All Natural Calming Product Open Thread

Oh, but if there are other UA fans out there, if you didn’t know Greg Stolze is currently working on a 3rd edition of that. I’m probably even more excited for that than I am for 2nd edition AW, if only because it’s been SO LONG since we’ve had new UA stuff, and I expect a lot of changes to the world and setting there, which is at least half the reason I love it so much.

@Jackie – thanks for the story! I think a rather apathetic vampire plus a sort of 28 Days Later scenario is an interesting mix. It intrigued me that the vampire was calling people “it” and I wondered is he the kind of vampire that used to be a person, or some kind of always-a-vampire creature?

(I still can’t figure out how to navigate Tumblr though. Are there forward and back buttons, or is every post once you click on it sort of in a world of its own? Apologies for my stupidity in that regard.)

I have links on top that go the tag and the next and previous parts. They’re right above the bolded date in the fic. (I’m naming each part after a day.)

And Fidel used to be a human.

I wounder how much newyen it would take to hire Slam-O!, Netcat ,Bull,and maybe even Fastjack himself to go into the matrix and hunt down and kill the blockqoute monster?

@epitome of incomprehensibility

Hey, you know, I’m just grateful that anyone would take time to read my poorly edited drabble.

Hopefully with some good criticism and stuff, I’ll be able to edit better, rewrite some things, clear some messy writing up, and put it in a PDF with some picture inserts…which people may or may not download for a fee if they so want.

IDK. It would be nice to make some money off of this. The version on Tumblr will be free but, well, maybe people wouldn’t mind paying for a more polished version? IDK, IDK.

EJ: quantum world convention? What do you even mean by that?

In a game like Dungeons & Dragons or Shadowrun, the convention is that the MC is supposed to decide what’s in the world — stat up the NPCs, map the locations, or whatever — in advance. Even though the players never see the MC’s notes, they trust the MC to “play fair” with them by standing by what was written there. Obviously, the MC is going to have to improvise some things, but the same ethos applies — they’re supposed to extrapolate the answer from their pre-designed model of the world.

Apocalypse World actually forbids the MC from specifying those details in advance, and when the MC is called on to improvise, the MC is not asked to do what’s logical, but what’s interesting. In fact, they are explicitly called on to “respond with fuckery,” so if you’re a player who doesn’t like being fucked with, it’s a bad game by definition.

Personally, I don’t have a strict preference for either style of play, and in some ways it’s a matter of personal style more than mechanics. You could play D&D in the same “quantum” way AW is played, and some groups do. When I was a kid, I would stat out optional reinforcements for the enemies that I would bring in if the players were doing well and leave out if they were doing poorly. However, it’s almost impossible to play AW like D&D.

@Katz

Thats not cool. A DM should facilitate play. Ive been in some RPG groups that were relatively humorous and allowed random attacks (Paranoia). But in a normal gaming group thats just being a jerk to the other players.

@Panda,

Thank you for sharing your story. Are you sharing it for our enjoyment, or soliciting feedback? If you want comments, what kind of commentary would be useful to you?

@CCD

YES! Another Tinykittens watcher! COMRADE!!!

I’ve been watching Tinykittens and FDJ’s cam since about May of last year, when I was recovering from knee surgery and on disability and didn’t have much else I could do. (Also found WHTM via Confused Cats Against Feminism due to painkiller induced insomnia. Coincidence? I think not.) When the world seems like it’s too damned stupid and mean-spirited to tolerate, watching kittens helps deal with that and renews my faith in humanity.

I was so relieved when Cassidy pulled through, because he was so sick that I went to bed one night not sure if he’d still be alive when I woke up the next morning. After the losses of Toothless and Tadpole (another day-old kitten that Shelly tried to save and couldn’t a couple of weeks earlier) all the watchers needed some good news. Cassidy, however, was able to make the most of Shelly’s and the ER’s love and care in order to be able to survive, because that little kitten has a will of steel. I still don’t want to think about how close a call it was though, because if they’d trapped him even one day later it’d probably have been too late. Fortunately it’s a non-issue.

If you want to see another blended litter, there’s the Great Catsby litter, being cared for by the same animal protection society(LAPS) Shelly works with:
http://livestream.com/accounts/14083503/Catsby
Their mama, Zelda, was being taken care of by a lady going through chemo when she started to go into labor in the lady’s closet. LAPS sent out their animal control officer to pick Zelda up as her caregiver didn’t have any transportation, and *then* had to turn back and pick up two tiny tabbies Zelda had given birth to with nobody the wiser. Zelda then proceeded to have two more babies when she arrived at the facility.

This was the best timing EVER. That same morning, LAPS had picked up six tiny day-old kittens that had been orphaned and who needed a mama. Zelda didn’t even bat an eye when they introduced them to her and she started caring for them like they were her own. The whole crew is now about two and a half weeks old and the most horribly, amazingly, lethally and wonderfully cute little bundle of fuzzballs you ever dun see. Zelda’s biological babies are all tabbies and her adoptees are cow kitties and blackies, but other than that she sees no difference to them. <3

(It is my personal belief that Zelda and Tip will eventually have a Throwdown of Ultimate Destiny as to whom gets All The Kittens In The World. Because they're like that. All kittens are theirs, even the ones that were given birth to by other cats.)

(P.S. Regarding Tadpole, the kitten that passed away, there is some comforting news. While it was too late for him his mother, an adorable little stray tabby named Lilypad who wasn't much older than a kitten herself, got spayed and a wonderful home with a family that adores her and where she'll never have to be hungry or without shelter again. I follow her updates on Facebook along with about five million other pages of kitties I've watched on Livestream.)

Kitterns: good fer what ailsya.

I read the first section, and spent like an hour trying to create a tumblr, finding out I had one, logging in, trying to change its name, failing, make a new one, trying to log out of the old one, failing, successfully renaming it, and then following your blog. After all that it looks like Tumblr is not going to let me message you, so I’m posting here.

I read the first section and enjoyed it enough that I’ll likely get myself caught up tomorrow. 3 things that really worked for me:

1. Premise. Running a well-known premise (zombie plague) from an unusual protagonist’s perspective seems promising. I don’t usually go for zombie stories, and I’m only moderately interested in vampires, but fantasy/urban fantasy/horror is home turf for me.

2. Protagonist. I had some difficulties with his portrayal, outlined below, but something about him inspires real pathos. I don’t know how you managed to convey so much loneliness and evoke so much pity in a brief scene that’s mostly not about him, but it’s basically his low-key sadness that convinced to read on.

3. Imagery, boldness of. There are moments where the writing really pops. I had some difficulty with the sentence structure, detailed below, but within those sentences are some great words and phrases.

A few things tripped me up/slowed me down as I went through.

1. Syntax. There are a number of dangling participles, and other places where it’s unclear how clauses hang together or where modifiers are pointing. Also some “garden path” sentences where words are revealed to work differently than expected. In almost all cases I was able to work out what was intended, but it was distracting.

2. POV and register. The narration has a pretty consistent and moderate tone overall, but sometimes breaks into “high style,” and other times shifts into a breezy, slangy voice. Also, I wasn’t really sure how “close” we are to his POV. I decided that the high style conveyed judgments from an external narrator and the breezy bits are Fidel’s opinion, but I couldn’t find clear marks, and at one point the registers bled into each other disorientingly fast.

3. Clarity about supernatural. Did Fidel use telepathic mind control in the knife scene? I decided that what happened is that Fidel thought the words in his head, the recipient did not consciously “hear” them, but that she changed her behavior to comply with the subconscious command. I wasn’t 100% sure though. The mental message, if that’s what it was, shares formatting with the free indirect discourse from earlier, which triped me.

Also, some of the language for mundane things has supernatural undertones. After I thought about it, I decided that night clubs only “drain” Fidel in the metaphorical way they drain humans, but I don’t know the rules of this world yet so I had to stop and wonder whether they actually siphoned his life force somehow.

4. Distance. I has troubled working out how Fidel was supposed to feel about humans. At the beginning of the story, it seemed like he thought of them as people, and he explicitly calls them people near the end. When he called crowds “draining,” I assumed he was speaking as either an introvert or a person with social anxiety. Either way, the implication is that he’s talking to / interacting with humans regularly, and that he considers them “people” enough that their opinions matter to him. I was surprised when, in the alley scene, he saw the others not as “people” but as “humans,” and “it”‘s, whose gender was irrelevant to him.

5. Zombie FX. It may be that I’m just not your audience, but I didn’t care for the actual moment of death. It felt like a video game animation or an animated show, and for me, it detracted from the somberness and compassion of the rest of the piece. Again, the opinion of people who actually watch zombie shows is probably more relevant.

I can do notes on individual sentences, but I’m not going to post that on here, so we’d need another way to communicate.

Another thing I regret: Having Fidel describe his short 127 year life as “tedious” instead of going with my original 127 years and already suffering ennui because Fidel doesn’t have anxiety, he’s just tired of everything.

This worked for me…

Re: Zombies. Before I read the story, someone else in this thread mentioned 28 Days Later, so that’s what I went in expecting. If I hadn’t been told in advance, I might not have come to that conclusion. Once I was reading, there were really only 2 things that made me think “zombie”. First was the mention of a “super virus” — that could mean a lot of things, but since I was expecting zombies, I said “ah, okay, zombie virus.” Zombie infection is, for some reason, always referred to as a virus, so if you are worried about confusion you could try replacing it with a similar phrase like “superbug” or “pandemic” or something. Or you could leave it alone, it’s fine.

My expectation that it was zombies was reinforced by the death scene — the vomiting up internal organs and the instant death reminded me of Diablo and such. Finally, the paranoia the EMT has toward Mel. Obviously, with any infectious disease there’s reason to be wary of exposure, but the specific tropes (fear because of who he was alone with / might have been injured by; fear so strong as to suggest abandonment; skepticism about his honesty) could have been a scene from The Walking Dead.

———————————————————————————–

When it comes to “fixes,” I recommend trusting your original instincts. I would not say you focused too much on character; focusing on character is good. Starting with an outsider perspective was a good hook, I don’t think that’s a mistake. You probably cut / didn’t write the exposition lectures because you currently have good pacing and don’t want to slow it down too much, or because you sensed that it worked best with a little mystery.

I jumped to some wrong conclusions because minor details suggested them / implied them /primed me to see them, however you want to put it. If you want to stop your readers from misunderstanding something, you don’t need to add an explicit explanation; all you have to do is find the details that were leading them astray and tweak those.

You also have the option of just accepting that some readers will be confused on some points. As I said, your first chapter sold me on the second, so I would eventually have worked out that it’s not zombies. If you want to clarify it and there’s an easy way to do it, great, but you’re not obligated to sacrifice pace, brevity, tension, or mystery, for the sake of clarity.