Fantasy and the Weird

You know, for a shy person who doesn't like to step on toes, it's really hard to just be like, "Hey, I'm gonna go disappear and do productive things for a while.  Don't bug me."  Especially in a house that doesn't really have a separate place for me to work.

I need to not complain.  Don't complain.  So I'm just observing.  And trying to think of a way to do what I need to do.

Homestuck continues to be a thing.  A crazy thing.  It and Adventure Time are my cartoony indulgences.  Legend of Korra is not an indulgence.  It is a necessity.

I think one of the coolest ideas for creating a world is to play with video game motifs.  It's something that Homestuck does, and most video games (obviously).  There are quite a few other stories that I can't think of at the moment, and plenty of webcomics that don't have an overarching  plot, all of which mess around with video game (and other pop culture) motifs in building the world of their story.  Scott Pilgrim is another good example of this.

Themed worlds are definitely easier to create than wholly new ones.  And "wholly new ones" are probably impossible.  But what I mean is it's easier to say, "This story is set in the Prohibition Era U.S." and present a world that a lot of people will recognize.  It's not as easy to develop the epic sweeps of the history of Arda.  Honestly, one of the most interesting aspects of the Inheritance Cycle was Paolini's experiment in world-building.  He used a lot of the trappings of stereotypical fantasy (men, elves, dwarves, and dragons) but he worked hard to make it his own.

Honestly, and it's taken me a while to realize this about myself, I prefer my worlds a little weirder.  Doctor Who's version of reality is very engaging partly because it doesn't take itself seriously.  Worlds you can laugh in make the moments of sorrow that much more poignant.  Which reminds me of Up.  Goodness, that movie is brilliant.  I won't even get started on that, though.  The Avatar world (again, the Asian-themed cartoon world and not the giant-blue-tentacle-people world) has hilarious things like platypus-bears and the recurring tragedy of a man and his cabbages, but their existence only heightens the feeling when we learn about an important piece of Iroh's past, or see a pair of brothers doomed by the upbringing their father gave them.

And Homestuck is definitely weird.  It's like Hussie dropped in the Weird-brew teabag and just left it there in the piping water until the ratio of Weird to water made the tea into a non-Newtonian fluid.  Wibbly wobbly, timey wimey Weird tea.  That's what Homestuck is.

And that's why I love it.

Now, some people can't take that seriously.  The irony of that statement is fully intentional, yes.  What I mean is that some people lose all their disbelief suspension and miss out on the ride because it's just too weird.  But I was never nearly normal enough to get along with people who like their world always straight vanilla.  Sometimes you just need to have some bacon ice-cream and get over it.

There's a smaller version of a dragonfly, and some wise guy/gal named it the damselfly.  That's an official thing.  That's the kind of world we live in.  We name bugs after medieval mythology.

There's a beetle out there somewhere that, as far as I know, can haul around a banana that's way bigger than it is.  Ants can lift things 100 times their weight.  If fleas were human-sized, they could jump football fields.  In the depths of our ocean, the wildlife glows, and the invertebrates down there are more mind-blowing to watch than a model of a four-dimensional object.

Our world flipped the lid off the can of weird before we came up with the semantic concept that weird corresponds too.  Also, we're capable of exploring semantic concepts that could never occur, and live in those mental spaces fairly comfortably without going entirely insane.  Most of the time.  There was never a Zeus, God of the Sky, man, but we sure as heck know about the stuff he did.

I guess what this Weird tangent was about is that we all need to settle down and non sequitur all over everything once in a while.  It's more honest.

Also, people like me need to drag our heads down out of the clouds every so often and do some manual labor so we can know this world we're living in isn't just made out of semantic space just because that's how we can (kind of) comprehend it.  There's stuff to it.  And it happens.  It keeps hapening.  You gotta eat something that's alive (or once was) in order to live.  Dog my cats, but that kinda sucks, doesn't it?  All it takes is a gulp of something suitably not air to cut off our respiration, and we go out like a light.

 I'm gonna stop there before I get too morbid.  I guess that's the kind of stuff I think about, and I bring it all back to stories because I'm wired that way.  This was all another defense of fantasy as a storytelling medium, I guess.  Or something.  I don't even know.

I'm still thinking about that deep sea jellyfish.

Camper Pies and Tangents

We cooked out today.  It was awesome.  And delicious.  If you've never had camper pie, you're missing out.  Go buy an iron, a loaf of bread, and pizza-making stuff, then start a fire and do things.  Delicious things.

We also watched the season finale of Legend of Korra.  It was excellent.  If you haven't watched that show, watch it.  All of it.  It's only about twelve episodes.  It gave me emotions.

Not that I didn't have emotions before, but I felt things because of it.

I seem to run out of time a lot lately.  That and inspiration.  And it's hard to force it when there's people over and I'm spending time with them.

I have a father and an uncle who are pretty good at the piano, and we have a grand piano sitting in the main room of the house.  It gets all jazzy and/or classical up in here pretty much every day.  That is a beautiful thing.  If you don't have a grand piano sitting in your living room (for us it's the "music room") then I am sorry.  You're missing out.

Talking about that makes me think about the sort of place I'd like to have when I have one of my own.  An office would be nice.  Someplace I can go that tells people automatically that I'm unavailable, which also separates me from the sights and sounds.  If I had to do my music stuff in there too that'd be all right.  Part of my problem is that when I get access to an office, I need to train myself to use it properly.


What do "normal people" prefer for their living spaces these days?  What would you like to have? Is wanting stuff from your space an entitled outlook?  I mean, if I had everything stripped away from me, would it be reasonable at all to want an office?

That brings me back to a question I think about a lot.  It's ironic that I'm talking about this on a blog going out on the internet on my expensive computing device, but there's this thing about society that I have.  I don't like it.  I mean, I like my conveniences, but there are a lot of things about the way we Westerners live our lives that really bother me.

Culture, man.

But I'll refrain from my rant about it and get down to my trouble.  I'm a writer, and the writing I'm trained in involves keyboards and pixels, rather than ink and quills, or verse to help me (and my listeners) remember it.  My education could potentially mean nothing in a world thrown back many years.  Also, the subject material I like to dig into—fantasy, primarily—would possibly be meaningless to the people at that point.

When I think about that, it makes me think I should spend more time trying to tell stories I've experienced directly, so I can relate to more than just my fellow geeks.  I don't even relate to the geeks all that well sometimes, because I stubbornly refuse to take part in some of the culture.

People are very, very complicated.  We're real.  Even the fakers.  And there's so many of us, too.  Like, billions.  We don't even all speak the same language.  It'd take a set of brains very differently wired to have seven billion people who were all capable of speaking the same language.

Have I ever talked on here about how fascinating language is?  Humans are wired for language, uniquely.  You have to go out of your way to keep a person from learning to speak a language.  It's a connection thing.  Oh yeah, I have ranted about this, haven't I?

It's the whole language thing that keeps me from despairing of my career choice.  I just have to try to keep on top of things.  Easier said than done.

Idioms man.  They're the thing.

I keep waffling, here.  I could start going on and on about things I'm interested in, or I could say a couple things and call it good.  What I ought to do is think of a subject beforehand to talk about.

Psh! What?  Premeditation?

Whatever.