognizable to their gown, there was only one person in the room who was the right age : an old man sitting all by himself in one corner of the room. This had to be him, surprisingly quiet and hunched on himself, reading and rereading his notes. As I said, getting to know someone through their writing is a peculiar experience. Whatever mental image I had formed of him, this wasn’t it.

The court clerk called the case before the end of the hearing, which surprised me. I saw that old man walk up to the stand. As he griped his papers, I noticed the trembling of his hands : early signs Parkinson’s disease, most likely. He started talking, in a meek, slow voice, and that’s when I realized : he wasn’t the Duckman. He had been sent to represent the county. The Duckman hadn’t come.

The court followed my reasoning and rejected the claim, as planned. This wasn’t exactly the last time I heard of the Duckman : the day after the judgement was rendered, he wrote to the administrative equivalent of the prosecutor asking for a written copy of his oral conclusions. The latter refused, as was his policy when people didn’t show up in court, and his right, as these conclusions were legally his intellectual property. And so the court clerk arrived at my desk with another one of these letters, adding us to the list of corrupted agents of the system he had vowed to expose. I have no doubt that at this very moment, somewhere in the Administrative Appellate court, there is another intern slaving over a file so incredibly thick you’d never guess it’s about duck poop. Onto the next authority, the next one given the chance to redress the injustice. As its chances of succeeding get slimmer with every rejection, I wonder at which point this decent, fairly standard case turned into something no judge could possibly look at in a favourable light.

This is a story about a man I’ve never met, and never will. But at the same time, it’s not a story about him : because every time I think of him, which is more often than I’d like – that Christmas, my mother gifted me a toy duck dressed as a barrister – I think of those dozens of other cases on which I spent not even a tenth of the amount of time and energy I spent on the Duckman’s, because there was no time, and because there was no effort to be made when the lawyer themself had barely had the time to put together a passable claim. I think about this mother of three who had come to France to escape a family vendetta, and was arguing that her younger son needed specialized therapy after his father was murdered in front of him. I think of this father of two infants who had come to receive treatment for his early stage Parkinson’s disease caused by a rough beating he had received in his country of origin, and needed to be on suicide watch due to his depression, but was about to be kicked out with his family of the emergency shelter, because his state wasn’t “serious enough” to warrant sleeping inside. I think of this chamber president, whose ties to the far-right were well-known, grinning, explaining to me never to trust anything I was reading from people claiming to be sick, when I had to come to her for advice on the case of a man who’d been left entirely paralyzed except for the eyelids after an emergency room mistake. All those claims I’d been instructed to doubt, to challenge, to evacuate. There’s no time, and the ball must keep rolling. But that one case ? The one case that keeps drudging from courtroom to courtroom, generating dozens of expert reports, building plans, and land infiltration testing ? The one whose judgement will undoubtedly be appealed again, all the way up to the Supreme Court ? The one whose plaintiff clearly doesn’t care whether or not justice is rightly served, no matter his claims, because this is all clearly just a mean to foster something much more private and sad ? This one I had to spend months on, because someone had the resources to make it into a difficult and important case.

Whether or not you feel sympathy for the Duckman is up to you. I still do, or at the very least I feel compassion, as I do for every human being who is hurting and could hurt less if they received the appropriate help. If the justice system is part of the generalized victimization of mentally ill people, and it clearly is, it doesn’t mean it operates the same at every level ; for some people, the aggression is direct, constant, unforgiveable : it ignores and distrusts, it rejects and abandons. For others, it simply gives them the tools to victimize themselves. There is something in law, in its spectacle, in its byzantinism that appeals to the more broken parts in us, the same way people came to watch executions. Some kind of truth, inflexibly delivered, whether it’s through the voice of a judge or the roaring of an angry audience. Whatever you believe about the judicial system, I doubt anything I’ve written here will change your mind. For it to retain its power, we need Justice to remain mysterious to us, just as much as Justice needs that veil of inaccessibility and incomprehension to keep at bay the pain, the humanity, the illness. It has to be blind and closed to it all, to remain what it is, a monolith of right and wrong, the object of so many fantasies and yet so many certainties.

Judges aren’t therapists, and they aren’t meant to be ; just like every other part of society, they are absolutely ill-equipped to deal with the irrationality and the often self-destructive nature of mental illness. Once, after receiving a particularly aggressive letter from the Duckman, I went up to the judges’ chamber to ask them if there was anything we could do to stop this man from keeping up with this defamatory tone that was undoubtedly headed toward another criminal suit against him. Judges and clerks simply laughed at my concern, and it was understandable : how many times before had they had a similar experience with another plaintiff ? The truth is the justice system is as desensitized to insane behaviour as we are to people claiming this system itself is insane. The wall that separates the two is one through which anything can look irrational on the other side, no matter which side you’re on. In making Justice a spectacle, a science, we have made it a new language, which no one speaks but its actors. It didn’t have to be like this. Justice doesn’t have to be something you have to suffer through : it was made for the people, by them, and it is as much on people to know their rights and their judicial system as it is on this judicial system to remain an accessible part of society instead of its Sphinxian judge. Justice should not be afraid to be human, for us not to be afraid of it. Then, maybe, there will be fewer people who come to break against that great wall separating two worlds that can’t seem to both make sense at the same time. And maybe people like the Duckman, people who are both privileged and victimized by such a system, won’t turn to Justice as much as a way to hurt themselves. And maybe we, on the other side, will have more time on our hands to try and ease someone’s pain rather than fostering it. Imagine that.

#law stuff #well this took forever to write #maybe now i can finally put this case behind me #exorcism writing

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npstephens01-blog · 4 years

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untitled 01

As I sit here in my bedroom on another cold November day, I'm not sure why I felt so drawn to write this. Maybe this dreary weather is getting to me, maybe grad school has inspired me to write more, or maybe some recent events in my life have had more of an impact on me than I thought. Whatever the case, this could be the first of many untitled pieces I write or the only entry on a page that gets deleted in a month. To be determined, I guess. For now, let's just call it some much needed self-reflection in the form of a message I think everyone should hear: own your story.

The other day, I was on the phone with my sister. She's in the midst of applying for graduate school and she sent me her personal statement for some feedback. Her essay was (unsurprisingly) almost perfect, but I had one recommendation-- I wanted her to tell her story. What does that mean, exactly? It means explaining how all your life experiences, the successes and the failures, fit together to tell the tale of a unique and incredible person. For my sister, it meant describing how her research project shows a real passion for her work and future; how her time abroad helped her develop a maturity beyond her years; how the sum of her experiences tells the story of a powerful, inspiring woman who's going to make a difference.

I’m not writing this to help improve your cover letter, though—I write this with the hope that someone will read it and understand that their story is meaningful. Some say we spend too much time focusing on day-to-day struggles and not enough on the big picture, but I'm not sure that's fair. I think recognizing those struggles is crucial and can make for the best stories of all. What I will say, though, is that our narratives lie in how those struggles connect and the ways we deal with them. That is the story that matters: not the thousands of mistakes we've made already or the thousands more we'll make in the future, but how those mistakes shape who we are. That is the story that describes the real beauty of our lives, and that is the story we must own. It’s the scars we cover that have the most meaning.

It's important to acknowledge how difficult it can be to do that. Owning your story means acknowledging the challenges you've faced and searching for the threads of progress that connect them. Most stories are not all struggle, of course, but we all face our trials at some point. Many of those tests can be traumatic to reflect on, and that's not something I want to blindly encourage; people often have very good reasons for trying to forget about certain events in their past. However, developing a willingness to embrace your own narrative presents the opportunity to see all the personal growth that has happened since those events. It's the scars we cover that tell the best stories.

The last couple weeks have been more difficult than I could ever imagine. You would think, hearing me say that, perhaps this entry should have a more negative tone. The truth is that while watching someone you love and care about struggle is hard, there is nothing more rewarding than seeing them own those struggles and continue to persevere. It takes immense strength for someone to confront their fears head-on and realize they can grow from them, and that is truly beautiful to witness. You know what else is beautiful? Watching people with their own stories, people who have also been through things you can't begin to understand, drop everything to help someone else. It’s the scars we cover that do the most healing.

Seeing things like that is what convinced me to own my story. I don't like to talk about it because I've been privileged to live a life filled with opportunities most people never get, but these last six months have been more difficult than most. Humans are powerful, though, and seeing that firsthand in recent weeks made me realize how much good can come from the tough times. I guess what I’m trying to say, if anything, is this: owning your story means seeing your flaws and shortcomings as strengths rather than weaknesses. The older I get, the more convinced I am that this is important. Searching for your own story and acknowledging it can be difficult, but I hope that doing so will help you realize just how important you are. Your story, the good and the bad, is what makes you special. It's the scars we see that teach the most important lessons.

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theonyxpath · 5 years

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Over a month ago, I was talking about Onyx Path‘s sales venues and things like that. Just kind of getting folks caught up on where they could find our stuff and which projects you could find there.

A different, but similar, thing that I wanted to touch on today is some of the other sorts of projects we have to offer beyond book-shaped things. Specifically, because Mighty Matt McElroy sent me some pics of the proofs for a couple of card projects, I’m going to touch on those today.

(Never mind that I haven’t received my card proof samples yet…sob.)

The Realm illustration by Yiyhoung Li

There are two types of card-based projects that we have been creating. The first, are card games. We don’t do a lot of them, as we need to see a clear connection to whatever TTRPG they are derived from or it’s tough to put effort towards them when there are books to be created.

Right now, we have Justin Achilli’s Prince’s Gambit for Vampire: The Masquerade, which we saw as a fun political machinations game that is waaay shorter than a VTES match. Something to play while waiting for your RPG or LARP session to start up.

And Fetch Quest for Realms of Pugmire, which has shipped to Kickstarter backers, should be available to order and in stores in May, and which we are waiting for the PoD proofs for. This is a cooperative card game set in the wilds around Pugmire that complements the TTRPG.

In fact, we’re looking to have the option for folks to make their own cards via DriveThruCards, so folks can play their TTRPG characters.

You might have noticed that the part of DriveThru that deals with these sorts of things is DriveThru Cards, which is a different Print on Demand company than the one who does our books. Everything still all goes through DTRPG, or OBS as it’s corporately known, but the card guys have their own little differences in how they proof, etc.

We’ve been really happy with the quality of their cards, and that’s one of the reasons we have made both the games, and the second type of card projects we put together: roleplaying aids. These can be the extensive selection of Charm Cards for Exalted 3rd, or Condition Cards for our CofD games, or Trick Cards for Pugmire, and more.

Pugmire also has Spell Cards, and right now we are proofing Spell Cards for the Scarred Lands that can be used for a SL campaign, or worked into any 5e fantasy roleplaying session.

If you’re saying, “Hey, what is this here Scarred Lands you keep going on about, Mr. Rich?“, then you should give a listen to last Friday’s Onyx Pathcast where our terrific trio take a Deep Dive into the Scarred Lands setting, and highlight the things that they think really work. Link below in the Blurbs!.

They do a fantastic job of conveying what they love and are intrigued by in Scarred Lands, which is actually really interesting to me, as a guy who helped create it way back in the crazy d20 Rush days. None of our Trio were around then, so to hear them go over the parts that compel them about our new edition and the first one, is kind of like hearing a whole new generation finding it.

Makes me feel both old and proud, by crackee!

C20 Players Guide illustration by Brian LeBlanc

Finally, to wrap up the Scion Errata situation I touched on the last couple of weeks, Neall, in his non-real-world-job time, was able to assemble and create a list of the corrections that he had made but which hadn’t stuck. We turned that into a downloadable PDF (in both full-color and easy to print versions) for any and all to get ahold of, and input the corrections and the backer credits into the PDF and the upcoming PoD files.

When all was said and done, there is a page of Scion: Origin errata, a page of Scion: Hero errata, a page for a FAQ Neall put together, and ten updated pre-generated character sheets. For perspective, Neall’s original list derived from backer input from all over the internet was well over 300 entries (many of them duplicates) across the two books so the vast majority of the fixes worked – except for a page per book’s worth.

While we wanted all of the errata we painstakingly gathered and collated to have stuck as we intended, and we’ve changed a couple of processes to try and make sure that when a change is made it by-gum sticks, we’re just glad that none of them were so bad that they wrecked the books and made them impossible to read and play.

As Neall noted in a message to the backers, we’re disappointed that the projects aren’t as polished as we intended, and we apologize to all involved for disappointing you too.

We will do better, as we continue to create:

Many Worlds, One Path!

BLURBS!

KICKSTARTER:

Our next Kickstarter starting in several weeks will be for Pirates of Pugmire!

ONYX PATH MEDIA

Illustration by Charles Bates

This Friday’s Onyx Pathcast is our 50th! So please join Dixie, Matthew, and Eddy, as they look at Fun! What is “fun” in gaming? Should games even be defined by the fun they provide? Come hear them answer these and other pressing questions of our time on: https://onyxpathcast.podbean.com/

And Here’s More Media About Our Worlds:

Here’s last week’s Onyx Path News, in which Matthew talks a little about the conclusion of the Contagion Chronicle Kickstarter and the movements on our schedule: https://youtu.be/UGERLK6nFQc

No Contagion Chronicle actual play this week, as our audio failed! We do however have a wonderful Scarred Lands actual play, run by Matthew for the Red Moon Roleplaying folks. Here’s the link to episode one: https://youtu.be/1xmU0HvT1Bw

If YOU have a podcast, YouTube or Twitch channel, or talk about games on a blog or other website, and want to perform actual plays or make reviews of our games, please reach out to the Gentleman Gamer on the Onyx Path forum. From there we’ll share emails and get you started, so when you do start producing content we’ll be able to promote it on our blog and YouTube channel!

Here’s the Story Told Podcast‘s superb Dragon-Blooded actual play, for all of you who are audio-inclined: http://thestorytold.libsyn.com/fall-of-jiara-episode-4

As well as Occultists Anonymous, which ventures into ghost territory with their Mage: The Awakening chronicle: https://youtu.be/_rMd7rda2a0

We’re never not going to promote the superb folks at Devil’s Luck Gaming, with their excellent Scarred Lands actual play: https://www.twitch.tv/DEVILSLUCKGAMING

The Dramatic Failure Podcast ventures into Mage territory over here with a big, big story arc filled with inspirational ideas: https://dramaticfailure.podbean.com/

Please check any of these out and let us know if you find or produce any actual plays of our games!

ELECTRONIC GAMING:

As we find ways to enable our community to more easily play our games, the Onyx Dice Rolling App is now live! Our dev team has been doing updates since we launched based on the excellent use-case comments by our community, and this thing is both rolling and rocking!

Here’s an update from the App devs:

Onyx Dice! We’ve recently released the Changeling: The Lost, Trinity Continuum: Aeon dice, and now the Geist dice. Next up on our radar is: Demon: The Fallen, Mummy: The Resurrection, Kindred of the East, Vampire Dark Ages, and Mummy: The Curse.

We have a serious issue on the Pixel and Motorola phones that prevent the user from using the app correctly. A fix is coming shortly. A temporary workaround is to minimize the app without shutting it down, and then restore it.

ON AMAZON AND BARNES & NOBLE:

You can now read our fiction from the comfort and convenience of your Kindle (from Amazon) and Nook (from Barnes & Noble).

If you enjoy these or any other of our books, please help us by writing reviews on the site of the sales venue you bought it from. Reviews really, really help us with getting folks interested in our amazing fiction!

Our selection includes these fiction books:

OUR SALES PARTNERS:

We’re working with Studio2 to get Pugmire out into stores, as well as to individuals through their online store. You can pick up the traditionally printed main book, the Screen, and the official Pugmire dice through our friends there! https://studio2publishing.com/search?q=pugmire

We’ve added Prince’s Gambit to our Studio2 catalog: https://studio2publishing.com/products/prince-s-gambit-card-game

Now, we’ve added Changeling: The Lost 2nd Edition products to Studio2‘s store! See them here: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/all-products/changeling-the-lost

Scarred Lands (Pathfinder) books are also on sale at Studio 2: https://studio2publishing.com/collections/scarred-lands

Looking for our Deluxe or Prestige Edition books? Try this link! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/Onyx-Path-Publishing/

And you can now order Pugmire, Monarchies of Mau, Cavaliers of Mars, and Changeling: The Lost 2e! http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/xcart/manufacturers.php?manufacturerid=296

DRIVETHRURPG.COM:

On Sale This Week!

This Wednesday, we’ll be offering the Advance PDF of the Changeling: The Dreaming 20th Anniversary Edition Players’ Guide!

CONVENTIONS

UK Games Expo: May 31st – June 2nd From the US comes Eddy Webb, Matt McElroy, and Rich Thomas to join with Matthew Dawkins, Steffie de Vann, John Burke, Chris Allen, and Klara Herbol! Gen Con: August 1st – August 4th Save Against Fear: Oct 12-14 GameHoleCon: October 31st – November 3rd We’ll also be back at PAX Unplugged later this year.

And now, the new project status updates!

DEVELOPMENT STATUS FROM FAST EDDY WEBB (projects in bold have changed status since last week):

First Draft (The first phase of a project that is about the work being done by writers, not dev prep)

M20 Victorian Mage (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

City of the Towered Tombs (Cavaliers of Mars)

Geist2e Fiction Anthology (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

Exalted Essay Collection (Exalted)

Kith and Kin (Changeling: The Lost 2e)

Scion: Demigod (Scion 2nd Edition)

Trinity Continuum Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum Core)

TC: Aeon Jumpstart (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Tales of Aquatic Terror (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Masks of the Mythos (Scion 2nd Edition)

Scion: Dragon (Scion 2nd Edition)

Wraith20 Fiction Anthology (Wraith: The Oblivion 20th Anniversary Edition)

DR:E Jumpstart (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

One Foot in the Grave Jumpstart (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2e)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #2 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Exigents (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Redlines

Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition core rulebook (Mummy: The Curse 2nd Edition)

Legendlore core book (Legendlore)

Heroic Land Dwellers (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

Monsters of the Deep (They Came From Beneath the Sea!)

DR:E Threat Guide (Dystopia Rising: Evolution)

Second Draft

Tales of Good Dogs – Pugmire Fiction Anthology (Pugmire)

Let The Streets Run Red (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Dragon-Blooded Novella #1 (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Chicago Folio/Dossier (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Cults of the Blood Gods (Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition)

Across the Eight Directions (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Blood Sea: Crimson Abyss for 5e (Scarred Lands)

TC: Aeon Ready Made Characters (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Development

Hunter: the Vigil 2e core (Hunter: the Vigil 2nd Edition)

WoD Ghost Hunters (World of Darkness)

Oak, Ash, and Thorn: Changeling: The Lost 2nd Companion (Changeling: The Lost 2nd)

Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed (Mage: the Awakening Second Edition)

Memento Mori: the GtSE 2e Companion (Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition)

M20 The Technocracy Reloaded (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

Creatures of the World Bestiary (Scion 2nd Edition)

Heirs to the Shogunate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Scion Companion: Mysteries of the World (Scion 2nd Edition)

Deviant: The Renegades (Deviant: The Renegades)

Manuscript Approval:

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant core (Trinity Continuum: Aberrant)

Scion Ready Made Characters (Scion 2nd Edition)

Pirates of Pugmire (Realms of Pugmire)

Lunars: Fangs at the Gate (Exalted 3rd Edition)

Editing:

Spilled Blood (Vampire: The Requiem 2nd Edition)

CofD Dark Eras 2 (Chronicles of Darkness)

Distant Worlds (Trinity Continuum: Aeon)

Post-Editing Development:

M20 Book of the Fallen (Mage: the Ascension 20th Anniversary Edition)

V5 Chicago By Night (Vampire: The Masquerade)

V5 Chicago By Night Screen (Vampire: The Masquerade)

CofD Contagion Chronicle (Chronicles of Darkness)

Witch-Queen of the Shadowed Citadel (Cavaliers of Mars)

Indexing:

Trinity Core

Trinity Aeon

ART DIRECTION FROM MIRTHFUL MIKE:

In Art Direction

Ex3 Monthly Stuff

Chicago By Night

They Came From Beneath the Sea!

EX3 Lunars

Hunter: The Vigil 2

Contagion Chronicle

VtR Spilled Blood – Hiring artists.

M20 Book of the Fallen

Dark Eras 2 – Getting the rest contracted out.

CoM – Witch Queen of the Shadowed Citadel

Pirates of Pugmire – KS art contracted, sketches and finals coming in.

Trinity Continuum: Aberrant – KS art started contracting.

Marketing Stuff

In Layout

Dystopia Rising: Evolution – With Josh.

Shunned By the Moon

Scion Jumpstart

C20 Novel: Cup of Dreams

Proofing

The Realm

Book of Oblivion – Inputting last corrections.

Signs of Sorcery – Dev comments back to layout.

Trinity Core and Aeon Screens – Prepping for printing.

Aeon Aexpansion

At Press

Scion Hero – Shipping to backers, PoD version processing.

Scion Origin – Shipping to backers, PoD version processing.

Scion Dice – Shipping to backers.

Scion Screen – Shipping to backers.

Fetch Quest – Waiting for PoD proofs.

In Media Res – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Geist 2e – PDF out to backers, gathering errata with new sheet.

Scarred Lands Spell Cards – Waiting forPoD proofs.

Adventures for Curious Cats – Errata.

Tales of Excellent Cats – Errata.

Dragon-Blooded – Deluxe at printer.

Dragon-Blooded Screen – At printer.

C20 Player’s Guide – Advance PDF on sale this Wednesday!

TODAY’S REASON TO CELEBRATE:

On this day in 1429 – Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orléans. (And then she got screwed over. I’ll leave the message you may derive from that to you.)

#Onyx Path Publishing

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zombiescantfly · 5 years

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Words About Games: Unreal (Epic Megagames, 1998)

Unreal Tournament 2004 is my favorite videogame ever. It's always a close match between it and the first Unreal Tournament, but 2k4 always manages to win out, if just barely. However, I am of the firm, unyielding belief that UT2004, when played with both the ‘No Adrenaline’ and ‘UT Classic’ mutators, is far and away the best multiplayer fps experience anyone could ever ask for. We'll get into that a bit later, because it's time for a bit of an explanation.

Unreal Tournament 2004 turns 15 this year, and I wanted to do something special to celebrate the release of a game I have such an unreasonably high appreciation for. Up until the day of its official release 15 years ago, I'm going to be putting out one of my infrequent essays on the games in the series I have experience with, starting now with 1998’s Unreal. I'll warn you, this one gets a bit rambly, but if you reach the end and still want more, take a look at the cooperative non-coop playthrough I did with a friend, where we each played a singleplayer campaign while discussing our experiences and thoughts on all aspects of the game.

But first, a little background.

I was born in 1992. Wolfenstein 3D, the game commonly attributed as the progenitor of the entire FPS genre (yes I know about Maze and Battlezone and all the various first-person dungeon crawlers) was released three months later. This makes me just barely older than the modern first -person shooter.

My dad has worked in the business end of the tech industry since the 80s. As a result, he was always very close to the then-rising PC gaming scene, and even dabbled in game dev for a few years. His position in various companies made him a very early adopter of the ‘home pc,’ something still rare up until like the mid 90s, seriously. He had free reign to take old hardware his workplace was replacing or to buy it for cheap, and by the time I was old enough to start forming memories that actually stuck around, there were two computers in the house.

In 1994, id Software released Doom 2, and my dad bought a copy. Thus began the long tradition of young me standing behind his chair to watch whatever he was playing, starting with Doom 2 LAN deathmatch with my older brother, progressing to his playthrough of Quake 1 and 2, and the first stop in this extended flashback, Quake 2’s online deathmatch.

Young me knew what a marvel online deathmatch was, because my dad told me. It's also just kind of a hard concept for a 5 year old to grasp, especially back then before the internet was in the public consciousness. Nowadays I doubt there's any lack of understanding, and that's cool.

(And yes, I know Q1 had online play but I never managed to catch any of it. Both my dad and brother liked its singleplayer more.)

So where does Unreal come in? Actually, not until about 2009. Bear with me.

In 2000, when I was 8 years old, my dad and brother had gone to spend the day at a local tech trade show. This was a common enough occurrence since we lived less than an hour away from Philly and that attracted a lot of businessy types. They'd usually come back with a new game or two, and I'd have something new to watch over one of their shoulders.

That day, my brother brought this home.

And said to me, “Hey, you should try this one out. It's from Epic.”

Or at least something to that effect.

Now, at this point in my life, I wasn't as avid a videogame connoisseur. The first game I ever truly felt grab me was Starcraft, which I played way more than I probably should have. But also at that time was a growing collection of titles from Epic Megagames. Epic Pinball is one of the first things I remember playing by myself, followed by Jazz Jackrabbit 2 and One Must Fall: 2097.

So I'd been with Epic for a while at that point.

So, Unreal Tournament. Spoilers for the next post, but I loved it, and I still love it. It capped off my experiences with shooters from the mid to late 90s with the first taste I was allowed myself, no longer stolen from over a shoulder while hoping my mother wouldn't choose then to come down the stairs and yell at me for watching and at my dad for letting me. It gave me a love for arena shooters, for the chunky, harshly and gaudily lit 3d graphics, for imaginative weapons, for tightly designed maps, and for a special sort of way to deliver a story buried in map and item descriptions…

But I'd never played Unreal.

Once, at a thrift store, I found a big-box copy of Unreal Gold, still in the shrink wrap, for five bucks. “Oh, I think your dad has that one,” my mother said, turning me away from it.

He did not.

So in 2009, I finally bought Unreal for myself off Steam and promptly returned to the chunky 3d I had probably just been seeing a day prior because I put UT99 on my school laptop.

Enough digressions, let's finally move into it.

Unreal is a strange game, and more than a little unlike its contemporaries. See, from 1993 to 1998, shooters were kind of a one-note experience. You, bad guys, big maps, many guns. From Doom to Quake to Heretic to Blood to Rise of the Triad to Shadow Warrior to Duke Nukem to Dark Forces to anything else you could find in a magazine for mail-order, the shooter was a pretty standard experience. Sure, this or that game had this or that thing that set it apart, some were more advanced than others for the time, but the general idea never really wavered: Click on men from point A to B until you find all the keys and reach the exit.

That gameplay loop made the genre successful, and it's not exactly different now. Keys could be anything, of course. They were literal keys, sometimes they were gas for a generator, now they're mostly cutscene triggers, but the point is that you must locate them to progress. Along the way, there wasn't much other than bloody slaughter to distract you, and that was fine.

It was fine. For those 5 years.

Then, in 1998, a very special sort of game came out that changed the way not just shooters but videogames in general were presented. A game that made expectations higher, products examined more critically. I'm talking, of course, about Half-Life.

On November 19, 1998, Half-Life released and literally changed the course of game development. It offered players a brilliantly constructed narrative delivered naturally by characters speaking in the moment rather than the then-common blocks of text before or after a level. The setting, the Black Mesa research facility, was a meticulously planned space made to feel like a real location and not a jumble of corridors whose first concerns were how many monsters could fit in them. Structured plot points replaced red and blue keycards, well-designed enemy encounters replaced rooms full of cannon fodder, and a new mentality replaced the old.

Which is a shame, because Unreal did something different, too.

Released earlier the same year on May 22, Unreal was the end result of a project always too ambitious for the four years it bounced around development. Conceived first as a medieval RPG of sorts, Unreal eventually morphed into a sci-fi shooter set amid echoes of that original idea.

In Unreal, there is no opening cutscene. There is no opening text crawl or long train ride to prepare you. The title screen is a looping fly-through of a location in the game made to show off various engine effects like reflective surfaces, particle emitters, real-time colored lighting, animated skyboxes, and volumetric fog. Selecting New Game sends you to a loading screen where you quickly fade in from black, staring at the wrecked interior of . . . somewhere. You start low on health and walled in on three sides. As you step forward towards the only path available, a pleasant, computery voice calls out “Prisoner 849 escaping.”

You are Prisoner 849, you are on a prison ship, and it has crashed. This is all evident within the first few seconds of the game. As you progress through the first level, you can see half-broken displays showing the sudden path the ship took, read status logs of engines and ship components, and even get a little taste of some daily life among the prisoners and crew alike. Yes, Unreal has text logs, but they're the good kind, used to inform the world rather than exposit at the player.

Very quickly you learn that something else is aboard the ship. Growls and snarls appear in the distance and screams of terror can be heard through the walls. Every so often, the same calm robot voice calls out another number, another prisoner escaping. This all tells us a good deal of the game’s primary theme. You're just someone.

You are Prisoner 849. You are not the captain of the ship, you are not the high profile super prisoner, you are not a space marine guarding the ship. You are Prisoner 849, one of many to board the Vortex Rikers, and one of many to leave.

There are no friendly human NPCs in the game. Two crewmembers aboard the ship live long enough for you to get close, but one bleeds out as you approach him and the other is slaughtered behind a door stuck partway open so that you can only see a mysterious pair of legs sprint away amid a shower of gore. Shortly after, you catch a fleeting glimpse of a strange figure at the other end of a ventilation shaft, obscured by fog.

Unreal slowrolls its opening. It's reminiscent of Quake 2’s opening level, though with no combat. You're free to wander the small area of the ship, reading various inconsequential text logs and looking at various readouts. Words like “unknown moon” and “sudden course alterations” pop up, telling - but not explicitly - that coming to wherever this is was unintended.

Eventually you leave, exiting through an emergency hatch somewhere on the side of the ship. A few steps forward brings you to a somewhat common looking grass expanse, not too unheard of at the time. You're closer to the ship’s bow, and a short walk around it and through the furrow it plowed in the ground leads to a small rise that still obscures the level until depositing you at just the right angle.

You stand close to the lip of a tall cliff overlooking a shimmering lake. On the other side, a waterfall crashes over the cliff. Trees dot the landscape, birds fly overhead, and small critters scurry away from you.

In truth, it looks more than a bit quaint today, but in 1998 it was without equal. Unreal is a game that put an intense focus on its world, Na Pali. This is a world inhabited for centuries or even millennia by the Nali, a race of four-armed pacifist aliens with a little bit of magic to their claim. Some unknown time before you begin playing, another race known as the Skaarj arrive to exploit the planet for a resource called Tarydium, enslaving the Nali in the process.

Here's where another game might set you up as the Big Badass Hero. You, the lone survivor of this crash; them, the downtrodden alien race; the other them, the evil tyrants. But Unreal never does that, because you're just someone.

Remember hearing those other prisoners escaping? More did even before you woke up. There's a small collection of Nali huts not far from the crash site where you can find the corpses of a few other prisoners and crewmembers from the Rikers next to some healing pickups - the Nali tried to care for them. Small bits of visual storytelling like that appear all throughout the game coupled with its smart use of text logs, and it starts strong and stays strong. A quick swim through a lake infested with carnivorous fish can lead you to a small secret where two dead escapees can be found next to a half-eaten fish. Further in, a dead human sits in a corner of a room, a dead Nali in the center, a flak cannon pickup on top of the latter showing their frantic last stand as the Nali abandons its pacifistic ways to protect its companion. Much later, you’re in a Skaarj warehouse where you can see stacks of boxes bearing the same logo from the Vortex Rikers - as you’ve been doing your thing, the Skaarj have gone back and started looting the ship.

Unreal is a game where things have been happening before you the player show up, and continue to happen while you the player are playing. The plot does not start with you and it does not wait for you. You’re just someone who’s been thrown into this whole situation as it unfolds, from a centuries-old conflict on Na Pali itself to the more immediate conflict of the crashed Vortex Rikers and what happened to its crew. Around almost every corner is another story just like yours, and the fact that we’re playing Prisoner 849 and not Prisoner 521 or Ensign Burt Masterson or whoever else feels like a roll of the dice.

Half-Life gets a lot of praise for finally putting the player behind just a regular guy. Gordon Freeman has been made to become something of videogaming’s first everyman in the way that John McClane of Die Hard ushered in the everyman action hero. But honestly, Half-Life wouldn’t happen without Gordon. A scientist tells you right away that they’ve been waiting for you so they could start the test. Without Gordon Freeman, the plot would never have progressed, and that makes it distinct from Unreal. Half-Life’s various expansions actually do this better; Opposing Force, Blue Shift, and Decay all put you in control of someone who is distinctly more Just Someone than Gordon Freeman.

But Unreal, man, Unreal just does it so well. Occupied Na Pali is a world that does not care about you as a singular entity. The Skaarj don’t turn and attack you because you’re The Player On A Mission, they attack you because you’re some dumb human who goes places they’re not supposed to and shoots all their friends (yes, Skaarj have friends, read the text logs). Hell, your mission isn’t even anything particularly grand! From the beginning, nobody tells you to do anything, you just wander out of the ship and start trying to find a way to leave. Obviously from a game standpoint, there’s always going to be a level start and a level end, and you will go towards the end because it’s a videogame, but in the context of that game, the story is “just find a way out.”

There is a thread you pick up on early, though it might be a bit strange and requires some minor explaining here real quick: in Unreal, you have the option when starting a new game to choose your player model. You can see yourself a few times throughout the game - Unreal has reflective surfaces in a few spots - so it’s not totally useless. By default, Prisoner 849 is a woman. Canonically, Prisoner 849 is a woman.

Early on, past the first level, you enter an ancient Nali temple, ruined and defaced by the Skaarj over the years, but not without its still-devout followers. It’s here that you get the first hints of what seems like it might be a story more appropriate for a 90s shooter. You see a carving on a wall that talks about “the Princess from the Stars” coming to deliver retribution to “the Demons from the Sky.” Now, if you’ve changed your player model to male, this doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But obviously the intent is to key you the player into the mentality that “oh, I’m some prophesied Chosen One, right?” Yes and no. We'll get back to it.

See, about a third of the way into the game you come across another crashed human ship, the ISV Kran. The Kran, gameplay-wise, is a mixed bag of levels ranging from good to meh, the worst of it stemming from symmetrical layouts and a lack of texture variety. But in the narrative as it unfolds, the Kran is very important.

So far, you've passed through a dozen unique and varied environments ranging from the cliffs at the start to the ancient temple, to a Tarydium mine near a small village, a high-tech processing plant nearby, and even an old coliseum or sports arena converted by the Skaarj into a torture chamber. The Kran is your first look at anything human-built since leaving the Rikers.

I'm not going to go through the game bit by bit, but the leadup to the Kran is important. Throughout that first third of the game, you find escaped crew and prisoners from the Vortex Rikers fairly frequently. The events of the game are happening without you, and things aren't going well.

Once inside the Kran, things change a little. Amid the text logs of status readouts and final words before the Skaarj broke in, there's a tiny narrative being constructed about a crewmember by the name of Kira. Kira had managed to do much of what you have - she's armed herself and set off in search of a way off Na Pali with a small group of other crew, some of who you find, once again already dead. One of Unreal’s longest maps comes in around this point, and Kira is a large focus. She was captured, made contact with a group of Nali also held prisoner in the temple (lots of temples in Unreal, the Nali are very religious), mounted her escape, and had to leave her last remaining crewmember behind, his final log suggesting she headed for something she heard was held in the nearby belltower…

This small aside is a brilliant piece of the game, it really is. When I said there was another game or another story behind every corner, I meant it. Kira’s journey from the Kran to Bluff Eversmoking is a full story on its own, and it lends some interesting insight towards a lot of the various prophecies and Nali beliefs you've run into along the way. From the Kran to the Bluff, you find more mentions of the Messiah, of the Sky Princess. You, right? Right?

Or was it Kira?

Kira followed the same path you did. Less of it, sure, but she fought the Skaarj infesting sacred Nali temples. She, an alien warrior, cleansed their holy places of demons who had enslaved them. A small group of Nali risked their own lives to break her out when she was captured, based only on their horror that she would be executed.

This is why keeping 849 as the default lady playermodel is important. The text logs were written with that in mind in order to muddle things. Are you the Messiah? Is Kira? Presumably both of you just want to go home, and maybe falling into a vaguely defined prophecy with incredibly generous qualifications (not Nali or Skaarj, girl, can kill Skaarj) was just an accident.

It certainly seems that way, because when you finally find Kira, she's dead. Your hopes of finding another living human, the Nali’s hopes in an alien warrior, lie dead on the ground with an empty pistol beside her.

Unreal, and Na Pali within it, does not care about Prisoner 849. The story does not revolve around you nor does it even stop to make room for you. Any one of those human bodies you pass throughout the entire game was another escapee. Between the Vortex Rikers and the Kran, you follow a trail of bodies almost up until the end of the game. Except for a very small stretch at the end, someone has beaten you to where you are. But you go further. You encounter things no human has. You escape Na Pali.

Eventually.

If it sounds like I'm taking Unreal a bit too seriously, it's because I most likely am. I admit that. But Unreal just creates such a unique atmosphere among games that I can't help it. Videogames are inherently power fantasies, and most facilitate this by making you play as someone obviously powerful. BJ Blazinsky. Doomguy. Lo Wang. Duke Nukem. A jedi. Even in Call of Duty, where you often just play as some grunt, you get to be the special grunt who sees all the coolest stuff first. And yes, again, even Half-Life doesn't start without you. Gordon becomes mythologized even in the first game, to say nothing of Half-Life 2. In Unreal, there's nobody to put you on a pedestal. Na Pali has its own problems and you're just plopped down in the middle of them while trying to solve your own. It isn't your fault that they intersect.

So it shouldn't be that big of a surprise that one of my other favorite games ever is another hero-by-random-circumstance romp through an uncaring world, Dark Souls. If you like the narrative themes Dark Souls has going on, you'll like Unreal, end of story.

Wait, no, not end of story, because all I did was wax philosophical about the theme for like 8 pages. I gotta talk about design now, ‘cause hot damn does my love of Unreal not stop with flowery prose.

The Skaarj are the primary antagonistic force in the game, but they're some kind of powerful empire with other races on their payroll. After escaping the Vortex Rikers, gaping in awe at the waterfall, and spending some time chasing harmless wildlife around the field, the first actual enemy you fight is a Brute.

Brutes are big lumps of meat with two rocket pistols and a permanent scowl. They move slow, they turn slow, and they fire slow. The first one you fight is really close to the exit of an indoor area. What Epic have done here is create an excellent enemy encounter.

Nothing in Unreal has hitscan weapons. Ignore Legend Entertainment’s Return to Na Pali, I'm gonna. That means that everything coming your way can be dodged. Two rocket pistols sounds scary, but you're in an open area and you have the ability to strafe. If you're somehow not comfortable doing that while shooting, that's why the Brute’s so big, he's hard to miss.

From there, you get exposed to the tentacle and the Razorfly. The Tentacle is essentially a stationary, ceiling-mounted autoturret that fires a single projectile at you every half second or so, and the Razorfly is a big bug that hits you with melee attacks. Neither are particularly challenging, but all three so far get you ready for your first encounter with a Skaarj.

You're in a small facility and have just shut off a force field. Coming back through the hallway, bars suddenly slam out from the wall, blocking your progress. The music fades out. And one by one, the lights turn off until you're sitting in pure darkness. You get a few seconds to sweat before the music kicks back in, the wall beside you slides open, flashing red emergency lights appear, and a large shape leaps out at you.

The first encounter with a Skaarj is cramped and claustrophobic, and intended to have you miss a lot of its capabilities. It runs around, does a forward leaping melee attack, and can shoot little bolts of energy at you. At the time, you only have two weapons: the Automag, a hitscan pistol with a decent fire rate, and the Dispersion Pistol, a projectile energy weapon you can charge up that acts in the same capacity as Doom’s fist or Quake’s axe as a holdout weapon. You'll most likely take out the Skaarj with the Automag because there isn't a way to run out of ammo with it unless you try, so you most likely won't see how this type of enemy reacts to projectiles.

Because, see, Unreal has very smart AI, and the people who made these enemies took great advantage of that fact. The Brutes and Razorflies of the level so far are pretty simple cannon fodder type stuff, they amble around and attack towards you. Once you're away from that first encounter, the Skaarj enemies have a few tricks.

A Skaarj will try to circlestrafe you. If you're using a projectile weapon, a Skaarj will dodge your attacks with a pretty damn high success rate (deviously, the very next weapon you get after the Automag is the Tarydium Stinger, a projectile-based minigun, and you start seeing Skaarj commonly around the same time). If a Skaarj is getting near death and has allies close by, it'll try to run away towards them. Sometimes a Skaarj will fake its death to try to catch you by surprise. It won't ever get back up while you're looking or within a certain range, and you can take the time to see if flies start buzzing around the supposed corpse or just gib it to make sure. A Skaarj will intuitively use cover, as well, thanks to a dead-simple pathfinding mechanism inside the level editor.

A Skaarj is a really cool enemy today, let alone in 1998, half a year before everyone lost their shit over Half-Life’s stilted Marine encounters.

Unreal keeps a pretty steady flow of enemy varieties coming your way, as well. Various types of Skaarj show up, often with ranks padded out by the Krall, another race they employ or enslave, and they have plenty of variety among them as well.

But Na Pali isn't just a collection of levels stuffed full of bad guys to click on. Most levels actually don't have all that many enemies to them, instead relying on strong encounter design over sheer overwhelming odds. . . . Most.

No, Na Pali is a world, and Unreal wants you to believe that. The game bounces you between open outdoor areas and various structures at a healthy pace, and it always manages to give it all a fresh coat of paint. Harmless critters hop around or soar high above, schools of fish scatter when you explore a lake, beasts of burden grumble at you as you charge past their pens, flak cannon in hand. And better yet, enemies aren't often just waiting around for you to show up. They have things to do or time to waste, and may very well be doing that when you come across them. In areas controlled by the Skaarj, you can often see them tapping away at computers or just staring out a window before you alert them, and Krall mercenaries are fond of drinking or playing dice. Brutes amble around on patrol patterns, stopping every now and then to scratch themselves. The more feral Slith enemies found near water tend to just be swimming around until they're alerted.

These tiny details make Na Pali feel like a place, and the levels you play through are no different. From the wrecked Vortex Rikers to the various Nali temples to the Kran and even up to the final levels set on the Skaarj mothership, the levels make room for details like bedrooms, kitchens, and even bathrooms in a way that shooters just sort of didn't usually do at that point. Sure, you'd have a bathroom in another game every so often, but it was usually there for a gag or some sort of reference. Unreal makes a concentrated effort to really sell you on these levels, and it works. There's so much variety in the maps that not a lot has a chance to get boring, though sometimes, as I mentioned before, things can get a bit muddy. The map Terraniux and the middle levels of the Kran are a bit less navigationally-friendly than they could have been, but there's nothing as egregious as the later levels of Doom or any of the other maps from various games that are mazes first and gameplay sections second. There are no out-of-place platforming sections or agonizing breaks for switch puzzles. There's just a world as you might find it in real life.

Another strength of Unreal’s level design is that sometimes it just lets you take a break. You might go minutes without seeing an enemy, leaving you free to explore your surroundings. There's even a level that has an entire segment dedicated to calmly floating down a river on a small boat, with no combat at all. It comes after a challenging combat section and acts as a nice little breather with great visuals and fantastic music.

Oh man, Unreal’s music. Never before or again have I heard a more distinct soundtrack in a game. Unreal has its fair share of late-90s electronic tracks, but the majority of its music is a very chill mix of unusual instruments. I know next to nothing about music, so let me just drop some links real quick.

Dusk Horizon

Nali Chant

War Gate

Surfacing

It's such an intriguing mix of styles, and it's all perfectly suited for the environments you hear them in. All of the levels are colored very deliberately, and the music matches the mood that texturing and lighting creates. Coupled with how each track has an ambient and battle section and how it seamlessly slides between them as you enter and leave combat, the levels in Unreal are all a treat to explore, and I really do urge people to look up the soundtrack because it's really just that good.

The music in this game created a precedent of quality that the series kept up easily, and is just more evidence of how committed Epic at the time were to making as immersive and vibrant a world as they could. It's just another part of a beautifully crafted experience that created a game so unlike any other at the time or since.

Unreal is a game that is still incredibly playable today. On a technical level, it's the Unreal Engine so you can pop it onto anything and get it working without any real trouble. The unofficial OldUnreal patch is easy to find, and is just a single .dll file that gets dropped in the system folder. But that's not the only thing playable means. Design philosophies and public reception to various systems and elements of gameplay change over time, and it renders a large number of games either too obtuse or too clunky to really get into. But there are always games that are timeless. Doom is still a treat because the only thing in it is shooting, there's nothing particularly experimental to have been done better over repeated iterations. Unreal is simple in that way, too. Its weapons are varied, unique, and famous. Man, I didn't even get into the weapons, but I'll save that for the Unreal Tournament essay.

My point is, Unreal did a lot, and it did it very well. It and every other game from 1998 was overshadowed by Half-Life, unfortunately, and that became the game to beat. Half-Life isn't the reason we never saw another Unreal in the same vein as the first, but I do think that a desire to be the next Half-Life is why the industry moved to such a narratively-focused philosophy. There was another game three years later that also focused on sprawling outdoor areas mixed with indoor structures, but it didn't have the same lonesome exploration, living world, or details that suggested hundreds of years of mythology. This game would go on to affect the industry just as much or even more than Half-Life, and was in fact Bungie’s Halo.

Halo had cutscenes and voiced NPCs and all the things Half-Life made people want. Halo is another beast, but its success was all but the final nail in the coffin for any hope Unreal had of spawning any imitators. The era of frantic slaughterfests in key-locked mazes was over, and Unreal’s attempt at carving out a spot for contemplative exploration in living worlds was ignored.

That style of game would come back, but not in shooter form. Both Dark Souls and Shadow of Colossus have similar feels to them, and I'm sure there are others out there. Other Team ICO titles, Journey, there have to be others, there are too many videogames for there not to be. But as it stands, Unreal is all but alone, and even now, in this wave of 90s revival indie shooters, they aim more for Doom and Quake. Even Epic would step away from Unreal’s distinctive style with its very next release.

See, Unreal was popular, but at the time, released into an audience high off of Quake 2, those same people wanted to dive into its multiplayer. And when it worked, it was incredible. But it often didn't work. Epic set to fervent work patching it to fix poor netcode and a variety of other issues, but that project turned into something far, far larger, prompting them to release an entirely new game running on an updated version of the Unreal engine. New maps, optimized and redone versions of existing maps, remodeled and rebalanced weapons, new music, new gamemodes, everything.

Unreal Tournament would come out a year later, setting the industry alight in its own ways. We'll take a look at that next month, so until then, take a day or two to play through Unreal. I played it and loved it a decade after its release, and another decade won't have changed much.

#unreal #words about games #review #epic #epic games #fortnite #videogames #unreal retrospective

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parkjmini · 7 years

Text

short hiatus

hey guys !! uh i never really know how to start this but I think I'm going to go on hiatus for a bit (as in this entire blog) starting oct29 pdt

It's nothing bc of what's going on here it's more personal things and my own responsibilities feel like they're piling up and I just feel so suffocated honestly.

November is the month of college apps and I have yet to even finish my personal essay and school has been crazy loaded with work that I feel like I'm going to malfunction soon.

Don't even get me started on how I'm slowly failing my classes. Or how calculus takes me 5 hours to finish. Or how I don't understand anything in aplang where I literally feel so useless and stupid. Or how I just have so many projects and essays that I need to finish.

I've been really tired to the point where I slept for 13 hours and then napped for 3 more. I can't handle it.

There is also this weird pressure of finding a job and I'm having horrible writers block for everything, even the requests in my inbox.

I'm really grateful for all the new followers who have been coming out of nowhere and to my wonderful mutuals for talking and loving me.

But I just need a break from tumblr bc it's becoming something that's consuming my time more than it should. I go on tumblr during my study hall hours when I should utilize that time to do my shit

I won't be responding to messages or chats anymore until I come back. I will be queuing reblogs from time to time, but I won't be posting any writings. I might like posts from time to time as well, esp if I'm tagged in posts.

And as for when I'll be coming back, I'm not sure. Maybe in December, towards January.

I feel really bad for leaving )-: mainly bc I really love tumblr and talking to everyone here. I want to stay active for my followers but I can't anymore. I'm sorry. I didn't mean for this post to be super dramatic and emo but I didn't want to leave everyone high and dry and without a reason for being inactive

I love everyone and I hope to be back soon ))-:

#personal #hiatus #)-:#im sorry guys #i feel reslly bad

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wishhbones · 6 years

Text

Wednesday, November 1st, 2017 -- 1:11 am

I type this as she is asleep beside me.

I believe I met her at a swim meet during junior year of high school. I was a 15 year old boy. Hungry for attention and eager to please for it. This is our love story.

It doesn’t matter who I was around or which other girl I was attempting to flirt. I knew I wanted Valerie the most. Fuck, I think everyone knew that. The night of the swim meet we skyped for 7-8 hours into the night about Metallica and my bucket list. She has strict parents so this fact means a lot to me. I texted her everyday and like a fuckboy would say my “goodnight sweetdreams” and “good morning <3″. I wanted to get in her pants and thought I was being sly ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

But the more I talked to her I realize I had finally met my match. She’s funnier than me, smart; and not to mention, stunning. I’m sure of I’ve been caught a numerous amount of times staring. Just. Staring. The best part was, she would just.. stare back. I could feel the energy oscillate between us telling me that she wanted what I wanted.

But what do I want now.......

I want her to be mine.

I can’t let any other person take away this opportunity.

But

She wasn’t ready.

And I lost it. I wanted beg... and I probably did ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

She wanted to stay as friends. That’s not what I wanted to hear. I assumed I’d be kept on a leash and be forced to watch her kiss another man.

So I left.. And she resented me, but at the time I don’t think she understood why. Through rumours I know she called me a bitch and such. okay :/

Time passed and when I would hear her name my heart would skip a beat. An equivalent to when its about to be your turn to present your project to the class. I swear I had arrhythmia too (I actually went to see a doctor about this, anyway I want to believe but I cant prove that she is the cause. o well)

She ended up dating a teammate from my swim team. Fucking hell. Of course it’s the fastest guy on the team. Of course she doesn’t want a mediocre fuck like me. This is what she wanted the whole time I thought. I hate her.

I think there was a time here where we felt interest for each other again, but she was still with him. It wasn’t right for me to take a woman away from her man. She knew it was immoral to keep flirting with me.

It’s time for me to move on. I hated myself for hating myself. I stopped talking to Valerie. I found a girl who went on to became my lover and prom queen. And on Prom day, guess who came crying. Not my girl lol. I did feel bad. No one deserves to cry after this much preparation and in front of this many people, but I don’t think she would have let me approach her (I asked her recently, she said I should have lol).

There’s something I want to confess. Even though my prom queen was lovely. I had Valerie on my mind. All the time. I left her for the purpose of wanting a new opportunity, and guess who I went to right away. You guessed it. Val. She had newly become single and I wanted her like always.

Valerie wasn’t ready. Again...... And again she went off with someone else.......... I should have learned the first time :c

The summer after that year, I was able to witness her on the day she left that man. I’d pay good money to see that shit, but I saw it for free instead. I made her laugh that day with my awful singing. That’s a (+1) for my ego.

I want her. I crave her. I am desperately curious to know what she tastes like.

One time she actually let me come over to catch up on life. It was around the time where she had recently let go of her best friend (and mine at the time). I truly remember this distinct moment where we walked through her kitchen and I wanted to kiss her by her fridge. I didn’t. Also when she invited me to her room and I sat on her bed. God, I wanted to grab her and kiss her passionately like in the Notebook. I didn’t.... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

After leaving, I texted her about how I felt a connection again and that I wanted more. I think she went along the lines of, “we’ll see how life turns out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. Yeah, I asked her out like 3 times in a 6 month span after that. All “No”s.

But, why did she still talk to me... Does she only like the attention give to her. Thats probably it. When she’s lonely she comes to me for attention, gets high from it until she finds someone else. (This is actually what I assumed at the time).

Well, during May 2016, we clicked again. It felt real. She even said over the phone that she missed being friends with me. (idk how to insert a crying emoji here. i dont use a macintosh). We were due for a Blink 182 concert in a few months, except I had to buy my ticket separately from her and her friends. I was pumped, were finally taking off.

Well, hold your fucking horses because I was supposed to see her one weekend back from Ottawa and she stopped me. In fact, she didn’t want to continue what we had going on because she wanted to work on herself. She said she couldn’t produce her own happiness and I while I do agree that this is a very valid reason, I was fucking disappointed again.

A month goes by and I send her a regretful essay over text pouring my heart out and saying something along the lines of, “dont even msg me on my birthday, youre gonna ruin it :’(”

Another month goes by and I learn that she invited my best friend, Jeremy to go to the Blink 182 concert. She had an extra ticket. Another month goes by and I learn that she has a new boyfriend.....................

just fucking kill me now.

It is September 2016, I fall into a deep depression. Stay high in my room. Skip class and eventually drop out of school like a fucking miscarriage. December rolls in and I find myself at home. A disappointed family surrounds me at the Christmas lit dinner table. Everyone is quiet and afraid to ask me how things are going. No one asked me actually.

My aunt gave me a self help book as my Christmas gift and I learned a very simple and great lesson. “Awareness is the first step towards Change”

I wanted to get better. I wanted to change from what I had become.

I applied to work at the pool.... which happened to be the same pool Valerie would supervise at... I carefully picked hours when she was not there. I dreaded that I would see her... but I was also sad that I didn’t see her. Strange. Anyway, I needed to reset my work ethic and picked all early bird shifts Monday to Friday. I invested over a thousand dollars into recording equipment to jump start my life as a musician. I rehearsed songs to play at open mic events. I flirted with girls again. I got back in shape doing cross fit. Soon after that, I got my first step into a job related to my field of study. I began working for Hibar Systems, an engineering firm dedicated to building high quality pneumatic pumps and assembly lines, as a Jr. Project Manager.

My life began to pick up again. Things were going great and I felt like I was finally moving on from Valerie....

One day, I decided to text her over Instagram probably about how dumb she looked in her profile pic. Apparently, it was great timing. I soon learned that she had gone through a life changing event just recently and wanted to break up with her boyfriend. I tried hard to act as a neutral body and give support.

On July 16th, Jeremy had tickets to go see Metallica. This was my first ever show and was ready to shit my pants. He had extra tickets though. So who did I hit up? ... Valerie.

And she said “yes” !

That night she told me that she only listened to Metallica because of me.. and that she thought at some point in the night that she was in love with me. Ain’t no drug can me higher than that. We had some great closure that evening. I learned that she was afraid to date me in case of the consequence that our breakup would mean the end of seeing me. That at least when were not together, I come around periodically (when im not ghosting on her) and thats better than never seeing me again.

A few days later on the 18th, I drove her back to her apartment from a get together with her friends.

That night she broke up with her boyfriend.

That night I kissed her.

That night she told me, “Thanks for never giving up on me.”

It has been 6 years since I first met her. Now, I type this on her laptop as she is asleep beside me. I love her.

-Kevin ‘Konkon’ Chung

#personal

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thenatureofpages · 5 years

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5 Reasons You Should Consider Participating in NaNoWriMo

Leaves are changing colors, the air is crisp, and pumpkin spice lattes are available to the masses. Do you know what that means?

NaNoWriMo season is almost upon us!

That’s right – the nonprofit writer’s program National Novel Writing Month, commonly known as NaNoWriMo – is getting closer!

“Wait,” you might be saying, “What exactly does this mean?”

WELL! Allow me to tell you!

National Novel Writing Month is a writing challenge in November with a simple goal: write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days.

NaNo is also far more than that – it’s a community, it’s a way of life, it’s – okay, I’m probably getting ahead of myself. I’m just really passionate about the program – in fact, I even wrote my college admissions essay on the life-changing power of NaNoWriMo!

1. Having a Deadline is Incredibly Motivating!

I don’t know if you’re anything like me, but if you are, then you struggle with procrastination. A lot. If procrastination were a major, I’d have a Ph.D. in the study. Yet every year when NaNoWriMo season rolls around, I find myself eager to write and hit my daily word count goal. I’ll wake up early, go to bed late, and even get my regular work done faster to have more time to write. The NaNoWriMo website also provides you with badges as you hit specific landmarks – your first 25k, writing for 10 days in a row, etc. – which I love to try and collect throughout the month.

2. A Sense of Community!

This is one of my absolute favorite parts on NaNoWriMo – the community! Currently, the site boasts over 370,000 participants between the Young Writer’s Program and the main NaNoWriMo program! Every November, Twitter, Bookstagram, and BookTube is flooded with posts and #WIP updates for WriMos to encourage, inspire, and support one another! The NaNoWriMo website also hosts forums for writers to flock together and form a community. I found some of my best friends through their website and am still heavily involved in local events too!

That’s right – not only is there an online community, but there are also offline ones as well! Most cities host NaNoWriMo events put together by your local Municipal Liaisons – MLs for short. Depending on your location, libraries, coffee shops, and bookstores have been known to hold NaNoWriMo meetings for writers to gather and participate in word wars and chat about your book. It’s a blast!

3. No Time for Doubt!

The basis of NaNoWriMo is writing 50k in 30 days – this means you’re writing 1,667 words every day. If you’re a fast writer, this might be easier for you, but it’s definitely not for me! This will be my fifth year participating in the annual event, yet the word count still catches me every time! When you’re writing so many words per day, you don’t have time to stop and edit what you’ve written! There’s no time for writer’s block! If you want to make it to the finish line and claim sweet, sweet victory, you have to trudge through it one foot – or word – in front of the other. Eventually, the writer’s block or problem-scene will end, and it’ll become smoother sailing once more.

For those of us who struggle with self-doubt or perfectionism, this is also super helpful. I tend to go back and fret over my writing style, “is this too trope-y?”, and all the lovely fears caused by our inner editors. During NaNoWriMo, I have an excuse to say, “Nope! I’ll deal with that in December! For now, just write!”

4. Author Pep Talks!

Look, if you haven’t read the NaNoWriMo author pep talks, you’re sorely missing out. My personal favorite is Lemony Snicket’s, written entirely in satire. I crack up and get inspired every time I read it! If irony isn’t really your cup of tea, they have tons of other pep talks cataloged in their archives, and new ones are sent out during NaNo season!

Here are several of my favorite pep talks given in the past few years:

Brandon Sanderson, Erin Morgenstern, Gail Carson Levine, Holly Black, James Patterson, Jenny Han, John Green, Kate DiCamillo, Maggie Stiefvater, Marie Lu, Marissa Meyer, Meg Cabot, Neil Gaiman, Rainbow Rowell, Scott Westerfeld, Stephanie Perkins, Veronica Roth, and Lindsey Grant.

5. YOU WRITE A FREAKING NOVEL!!

There is absolutely no better feeling in the world than this:

You’ve been writing nonstop for the last 29 days. The end of your novel is in sight – you’ve been through ups and downs with your characters, you’ve cried with them (or because they refuse to stick to your outline), you’ve plowed through writer’s blocks, and you stuck with it for an entire month.

And here it is.

Stare at those words for a moment.

The End.

You’ve written a novel. A NOVEL! It might be terrible – goodness knows some of my NaNoWriMo drafts are so awful that I have to laugh at myself – but you’ve done it. You wrote a novel. You’re a novelist. A writer. An author – published or not, it doesn’t matter. You’re an author to a first draft.

“But Ally…”

“But Ally…I just don’t have the time to write a novel.”

This is by far the most common reason I hear from people for not participating in NaNoWriMo – and who can blame them? Life gets in the way!

I totally understand – but it’s only for thirty days! After the month you can go back to the sanity of having free time – but for NaNo, we buckle down, we prioritize, and we drink our caffeine by the gallon.

The best advice I ever heard for this problem comes from Chris Baty, the founder and former executive director of the program. He’s written three books about NaNoWriMo and started off the whole event in 1999.

Write in the small moments.

Can you wake up twenty minutes earlier? Go to bed ten minutes later? Write during your lunch break? Jot down snippets on the ride home from work? It’s incredible how many small moments you can find when you prioritize your writing and how much they add up!

“But Ally…doesn’t quality matter more than quantity?”

This is definitely the second most common reason I’ve heard for being nervous about participating in NaNo. The naysayers insist that writing so many words in a month creates a chaotic mess of words with no real quality in writing (no, honestly, I’ve heard someone say this).

Yes, I’ll admit – my drafts are a chaotic mess of words. They’re messy, wonderful, sometimes rambly first drafts that absolutely suck – isn’t that beautiful? First drafts are allowed to be terrible. Usually, they aren’t all too bad – there’s enough to go off of for a second draft. Then maybe a third. Then a fourth, and soon enough, you’re well on your way to getting ready to query for an agent.

Don’t believe me? Check out some of these novels that started off as NaNoWriMo projects:

Fangirl by Rainbow Rowell

The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

Wool by Hugh Howey (soon to be a movie!)

Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (already a movie starring Robert Patterson and Reese Witherspoon!)

The Beautiful Land by Alan Averill

Cinder, Scarlet, and Cress by Marissa Meyer (all three NaNoWriMo projects went on to become best-selling books!)

That’s a pretty dang successful list right there. I think it speaks for itself – NaNoWriMo clearly doesn’t skimp on quality for quantity.

I hope this blog post has been enough to convince you to start thinking about joining NaNoWriMo! I’ll let you in on a closing secret:

Even if you don’t make it to 50k, you still have more words than you started with!

If you only manage to write 200 words during the month of November – guess what? THat’s still 200 more words than you had before NaNoWriMo! At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter how fast you write or what your word count goals are – it’s that you’re writing. And having fun. And probably losing some of your sanity but that’s beside the point.

I really, really love NaNoWriMo and hope I’ll see you on the website! If you decide to join, feel free to add me as a writing buddy to get started! I’m kineticbugsy on NaNoWriMo’s website and @natureofpages on Twitter, where I screech about word wars and character aesthetics throughout the month.

Go forth and write!

Are you thinking about participating in NaNoWriMo? Are you a veteran NaNo back for another season or a newbie? Tell me about your upcoming project or feel free to drop any questions about the annual event in the comments!

TNOP out!

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#IFTTT #WordPress

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feedit · 6 years

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LiketyLikeLikeLike

Hillary Clinton wants you to like her.

I mean, she’s not staying up at night thinking about you, per se, but in general she wants to be liked. And that, she admits, has been a problem.

I had the pleasure of seeing and hearing Secretary Clinton this week in Chicago as she toured in support of her book, What Happened. She said that just after her tenure as Secretary of State, her approval ratings were around 69%. People seemed to really like her when she was in a supporting role: As First Lady, as a Senator from New York, as Secretary of State. But when she stepped up and wanted to lead the nation as President, and indeed when she was a candidate, her approval ratings went down substantially.

She admitted that when people openly express that they don’t like her it is painful, even though she knew that it’s very common especially for those who run for public office and as an experienced public persona, she also knew what she was getting into as she stepped into the spotlight on her own. But it still hurts, she said.

Who can blame her? We all want to be liked, even powerful, strong people have that basic human need for approval at some level. But not everyone has public polling numbers following them around to remind them of their ‘failure’ in this regard.

Secretary Clinton noted when women are ‘behind the scenes’ for others in power – publicly or privately – they are seen as (and I’m paraphrasing here) warm, sincere and honest, but when they want to lead, suddenly they are cold, conniving and selfish climbers who have abandoned all of their previous morals to attain personal glory. But when men move from the background into a more prominent role, they are seen as successful, strong, intelligent and bold, and it is completely understandable that they would want more for themselves and strive to achieve those goals. Women who do the same are less liked than their male counterparts as a whole. And sadly, this shift in opinion, which has been measured in scientific polls, comes from both men and women.

Once upon a time, I was asked to take a ‘behind the scenes’ role by a partner in the advertising agency where I worked because the client on the account that I led “didn’t like my style.” To me that was insulting on so many levels. I felt that ‘my style’ was being honest, direct, hard-working and smart, all things I had been raised to believe were positive traits. But when I was being asked to support a junior person on the team, I realized this client wanted to be the smartest woman in the room. Perhaps I was a threat, even though I felt that my job was to help her succeed? After all, she was my client and her success was the agency’s success, if not my own.

I guess she didn’t see it that way.

As angry as I was, a tiny part of me was also hurt. I didn’t want to be best friends with this person, but why didn’t she like me? Wasn’t I really more similar to her than not? Why not support a fellow smart woman in a leadership role who was just doing her job, and actually doing it well? Was I supposed to sublimate myself or bring her coffee to reassure her that I was clearly her underling? I will never understand this phenomenon, no matter how many times it happened to me and to others through the years.

Needless to say I didn’t take that news very well. I stacked a pile of folders for this client on the floor by a partner’s office door and left the agency for the day. I told them I’d be so far behind the scenes that I actually would not be working on this particular account at all and good day. I may have also punched the wall by my cubicle on the way out. I have a tiny scar on the knuckle of my right hand and when it rains sometimes that joint aches just a little bit.

It’s my modern-day war wound.

Roxane Gay writes about likability and her struggle with it in the essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” in her collection, Bad Feminist. Gay writes, “I had no idea what it meant to be likable, though I was surrounded by generally likeable people – or, I suppose, I was surrounded by people who were very invested in projecting a likable façade, people who were willing to play by the rules.”

Further on she poses, “Why is likability even a question?” and discusses how one common criticism of popular fiction is the ‘likability’ of female characters.

“Some might suggest that this likability question is a by-product of an online culture in which we reflexively click ‘Like’ or ‘Favorite’ on every status update and bit of personal trivia shared on social networks. … it would be shortsighted to believe that this desire to be liked… begins or ends with the Internet.”

It’s so addictive to be Liked.

I enjoy – I almost wrote ‘like’ – Facebook. A lot. Being a SAHM is often a lonely enterprise in terms of adult companionship and I find that reaching out online throughout the day makes me feel more connected to the Grown Up world that I might otherwise participate in IRL if I were a person with a Real Job Outside the Home. (I dislike the term Working Mother, but that’s another topic.)

Facebook is the modern day Slam Book, and it’s so easy to cast a quick and thoughtless judgment upon the masses. Like. Angry. Sad. Quick snarky comment. Eye roll emoji. I try to stay away from political commentary - even those with opinions with which I vehemently agree - simply because I can’t sit idly by and watch comments go by without adding my own thumbs up or down, and impulsively watching if others do the same. If so, they must be smart like me. If not, well… poop emoji for them.

As I’ve been writing more frequently and spending time to promote myself in the past few months, I have found more and more drawn to the Like. Writers tend to be terrible self-critics and the online world is the perfect venue for rampant self-doubt to find fertile ground to grow and fester. Compulsively, I check to see who read my latest piece. Did they Like it? Love it? Haha at it? Sad face rate it? Share it – ah, bingo, more chances for more Likes, more Love. More more more.

It worries me because these instant, Pavlovian ratings can pummel my self-esteem. Nobody put a heart on my stunning Instagram photograph? My kitschy homemade Halloween decorations? My self-deprecating and witty observation about parenthood? My heartfelt personal essay? Conversely, I get an adrenaline rush from seeing that Like count rise and other comments supporting my efforts. Where are you, my digital friends? Come and share a moment of your time and a few electrons to validate me. Like like like me. If you do, I must be OK. I must be doing OK as a writer, as a mom, as a human being. It’s my own Approval Rating Meter: 44 Likes today = Likable? Acceptable? Smart?

Or not.

As of today, November 1, I deleted Facebook from my phone. It’s just been a few hours now but it’s kind of painful, honestly. I literally forgot that I deleted it moments after - That’s done, now I’ll just go check on, oh wait a minute… It may be impossible to completely go dark (I do use it for volunteer work and events) but my goal is to stay away from it for most of the day. I wonder if I will feel like a relief or a terrible sacrifice? Will I feel less liked or will I just care less about being liked?

Either way, it will be interesting. Poop emoji, smiley face, wink, donut.

#like #facebook #roxanegay #hillaryclinton #badfeminist #whathappened #women

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thesecondmate · 3 years

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reading: week 49

this is my 3rd week of my obs&gynae rotation, so i rotated onto the gynae side having spent 2 weeks on obstetrics and absolutely loved my time there. am i converted to obstetrics? no, but i love the environment and the team. am i converted to anaesthesia? ...maybe. gynae is less my thing - my entire internal monologue all day every day is that quote about "all women do is bleed and suffer”.

spent a lot of time considering communication and how we as doctors speak to patients this week. spent a lot of time discussing how, actually, we forget that we are two people having a conversation - one side knows more about medicine, one side knows more about their life and how this condition impacts them. i think that too many doctors get caught up in ‘this is how to break bad news’ or ‘this is what i need to tell them’, forgetting that we are all humans having conversations. and also some doctors forget that their patients have feelings, and the docs and i had a good bitch about that too lol, comparing our experiences of being patients whilst also being doctors/med students.

~ under the cut ~

op-ed/essays clearing out some of my articles in my saved-for-later folder on fb, as i dislike reading on my phone; hence, some of these are kinda out of date.

✩ Oliver Burkeman's last column: the eight secrets to a (fairly) fulfilled life - Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian

✩ Glastonbury fence-jumpers: 'It was girls underneath, boys over the top!' - BBC this was just cute + i miss festivals

✩ How Germany remembers the world wars - BBC News

✩ The rape of Berlin - Lucy Ash, BBC News tw: rape

medicine

✩ Researchers say blood test can detect cancer years before symptoms - Nicola Davis, The Guardian research paper below - highly! exciting!

✩ Non-invasive early detection of cancer four years before conventional diagnosis using a blood test - Chen et al., Nature Communications nb: i know v little about genomics or cancer, as they are 2 of my least favourite things in medicine. that said!! this was super interesting!! v exciting - they can’t differentiate btwn cancers but honestly they used machine learning to achieve rly high sensitivity & specificity up to 4y before diagnosis, which is often v much too late - so exciting if they can apply this to a) differentiate different types of cancer and b) extend it to a screening programme that allows patients to be treated. vvv cool, but not without drawbacks of the potential of over-treating, etc!! but still so cool.

✩ NHS blood unit systemically racist, internal report finds - Amelia Gentleman & Denis Campbell, The Guardian

✩ Covid: Russia begins vaccinations in Moscow - BBC News

✩ Covid: Boris Johnson urges MPs to back tough tiers for England - BBC News

✩ Covid-19: No plans for 'vaccine passport' - Michael Gove - BBC News lots of chat about vaccines, trials, plans for roll-out amongst doctors & med students alike this week. many tweets consumed on the topic.

✩ Puberty blockers: Under-16s 'unlikely to be able to give informed consent' - BBC News absolutely furious about this. how on EARTH do we allow contraceptives to be given out - with much more serious potential consequences! - under Gillick competency (this is where under-18s can give their own consent for taking medications w/o need for parental consent, which is ordinarily required to treat under-18s in the UK) and NOT puberty blockers! which simply STOP puberty - it’s not hormone replacement therapy, which yes does have risks! and it’s much easier for people to transition, or continue with their biologically-determined puberty, after puberty blockers than to medically/surgically transition after allowing non-gender-affirming puberty to take place. oh my god i’m so furious about this.

✩ Essure: Women in England take legal action against sterilising-device maker - Sophie Hutchinson, BBC News netflix’s documentary the bleeding edge covers essure very well - highly recommend.

refugee issues

✩ E.U. Border Agency Accused of Covering Up Migrant Pushback in Greece - Matina Stevis-Gridneff, The New York Times

✩ Missing Migrants Project - Mediterranean focus - IOM this is a truly excellent resource for anyone looking to grasp the hard numbers of the refugee crisis + also great reference for anyone doing research.

✩ November summary - Aegean Boat Report ABR is a Norwegian non-profit dedicated to monitoring boat traffic in the Aegean Sea + upholding human rights, documenting injustices, and presenting these. they are running a fundraiser atm so please do donate if you can - their work is invaluable and really must continue!

environment

✩ Britain goes coal free as renewables edge out fossil fuels - Justin Rowlatt, BBC a few months old but so exciting!

culture

✩ To Understand Us, Pay Attention to the Outfits - Tanisha C Ford, The Atlantic the woman who did the costume design for ‘us’ also did it for THE MATRIX?!

books

✩ Kafka on the Shore - Murakami finished over the weekend! i love murakami’s style - describing each action the character takes, lists be damned, and the surrealism with light touches of comic relief. i still dislike kafka as i did the first time i read it - for someone supposedly so “introverted” and “introspective”, he really had a lot of misogyny to unpack, which i know is like tied up in the whole oedipus prophecy thing, but it didn’t quite sit right. i still loved oshima, though, and the setting of komura memorial library - my mental image is the same as last time and i just want to live there...also really appreciated hoshino this time! he brings so much levity to the book, even if his ~ epiphany ~ over the archduke’s trio feels a little rushed. overall: enjoyable re-read but will take my time before re-reading a third time.

✩ One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Solzhenitsyn another re-read from sixth form, finished! this book is really incredible - so short yet so evocative and transporting. solzhenitsyn does an excellent job of humanising the story, not simply making it trauma porn, which is the power of this book imo. other thematic analysis: non-existent as i am not an english student!!

✩ Obstetrics & Gynaecology - Impey & Child woo the joy!!!

tv/video

✩ The Source - documentary on ultrarunner Courtney Dauwalter

#reading 2020 #weekly

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glitteryyouthstudentworld · 4 years

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The 9th of June 2017, 3 years ago today, I was released from prison. No doubt, for most people being released, it is a joyous occasion. For me? Not so much. In fact, it was one of the scariest days of my life. I can hear some ask, “Shouldn’t that be the day you go in and not when you’re set free?” and I don’t blame you. However, this was the first time following a release that I felt I could fail, that I could let people down. Something that with 16 months still left of my sentence I almost achieved, well, actually I did achieve it but I was fortunate I was given a second chance. I should explain.

I had predetermined that this sentence would be my very last. Even I was getting bored with hearing “I promise this is the last time”. As I was being booked in when I was put on remand for this offence a few months prior to being sentenced I even went as far as speaking to the governor on duty about how serious I was and how different things will be this time. I never used to play up through my previous sentences. Not the ones as an adult anyway, nor my first time in 1985 at Her Majesty’s Detention Centre Blantyre House. Imagine as a 15-year-old pulling up to this place with 4 months to serve.

Mark Twain once remarked that he didn’t let schooling get in the way of his education. I sure learnt a lot at this place. ‘Short, Sharp, Shock’ they called it. Looking back it was more like a crash course on prison life. Entering the Youth Custody System less than two years later wasn’t as harrowing as it may have been having already dipped my toe in the waters of incarceration. Reflecting again, it was as if the children’s home was my nursery, detention centre my infants, youth custody my juniors and of course, last but not least my seniors, or even university, prison. Some kids absolutely love school. Some can’t wait for the school holiday to finish so they can get back. Environments can be a funny old thing. Certain people feel comfortable in some environments which others can feel like a fish out of water in and vice versa.

I have slightly digressed, those that know me personally won’t be surprised, but there is a point behind my digression. There came a point in my life where prison become the environment in which I thrived. And thriving in so many different areas. I was a better person in prison than I was in society. I would go as far as to say that I was a somebody in prison. I don’t mean that in an egotistical way or “I’m the daddy” kind of way. My role models were not your typical role models, not at that time anyway. It may seem strange to most but don’t forget I was in my environment. My role models were the likes of Charlie Richardson, Norman Parker, Alan Lord, Noel ‘Razor’ Smith and, especially, Mark Leech. Mark gets a special mention because through his books and writings over the years it was Mark that taught me how to play the system, not try and fcuk it. It took me a while to hone my skills. Having to learn the hard way that knowing too much or saying it the wrong way gets you a ticket on the ghost train.

However, this was the sentence where it all came together, and also where I lost everything once again. The everything had nothing to do with outside life but everything to do with my life on the inside. Within weeks I had gone from this:

I had also literally just received my D-cat when it all came crashing down. I had gone from an enhanced D-cat prisoner, although still in a C-cat, to being sent back to B-cat conditions and on basic for 5 weeks. I couldn’t help myself. I was still playing a game, a risky game. Sitting in my grubby cell, mentally I was a mess. I’d ruined everything. This was my last chance and I’ve ruined it. What’s the point? Two days after my unceremonious return, I was seen by an officer from the Safer Custody Team. Miss. S and I had a long chat. Along with a raft of feelings I was going through, one was shame. I had given it the waffle in reception on day one and here I was, still with 16 month left, sitting with my head in my hands. I had become so stuck in my old prison habits that I’d forgotten I needed to change that attitude as well. To my surprise, Miss S understood what I was saying. To cut a very long story short, this was April 2016, in November 2016 I had a re-categorisation review for my D-cat, I was still in B cat conditions, which was refused with a recommendation to review again in January 2017. Before the January review took place I wrote to the governor explaining my circumstances and that my purpose would be better served if I stayed where I was. I was halfway through my degree module, I was involved in a few projects with the education department which I wanted to finish. He accepted my comments and agreed with me, so I stayed on M wing at HMP Norwich until my release. It was as if what happened, which involved drugs, was the final lesson I needed to learn. As the saying goes the rest is history.

One of the projects I wanted to finish was one in which an English lecturer from the University of East Anglia and I were jointly involved in. JH facilitated a creative writing class. We’d meet every Wednesday afternoon on the third floor of the education block. Each week JH would bring 4 or 5 students from the university in with him to join in with the class. Creative writing is not only a good skill to learn it has the power to do so much more, directly and indirectly. During the class, I noticed that the students were asking occasional questions about prison life, especially at break time. They were genuinely interested, JH told me at the end of one class what the students say to him on the way home or to other students back at the uni. This gave me an idea. Eventually, JH and I with the help of the library and education departments created a forum that included a couple of governors, a few prisoners and a number of students from the university. It was to give students the opportunity to ask questions about their local prison and gave us the opportunity to speak directly to them. Dispelling the many myths that surround our prisons.

Creative writing also had a direct influence on my life. One that continues to do so. Combined with the skills I was picking up writing essays for my degree assignments, creative writing has enabled me to fulfil a dream. Not only that but it has also been a coping mechanism for when things get tough. When that anxiety gets too much, or when the depression gets deeper or the negative self-talk louder. Or are they voices? Rather than wallow or suffer I create.

For different reasons one of my hobbies, well, my only hobby is to research and write about organised crime, in the main historically, however, never to glorify it. Not long after being released from prison, I saw a website called the National Crime Syndicate after clicking on the link I was slightly overwhelmed. However, I took a chance, found their email address and wrote to them with an article I’d written attached saying I would love to write articles for them. In no time at all, I received an email with “you know what this ain’t too bad” and I once again refer to the saying I used earlier. The rest is history (excuse the pun).

Another well-known saying is horses for courses. Mental health sucks. Creative writing and being creative means it doesn’t suck so much.

Another well-known saying is horses for courses. Mental health sucks. Creative writing and being creative means it doesn't suck so much. Get out! and Stay out! The 9th of June 2017, 3 years ago today, I was released from prison. No doubt, for most people being released, it is a joyous occasion.

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supersportsnewsblog · 4 years

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Earlier this month, I wrote a column asking what Democrats should do about sexual assault allegations against Joe Biden, the party's presumptive nominee for president. My answer? Not much. The accusation made by Tara Reade, a former Biden staffer from his days in the Senate during the early 1990s, didn't strike me as especially convincing, so Democrats, I suggested, could move forward without much concern. Though toward the end of the column I included two caveats: If Reade offered further corroboration of her claims or if evidence emerged of a larger pattern of abusive actions toward women on Biden's part, that could well change my views of the matter.Just two weeks later, both of my conditions have been met.Last week we learned that Reade's mother called into the Larry King Show in 1993 to talk about how her daughter had quit working for a "prominent senator" after unspecified "problems" as a staffer. Then earlier this week Business Insider reported that a former neighbor of Reade's (a self-described "strong Democrat") recalls a conversation with her in 1995 or 1996 in which Reade tearfully described being sexually assaulted by Biden. Together, those two stories help to corroborate Reade's specific claim about herself.Finally, on Tuesday, a 2008 essay by the late Alexander Cockburn surfaced in which the journalist reported that Biden had made "unwelcome and unwanted" sexual advances against a woman in 1972 or 1973. That establishes a possible longstanding pattern of Biden's behavior that further validates Reade's accusation (and potentially opens the door to others).In light of these revelations, the time has come for a two new questions: Can Biden survive the gathering storm around Tara Reade's allegations? And if so, will that fact be good or bad for the Democratic Party in November?The first question is the easier one to answer: Biden's presumptive nomination is quite likely to survive the corroboration of Reade's claims. That's because members of Biden's electoral base in the Democratic Party — older, culturally moderate white working-class voters in the Midwest and older, culturally moderate African Americans — are unlikely to be turned against him by one corroborated allegation of sexual assault from nearly three decades in the past. If anything, rank-and-file Democrats have expressed regret that some MeToo allegations have taken down popular members of the party (former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken is the example cited most frequently) — and they're also irritated that Democrats are expected to adhere to standards their opponents openly flout.The factions of the party most likely to turn on Biden because of a sexual-assault scandal are those who've been least wedded to his candidacy from the start — those firmly on the left, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders; and white urban progressives, who tended to favor Sen. Elizabeth Warren's candidacy. Neither group possesses the numbers or influence in the party to get it to overrule the preferences of the other two electorally crucial factions — and obviously their opinions will also carry little weight with the candidate himself. This means that, so long as no additional corroborated accusations materialize, Biden will most likely get to hold onto the nomination if he wants to.That might turn out to be a very bad thing for the party come November.But how could this be? How could a sexual assault allegation place Biden at a disadvantage in the general election against President Trump, a man who has openly bragged on tape of sexual assault and has himself been accused of rape on multiple occasions?On substance, Trump will have zero moral ground to stand on. But he won't be taking a stand in the name of treating women with respect. Neither will he be accusing Biden of being a sexual predator. Instead, he and the entire Republican noise machine will constantly, relentlessly hammer Biden, leading Democrats, and the media for flagrant hypocrisy and double standards. The moral content of the issue won't matter one bit. What will matter is that Biden has set himself up as a moral arbiter on issues of sexual harassment and violence, insisting we must "believe all women," and that in the fall of 2018 he and many other members of his party sought to destroy the reputation of Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for allegations of sexual assault that were less convincingly corroborated than those Reade has lodged against Biden.The Democratic nominee for president and his party are ruthless political operators who seek above all else to destroy their enemies and help themselves, all the while setting themselves up as impartial moral authorities. This will be the message, driven home over and over again: that claims of purity and impartiality are pretense, transparent fakes. Democrats might posture like they're better than Republicans, including the president, but they aren't. They're every bit as bad. They're just more dishonest about it.The Biden campaign's effort to portray itself as a moral reset from the debasement of the Trump years will run into this counter-message like a power sander. The Trump campaign will strip it away with a barrage of paid ads, prime-time cable news diatribes, and a hailstorm of tweets — all of it repeating the message (illustrated with clips from and about the Kavanaugh hearings) that Biden and his fellow Democrats are every bit the BS artists that Trump is, only they won't admit it. They'll lie about it, right to your face.To Democrats this prediction may sound implausible. There's no way that Trump, a man whose mendaciousness is well established and total, can possibly succeed in portraying Biden as more dishonest than he is. But he won't have to show that Biden is worse, just that he's no better.That's Trump's (perhaps only) winning move — to bring the playing field down to his level, to lower Biden's favorability rating, to make him seem less admirable, less likable, less morally upstanding, less … superior than Trump. He did the same thing against Hillary Clinton in 2016, using the FBI investigation of her email practices while secretary of state as a cudgel. Last summer, the strategy was to impugn Biden's son, making them both look like corrupt wheeler dealers in Ukraine. That didn't work out, but now Reade's allegations have made it possible for Trump and his party to do what they love most of all, which is to accuse Democrats and the media of smarmy double standards instead.Of course this won't work with most Democratic voters, but that won't be its aim. The aim will be to ensure maximal turnout and Trump loyalty among Republicans — and the destruction of Biden's reputation among independents in crucial swing states.Will it succeed? Trump will be facing re-election while presiding over a deadly pandemic and the early stages of an economic depression, so who knows. What I do know is that the behavior Tara Reade has plausibly alleged about the presumptive Democratic nominee is going to be a major liability for him as we head toward Election Day.Editor's note: A previous version of this article mischaracterized a quote by Alexander Cockburn. It has been corrected. We regret the error.Want more essential commentary and analysis like this delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for The Week's "Today's best articles" newsletter here.More stories from theweek.com The perils of Hooverism The Trump administration is reportedly organizing a Manhattan Project-style effort to expedite the development of a coronavirus vaccine This visualization shows how droplets from a single cough can infect an entire airplane

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gosatsuvns · 4 years

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Weekly Update #280 - 2019 Retrospect

This year has been a rather eventful one. A lot of things have happened and there have been some pretty big changes in my private life, which inevitably affected the development of our current visual novel project, the murder mystery GENBA no Kizuna.

Overall, I am happy with where I am right now, but there were quite some obstacles to face along the road, especially during the second half of the year. But let's start at the beginning and do a little recap of what we have accomplished over the past 12 months, because even though I wasn't able to reach all the goals I was aiming for, I am still proud of the progress we have made on GENBA!

Sprite Work:

The first couple of months were spent working on the assets for our extended demo. Half of the characters appearing in it didn't have any sprites yet and it took some time to lock down their poses, expressions and, in Terano's case, even the design.

Finishing these sprites marked a major step forward, though. Even for SHINRAI, it took more than half a year to complete the sprites for all major characters, which was rather discouraging, because it felt as though we were not making any real headway. Once they were finally done, however, there was a lot less to worry about and the same is true for GENBA as well.

With a broad range of emotions for all characters at our disposal now, sprite work should go a lot smoother from here on out!

We will definitely need to create more sprite variations for later scenes in the game, but it's just a matter of changing an expression or adjusting the position of a limb now. The hardest part was to get the base sprite right, because that is going to be the base for all future pose variations. Development already takes too much time as it is, so I can't afford to draw various, completely different poses for all characters. Just like with SHINRAI, we had to stick to one basic body posture per character, which required a good grasp on all the poses/expressions they will display throughout the entire story, and pick the base postures accordingly.

As you might imagine, this was a very time-consuming process, but with this out of the way, we can now speed things up a bit!

Polish:

The sprites obviously weren't all we had to worry about. A lot of time was also spent working on backgrounds, CGs and making tons of tiny tweaks to the overall presentation of the game. We really took the feedback to our initial demo to heart and adjusted GENBA accordingly. So I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who played our demos and even took the time to leave us their impressions and suggestions. This really helps us out a lot, because as a developer, you can easily become blind to certain issues. Sometimes, it takes a fresh perspective to point them out.

Delays:

Originally scheduled to be released in April and then during Jurassic June, the release of our extended demo had to be pushed back quite a couple of months. One of the biggest reasons for that is that (compared to the time when I was still working on SHINRAI) the time I can commit to VN development now has essentially been cut in half.

In January, I started looking for a day job, because one little indie VN obviously isn't enough to live off of. The first four months of the year were spent looking for offerings and writing countless applications. That alone took quite a bit of time away, but in May, I finally managed to get a job, which I have now been working ever since. Although it is only part-time, I still lose around 8 hours per day, which I could previously spend working on our projects, due to commuting.

On the bright side, this now provides me with a lot of additional funds that I plan to invest into our VN dev endeavors, and the job itself honestly isn't all that bad, either. I feel pretty lucky, actually. Nevertheless, this is a major reason development started to drag...

Extended Demo Release:

On the 26th of August, the very day SHINRAI was originally released in 2016, we finally unveiled our extended GENBA demo to the public. Despite the delays, I am happy with not only the result, but even the feedback we have gotten so far.

This was definitely one of my personal highlights this year. Although it's only a demo, providing about a fifth of the full game, it still felt almost as good as releasing a finished product. That feeling, coupled with the demo's reception, really fueled my passion and desire to get this game fully done ASAP. I had some pretty big goals set for the remainder of 2019. Mainly to finish writing the entire script. However, as I alluded to during the opening paragraphs, the second half of this year turned into kind of a mess...

Unexpected Roadblocks:

It actually started in July already, when we had an issue with the water tank in this house. I don't really want to bore you with all the details, but as a result, we were hit with a need for emergency renovations starting in mid August. Rooms had to be emptied out and various companies had to come by to renew floors and walls. It was a long, very work-intensive process and even by November, we were still cleaning up, buying new furniture and generally trying to go back to having a normal life "orz

Unfortunately, all of this happened right when Kuna, the mastermind behind the romance/mystery visual novel Pitch Black Serenade, finally moved to Germany, so we could start living together. And as some of you might know, we even got married on October 16!

As nice as the extended demo release was, this was easily the best day of the year (if not my whole life) for me! w

However, even though we had started planning all of this many months in advance, a lot of major last minute obstacles were suddenly thrown in our way, and I'm not just talking about those renovations. This could be an entire essay on its own and I'm already feeling the anger swelling up inside of me, just thinking about it again. So let me just sum it up in one word: bureaucracy.

In the end, everything worked out well and we spent a beautiful day together, so that's all that matters. But needless to say, there was a lot of stress and frustration involved. So much in fact, that it severely affected my health. Ever since August, I've been dealing with all sorts of stress-related issues. All of this together really made it difficult to focus on VN development and devote a lot of time to it.

As a result, I barely managed to reach any of my goals for the second half of the year. Development got stalled even more than during the first half, but at the very least, I'm finally getting back to not just a normal life, but a much better one, now that I can spend it with Kuna. Our ultimate goal is to eventually work on something together, and we're going to take the first steps towards that in 2020!

What Lies Ahead:

Like I said, in the end, I'm proud with what we have accomplished, but part of me feels very disgruntled about the lack of significant progress this year. I managed to get a lot of work on the script done, and even on some of the new assets, which will be needed for the next chapter, but it's far from what I original had in mind.

Guess I'm gonna have to use this feeling of dissatisfaction as fuel to make a lot more progress on GENBA next year. As a matter of fact, I am hell-bent and extremely motivated to accomplish quite a few things, but I guess that will be the topic for next week's blog post, when I will share my plans for the new year!

Speaking of which, for now, I just want to get the New Year's artwork done and chill out a bit more, enjoying the final days of 2019.

I'm also trying to be a bit more active on social media again, which is another thing I barely had time for during the last few months. Even though we added Instagram and even Discord to our repertoire this year (I really need to promote the latter some more)...

Anyway, that more or less wraps up my summary of 2019. At first glance, it was kind of a mixed year. However, despite the setbacks, I will always look back on it fondly, because the positives far outweigh the negatives. So let's make sure the same will be true for 2020 as well! We're not just starting a new year, but a whole new decade, so let's put some extra effort into it and work really hard!

But for now, please enjoy the rest of 2019 yourself and have a safe transition into 2020! Take care and see you next year! :3

PS: don't forget that SHINRAI is still on sale until January 2!

#shinrai #genba #visual novel #visualnovel #visual novel development #vn #evn #vndev #interactive fiction #game development #gamedev #indie game #indiedev #indie #Ren'Py #renpy #murder mystery #detective game #retrospective

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