The Desert Mermaid

So today George Takei shared this photo on Facebook, and it got me laughing because I totally used to do that to my little sister when she wanted to play, because when you're little you're a right bastard. (She caught on pretty quickly, though. Damn you, swiftness of child development!)

But then I got kind of fascinated by the sheer number of sanctimonious people pitching a fit about Spending Quality Time With Kids in the comments. Normally I try to avoid comments sections, but sometimes I just can't help but look because you think, "There is no WAY someone is going to get angry about ... oh, my bad." I have a whole lot of opinions about well-rounded child development and parents who terrorize their kids with the Quality Time ideal and the values and drawbacks of video games ... but better folks than I have commented on those things.

Right now I want to address one aspect of video games that doesn't get mentioned very often. I'm not sure if that's because it's an experience unique to me (because I'm guessing it's not), but here's something you never see pointed out in these arguments: video games are an avenue for imaginative play.

Sure, they're no substitute for being outside--but neither is reading a book. You've got to just balance your interests. And when we were in front of video games, my siblings and I treated them a lot like we treated, say, playing with Ponies or Legos or Transformers or any of our other toys. We invented elaborate scenarios and dialogues for the characters--Mario's trek over Dinosaur Land was filled with arguments with Luigi, chats with Yoshi,* football games, food fights, random phobias, and all-around silliness, projected by our imaginations onto levels where the goal was SUPPOSED to be just getting from the left side of the screen to the right side. We would make up explanations for some of the weirder in-game phenomena. We'd abuse the hell out of our onscreen avatars as they acted out something that was only funny because our added narrative made it so.

As for the idea that video games can't possibly allow for interaction with other people--PLEASE. All of us--me, my brother, and my sister, plus any friends sitting in that bare room with us watching the action--were actively engaged. One of us might be playing, but all of us were involved in the invention, character development, song composition (yes, really), and resulting entertainment centered around the screen.

And later on I wrote sweeping epics set in Super Mario World and Hyrule (which were in the same world, actually, so Mario and Link had crossover adventures, as they did with Donkey Kong and Star Fox and Megaman and the Pokémon). I got a lot of writing practice from video games. Hell, my breakthrough into writing conlangs came when I decided to write a sentence in "Yoshese" and realized that I'd have to give it a real structure and thought "... this is fun."

I think people who never grew up with video games don't see that. And that's understandable--from the outside, a kid reading a book doesn't look very engaged, either; they're just sitting there staring at a chunk of paper. You have to look at it from the kid's point of view. Anything--rag dolls, Lego bricks, ponies, aquarium beads, paper dolls, yarn, toy trains, American Girl dolls, the sticks and rocks those self-righteous people are so enamored of--ANYTHING can help foster imaginative play, if the kid knows how to use them right. And believe me, if there's one thing kids know, it's how to use their imaginations.

So shut up about the damn video games, already.


*I think this is specifically why I don't like full voice acting in video games--the most I prefer is the incidental Charles Martinet-type noises, because I am supplying my own dialogue.

Okay, everyone! Meme time wrapup. Y’all asked me questions, and now I provide the answers in the Mystery Characters Doing Stuff Meme! The players were:

1. Bilbo Baggins
2. Toph Bei Fong
3. Pilot
4.Pyanfar Chanur
5. Hank McCoy/Beast
6. Granny Weatherwax
7. Donald Duck
8. Digger-Of-Unnecessarily-Convoluted-Tunnels
9. Data
10. Old Spice Guy
11. Daja Kisubo
12. Keladry of Mindelan
13. Lando Calrissian
14. Uncle General Iroh
15. The Joker

Put them all together, and ( hijinks ensue! )

You know, I keep trying to give my orly aliens a broad but definitive cultural background, to give them opinions and attitudes and strong identities and understandable material culture and basically make them as real as possible. I want to give them, with their own alien twist, the breadth of human experience, from war to love, from art to industry, from stone wheel to spaceship. Theirs is a dignified and worthy entry into the ranks of alien concultures.

The only problem is, every time I make another entry into their hitchhiker’s guide, I wind up making them look FUCKING ADORABLE.

I wonder if Poul Anderson, or indeed the Na’vi anthropologists, ever had this problem.

I think I’m starting to figure out a pattern that accommodates my writing style. It goes like this:

Step 1: Have moderately interesting idea.*
Step 2: Attempt to flesh out idea in head. Come up with moderately interesting scene.
Step 3: Write scene.
Step 4: Edit scene.
Step 5: Have a spectacular idea for how to make the scene phenomenally interesting, adding conflict, action, character development, and milieu in a fabulous convergence of style and substance.
Step 6: Look mournfully at boring but already-written version of scene.
Step 7: Say “goddamn,” make a cup of tea, and stare at the wall for the rest of the day.

Now I just need to work out a Step 8, and I’ll be on my way to getting an interesting story out!

*Slightly Tangential Step 1.5: Discover that Poul Anderson already had that idea.
Step 1.5.1: Decide to go on anyway and apply my own unique vision.

Finished the latest episode! I hate tying up loose ends afterward, but after crumpling a few pages of dumb dialogue, I have a page or two of halfway decent dialogue for the end.

Speaking of dialogue, I want to redo The Hive’s dialogue. I like the idea of a somewhat unreliable voice synthesizer working off of the top of a stream of consciousness, like a Dalek’s, only less hysterical.* Of course, The Hive’s stream of consciousness is pretty complicated, but I have to use at least the top layer of it. I can’t very well make the thing work directly off the speech production centers, since it’s The Hive we’re talking about here, and it never evolved speech production centers. I’m trying to decide if it can learn enough to become fluent in a language, or if there’s a basic ability here it lacks. I want it to have good comprehension but difficult production, which suggests it's got some linguistic ability. And since it's got such a vast and weird consciousness anyway, I think it could compensate for lacking wathever possible intrinsic linguistic neurology other species have with pattern-recognition.

The next question is whether I want the synthesizer to default to “on” or “off”—whether The Hive has to consciously turn the thing on, or whether it’s always on and it has to hold it off until it wants to say something. The first suggests more deliberate delivery, while the second would be more haphazard. I haven’t decided yet, but I’m leaning toward deliberate, with a tendency to drop grammatical words in favor of lexical ones. I’ll have to tinker with it a bit to see what works the best.

Meanwhile, I plunge headlong into the next one, where I tear down a couple of the more confident characters with a painful bit of biology. Whee for suddenly becoming the thing you have always loathed! Writing is fun.


*I think I’m going to start demanding explanations the way Daleks do: “EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN EXPLAIN …”

Man, writing a first contact scene without a Babel Fish is hard.

Especially when the first thing you want to communicate with the aliens is, “Hi, we’re sorry unscrupulous pirate aliens abducted you, but you’re safe now in the galactic community! Now … can you tell us roughly which of the stars in this vast whorl of glittering systems is yours?”

Not to mention I still have sickbrain,* which means for all I know I just wrote a scene involving psychedelically furred aliens whose faces can fwoomp out like giant inside-out umbrellas and whose language sounds like dueling banjos.

Hah, wouldn’t that be crazy and … oh, it looks like that’s what I did write.

Good god, I’m not even on any drugs other than your basic antidepressants, and yet I see colors in music and firmly believe that the number eight is male and invent flying umbrella-faced banjopeople.

I probably wouldn’t even notice if I took LSD.

Well, anyway. This scene is complex enough that I wasn’t sure I was going to put it onscreen. The aliens are important enough to the plot of this Doctors! episode, but if it weren’t for the fact that it also provides a very useful setting for secondary character development, I might have just scrapped it. I myself would find a slow, uncertain scene involving a somewhat lost galactic culture trying to talk to a thoroughly lost pre-space individual to be fascinating if done right, but then I also found the linguistic appendices in The Lord of the Rings fascinating, so I’m not the best judge here. But I think if I do it right it’ll wind up useful and interesting.

I just hope I still think that when I get all the mucus out of my head. Otherwise I’ll have to try again, and damn, it was tough enough the first time.


*I know I’m whinging, but I am sick dammit and GET to whinge, and I hate the way I think when I’m sick. It’s sort of fuzzy and soupy at the same time.

I made a Customer Service Bingo card today and tacked it up in a somewhat unobtrusive spot behind my monitor. It does seem to add an element of interest to the job: “Great! I only need ‘This has been going on for some time and I’ve just about had it with you people’ to make Bingo!”

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I am really liking this new definition of the word “porn,” where it means something like “things you can’t stop looking at,” “things that make you drool,” or, as gondolinchick01 put it, “any kind of sensory titillation.” If I were still in school I would write the hell out of a dissertation on it.

I’ve heard a few versions: there’s library porn, space porn, food porn.

Of course, searching for more examples may be a bit of a minefield, but hey—FOR SCIENCE.

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Meanwhile, last night I had a Really Awesome idea for a short story. It even still looked semi-awesome when I woke up this morning, which is a good sign. On the other hand, I may be one of few people on Earth who find the thought of exploding cows awesome.

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Also, it looks like I’m going to need a Halloween costume, after all. I wasn’t planning on it; I was thinking this year I would just dress up my dolls instead. (Damn those twins are gonna look cute.) But then I got involved with Jess's social circle again and suddenly I’m going to a party. So I’m going to take one of the costumes I was going to make the doll, and make it for me. Which means I have two options: I can either dye something I’ve already got a hideous slime green and then modify it, or buy more already-hideous-green fabric and haul it into my first day of sewing class with a reference photo and say, “I need to make this look like this by next Saturday!”

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Urg. Too much time staring at the screen. Gotta rest my eyes.