alexanderwales

[alexanderwales]

A team of seven was sent to capture the princess. It was a dirty move in what was sure to be a dirty war, but the princess was near the frontlines, and their spies had learned there was a small chance that she could be snatched. When one or the other side sued for peace, she would be an important bargaining chip, if she wasn't simply ransomed.

In spite of encountering next to no resistance, three of the seven men died during the mission. One was kicked by a horse when it spooked, another fell during their race through the woods and snapped his neck, and the third was shot with a crossbow when they returned to their side of the war, a case a friendly fire.

The princess had been utterly impassive through all of it, from the very moment they'd yanked her from her carriage. She had shown no expression on her face when they'd gagged her. She hadn't so much as flinched when a man fell to the ground with a crossbow bolt in his neck.

She'd been placed under armed guard in one of the tents, then the next day, brought further into the kingdom, away from the war and to the seat of power.

The same man who'd been in charge of the team who had taken her, Kipling, had accompanied the wagon to the castle to give his report.

Kipling watched as one of the guards keeled over for no discernable reason. They had stopped and tried to revive him, but there was no gleam of life in his eyes and no pulse in his veins.

The princess had watched, not seeming to find it interesting.

Kipling didn't mention the deaths in his report to the king. They made his team seem incompetent. He didn't mention that another of his team had died of food poisoning the morning before the princess left camp. He did mention that he would need to recruit more people, and that the princess had been behaving oddly.

Later that night, having washed his hands of the princess, he went to a tavern to drink himself stupid. He passed out in an alley on his way home, and when someone tried to steal the shoes off his feet, he made to fight back and got a knife in the stomach for his trouble. He wasn't identified until much later, at which point a pattern was becoming very clear.

[alexanderwales]

It's lupine season, which is one of my favorite times of year in northern Minnesota. They grow in the ditches and stick up these tall purple, white, and pink flowers, so every time you go driving in the country there are stripes of them next to every road.

They are, unfortunately, an invasive species. There's a species of lupine that's native to the area, and it's not the one that's growing rampant in every ditch.

But they're very pretty, so I forgive them.

And here they are in their natural habitat, bordering all the random country roads:

[alexanderwales]

There was some discussion on the discord about how most "superhero fiction" gets tainted by the fact that there are such established things as "superheroes" and "supervillains" in these settings, and that this then taints everything about these pieces of fiction because wide swathes of psychology and character immediately get swept to the side. There's a flattening effect to that, I think I would agree with that, and anyway, it's well-mined territory.

So instead, you could write a superhero novel (or comic) where the entire concept of "superhero" doesn't actually exist, in the same way that zombie movies don't recognize the concept of zombie.

And I think that this would be interesting, but would also immediately introduce a few constraints of its own:

The timescale is relatively short. There's very few imitators, and not enough coverage/traction that people have started to say "hey, these guys are all kind of like each other".

The scope is relatively narrow, probably not more than ... ten characters? And they can't overlap with each other all that much. Maybe you can have small clusters that expand the cast, I guess, a recognized subset of the unrecognized superhero.

This works best in a novel, not in a webfic, because webfic loves to sprawl (and this is one of the best things about webfic).

So to game it out a bit, you have all these different characters, and none of them thinks of themselves as a "superhero". We're pretending the whole concept doesn't exist in this universe. We're making no sweeping generalizations about superheroes, because they're just not a thing here.

Instead, we draw from as many different genres and ideas as possible.

People aren't wearing costumes, there's one guy who's wearing a costume, dressing up like a mascot. Someone else is wearing a uniform. Another guy is wearing a disguise, totally different thing meant to protect his identity, nothing more. There's a guy who summons armor around himself, a guy that transforms, they have distinct individual powers that come from different places, there's nothing that unites them except that they come into conflict with each other. There's no ethos of superheroism or supervillainy.

Part of the idea is that you cannot sort these people into typologies, each of them is individual, except maybe there's a brother-sister couple in there, or a group of five super sentai types or whatever, because we also don't want to make a rule that each and every person is a unique individual.

I think there's a lot that you could get from this. Normal superhero fiction tends to have a lot of ideology in it, and here, because these people don't recognize each other as being the same thing, you have more room to move around. No one is doing things because it's expected of them, except the people who are, who are fighting crime because this is part of their family legacy, or the guy who's a space cop and this is just literally his job. There's greater room for intersectional discussion if you drop "superhero" from the vocabulary.

And it's much closer to what superheroes used to be, before the genre calcified and congealed, when everyone was just their own weird person with their own weird agenda. There is something fresh about that, I think, something that I haven't seen very often, a way of writing superheroes that tries to be in the genre by being outside of it.

I'm not sure I have any ambition to actually write something like this, but I do think that it's probably worth doing. (And I also imagine that if I had infinite depth of knowledge on superhero fiction I would be able to point to three specific pieces of media that did this exact thing.)

[alexanderwales]

I think people don't talk enough about awesome the Sonic & Knuckles cartridge for the Sega Genesis felt.

Putting a cartridge into a cartridge felt illegal. It felt transgressive. What wonderful design, what an achievement of marketing and engineering. It felt like the future of videogames, like maybe you could stick any cartridge into Sonic & Knuckles and something might happen, as though you could insert Knuckles into anything.

And then we went away from cartridges, and this whole technology just completely died, and no one ever talks about it anymore, or if they do, it's not with the wonder that I felt when I was eight years old and my parents were on the verge of divorce and videogames were the thing that were going to save me from having to think about any of that.

[alexanderwales]

Aphrodite hated dick pics.

The first reason wasn't one she shared with other people, because it felt very petty to her, even if it was how she felt: "dick" was a word and "pic" was an abbreviation, and "dickture picture" was a thought that always came to mind, unbidden, or sometimes "Richard picture".

But the other reasons were more cultural, social, and aesthetic.

"There is an art to capturing the erotic," said Aphrodite. "And the vast majority of men are nothing more than preschoolers showing off their scribbles."

Her girlfriend was curled up next to her. Julie was an awkward, somewhat androgynous lesbian who had moved to Seattle from somewhere in the Midwest. She had eyes that the Minoans would have gone crazy for. Aphrodite had picked her up off the street because she'd had trouble understanding what the woman would even look like in the throes of passion, and that was something that Aphrodite, God of Love, was normally incredibly good knowing about people.

It turned out that Julie looked cute when she orgasmed, with a kind of fetching innocence to her, and her face was plastered with love afterward, eyes wide and all-seeing. So they had started dating, in the way that Aphrodite did sometimes, which would last until she grew bored.

"So it's not that you hate dick pics," said Julie. "It's that they're not artistic enough."

"Well, no," said Aphrodite. "Even the most artistically done picture, by a master photographer, with the perfect subject, I would still dislike."

"Well ... why?" asked Julie. "You're bisexual."

Aphrodite didn't like that term, not when applied to herself. She was the embodiment of all forms of love and attraction. It didn't feel right, to distill that down in such a way. She let it pass, though it would be a conversation for another day.

"Erections are transient things," said Aphrodite. "To capture one in film is to take this moment in time and suggest that it's representative. That, I think, is the objection. A moment of passion, which fades away after the photograph is taken, is a lie, of sorts."

"So -- and just so I understand this -- you're fine with a dick pic that gets sent so long as the erection is maintained until you arrive to greet it?" asked Julie.

Aphrodite laughed, because there was something funny about that, perhaps the image of her restlessly waiting in a cab, or inspecting the erection to make sure that it was the same one as in the photograph and not a second, imposter erection. Julie laughed too, and Aphrodite found that somewhat annoying, because she couldn't imagine that they were laughing at the same thing.

"I think there's a sense in which men adore their own erections," said Aphrodite. "It's a narcissism. A failure to imagine women."

"For gay men?" asked Julie.

"Perhaps it's different," Aphrodite allowed. "But I would wager that most of the dick pics are sent by men to women, and I do think it comes from this sense of pride, and I do think it's sad how much disconnect there is, between what these men feeling, what they expect, and what the reality is."

"So in a world where women were reliably aroused by these pictures," said Julie, gently stroking Aphrodite's arm. "Perhaps that would be fine?"

"Perhaps," said Aphrodite. "I'm still not sure that I would like it though."

"There have to be women that do," said Julie. "Among all the natural human variation. A woman for whom an unexpected, unsolicited dick pic following a comment on a local neighborhood app gets her hot and bothered. Odd to think about, how different people are from one another."

And Aphrodite smiled, and held Julie closer, because it was one of the things that had remained odd to her through all her years. She kissed the woman on her collarbone, and her neck, and between her breasts, and this too was transient, an ephemeral moment, that perhaps she would one day like to have a picture of.

[alexanderwales]

Book Review: Delta of Venus

I first read Delta of Venus when I was about fifteen or sixteen years old, possibly fourteen, maybe as young as twelve. It was the first piece of erotica I'd even read, and left an impression on me, but until last week, I had never felt the urge to revisit it.

The backstory to the collection is that Anaïs Nin was in need of money and there was a Collector who was eager to pay money for different works. In spite of being told to just write erotic, sexually charge sequences, she wrote a bunch of stories that had their own interesting literary texture to them.

There are a few things that struck me on reading it again. The first is that I'm not sure how I got through the first two stories when I was sixteen, which are definitely the most transgressive and also the worst. The second one has pretty extreme sexual violence, and the first has pedophilia and incest. They're not terribly interesting or literary, and there's nothing very hot about them, and I think I kept going because I'd never read a book like that before. Hard to say though.

The second thing that struck me is just how grudging some of the erotica is, since the author clearly cares much much more about the psychosexual elements than the parts where people are actually having sex with each other.

So you get these stories that are about people having specific hang ups and fetishes, but the author is doing more of a Twilight Zone "wouldn't it be fucked up" kind of thing than an erotica thing. There's a story about a guy who gets off on being a model for a woman's painting, and so much of the word count is taken up by the particular ways in which the female lead is unsatisfied by his psychological quirk, the way he only wants to be seen and not actually participate in sex.

Or there's this story about a woman who only wants to have sex with men that she knows nothing about, not even their name, and never meets again, and then it turns out there's a twist ending where she's been selling voyeurs on being able to watch these lovemaking sessions, and ... this is a part of it for her, maybe? To be clear, there's nothing erotic about this twist ending, it's just there to put a little capper on the story, because this is the sort of thing that the author finds more interesting than the sex itself.

I think there's something I can see in it now that would have been lost to me at fourteen, which is that Anaïs Nin did not really enjoy the confines of the genre she was writing in. She was commissioned to write erotic stories with people fucking each other, and said "ugh, fine, but by god are we going to do deep dives on power dynamics and the philosophy of transgression" in a way that undercuts the erotic content. It doesn't normally look like this, but I've seen a number of times an author was writing under duress or for a paycheck, and smuggled in their actual interests to the detriment of their brief. And usually it does result in something more interesting and off beat. I've seen the argument that this "elevates" the work above "mere erotica" and I think that's not really true, because so much of the "elevation" is in tension with the erotic elements, rather than supplying them with fuel.

One of the things that I find interesting about the book is that it has something of a legacy, and if you ask for a recommendation of erotica, someone might suggest Delta of Venus to you, and ... it's much more a historical artifact than anything else? It's much less trying to be erotica, at least in the modern sense of the term? And then it rarely comes with warnings, or the proper context for what it is.

After I read it this second time, much older than the first, I read some of the critical analysis of it, along with the contemporary audience reaction. The position of two of the most shocking stories at the front of the collection certainly seems to make a lot of people drop it instantly, and probably rightly so depending on why they were told to read it.

One of my favorite little things in Worth the Candle is buried here, in a section where Juniper visits Tiff's bedroom and peeps her collection of books:

A section of books caught my eye, The Second Sex, Sexual Politics, and Delta of Venus, all feminist works, judging by their titles, all well-read, judging by their spines.

And of course, Delta of Venus doesn't really belong clumped in with The Second Sex and Sexual Politics, but Juniper doesn't know that, and this is one of the things that can slide by you if you have some familiarity with titles rather than with the actual nature of the work itself, if you're trying to infer something from a person on the basis of their bookshelf. But it is a place that people would often put The Delta of Venus.

How did Tiff acquire a copy of Delta of Venus? What did she think of it? I guess I don't know how or why I had a copy of it when I was in seventh grade, but I had a lot of books from a lot of places, picked from old collections, garage sales, library sales, and secondhand book stores.

I didn't remember it well, but it's interesting to think of the ways in which it might have been formative, because it was something that I read when I was young and just developing my taste in proper literature. Sometimes you just read a book and don't really understand it that well, and I think that's probably what happened to me, especially since I don't think I understood what an opium den was just through context.

I don't recommend reading this one unless you're really into works of fiction that have a lot to unpack, many places where it's fighting against itself, where it's impure because it was created from too many competing interests. And also there's the unsavory, stomach-churning stuff, which I personally find unpleasant to read, and probably wouldn't have read if curiosity weren't getting the better of me.

[alexanderwales]

I came across one of those "everyone has just as much interiority as you do" posts, and it got me thinking ... is that true?

I mean, I can conceive of it as true, and treating it as true seems to be the proper way to live your life as an ethical human.

But is it necessarily the case that this property, interiority, is equally distributed among every person across the whole of humanity? That there's no natural variation? That I cannot work on having more interiority, can't do interioritymaxxing somehow?

Do I actually buy that everyone has an equally rich and deep inner life? That everyone has identical emotional complexity? That we all have exactly identical capacity and tendency for introspection?

And obviously we don't have access to the internal experience of consciousness as other people, and obviously there have been a lot of bad ideologies that take, as their premise, that the ingroup is awesome and the outgroup is bad. Like I said, generally speaking I'm fine with having a principle that we don't actually make judgements on who has a richer inner life, because that's not something that's easy to know, and most of what we "know" could be rounded off to the ability to express an inner life.

But if you boldly assert that people are all fundamentally alike, and then you assert that they're fundamentally alike in specific ways, then I really do start to question whether maybe you're committing some kind of typical mind fallacy. Like you're taking your experience of the world (or my experience of the world) and saying that it is very generalizable to everyone ever.

I do think that you could define interiority such that it's a property that everyone has at exactly the same level, that we all possess in the same way. But I'm not sure that's what people actually mean.

[alexanderwales]

There was a recent study about how LLM usage decays brain function in some way, and while there are methodological flaws and small sample size, it's one of those studies where I think to myself "well, that seems obviously true".

That is to say, the brain is a muscle, and you need to use it in order to keep it honed. Or rather, the brain is neural net, and it's going to get better at the things that you train it to do, and connections will naturally atrophy for things that you're not training it on.

You can imagine someone who does a crossword every day, and someone who stops doing crosswords and instead goes to look up all the answers and fill in the crossword that way, and ... yes, obviously the person who is actually doing the crosswords is going to have better skills after a month? Obviously the person filling in the answers is going to get good at searching for the answers and filling them in?

And if you don't actually care about being good at crosswords, if you just want to fill in the crossword as quickly as possible, then maybe you don't actually give a shit about whether this skill is being honed or is degrading.

But you should think about whether you care about the skill, about what's happening to the brain.

I also tend to think of a lot of things in terms of skills, to think of the brain as this training system that needs deliberate care and attention if it's to be kept on track. So I do try to practice what I preach, and be very careful what it is I'm using the LLMs for, if anything: if the use case is an area where I'm genuinely okay with losing a skillset in exchange for having work done faster and worse.

[alexanderwales]

Pictured here, the robin hopping into her nest to settle in for some egg warming.

An idiot robin has built a nest on top of our garage door motor. The nest was constructed so the chain that drives the door is actually a part of the nest, and if we open or close the garage door, the whole thing is going to get torn apart. So I guess the garage door is staying open for as long as it takes for these eggs to hatch and these birds to leave the nest.

My wife has set up a camera to continuously monitor the situation.

Wife: Maybe we should set up some padding beneath where they'll fall out of the nest? Normally they fall onto grass, not concrete. Me: Seems like we're really coddling these birds. Wife: Well, yeah. Me: I just don't want you to get invested. Wife: Way, way too late for that. I'm all in.

So we're keeping the garage door open for a few weeks, I guess. Whenever I go to use the car, the robin flies away from the nest and watches me cautiously to see whether I'm going to kill her babies, and I can't help but find that a little bit rude of her.

[alexanderwales]

An idiot robin has built a nest on top of our garage door motor. The nest was constructed so the chain that drives the door is actually a part of the nest, and if we open or close the garage door, the whole thing is going to get torn apart. So I guess the garage door is staying open for as long as it takes for these eggs to hatch and these birds to leave the nest.

My wife has set up a camera to continuously monitor the situation.

Wife: Maybe we should set up some padding beneath where they'll fall out of the nest? Normally they fall onto grass, not concrete. Me: Seems like we're really coddling these birds. Wife: Well, yeah. Me: I just don't want you to get invested. Wife: Way, way too late for that. I'm all in.

So we're keeping the garage door open for a few weeks, I guess. Whenever I go to use the car, the robin flies away from the nest and watches me cautiously to see whether I'm going to kill her babies, and I can't help but find that a little bit rude of her.

[alexanderwales]

Game Review: FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time

This is a bad game, but it's a bad game that I played to completion.

There's a principle in cooking called depth of flavor which is where you use different ingredients and cooking techniques to make something multidimensional. My go-to example of this is chili, where I do my best to create depth of flavor by using multiple forms of the same ingredient: onions get sautéed, but I also add in onion powder, and when the chili is done, some finely diced fresh onion, scallions, or chives as a garnish. These are not exotic ingredients, but by having many different but similar notes, you get something better as an end result.

FANTASY LIFE i: The Girl Who Steals Time has a dogshit title, we'll call it Fantasy Life from here on. But the title isn't the only thing that's dogshit.

The story is awful, mostly because it commits the cardinal sin of being boring, but there are multiple ways in which the story is bad: cardboard characters, nonsense plot, stupid and predictable "twists", and a bunch of irrelevant fetch quests. There are too many characters, and they're all completely forgettable, merely suggesting ways in which they might be interesting. But I don't think you come to Fantasy Life for story elements, probably, even if you're the target audience.

So that leaves us with the gameplay, and I would say that this, too, is actually pretty bad when looked at on a granular level.

The game's main thing is that there are fourteen "life classes" that you swap freely from. Four of these are combat classes, which are all redundant with each other because you don't need more than one, but then there are also gathering classes and crafting classes, which is what you'll spend most of the game on. Each of these is incredibly shallow and there's a great deal of repetition among them all.

Mining and chopping, for example, are just clones of each other, where you find a node out in the world, circle it until you find the "sweet spot" and then hack away until it's given up the goods. The crafting classes are particularly egregious about this, as there's not really a functional difference between any of them: a timer starts, you're sitting in front of three stations, and you have to move between each of them, hitting a button, mashing a button, or holding a button. The only thing that changes is aesthetics, and whether you have particular bonuses you get from gear or the class skill tree.

And the combat, which you have to engage in with regularity, has absolutely no challenge or substance to it, and does not feel enjoyable to play.

And at this point, you might be asking "well why did you keep playing", which is a great question.

The thing is, while each individual element of this game has almost nothing to it, they're all somehow working in harmony. There are three time periods to move between, one a rip-off of Breath of the Wild, one more like Animal Crossing, and the last one of the most generic JRPGs you've ever seen. And because you can switch between them, because you're encouraged to keep adding things to the list of things to do, there's something that becomes dynamic about it.

There's something hypnotic about it, a "one more turn" feeling. It's a dopamine drip that works by varying the stimulus and jangling some keys in front of your face at regular intervals. You get distracted and go off to do something else, forgetting your original goal, but it doesn't actually matter what your original goal was, so it's fine.

And this is the depth of flavor thing, I think. There is nothing complex in this game, nothing original, nothing interesting, but all the uncomplex things together make it feel complex. This is the magic at the heart of Fantasy Life, the thing that makes it work as a game.

I despise it, in case that wasn't clear. It's rare that I walk away from a game feeling manipulated, like I wasted my time, but this game did that to me. I think it helped illuminate this pattern for me, in some way, one that I'm sure I've fallen victim to before, cheap garbage assembled in an interconnected pile.

Hopefully I remember to get out earlier next time I find this happening.

[alexanderwales]

Interestingly, this is one of the things that people told me they didn't like about my cozy fantasy novel: they wanted everyone to be friends with each other right off the bat, to meet and then seamlessly integrate with each other, to not have conflicts with each other that could be made apparent over time.

I think there's something to certain readers wanting low cognitive load, and so it makes sense to me that they're attracted to stories where they know the setting, where the characters are so archetypal that you don't need to learn their ins and outs. You know them already!

But my preferred form of fiction is high cognitive load, stuff to think about, new ideas, characters that have these fractal curves to them where there's always more to learn. I won't say that I always succeed at that, but it does mean that I've set myself fairly firmly against a certain type of reader who wants the opposite of that.

And I don't think that this is something that's going to go away, personally. I think it's always been there, through the history of genre fiction, and will probably just find new expressions.

I've had a lot of conversations lately about what's lacking in cosy fantasy and romantasy, and the general consensus is that it boils down to being written like fanfiction.

Fanfiction is an entirely different beast than published fiction. Your reader is already invested in the characters, and you don't need to sell them on anything to get them to read it. And that's great! That's the beauty of fanfiction! You should write that if it is your true passion!

Cosy fantasy and romantasy that has no fucking plot whatsoever argh often skips the step of getting you invested in the characters. You're already supposed to be into the "hot mysterious baddie" trope, therefore there's no effort being made to make you interested in this particular hot dude. Female leads are interchangeable. What were they like growing up? What are their morals? Who cares, let them fuck.

Don't get me started on DnD-lite books that rely on you being familiar with DnD to do the world-building for you. First of all, this is boring as all hell. If you're not willing to world-build, you're not going to give us a good story. Second of all, DnD can be a great world-builder, and everyone not taking advantage of that is just being lazy. If you have orcs in your damn book, I want you to tell me what that means. I shouldn't have to flip through a source book to understand the conflict you're setting up goddamnit!

And listen, you can say queer cosy fantasy/romantasy fixes this problem, and I can promise you it doesn't. Some of it is better, but the vast majority is still written for tropes and nothing more. Please, I am begging you, you need more than tropes to write a good book. You need to actually convince us, the reader, to care about these characters as much as you do. That means letting them make mistakes. That means they have to have real problems that aren't solved by the power of love, but by confronting their own flaws. You cannot do this if your characters don't actually have flaws.

I cannot wait for this trend to die.

[alexanderwales]

[Alright, I don't normally go back to these, but there was a single scene from the "full version" of this that kept rattling around in my head, and if there had been more than one scene rattling around, I might have put effort into writing the thing, but it's been some time, with no other scenes appearing with clarity. So here's the second scene, you can imagine the connective tissue if you'd like.]

As a general rule, Kyper dispatched his foes virtually without comment. He would say "Hyah!" or similar. The others had their own catchphrases, repeated ad nauseum. Gendin would say "Just a little cut ..." or "You're nothing against my armor!". Merrith would say "Light and shadow!" or "Breathe!" if she was healing someone.

I had always said to myself that I would be like Kyper if I ever got a chance to fight, stoic and silent, maybe a grunt of effort or a dignified "Hmm!" before thick lightning struck out from my fingertips, branches merging together into a column of blinding light.

It turned out that I said "Lightning's strike!" and once I started, I said it kind of a lot. When I launched myself into the air for an attack, I would say "Twist!" really loudly. I didn't know what I meant by that, but I couldn't stop myself.

The things we learn about ourselves, right?

Thanholm was nothing like the places we'd been before. Everything there was weak. The wolves that I'd been so afraid of as a girl could be brought down by a single hit from any of us. I killed five of them with a single blast of lightning. That phrase, "Lightning's strike!" felt off to me, the double s of it, the weird way it was possessive. The strike belonged to the lightning, I guess, not to me. But with the battles being so quick, it didn't feel like we had much time to dwell on the ins and outs of catchphrases.

We tore across my homeland, killing everything in our wake, barely stopping when our many enemies came close to us. We were heading for the home of my father, who was now apparently in exile, and wolves and bears were coming out of the woods in force to stop us. Their motives were opaque, but also unimportant.

I said that Kyper didn't talk while fighting, and this was only mostly true. Sometimes there were battles where he'd talk a lot, either before, during, or after. Often it was a named foe, someone important, but I never really knew for certain what would make it happen.

I had never been a part of the party when it happened, certainly had never expected myself to speak during one of these moments.

"Harper?" I asked when the seven bandits moved to block our path.

"You know these thieves?" asked Kyper.

I didn't. I only knew the one in the center, Harper, a boy from my childhood, identifiable by the scar across his face. "Harper," I said again. "What are you doing here?"

"I never thought you'd return, Titania," growled Harper. "And with new friends to boot. But I don't have time for nostalgia. I'm here for your gold."

"A friend of Titania's is a friend of mine," said Kyper. He stood slightly in front of me, guarding me, protecting me. "We don't have any quarrel with you."

"I wouldn't call her a friend," said Harper. "And we have you outnumbered."

"Harper, please ..." I said.

"Then we'll settle this with swords," said Harper.

There were seven of them. They had simple weapons, a combination of clubs, daggers, and swords.

Kyper held the Godsword. It was a gaudy thing of gold and crystal, with a color scheme that matched his cape. He had personally killed thousands with it, mercenaries and thieves, all manner of monster and animal. He was the most skilled swordsman in the entire world, the Chosen One of prophecy.

"Titania, get back, I'll protect you!" he shouted to me. He drew his sword, holding it in a defensive stance.

It was ridiculous. I shouldn't have been moved by it. There was no way that they could so much as touch either of us. I could have launched myself into the air and gone beyond the reach of simple steel. He wasn't protecting me, not really. We could have walked past them and let their weapons thump against our armor.

Instead, Kyper crouched low, drew his sword back, and killed them all in a single sword stroke.

This was the Eightfold Cut, the pinnacle of sword technique, learned from a grandmaster yogi who had gone so deep into theory that he'd come out the other side half-crazed. Kyper used it only in special situations, when there was something on the line, so I don't know why he used it here.

Their bodies separated, torsos flying upward from the pressure of their blood, disassembled people coming apart. The cut was perfectly clean, a straight line with no variation, and as the bodies fell to the ground I could still see it in my mind's eye, only not just my mind's eye, because it had angled down toward the ground, and cut beyond the bodies, through grass and trees, scoring rock.

Only Harper still lived, and then only by a thread. He'd avoided bisection somehow, through some feat of will or by the grace of Kyper. He fell to a knee, propping himself up with his sword, and looked up at me.

"Titania, I'm sorry," he said.

Then he ran for the woods he'd come from, limping along, bleeding but somehow not dead. Kyper let him go, and the rest of us wouldn't have dared to do something that Kyper had elected not to do himself.

Kyper turned to me. "Titania, are you okay?!"

"I'm fine," I said. I wanted to laugh, but I didn't.

"They were tough foes, and I'm worried that he'll be back," said Kyper.

There was no trace of irony on his face, no suggestion that he was joking. He was looking at me like I was fragile, like they had landed a hit on me that I wasn't aware of. Maybe there was something about seeing Harper again, an old friend from childhood, but I had seen so much else since then, gods and demons, and the most powerful man to have ever lived.

"He wasn't like that when we were growing up," I said, mouth moving on its own, inane observations spilling out. "He was tender, kind, always a friend even though I was different."

"We'll help him see the error of his ways," said Kyper. "Trust me. No one is beyond saving."

We walked past the bodies of the six dead men, toward my father's house. I was worried about what we would find there, but more worried about how fast we were cutting through the kingdom.

The Hero is Finally Doing my Sidequest

The party was four people, but there were twelve of us all told. Kyper was the leader, the protagonist, the Chosen One, our assigned hero, so he was always there with his sword in hand and cape swirling behind him. Gendin was a big, blocky guy with thick armor, a heavy shield, and an incongruous little kitchen knife that couldn't have been longer than six inches. Merrith was the party's cleric, light and shadow coming from the hoop on top of her staff, a second-rate healer but with a high amount of versatility.

There were a handful of people that usually occupied the fourth slot. Cardi was an archer, always there if the party was going up against fliers. Terrent was an elemental mage, mostly used to counter affinities. Against humans, it was usually Dennin, who was a skulk-thief, unless they were mind-controlled, in which case it was Tathia, who could use her martial arts to take them down without killing them. Occasionally someone who wasn't even on the roster would join up for a time, but usually not more than a day or two.

Where were the rest of us, when the four members of the party were doing their thing? Good question.

I had the sense of being there, but could never place myself. After the fact, if asked, I would say things like 'we fought the wyvrens', but if you asked me what I had done -- which no one ever did -- I would have been puzzled and unable to explain, even if I was able to recount the blow-by-blow of what the party had done, every sword stroke, every claw against shield, every shout that lingered in the air. Where was I? There, I suppose. I must have been. I traveled with Kyper, didn't I?

Whenever we stopped to rest, I was much more clearly present. Kyper would always make his rounds, and he would always speak to me, and I would feel warmth in my chest and the small hairs raising on my arms. There was something electric about him. We all felt the pull of him, and it was hard to hold back a flirtateous tone -- for me, the rest of the girls, and a few of the men. Kyper liked to give gifts, even if they were small, and whenever we broke to rest that became a part of his visits. At first it had been things I didn't know what to do with, a little acorn or one time a live frog, but on one occasion he gave me blueberries, and I had blushed and asked if he was sure. Every time after that, he had blueberries on hand for me. They reminded me of my childhood and summers spent in the hinterlands, though I never had occasion to tell him. The gift was always the same, but it never stopped giving me a warm, fuzzy feeling. He had noticed my reaction and then gone out of his way to give me something I liked, and it was that, more than the blueberries or the summer memories, that made me blush every time.

In the scheme of the world, I was special. I had been born from a crystalline fragment of a god that had fallen down to land in the woods, and been raised by the Winter King as the Lightning Princess. I had power that most people could only dream of: I could run across water without getting wet, twist myself high up into the sky, clap like a thunderbolt, and glow with pale blue arcs of electricity.

In the scheme of the roster, I was dirt. I could fight in the air and at range, and I was the fourth best person at both those roles. I could use the lightning coursing through my veins to resuscitate people in a pinch, and I was the worst of the five of us -- Barbarelle could bring a person back healthier than they'd been the day before and with their clothes repaired to boot. I could take a hit, but not that many of them, and I could fight, but not as well as the others. We were each supposed to have our niche, but I had none. Maybe that was my role, to be the all-arounder, jack of all trades and master of none, but if that was it, it was a role that consigned me to eternally sit on the sidelines.

Was I actually there for any of it? I thought about that a lot. It might have been that I only existed in those moments when Kyper was talking to me or giving me another handful of blueberries.

There was one time the team had to split in two, when we became separate parties of four attempting to achieve two mission objectives at the same time. I watched as Kyper made the parties. I wasn't on either of them. One party went north to the shield generator, while the other party went south, to the castle walls. Where was I? Both places. Neither. No one ever talked to me about that experience. I never mentioned it to Kyper. I think it was then I realized that I would never have anything to do, that my life would exist only while resting in inns or at campfires, and then only to get blueberries.

Eventually I stopped believing that I would somehow make the party. I stopped hoping for it. I was growing stronger the more we adventured, and every now and then I would find myself in a new outfit I didn't remember picking up with a collection of throwing stars that was sharper than the ones that had come before, but it was all irrelevant.

Someday, Kyper was going to complete his quest. Maybe I would know who I was then. Maybe I would be there, for one last party, before the team dissolved. I no longer had illusions that he was going to make me his wife.

And then, as it seemed like we were about to go after M'ok Tannid the Ancient and bring about the end of prophecies, I found myself standing in my hometown.

I looked with shock on the thatched-roof cottages and the fir trees that had been bent by the wind. The smell of smoke reached my nostrils, birch in the fireplaces, a faint whiff of meats being preserved. I knew this village, Thanholm. I had been here with my father, before his illness.

"Is everything okay, Titania?" asked Kyper. He was looking at me with a furrowed brow.

I looked back at him. He was looking at me. Gendin was beside him, looking at the village, and Merrith was adding yet another carving to her staff in that bored, disinterested way she seemed to do everything.

There was no one else.

I was in the party.

"I ... this is my home country," I said.

"Oh," said Kyper, seeming relieved by this for some reason. "Well you're going to be our guide then, okay?"

"Okay!" I said with an enthusiastic bark I didn't feel.

We walked into the town together, the four of us, my first time in the party since we'd met. I felt the ground beneath my feet, the wind in my hair, and the lightning in my spine. I was real, whole.

Whatever happened next, I knew I had only one goal: I wanted to make this last as long as I possibly could.

[alexanderwales]

There's a thing that happens with writing sometimes where the intent of the story runs up against the reality of the story, and this is where a lot of really terrible conversations about stories come from.

For example, a story sets up a hard choice that a character has to make, but doesn't sufficiently set up why this choice needs to be made, or why it's a binary. There are different ways to read this:

The character is making a choice, got it

The character is making a choice, and it simply did not occur to them that there was a third option

The character is making a choice, and they considered the third option but rejected it off-screen

The character is making a choice, and the fact that they see this as a binary is an important aspect of reading their character

The writers screwed up

The writers were being expedient

The writers were simply not interested in having this choice be justified by the text

And the big problem is that people get into a conversation about the hard choice, and then don't ever reconcile that they're having different conversations. They haven't agreed on the frame they're arguing in, and might not realize that they're in different frames at all, and everyone just talks past each other for ages.

(I think that this post might have originally been about some particularly insipid conversation I was reading, but then it sat in drafts for long enough that I'd forgotten.)

[alexanderwales]

Book Review: Crystal Trilogy

I finished Crystal Eternity roughly two weeks ago, and immediately went to do a podcast with the author, Max Harms about the series and how he saw it. I've had enough time for my thoughts to crystalize (heh), so it's time for a short review.

Spoilers follow.

Going in, I didn't know much, only that it was about AI in some way. I was surprised, in the first book, when aliens were first mentioned, and for a time, it seemed like they were only there to justify having a single AI in a contained body, a "big ask" of the kind that's common in scifi.

But over time, more and more different things start showing up, and eventually I cottoned onto what the novels were doing: they're showing as many different types of intelligence as possible, they're about intelligence and humanity, and what assumptions we take for granted. There's WIRL, the dog, the daughter, the aliens, all kinds of different takes on what it means to be an intelligent, thinking being.

And this is the thing that I liked best about the books: they have a lot of ideas in them, and it's never too long before another idea comes by. If you're going to write a sprawling story, this is one of the things that's great to do.

The other thing that I liked about the books is that it felt free to get weird with things. It's a book written by an author for his own amusement, the way that he wanted to write it, and if you don't like it, fuck you. This is one of the great Authorial Virtues, and no, I don't have an essay ready to go on what those are, nor am I ready to add a second one to the list.

I'm a big fan of the monomyth and Dan Harmon's story circle, and of narrative structures in general. I like when we end at the beginning, having gone through the underworld and changed. I like character arcs, whether they're subtle or bold. There's a lot that you can do within these frameworks, and when you're a student of them, you know when to break them for effect.

The trilogy does sometimes break narrative rules for effect, to give you the sense that life is not how it is in books, or to highlight that these artificial intelligences are not human, or to give a sense of alienation, or to be confusing on purpose. I think that if I went back and read through some reviews of the books, I would be able to predict with great accuracy where people said that something was "unsatisfying" or "confusing", and I think that this is largely the point.

But do I like it?

I have this monkey brain that claps when the narrative lights go on. When a gun is placed on the mantle in the first act, I say "oh boy, someone's going to get shot with that" and then when someone gets shot, I clap. When there's a bit of backstory that comes in handy, when a heist gets pulled off, when two people kind of hate each other and then end up falling in love, when the bomb gets defused at the last minute, that's my jam, that's the thing that I'm into fiction for. I like when things are predictable, and then that predictability lends the opportunity for a twist on things, when there's a setup with a different payoff than expected. The gun gets set up on the mantle in the first act and someone gets clubbed with it instead of shot? That's the kind of thing that I also like, the subversion, the way that we're all in it together, that we know the same grammar.

My monkey brain liked bits and pieces of the trilogy, but overall, the books are just not written with the monkey brain in mind.

But I did like what it was doing on other levels.

There are reveals that feel uncomfortable because the monkey brain isn't getting satisfied, because you feel confused and unhappy about things happening off-screen by people unknown to you, but the narrative focusing where it shouldn't logically be focused for the reader to understand things. There are deaths of important characters that happen without fanfare, barely commented on by the narrative, and this was affecting in its own way, even if the monkey brain was frustrated.

There's a point, halfway through the second book, when the protagonist essentially dies and is replaced by a different person who has none of the same personality. And this is just a weird thing to do in a book, it feels bad to the monkey brain, but it's there by intent, and the jarringly unnarrative nature of it seems to be why it happens. It's not playing within the narrative frameworks, or using the narrative grammar.

I enjoyed the trilogy in the same way that I enjoy some art; it gave me something to grapple with, it had clear intentions, and I never knew quite what it was going to do. The narrative monkey brain has gripes, but most of these are in the form of "narrative rules good, narrative grammar good", and when I think of how I would "fix" any of these things, I immediately see how no, that would go against the artistic intent. (Mostly, anyway. I cannot claim to have picked through every single scene in a deep reading kind of way.)

I went into the trilogy knowing that some people did not like the second and third books, and yeah, I get that, because it becomes less of the thing that the first book was. But it does that for reasons, and I respect those reasons. The part of me loves analysis had things to grapple with, and I enjoy having things to grapple with, but not everyone is like that. Some people just wanted to keep seeing Face get up to hijinks, to have the characters stay as they were, and ... you know, maybe I could say that this is a signaling problem, that there should have been more signposts about how it would go, but I'm not sure I even believe that.

I think that makes it easy to recommend the first book and much harder to recommend the books that come after. It's not the kind of media diet that everyone wants. But the second and third book gave me things to chew on, which is something I value, and they had a clear artistic intent that was playing outside the rules of narrative, which is also something that I value.

[alexanderwales]

Talking about AI with people who don't know about AI is always fun.

Guy: Yeah, an AI can write "apple", but it's never seen an apple.

Me: I mean, we have multi-modal models now, but I get what you mean.

Guy: What's that?

Me: Er, we have multi-modal models that are trained on text and pictures and video and audio. So they've "seen" an apple.

Guy: Wow, that's wild. But I guess they've never tasted or held an apple.

Me: I mean ... there is not, in principle, any reason you couldn't hook it up to sensors. There are artificial "tongues" used in food science and research that can "taste" things. Which is not the same thing as a human tongue, but you could, in theory, train a huge multi-modal neural net on a wide variety of taste inputs that were combined with auditory and visual inputs. They're not doing that, so far as I know.

Guy: A computer can hold and taste an apple?

Me: Yeah. I mean, the model could be trained on data, and then use tool hook-ins to control a robot arm with sensors, and then all the collected data could be used to train another model, which would, when writing about an apple, have associations between all its "senses" and so in some way would be able to describe an apple using different data streams. But I don't think that's what you meant when you said that.

Guy: No, it was. A computer can eat an apple. Huh.

[alexanderwales]

My son was three.

He burned himself on the stove, not badly, and I foolishly thought to myself, "Oh, well at least he'll think about what we tell him a little bit more."

So today he was going around the house cleaning the walls by spraying them with water and then wiping them with a cloth, not terribly effective cleaning, but I'll take it. When he went over to the TV, I stopped him:

Me: Don't ever, ever spray the TV, under any circumstances. Do you understand?

Son: But maybe just spray the TV once.

Me: No, never spray it, it's got electronics in it that can corrode and break when you spray it.

Son: But maybe just spray the TV a tiny bit.

Me: Never, under any circumstances, get any water, including from the spray bottle, on the TV, because it might break.

Son: But if the TV is dirty then maybe spray it.

Me: No, never spray the TV.

Son: Maybe spray next to the TV and some water gets on it, maybe that would be okay.

Me: No, that wouldn't be okay, don't spray the TV, don't spray next to the TV if you think there's any chance that water would get on it.

Son: Maybe milk --

Me: Just no, no milk, no juice, no water, no fluids, nothing wet, and you're not allowed to touch the TV, or to touch the TV using other things.

Son: But Loki can touch the TV when he wants to, and paw at it.

Me: (literally knowing exactly where this is going) Yes, but Loki is a cat.

Son: Meow.