Godammed SDN

[Aaron]

How can you miss the racism in Noire? It's everywhere.

[Zod]

How can you miss the racism in Noire? It's everywhere.

lolwut

[Aaron]

Dude, its set in the late 40's and one of the partners even talks about it with the PC.

And the cock in Vice?

[Zod]

Dude, its set in the late 40's and one of the partners even talks about it with the PC.

And the cock in Vice?

no no, i mean someone missed the racism?

how? who?

[Losonti Tokash]

Don't think the issue is "are there racist elements/characters in Noire that are the product of its setting" and more of "is the game itself racist."

[adr-admin]

that sci fi universe thread has so much laemness


i can't knock it too much since i did and do some of the same shit


but mang


whatever

[RedImperator]

that sci fi universe thread has so much laemness


i can't knock it too much since i did and do some of the same shit


but mang


whatever

Meta and I were talking about this the other night.

Basically, we decided that 1) worldbuilding is fun and easy, 2) character development is hard, and 3) the kind of people who write things like "the Long Dong class megadreadnaught is 39km long and has a 155 juggaton main battery" are probably going to be more comfortable with "numbers" (even if they're totally arbitrary) than squishy stuff like emotions and motivation and therefore tend to invest more effort in setting.

I added that there might be something TEO-specific happening, where you have people who've read hundreds of threads where nerds drill deep into a setting and start uncovering contradictions, lapses, and silly mistakes (and, more often than not, hurl invective upon the author and/or declare the inhabitants of the setting are stupid). So you invest a ton of effort into finding and tying up loose ends so imaginary future nerds won't make fun of you. I used to do this, until I realized I didn't care. I mean, I want a setting to make sense and I don't want to ruin the reader's experience by writing an obvious idiot plot, but I'm not going to outsmart hundreds of nerds and even if I did, the payoff wouldn't be worth anywhere near the work.

There's probably also a desire to create a full, rich universe like Middle Earth or the Star Wars galaxy (ignore for a moment that the SW galaxy has its own flaws, contradictions, and weird holes and Middle Earth probably does too). But I'll bet you a million dollars when Lucas sat down to write the first draft of Star Wars, he knew more about Luke Skywalker (Starkiller?) than he did about the Jedi Order. Even when you have a fairly well-developed setting out of the gate, details are going to emerge as you go, and others are going to be contradicted or abandoned because they don't fit the story.

Really, I think a lot of it is lack of experience. Actually writing an editing a complete novel, intended for publication, is a wonderful way to learn what matters and what doesn't. If you actually intend to set stories in the setting, then writing a 300 page writers' bible is a waste of time.

[Zod]

i'm probably an aberration since i prefer character development to world building

i can't world-build for shit but cooking up a character with goals and motivations is easy

[adr-admin]

i find people's personalities the hardest thing. goals aren't too hard, and a lot of actions follow from that

but putting in the little touches to make them more like unique people, and portraying that well is a huge pain

[Zod]

well when you're a shut-in understanding other people is hard

[adr-admin]

I added that there might be something TEO-specific happening, where you have people who've read hundreds of threads where nerds drill deep into a setting and start uncovering contradictions, lapses, and silly mistakes (and, more often than not, hurl invective upon the author and/or declare the inhabitants of the setting are stupid).

Aye. In a lot of cases, I think the numbers' values come right from this too. How many times do people say shit like "star wars level firepower"?

(which I don't think comes from wanting to win a vs in itself, it's more that they've been socialized into thinking losing vs = bad story...)

I used to do this, until I realized I didn't care.

For me, I still care... but I can control it better. It still bugs me, for example, if a background detail like a ventilation fan isn't mentioned when I know there's probably one there.

But on the other hand, I'm slowly starting to realize that editing the WORDS WORDS WORDS is good too.

There's probably also a desire to create a full, rich universe like Middle Earth or the Star Wars galaxy

Something that bugs me though is there's often a lot of breadth but not so much depth.

There's galaxies of shit with a million different space engines.

But most of them have a name and maybe a sentence, nothing more. It's like they want to check off some boxes to look full, but it's just too shallow.

Of course, too much depth gets bad too but meh.

[adr-admin]

well when you're a shut-in understanding other people is hard

yes, indeed

though even if you understand something really well, turning it into interesting words can still be a challenge. infodumps on emotions can be just as lame as infodumps on bombs even if totes accurate

[adr-admin]

Modern instances of purple prose can often be found in romance novels. These started alluding to sex in the 1970s, and authors, not wanting to be either pornographic or clinical in their descriptions, developed many euphemisms to describe body parts and sexual activity. Examples include "throbbing manhood", "quivering desire", "[he] filled her with the hot wet tumult of his love", and the much-parodied "explode with delight".

lol

[Zod]

i've found that doing roleplaying games on chats helped me with writing emotions in a few ways

one of the things i kept challenging myself to do was figure out how to show a character's emotions without info-dumping and just telling the other players how he was feeling

that way they might be able to infer it from the language but it wasn't flat out explicitly stated eg -

"he started wringing his hands, quickly glancing from side to side while his lip twitched"

is a lot more interesting than

"He looked around in a nervous manner."

[Losonti Tokash]

That says "paranoid schizophrenic" more than "nervous dude" to me.

[starku]

Really, I think a lot of it is lack of experience. Actually writing an editing a complete novel, intended for publication, is a wonderful way to learn what matters and what doesn't. If you actually intend to set stories in the setting, then writing a 300 page writers' bible is a waste of time.

there's a powerful reward loop too

nerds love reading stupid shit about people's worldbuilding

so you can end up doing the useless part of writing over and over because people say OMG SO GOOD I LOVE HWO YOU COMBINED THOSE TWO WIKI ARTCLES INTO ONE SETTING

i mean look at how threads say 'what is your long-range ftl' and 'what is your short-range ftl' and 'what is your stutter ftl' - obviously all settings must align with the nerds expectations

and frankly you can read the teo opinion of heaps of authors (and their entire works) where they appear to have TOTALLY MISSED THE POINT in favor of 'wow the culture has big numbers'

they will even ask 'what is a scifi with big numbers'

this even feeds back to authors so you get stuff that starts out ok and then becomes obvious fanservice

[Civil War Man]

i find people's personalities the hardest thing. goals aren't too hard, and a lot of actions follow from that

but putting in the little touches to make them more like unique people, and portraying that well is a huge pain

Coming up with a personality for characters isn't really that hard. If you know their goals, you have a pretty good start. When I know the character goals, my next step is figuring out why they care about those goals.

I personally could never make it as a writer, though. I have a terrible work ethic when it comes to something like creative writing, and I can't name characters worth shit, especially in sci-fi/fantasy settings where you apparently can't just asspull a normal name.

[starku]

i think one of the things red knows all about is that selling characters as actors is related to what kind of writing style you're using

and because heaps fo people (like me) don't really understand that shit they just use methods they've read themselves without understanding the way they work together

if only the 5 years of high school english had covered any of that stuff?? :V

[Phantasee]

Zentei seems to have trouble perceiving things outside his mental model of how things work. If all he saw in Stark's post was "trolling"…

[RogueIce]

this even feeds back to authors so you get stuff that starts out ok and then becomes obvious fanservice

Kinda like TSW, right?

[starku]

Take the culture or xeelee stuff where it was on e scifi about stuff but nerds obsessed over numbers and pee pews and thus will describe it in acompletely divergen way
Wow autocorrect fucking me up today

[Flagg]

I love how Knife is a blatant liar. I can guarantee that if a mod gets involved I'll be the one yelled at.

[starku]

look the thing to take away is a certain clique made zentai shut up

that's something for the album

[Flagg]

A win!

[Bakustra]

too early to declare victory yet

he just posted again and i'm bushed