The Aviary

Y'know how people talk about the fact that "collecting craft supplies" and "actually doing the craft" are two different if related hobbies?

I feel the same way about playing solo rpgs and figuring out how I want to set up my notebooks for each different game. Picking a notebook out of my stash, deciding how I want this particular notebook to be organized for this particular game, figuring out which bits of the rulebook I want to print out (or copy by hand) for quick reference, carefully drawing charts or tables - incredibly enjoyable and really only tangentially related to actually playing the game. I probably won't actually get to play my new game until Wednesday, but my notebook looks very inviting.

I also finally did something I've been meaning to do for a while and bought a few different pencil boards in the most common notebook sizes I use. Once they arrive, my games will become playable basically anywhere, regardless of whether or not I have an available writing surface. Perhaps most importantly, they'll then be playable in bed (with the dice roller on my phone), which I'm inordinately excited about.

Me: Okay, I need a monster for one of my solo rpgs and I want a sort of scary bug thing but not a spider because that's boring.

Me: What if it's a mole cricket? Like, a swarm of giant mole crickets. That sound terrifying.

Me: I realize that, in reality, mole crickets are herbivorous but giant monster mole crickets aren't, obviously.

Me: ...can mole crickets fly? ::frantically googles::

Me: I have just created the worst possible thing. I have succeeded in freaking myself out, great job everybody!

A conversation from today:


Me: ::relays an incident I witnessed earlier, wherein a mother told her two children Wrong Information about otters in front of me and I had to restrain myself from correcting her::

Katie (my sister): Oh no, you can't do that!

Me: I will admit that I have done that, but only in zoos.

Katie: Parents are allowed to be wrong sometimes.

Me: Parents are allowed to be wrong sometimes. They are not allowed to be wrong in the zoo when the informational plaque is right in front of them.

Sean (Katie's husband and the one person I've recommended The Magnus Archives to who has actually become a fan): That is the most Jonathan Sims thing I've ever heard a real person say.



I am recording this conversation for posterity because I've never felt so simultaneously flattered and vaguely horrified at myself.

Also, if you're going to give misinformation to children because you are too lazy to read something a foot away from you, then you don't deserve to be at the zoo.

Recently, I have been spending some time doing seneshi translations of randomly selected passages from books I like. Would you like to see them? (Of course you would.)

( Here they are! )


And that is what I did during the last few days when I wasn't working.

So, I have been reading a lot of nonfiction about the Revolutionary War of late, because of reasons. It has been a long time since I read this much nonfiction about history. Or, indeed, anything that wasn't some kind of literary analysis, usually of horror film. Mostly, I read fiction about people with magic or spaceships or superpowers. Or all three.

Which makes you read differently. I read history like I read fiction: for the story. And since I'm reading my current nonfiction mostly for entertainment purposes, I find my brain engaging with it the same way it engages with other stories that are entirely fictional and that I'm fannish about. Which is: a) I want to know every detail of canon, b) I will then decide which details are important to me (and keep them) and which details are terrible (and discard them), c) I will then make up my own crazy-ass stories.

All of which is to say that today it occurred to me that several events during the Revolutionary War make a lot more sense if you accept the premise that George Washington had minor (possibly unconscious) weather controlling powers, and that that's basically a headcanon I have now for all future reading of 18th century American history.

(I would read that hell out of a novel where the Founding Fathers had magic powers. Someone should get on that, just saying.)

Am at the Lovecraft film festival. Whee!

Jeffery Combs is downstairs and it's kinda weirding me out. Usually the film fest only gets author or filmmaker guests, which is much less awkward-feeling for me. I mean, I find encounters with actors uncomfortable at the best of times (which is one of the reasons I don't really enjoy ECCC), but it is super weird to turn around and suddenly be two feet from someone about whose characters I have spent a lot of time making up terrible fanfic porn in my head. So that's weird. But I am quite looking forward to watching Re-Animator tonight.

In other news, I bought new radio plays from the HPLHS, which is exciting. And the guy at the table gave me a free pack of prop Fleur de Lys cigarettes (that i was also going to buy) because he thought I was a guy and then felt bad about misgendering me. I quite like looking androgynous, so that's a little fun on two levels.

In which I am ridiculous:

So, the conlang stuff I'm working on goes with a story. Or, rather, a set of stories, spread out over a very long period of time, because most of the major characters are immortal or semi-immortal. (Evil god-emperor, his chief lieutenants, some of his family members.) And I was thinking about one of them yesterday and, unlike most of my stories, it involved more than two people in a room having a conversation - there's sort of actually a plot, it involves traveling to cities outside the god-emperor's control and also crossing the desert. And I thought, okay, I am terrible at imagining where things are in space relative to each other - I will draw a map.

It...is not a great map, because I can't draw and have no actual knowledge of how geography works, but it was fun to do and I colored it and made up mountain ranges and rivers and things. And other cities, which I had to name. I hate naming cities. Or, I hate naming cities outside the empire, because I know the way the language inside the empire works and I can make up city names that go along with it, but I haven't spent any time thinking about other countries. (Some of them now have cities with names that sound vaguely Finnish. This is mostly because I had a Finnish song stuck in my head at the time.) Anyway, now I have a map!

A map that has national borders drawn the way they would have been at the very beginning of all the stories, before the god-emperor even marched into the country where all the stories are set. It is a Pre-Conquest map.

It's still very useful, in that I can see where the cities are relative to each other and, like, mountain passes and stuff for travel. But now I keep thinking that what I really need is a series of maps, drawn during different periods of the story. A Pre-Conquest map, a map from around the time when the main character becomes important (about 60 years Post-Conquest), a map from around the time of the story I'm currently thinking about (around 200 years Post-Conquest).

I am not at all certain of my ability to reproduce the important features of the map I've already drawn. Also, this is a hell of a lot of work for a set of stories with no actual plot arc other than "I thought this would be cool" that I'm not even writing down. I write down plot outlines so I don't forget them, or emotionally important things people say, but actually writing the story? Nope, not so much.

I should...maybe figure out an actual timeline of events at some point. Which probably means coming up with a dating system and deciding what the calendar is like.

I am the most absurd.

And then, I guess I fell off the internet. I mean, I've been reading my flist and all, but haven't really wanted to post anything. But here are some things:

- This is the Week of Birthdays for my family - Dad's is today and Katie's is tomorrow. So we celebrated Dad's last weekend (concurrent with Father's Day) and we'll do Katie's this weekend. Dad's was fun - we went to Port Townsend and hung out in a park and threw frisbees. We even had a bunch of little boys come and ask if they could play, so we taught them how to throw frisbees too. We are none of us any good at it, so our teaching may not have been productive, but we had a good time.

- I have been reading some Marvel comics. Mostly Daredevil, which I am thoroughly enjoying, but I'm also rereading Alias. Which was the first Marvel comic I ever read, probably around 10 years ago. I enjoyed it then but I think I'm getting more out of it now since, y'know, I know who some of the other character are. (My exposure to Marvel comics prior to the MCU consisted of a few cartoons, Alias, a friends continuing to try to get me interested in the X-Men. Protip: this has never worked.)

- In other, more ridiculous comics news, I'm gonna talk about Fourth World things. So, as you may know, one of the fannish things I do is make fanmixes. Mostly just for me, as they are always mildly ridiculous. I have an Apokolips fanmix, because of course I do, have you met me? It's pretty good (though there's at least one song on there that's tonally wrong but I keep it because it makes me giggle.) I keep thinking I should try to make a New Genesis fanmix and then I realize that all the songs I want to put on the New Genesis fanmix are absurd. Seriously, among the songs that would definitely be on the mix are In Time from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, We Don't Need Another Hero from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome and Donovan's Universal Soldier. I'm not even kidding.

( - No, man, We Don't Need Another Hero is actually a wonderful Mister Miracle song, you don't even understand, it is perfect. I have this whole big incoherent explanation for this, which includes tangents into how Scott is the ultimate embodiment of the Life Equation because of his absurd domestic sitcom life, comparing Scott and Orion's respective destinies, and also ranting about how everything involving the New Gods post-Flashpoint is wrong and terrible*, but I will spare you. No one actually needs to listen to me talk about Fourth World. There's a lot of flailing involved. Scott just wants to get beyond Thunderdome, you guys!)

- These are all pretty happy things, but I am actually currently kinda depressed. I mean, I will still absolutely do the animated flailing about Thunderdome thing, but there's kind of a grey flatness underneath it, which sucks. I mean, I'm pretty sure it will eventually go away but, y'know. There we are. Oh well.

- I think I will now go read more comics.






*It continues to be wrong and terrible and yet I keep reading it, what is wrong with me?

Here is a completely ridiculous complaint about current DC comics*:

So, it may not be entirely evident because I don't talk about it as much as I do the Flash, but I have sort of a New Gods thing. I don't know how that happened, one day I found myself reading Jack Kirby comics from the 70's and now you can basically get me to read just about anything by telling me that Metron or Orion or Desaad** is in it. (It's a little bit of a problem because do you know how much ridiculous stuff Darkseid is in? So frelling much. Usually, when I try to read everything a character's been in, it ends up being someone like the second Captain Boomerang, where that's actually doable.) The New Gods are absurd in all possible ways, but they are also amazing and I love them. (Part of this is because 70's Jack Kirby is so stupidly quotable. Like you don't want to yell things like, "I am the tiger-force at the core of all things!" at people.)

And now, okay, the nu52. Darkseid is all over the place, Orion and Highfather and Metron are around, we've seen Scott and Barda and Kalibak, Desaad is over on Earth 2. Hell, we brought back Glorious Godfrey.*** But as far as I can tell - and the internet confirms my impressions - we have yet to see any sign of Granny Goodness. Which is just a crime. I mean, all of the New Gods stuff in the nu52 is a mess, absolutely - I feel like no one quite knows what to do with them - but the lack of Granny Goodness and her terrifying orphanages just makes me sad.

DC comics, don't you love your Granny?







*Okay, there are a lot of things to complain about regarding current DC comics, all of which are much more serious than this, I admit that. I also admit that, for the most part, I am currently really enjoying all of the comics I read, which are 90% DC. Also, the first issue of the new Secret Six came out this week and I haven't stopped being happy about it yet.

**He is a squirrelly evil toady guy in a purple robe who is literally the god of torture. Of course he is my favorite. Yes, I feel suitably ashamed.

***This is not a complaint. I love Glorious Godfrey.

One of the great things about working at the library is that there will inevitably come a time when a patron will come in and want to gush at you about a book that they just read and thoroughly enjoyed. And it will be a book that you also read once and completely loved and now feel a little embarrassed about because maybe it wasn't actually all that good and was kinda silly but still, love. And you can talk about it with that patron and they will understand.

By which I mean: yes, new patron who mostly uses the computers but has just started placing holds, please come back soon and talk to me about how awesome Raistlin Majere is, that would be great.

The thing is, I was on steam the other day because I have a new computer that will actually play some of the games I want to play (I am finally playing Mass Effect!) and they had that DC Universe Online thing that you can play for free. And I am weak for DC comics, so I installed it, thinking that if I hated it, I would not have spent any money.

And then I spent several hours today designing a character with ice powers, superspeed*, and a kicky little yellow skirt, and then wandering around Gotham beating up police officers. Because if you can play a DC MMORPG as the Golden Glider, why the hell wouldn't you? My only regret is that I couldn't give her ice skates.

Flash villains = still the best.





*No, Glider doesn't have superspeed. But you have to pick a movement type and the other two are "flight" and "acrobatics". Since there is no option for "generates a gravity-defying ice flow with her own skates", I chose superspeed because it's at least thematically appropriate.

One of our frequent patrons just walked into the library and asked us what was different. As far as I know, we've rearranged nothing since he was in last week, but he insisted that the library looked different.

I said, "Maybe it's like The Prisoner and we've moved the whole library to the Village."

I do not think he got the reference (because I tend to forget that not everyone has seen The Prisoner and that making jokes about the Village really only works for people who have). I think, in fact, that I made the whole experience that much more surreal.

Which, really, is what The Prisoner is meant to do, so mission accomplished, I guess.

We don't have a giant white death-ball that collects your overdue books, though. Which, now that I think about it, is really a shame.

The thing about sharing computers at work is that sometimes I google things using the search box and forget that I've done so. And then my coworkers come along and use that computer and the search box says things like "dead things extra teeth" and, really, my coworkers think I'm weird enough as it is.