Burning Contest Experience

So, it's started to bug me that I have no idea how popular this blog actually is. I mean, I know the Abigail reads it, even though she doesn't like Drabbles much. I know that Kindli reads it, because she comments. According to Blogger, I have 14 followers - according to Blogger's Google-tracking features, I have probably about 20 more.

But I'd like to know.

More importantly, I'd like to foster more of a sense of community and conversation at this blog. This is the Internet, after all. I don't want to shout into the ether - I want you to shout back!

In order to achieve this, I have an idea. A contest! Unfortunately, I can't offer you fabulous prizes - because unlike the miniatures wargaming blogs I'm stealing this from, I don't have any - but I can offer you a one to two hundred word story, written to your specifications.

What do you need to do to win? You need to comment on this post, and... recommend this blog to one friend. The first will be apparent here, and for the second I'll take you at your word. After a suitable period of time - I'm thinking a week - I'll randomly select a winner and get your specifications. Then I'll provide the story.

This should be fun... or at the very least, educational.

A Question

What would have happened if someone had buried a dead pet - say a dog or a lizard - in Narnia at the moments when the Lion's song still reverberated in the earth?

Also, I'm baaa-aaack.

No More Teachers!

In honor of today being the last day of school, have a creative prompt. Tell me the story of a character with an imaginary and unlikely academic specialty - an ethnomycologist or a cryptomusicologist or something. Bonus points for convincing me that the specialty is actually real.

In a Hole in the Ground, There Lived a Neanderthal

So, I've been watching Walking with Cavemen with my kids as a way to keep some science learning going, despite the disruptions of the testing weeks. We finally made it to the section about Neanderthal Man, the much maligned failed evolutionary offshoot of humanity (though, interestingly enough, there are signs that even as it was dying out, Neanderthal man was mating into the lines that would eventually produce modern humans). As we were watching, something occurred to me:

Neanderthals are hobbits.

• Short? Check.
• Stocky? Check.
• Omnivorous? Check.
• Tough as all hell? Check.
• Cave-dwelling? Check.
• Essentially human in the ways they think and act? Check.

I can easily see how, if Neanderthal Man had not died out, they might have cleaned up in much the same way as the humans they coexisted with. Their musculoskeletal system would have slimmed down and their brains continued to advance as their ecological niche increasingly selected for smarts rather than brawn. They could easily have stayed short and tough when compared to humans. Why develop an easy-going disposition? Why not?

Anyway, just a weird little thought that occured to me, and I'm eager to hear what you think of it (hence the creative prompt tag).

Arise and Go Get McDonalds

I the comments to this failed creative prompt post, one of my new readers requested something related to the content of earlier editions of D&D. While I'm still failing to think of anything related to 3.5e and earlier D&D, here's something spinning of the D&D franchise as a whole:

Tell me about resurrection.

The rules are (or at least seem to be) exactly the same as D&D. For the right price, a sufficiently powerful spellcaster (and there is no shortage of those) can bring the dead back to life. The dead person must agree to be brought back, which means that good people who lived full lives and have gone on to whatever reward awaits them are usually fine with staying dead, bad people are eager to escape, and heroes usually come back, but might take death as an excuse to retire from the whole painful, messy business. Being brought back to life costs you something, but it's something you can regain with time and rest.

I want to hear about the deeper consequences of this idea. What kinds of cultural and artistic quirks would develop, given this "technology?" Basically, I want to hear what you come up with when you attack the idea of fantasy resurrection with the rigor usually reserved for science fiction. Bonus points for truly original ideas. You get docked points for falling back on tired old standbies, though if the idea has legs it'll still walk.

Go.

Creative Prompt, Take II

Ok, I guess the D&D fans aren't out there.

Instead, give me this, somewhat more generically fantastic thing:

Tell me the story of a world in which a god associated with a generally malevolent phenomenon is viewed as a benevolent force. The more negative the phenomenon, the more genuine the god's benevolence, the more points you win. The who, what, where, when, why, and how are entirely up to you.

Go?

Please?

Creative Prompt, 4th Edition

To all my D&D fans (I know you're out there):

Tell me about the Astral Chaos.

Tell me about the Elemental Sea.

Go.

Creative Prompt Me This, Batman!

Actually, this post has nothing to do with Batman and everything to do with awesome.

Comment me (or, you know, if you're Nathan, you'll probably up and drabble all over me) with something inspired by the article, either it's actual subject or some of the weird stuff said by the clearly elated scientists.

Show Me...

Weapons-grade nonsense.

This phrase just popped into my head last night, and I'm curious to hear what you make of it.

Go.

Lady Burn

Ah... the Creative Prompt Post. It's the new Lame-Ass Link Post. Fun to make and quick to write. The only reason I'm still able to post on school days, even now that it is autumn. Oh, how I love thee.

Today's post is inspired by this and this (these entries are clean, but the blog is not always safe for work - be forewarned), posts deconstructing the trope of the  iconic super hero costume by re-imagining Dazzler as a Lady Gaga-esque woman of many daring costumes.

And, you know, super powers.

Riff off that, my faithful reader(s). Comment with your tales of super heroes who wear many odd costumes and not just the one.

Gutters & Goblins, Zeppelins & Zombies

I don't know where this is coming from, but I've been thinking about how some fantasy settings - especially D&D clones and subsettings - like to orbit some central monster. The most famous such game is Tunnels & Trolls, in which, at least at the time that I played it, trolls really were the big, scary monster. There's also Ravenloft, which is sometimes described as "D&D with vampires."

So, amuse me. Take a fantasy setting, wrap it around a less common monster, and tell me what you get. I'm looking for something that, like Ravenloft, is thematically coherent. That means no fair just saying "it's like bog-standard D&D fantasy except everyone's really scared of owlbears." You've got to write about why the thing you pick is important and the consequences of that choice.

Alliterating titles are purely optional.

Go.

Comic Depression

For the longest time - about as long as I can remember being aware of the art form - I have wanted to be a part of the team that writes a webcomic. The first reason is pure arrogance: I often want to do things right that I see done wrong. Actually, this can get really frustrating when I experience something that has maybe, the smallest seed of quality and I find myself obsessing over how I'd do it, and how I'd make it good. A lot of webcomics... well, they're clearly written by artists who think they can write, rather than writers who think they can draw (the latter, when I have to choose between the two, is the one that I prefer).

The second reason is that I love dialog, I love character development, and I love plots. While I have a good visual imagination and like deciding on the appearances of things, it isn't my favorite thing to do. Frankly, I get stressed out trying to figure out how often to reincorporate so-and-so's appearance, such-and-such's smell, the fact that what's-her-bucket has a pet weasel-hawk.

So basically, writing a webcomic means that I get to do just all the fun stuff and none of the less fun stuff? And also it's serialized, long-running, and full of potential? What's not to love? You'll notice that I don't want to get a job in the comics industry, and that' because I do like writing descriptions. I'd feel incomplete if all I did was plot character arcs and write dialog. But, as a project, as something to do (along with everything else I do) it'd be... glorious.

Despite my rather arrogant and cynical description of the webcomicist's art above, I do read a number of truly wonderful webcomics:

• Collar6: It's ridiculous, it's absurdly kinky, and the setting seems like an absurd mix of a modern version of Exalted and a bondage fantasy... but I like it. Take from that what you may.
• Digger: The comic's own tagline says it best: "a wombat, a dead god, a most peculiar epic." I remember wanting to read this one back when it was on a pay site, and how happy I was when it finally went free.
• Drowtales: I've been meaning to write a longer ode to this comic, which actually has done a great deal to cure my elf rage. Seriously.
• Girl Genius: Does anyone not read Girl Genius? Really?
• Keychain of Creation: Like ORder of the Stick, but younger and for Exalted.
• MythAdventures: The team behind Girl Genius, bringing Robert Aspirin's creation to the screen. Top quality stuff.
• Order of the Stick: Rich Burlew's gently mocking presentation of a D&D-themed fantasy world is practically required reading for fantasy gamers everywhere. This story manages to oscillate perfectly between humor and drama, with real characters, really developing, in a hillarious and absurd world.

Unfortunately, I have never made the acquaintance of my opposite number - an artist with lots of time on his or her hands, eager to bring my mindchilds to life.

But some day. Someday...

Live Long and What Now?

There are crazies, and there are crazies, and there are people even I'm moved to mock and shun. VHEMT goes beyond that last category and enters the world of movements I find myself actually despising. Seriously. Get this:

"VHEMT (pronounced vehement) is a movement not an organization. It's a movement advanced by people who care about life on planet Earth. We're not just a bunch of misanthropes and anti-social, Malthusian misfits, taking morbid delight whenever disaster strikes humans. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Voluntary human extinction is the humanitarian alternative to human disasters.

We don't carry on about how the human race has shown itself to be a greedy, amoral parasite on the once-healthy face of this planet. That type of negativity offers no solution to the inexorable horrors which human activity is causing.

Rather, The Movement presents an encouraging alternative to the callous exploitation and wholesale destruction of Earth's ecology.

As VHEMT Volunteers know, the hopeful alternative to the extinction of millions of species of plants and animals is the voluntary extinction of one species: Homo sapiens... us.

Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning billions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Nature's “experiments” have done throughout the eons.

It's going to take all of us going."

Let's start with VHEMT's "arguments," which boil down to a list of varyingly clever straw men, which they predictably line up and knock down. Then let's carry on to their failure to engage with the logical conclusions of their philosophy: why not kill people, support disease and murder, if you despite humanity and want it to cease? Why propose humanitarian action and when the continued existence and comfort of humanity is counter to your goals? If there's anything I frown on more than depressingly nihilistic, rhetoric-poor, spinelessly genocidal whackjobs, it's halfassed depressingly nihilistic, rhetoric-poor, spinelessly genocidal whackjobs. Come on, people! I've seen more enthusiastic and better-argued evil in poorly written pulp novels. I know you can do better!

This brings me to my final point. What do we do with things who disturb and frighten us? We make art about it!

Creative prompt: you know the conventions of modern/urban fantasy. Take a good long look at these VHEMT folks, maybe even peruse their website (linked above) and tell me what they're really about.

Headline: Ashpocalypse

Europe becomes the Final Empire. Waistcoats and pocketwatches come back into style as ash falls from the sky. American fantasy author Brandon Sanderson declines to comment. Will an immortal emperor rise from Iceland to declare himself the Lord Ruler of all the Earth? Only time will tell.

In the meantime, if you're reading this from airport wireless somewhere in Europe, you have my sympathies.

And if you're in the mood, I have a creative prompt to help you pass the time...

Write me something topical, something relevant; write me the ashpocalypse! The comments button is yours.

Vampires Part I

I have vampires on the brain. Vampires! Clearly I should see a doctor about that.

Anyway, last night the Abigail and I were reflecting on the preponderance of biblical symbolism in vampire stories, from the White Wolf canons to This is My Blood (which, by the way, looks awesome). In the end, the Abigail gave me a challenge: create an origin for vampires in a modern setting that doesn't involve biblical characters. Here is what I have created:

Vampirism is a taint. It enters the blood through the practice of keeping other humans in bondage through fear and violence. Out-breeding and gaps in the practice that last a generation or two are enough to clear the taint from a line, but if tainted lines hold slaves for generations and breed among themselves, eventually the taint reaches critical mass and explodes into a curse. In life, those who bear the curse of vampirism seem completely normal; after death, however, they rise. For their bloodthirsty ways they are saddled with a hunger for blood. For their practice of dominating others, they are blessed with the need and the power to continue their domination.

Worse, once the taint becomes a curse, innocents can also be made into vampires. Anyone transformed in this way is instinctively obedient to the vampire who made her until that vampire is killed, when she becomes a free agent.

Of course, the largest group of vampires in America are the scions of old Southern families that held Africans in bondage for centuries, though some California farmers who keep undocumented immigrants in near-slavery might be getting close to the change. Older families include a particularly bloodthirsty line that rose in South America and inspired the Aztecs to constant warfare to feed their hunger, several once-noble families in Eastern and Western Europe, and a clan of bloodsuckers in the middle east who claim to be the world's first vampires.

This is a creative prompt, so comment away. What would you do with this concept? Where would you take it? What characters, storylines, and themes jump out and, well...

Bite you?

If You Won't Be You

I've had a scene living in my head for a while now. The context doesn't matter - the details of the story refuse to be resolved into anything coherent - but the moment remains the same:

One character is a shape shifter with identity issues. Over the course of the story so far, he's lost track of a great deal of who he is. The other is his last friend, and he's dying slowly - wounded, poisoned, sick, or all three - behind enemy lines. The shapeshifter turns to his friend and says "if you won't be you anymore, can I be you?" The dying friend chokes out a final yes, and the shapechanger takes his friend's form, his memories, and a portion of his loves and passions and builds a new self out of them.

I don't know what comes before this moment. Why is the shapechanger blessed and cursed with his power? Why is the friend dying? What is the larger shape of the plot, and how does it relate to the friend's death and the shapeshifter's situation? I also don't know what comes after, but I can imagine the amusing complications, as the shapeshifter deals with his friends family and lovers and no one knows how to deal with anyone else anymore, all against the backdrop of whatever else is going on.

It would be pretty cool... but I don't know what to do with it. The rest of the story - if there is a rest - is buried under some piece of inner detritus.

Well, they say if you love something set it free, so I'm finally cutting this scene loose. Go free into the internet, little idea. If it's meant to be, you'll come back to me some day.

Also, if you folks have any comments I'd love to hear them. Treat this as a creative prompt: what do you think comes before and after?

Idle Musings

For newcomers (do I have any newcomers? I'd really like to have newcomers): once in a while I'll toss an idea into the tubes, just to see what sticks. Sometimes the ideas are sticky... and sometimes they just need to be hit by a stick.

A question that occurred to me on the way home from school: what would the story implications be of a science fiction in which the obligatory force field technology had two main flaws: firstly, the force field has to be a sphere, and secondly, the object that produces the force field needs to be outside the area of effect? Other than the obvious - some really interesting design choices for warships - what else would be true? What style or feel of space combat would these limitations produce? What else is not occurring to me?

Post if you've got 'em.

Johnny Jordan <3<3

Found in the bathroom at the cafe where I do my lesson planning, written on the wall in black permanent marker:

"Your soul was made for eating," said Johnny Jordan at midnight. He'd lasted a long time without eating souls and he was very happy about himself. He was also stupid. Very, very stupid.

Johnny Jordan <3<3

I wish I had a digital camera so I could capture for you the true strangeness of this moment, but you will have to make do with my meagre efforts at reproduction.

Who is Johnny Jordan? The closest I could come was an English former professional soccer player named Johnny William Jordan, and I can't imagine that's who our enigmatic graffiti artist was talking about. English soccer players don't eat souls, right?

Right?

Weasel Cheeseburger Disease!

Today's Burning Prompt Experience is inspired by my real life Tuberculosis Adventure:

Very few venture into the softlands, that ever-changing wasteland of illusion and danger, and even fewer travel to the Mouth of Chaos at its center, a twisting pillar of transformation that warps everything it touches. Mostly they are priests - come to close the Mouth of Chaos or to worship it, or try their faith against the softlands - magicians come to learn what the softlands have to teach about the nature of the world, or adventurers come looking for monsters to slay and treasures to sell. Some are desperate men, come in search of transformation, hoping the softlands or the Mouth of Chaos can change them in some way, remove some defect of body or character, or at the very least exchange a hunted face for an innocent one, however terrifying and deformed that new face might be. Cities have cropped up at the edge of the softlands, for these adventurers and madmen to spend their gold, and a few communities survive within its borders. A few.

No one knows when the sick man came to the softlands. No one will admit to having met him, succored him, even spoken to him, out of fear of reprisal. He probably suffered from some life-destroying disease, like leprosy or consumption. He had probably been cast out of his home and had nowhere else to go. Perhaps he hoped that the Mouth of Chaos would remove his illness altogether - it had been merciful in the past and might be again - or perhaps he had only hoped for death. Either way, he remained unchanged. It was the disease that enjoyed the full extent of the softlands' mad blessing.

Before, those who stayed away from the softlands were safe. Far from the edge of chaos, in sane countries, they could live in peace and enjoy whatever their lives had to offer. Before, those the softlands had touched could leave and travel the world, and though their strange or grotesque shapes might inspire admiration, pity, or revulsion - or some combination of the three - but never fear or hatred.

Not so once the Change Plague began. The mutant disease, born of one man's desperation, spread far and wide. Now a chance meeting could lead to infection, and infection invariably led to transformation. Some can carry the disease their whole lives without knowing, meaning that anyone touched by chaos - or, in fact, anyone at all - was suspect. And when the disease chose to blossom, it was as a terrible fever that changed as it killed, leaving the survivors with warped bodies and shattered minds, and the knowledge that one day the disease might blossom again, and again, and again.

Much of the world died in the anarchy that followed. Kingdoms fell and new ones rose in their place. Those who are touched by the chaos are carefully watched. In some places, they driven away or killed. The only place safe for us and those who become like us is here, at the edge of the softlands.

Welcome.

You know the rules; there aren't any! In comments (or with a link to your own blog), tell me a story of someone touched by the Change Plague, the softlands, or the Mouth of Chaos, or anything else in the above.

I'm Not Alone

Last night, during a conversation about Monday's post about The Vagina Monologues, the Abigail directed me to Betty Dodson (a famous sex educator, pro-sex feminist, author, and artist) and her opinion about the play.

For those of you who are too lazy to follow the link (read it - it's a great essay), I'd be doing Dodson a disservice by summing it up as "she agrees with me." However, I think it's fair to say that Betty Dodson's criticism and mine stem from the same sentiment: it's not enough to simply have a voice. You need to pay attention to what that voice is saying.

* * *

I'm sorry that today's post is brief, a link in the dark, and really about as off topic as I've ever gotten. I just found out yesterday that I'll be taking the CBEST on Saturday, and I haven't got much time. I will mend this with the following:

Source unknown, but the image looks old so I'll risk it.
Image Courtesy of RPGnet's "Spirit of the Century Inspirational Art" Thread

Which really is about as on-topic for this blog as you can possibly get.

Let's treat this as a creative prompt post. Tell me the plot of Zeppelin V. Pterodactyls. Who are the characters? What do they want? Where did they get a Zeppelin? How did they end up fighting dinosaurs? How can I get that job?

And if you can manage to tie the second half of the post into the first half, well... no one's stopping you.