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Xin Yun is dead. Long live Xin Ariq

Xin Yun is dead. Long live Xin Ariq published on No Comments on Xin Yun is dead. Long live Xin Ariq

I decided to change the name of Xin Yun- Lost Noise’s aging Baatar- to Xin Ariq. I combed through the archives and updated dozens of pages to properly reflect this. However, it is likely that I missed an instance of “Xin Yun” somewhere. I will update it as necessary when it comes to me attention.

This might seem like a weird decision to make. For me, it was particularly hard because I really like the name Xin Yun. It’s a tight, punchy, and regal sounding name, and a part of me hates to see it go. Fortunately, I also like the name Ariq. It is the name of an in-law who lives in Mongolia, and I think Ariq will also work well for the Baatar.

The problem for me with Xin Yun is that the pronunciation is far too similar to Shen Yun- a dance performance troupe created by the Falun Gong cult. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this religious group, I will quote Wikipedia to illustrate some of their positions:

They are known for… espousing anti-evolutionary views, opposition to homosexuality and feminism, and rejection of modern medicine, among other views described as “ultra-conservative“. The Falun Gong has also received substantial criticism and heavy scrutiny by observers for its extreme founder veneration, use of psychological abuse against adherents, use of guilt and emotional warfare to secure donations from followers, and involvement with political information operations and disinformation campaigns in the United States and Europe

The naming similarities between the name of Shen Yun- the most notable, public outreach effort of this group- and Xin Yun was accidental. I was not aware of this group until recently. After reflecting on it, it was an easy decision to change Xin Yun’s name because the positions of the Falun Gong group are antithetical to what I stand for as a modern, queer person. Any association (real or imagined) with Falun Gong or their naked bigotry is intolerable. While I will miss the name “Xin Yun,” this change will have no bearing on the story, and I am looking forward to sharing how Xin Ariq will contribute to the story of Lost Noise.

Bluesky

Bluesky published on No Comments on Bluesky

Did you know that you can either follow a Lost Noise update bot on Mastodon (or subscribe to it for a RSS reader) or follow me on Bluesky for updates for the site? Below is the most recent bluesky post regarding page XIII-7

 

 

New episode of Lost Noise is online.

Does Zel have enough Paragon or Renegade points to avoid shooting Wrex? Isn’t that actually a weird mechanism for a narrative driven game when you think about it? What does this has to do with a succession crisis? Find out here.

#webcomic #fantasy

[image or embed]

— John Cutting (@johncutting.bsky.social) Jun 22, 2024 at 12:02 PM

More Flags from an Alternative Future

More Flags from an Alternative Future published on No Comments on More Flags from an Alternative Future

I had so much fun sharing the flags from the “playable” fictional nations in our Olympics game, that I took some time and finished the designs for the NPC (Not Permitting Chrono-migration) nations. There are two categories, nations that will compete in the events and those that are banned. Countries that compete had a simulation performing the actions that fans could do to influence the Games.

While the playable nations have fixed ethics, these nations have ethics that are more malleable and can be influenced by other players

NPC Nations

Nation: Armstrong Habitat

National Anthem: Home On Lagrange

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Collectivism 

Nation: Fertile Crescent

National Anthem: Wax and Wane

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Angevin Empire

National Anthem: No Gods. No Kings. Normans.

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Divine Right

 

Nation: Gibraltar Pillars

National Epic: Over or Through

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Militarism

 

 

Nation: Gran Columbia

National Anthem: ¿Quiubo parce?

Continent: South America

Ethics: Pacifism

 

Nation: Hunan

National Opera: Bu Guo

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Intermarium

National Anthem: Do Not Call the Wolf from the Forest

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Nation:  Kandy Kingdom

National Anthem: Ah, Red Rock!

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Cultural Influencers

 

Nation: Lands of Cyrus

National Anthem: I Would Not Kneel

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Militarism

 

Nation: Luxembourg Hive

National Anthem: Assimilate!

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Hive Mind

 

Nation: Mount Bali

National Anthem: Gede

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Nation: Nunavut

National Anthem: All or Nothing

Continent: North America

Ethics: Prosperity 

 

Nation: Republic of Greenland

National Anthem: Time Is an Illusion

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mechanist

 

Nation: Sikkim

National Anthem: Where Teesta and Rangeet Flow

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Divine Right

 

Nation: The Holy Sea

National Hymn: Ave Mare

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Spiritualism

 

Nation: The Neverlands

National Anthem: Can’t Say That Again

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mechanist

 

Nation: Tornado Alley

National Anthem: It’s Raining Men

Continent: North America

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Tsang

National Mantra: Guru Rinpoche

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Discovery

 

Banned Nations:

Nation: Corsicas

National Anthem: God Save You

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Prosperity

 

Nation: Costaguana

National Anthem: No Peace & No Rest in Material Interests

Continent: North America

Ethics: Environmentalism

 

Nation: Dyson Sphere

National Anthem: Drain the Sun

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Piracy

 

Nation: Kansas

National Anthem:  From the Stars, Through Difficulties

Continent: North America

Ethics: Authoritarianism

 

Nation: Sea of Tranquility

National Anthem: Leaps and Bounds

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Prosperity

 

Nation: Siberian Rails

National Anthem: Ride! Ride!

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Nomadic

 

Nation: The Hansa

National Anthem: Ordnung und Disziplin

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Flags from an alternative future

Flags from an alternative future published on 1 Comment on Flags from an alternative future

One of my “pandemic projects” was a python-based web-browser game that was loosely inspired by Blaseball. The premise was that we could see a different version of the “Olympics” in a post-scarcity future where humans are augmented. The goal was to highlight and delight in the excesses and absurdities in modern Olympics, but the project eventually died as I got busy with real commissions and real projects. What ultimately killed it was a bug in the code that was discovered when a hockey fight created infinite clones of all athletes and had them wail on each other for all eternity. As metal as a universe-shattering hockey fight sounds, it revealed that I was out of my depth as an amateur coder, and I haven’t had the time or skill to rewrite the game from scratch.

Below, I want to take a moment to share some of the “playable” countries from our alternate future. It was a lot of fun imagining how a different history would shake out and how that would be represented by the political lines, names, and flags of our futuristic nations and city-states. I tried to strike a balance between historical projections, fantastical, silly, and aspirational potential nations. While the list below doesn’t include the non-playable nations or the nations that are banned from the futuristic Olympics (yet), I hope you can enjoy a glimpse into a project that will probably stay on the drawing board.

Nation: Antarctica

National Anthem: On Top of the World

Continent: Antarctica

Ethics: Cultural Influencers

 

Nation: Aurora Commonwealth

National Anthem: The Heavens Weep

Continent: North America

Ethics: Collectivism

Nation: Chesapeake

National Anthem: We Do Not Inherit the Earth

Continent: North America

Ethics: Environmentalism

Nation: Estados Unidos

National Anthem: Himno Nacional de Norte America

Continent: North America

Ethics: Meritocracy

Nation: Gulf of Havana

National Anthem: ¡Chao pescao!

Continent: North America

Ethics: Egalitarianism

Nation: Manhattan

National Anthem: Success is Critical

Continent: North America

Ethics: Individualism

Nation: Silicon Coast

National Anthem: Compile and Execute

Continent: North America

Ethics: Materialism

Nation: Inca

National Anthem: Bring It On

Continent: South America

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

Nation: Tropicália

National Song: Coração Materno

Continent: South America

Ethics: Anarchism

Nation: Libertatia

National Shanty: Raise the Black Flag

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Piracy

Nation: Sahara

National Anthem: Face the Mind Killer

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Expansionism 

Nation: Salted Carthage

National Dirge: Dido’s Tears

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Hegemony

Nation: The Coffee Bean Thalassocracy

National Jingle: We’ll Grind You Wholesale

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Dominance

Nation: Hellas Megalopolis

National Anthem: Smite Thee

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mysticism

Nation: Kalamar Vikings

National Anthem: Eagle, Show Your Claws

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Prosperity

Nation: Scythian Empire

National Anthem: Less Talk, More Rock

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Centralism

Nation: Oceania Flotilla

National Anthem: Aboveboard and Inboard

Continent: Australia*

Ethics: Discovery

Nation: Mauryan Techno-Republic

National Anthem: Embrace Change

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Pacifism

Nation: Neon Tokyo

National Anthem: Jack the Sound Barrier, Bring the Noise

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Mechanist

Nation: Yuan

National Anthem: Hear Their Lamentations

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Nomadic

Plotting and ‘Pantsing’

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The expression “No Plan Survives First Contact with the Enemy” is pretty common. However, it is worth noting the whole context of the quote where this idiom (probably) came from:

In 1871, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Von Moltke wrote an essay with the line (boldness added by me), “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end.”

The highlighted bit made me reflect a lot about my growth from an amateur writer to a more professional creator.  Recently, I had a discussion with some other writers about how much time we spend “plotting, writing, and pantsing.” For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll define plotting as “planning out the steps and progression of your story’s plot (A happens, therefore B happens but C occurs to disrupt B).” Writing is the physical act of writing or drawing your story. And “pantsing” is literally flying by the seat of your pants.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really grown to embrace the pantsing portion of the writing process. As a young writer- for example, when Fortuna Saga was being written- I would agonize for weeks on trying to plot out every single turn and counterpoint of the plot. It was only near the end of Act 4 in the Fortuna Saga that I really felt that the story took a life of its own. The characters began driving the plot instead of me trying to corral it to a conclusion.

The plotting portion is important. It’s valuable to think about the world as a whole and how the various timelines and perspectives should reasonably intermesh. It’s also really easy to get lost in Planning Paralysis where no writing actually gets done, the story loses momentum, and things might ultimately get stuck. Plotting is necessary because you need something to throw away and rewrite as the story takes a life of it own. It’s painful to admit, but that first plan is never, ever going to work. That’s why the pantsing portion of the process is important. It gives the story life. It helps snap the story into something more alive and emergent. Forcing a plot to conform to the original plan is amateurish and breaks the story.

My method is a constant cycle of plotting, writing, and pantsing over and over again. I’m sure there are writers that can plot out every detail of a story and then make the story work within that original plan, but I suspect they are the exceptions to the rule. For me, big aspects of the story stay the same. It’s the paths that we take to explore these big aspects that will diverge and take exciting new journeys. Sometimes these paths will undermine the original plot. Sometimes it will breathe an uncomfortable wrinkle in what was once an easy choice. It can be really painful but it’s never destructive.

Out of curiosity, I dug up some of my old paper notes from (*cough*) 2007 when I was finishing up Fortuna Saga and plotting out the greater details of how I wanted the then forming Hymns of the Apostate and the distant Lost Noise to tie into each other. This particular page caught my eye because it was a more detailed breakdown of the ‘Lens’ from Fortuna Saga. I had assumed that much of it would be obsolete at this point, but most of it is still valid (and has been redacted due to potential spoilers). We’ll see how much of this stands once Lost Noise is said and done. It proves that good plotting can be a north star to keep a story on track, but I’m more than prepared to throw most of this away if I need to.

Twitter No More.

Twitter No More. published on No Comments on Twitter No More.

Many of you used twitter as a way to get updated on when new Lost Noise episodes were online. I am no longer going to use twitter (“X”) for this.


You can find my social media profiles on:

Mastodon at @jcutting@vivaldi.net

Bluesky at johncutting.bsky.social

I will also look into if I can get an RSS feed or a Mastodon bot purely for updates to this site.


Visual Shorthands in Movies

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Movies use a lot of visual shorthands to quickly communicate a point, but these shorthands don’t exist in the real world. This causes a lot of subtle problems in the real world because movies- for better or for worse- are how most of us inform our lives outside of our actual experiences. For example, if I ask you to imagine Moscow right now, you are probably going to think about an onion-domed cathedral covered in snow. Moscow is snowy, but it isn’t THAT snowy. In fact, it can get quite hot. The average annual temperature in Moscow in 2015 was 47 degrees which was slightly higher than the average annual temperature of Paris.

The point is, movies fill in the gaps a lot of us have about the world, and this can lead to a lot of misunderstandings that it is hard for people to put out of our minds because we aren’t aware that these cognitive shortcuts exist in the first place. Some of these shorthands can lead to real problems while others are simply funny to think about. Here are a few examples:

  1. “Go to Aisle 28 in Michaels for Conspiracy Crafts”

Scene: The main character is trying to unravel a web of lies, corruption and conspiracy that involves petty criminals, politicians, and mafia dons. To figure out all of the connections, pictures are placed on the wall with red strings showing the connections between the various parties. People that are killed have giant red X’s marked over their faces. Reality: This may be the most inefficient way to track these web of relationships possible. The cork board with photos only serves to inform the audience and provides no practical detail for the character. It does raise some questions that I would like to see…

I want to see Frank Castle in the middle of his investigation montage actually doing the physical arts and crafts- show him standing in an aisle at Joann’s Fabrics deciding which string is most appropriate for his revenge map, comparing prices, printing and carefully cutting out photos, and getting frustrated when he makes a mistake and has to unspool a bunch of thread so that the map makes sense again.

I did some consulting work for a California agency that was doing a deep dive into white collar crime involving fake pensions, tax evasion, worker intimidation (perhaps worse), etc. We had a team of forensic accountants and investigators unraveling the net, and everything was tracked on an Excel spreadsheet. This makes sense because you can easily do regression analysis to find connections and correlations from gigabytes of data. The investigation leads actually went out of their way to restrict access to photos, names, and identifying features of the people being investigated because they didn’t want any subconscious biases to affect the decisions being made.

Regression analysis isn’t sexy to show on the screen, but the corkboard is also silly. I suggest we replace this shorthand by cutting to the executive summary that the team of investigators presents to summarize the results of a difficult data analysis.

  1. “Help, my child has been abducted… yes, I can hold.”

Scene: The main character’s loved one has gone missing. Despondent, they call the police, and the 911 operator says that they can’t file a missing person’s report unless the person has been missing for 24 hours. The protagonist can’t wait that long and is forced to strike out on their own to find justice.

Reality: This is pure fabrication by movie writers in order to create a sense of drama. It’s not true. In fact, police will release PSA’s begging the public to report a missing person right away because it’s HARDER for them to find the person after 24 hours. It makes sense in an odd kind of way for this to be ‘true’ in movie logic because it creates drama and crisis that the protagonist has to resolve instead of handing over the search to a (supposedly) trained, fully staffed police force. Movies would be boring if the police believed John McCain and surrounded Nakatomi Plaza right away or if the Chicago PD actually searched for Kevin McCallister instead of just ringing the doorbell and then giving up.

  1. “Bombs should audibly tick (and also have a glowing light). It’s unfair otherwise.”

Scene: Our hero kills all the bad guys and dashes to an easily accessible time bomb. He agonizes over whether or not to cut one of the conveniently color coded wires (or, for a Shyamalanian twist, they all might be the same color). The timer approaches zero and he is forced to choose. A quick snip, a pause, and the timer stops at 1 second. The bomb lays inert.

Reality: This is a common trope complaint, so I’m not going to talk about the logistics of bomb defusing (the correct answer is to destroy it with a smaller bomb or a shotgun), but I want to talk about the fact that time bombs (or, more specifically, “timer activated explosives”) are really impractical and are rarely used. 

Most bombers want some sort of control of the bomb because (1) making a bomb is difficult and dangerous and (2) a timer almost guarantees that you’ll end up exploding nothing of value. That’s why most bomb makers use some sort of active trigger- a cell phone call, a pressure plate, and button- because it offers control, reduces the risk that the bomb will be discovered, ensures that the target is actually struck, and reduces the risk that the bomber will blow himself up (time bombs are prone to early detonation). I understand this movie shorthand- a timer adds a sense of dramatic tension to any scene- but I also find this shorthand particularly insidious because politicians will cite a proverbial time bomb to justify torture and all sorts of misdeeds. Any credible threat outside of unsophisticated lone-man lunatics will forgo a simple time bomb for something that they can control.

Even in movie universes, time bombs don’t make a lot of sense. A terrorist in the story usually uses a bomb as a form of leverage to make demands. What if their demands are actually met? It’s going to be an awkward moment when the terrorist will have to explain that they couldn’t defuse the bomb because there was traffic and they couldn’t make it back in time to stop the timer.

Abstraction >> Faux Realistic

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I have been thinking a lot about video games that remain compelling to me over a long period of time, and a common theme is the amount of abstraction that the game itself embraces. Many game studios (or at least their marketing departments) love to talk up how photo-realistic, immersive, or lifelike their games will be, but I really think this material misses the point about why people play games more than once. 

All games are abstractions, and I posit that the industry trend of throwing millions of dollars in an attempt to obscure this abstraction creates a total that is less than the sum of its parts.

A lot of very smart people have written dissertations about the Uncanny Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) and how humans tend to have a negative emotional reaction to object that approaches a human’s appearance. There is something off, and our brain notices it whether we want it to or not.

I suspect that this reaction holds true for other representations of reality even though the Uncanny Valley reaction is most strongly felt for human faces because a major portion of our brain is dedicated to processing faces and emotions. This might be best explained by example.

I was playing a first person shooter not too long ago that boasted a destructible environment and a few other realistic features. I came to a point where I couldn’t figure out how to get around a chain-link fence. I couldn’t climb over it. I couldn’t knock it down with a rocket launcher. It held impossibly firm when I drove a vehicle into it. Despite the graphical fidelity, this felt ridiculous in the moment. It took me out of the moment, broke flow, and was a strong reminder that I was sitting in front of a monitor playing a game.

Let’s take the same scenario and lower the promise of graphical fidelity. I’ve played dozens of top-down shooters where you can blow apart some buildings but other walls are impervious. I can’t recall a single time this has disrupted the flow of play because my brain is readily able to process the abstraction of reality and frame it in a universe where rules seem consistent or at least understandable. Instead of wondering why a simple fence is impervious to tons of steel barreling into it, my attention snaps to finding the proper path to my next objective instead. Even though the situation might be exactly the same, it is more frustrating and off-putting to be placed in a less abstracted representation.

To test this hypothesis, let’s dial down the graphical fidelity and increase the abstraction as much as possible. The first game that comes to mind is Dwarf Fortress. I play Dwarf Fortress using ASCII characters to represent everything from tree leaves, water, giant pandas, lava, etc. The level of simulation is absurdly detailed and oftentimes beautiful once your eye is trained to understand what is being represented by a few tildes and hashes.

I recently did a Let’s Play thread on twitter (using my Blaseball handle) where I built a wooden fortress completely suspended in the trees of a forest (https://twitter.com/BlobCostas/status/1585040951768416256). This was a hilarious play through because the trees would often drop branches down through the multiple layers of roofs and floors of the fortress… often with funny or tragic results. The game we played had a lot of emotional moments of sacrifice, loss, and fortitude in the face of impending disaster. Also, there were tales of romance, betrayal, and grief from the poor dwarfs of the fortress… and all of it was rendered using characters that one could type into a text editor.

If we were somehow able to render this exact same scenario Unreal Engine 5, it would not have been a fun play through. The thought of a giant, two-headed Ettin climbing a wooden ramp into a massive treehouse would have looked odd. We would wonder why the monster didn’t simply pull itself up by tree branches to get to the fort. Likewise, the falling branches that pile drive their way through the fortress would look ridiculous instead of being a fun sort of environmental hazard to the fort. Even the fort itself would look uncannily stable and resilient because it wouldn’t sway with the breeze or droop under its own massive weight.

The same can be said about the online game Blaseball which uses an even higher level of graphical abstraction. The entire game is represented by text prompts and a few common representations of whether or not a player is on a particular base. That being said, the game has a rich lore of murder, theft, betrayal, redemption, and literally attacking and dethroning gods. None of this would be remotely enjoyable if it were rendered in the latest MLB the Show 22 engine. Dominic Marijuana hitting a home run to cripple the Shelled One’s pods was an epic moment in Blaseball history (https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Day_X). If we tried to recreate this in The Show 22, it would never pack the same punch because the joy of imagining and losing ourselves in the moment would be replaced by a passive, less-satisfying representation of reality.