next »

[tok]

thanks moth. i playe a moth game once and it was really good. close to the flame.

ok, i can tell you what little i know about the other mambos.

'tricky tricky' is a parable about difficulty. lou bega loves a woman he can get, but what he really loves is a woman he can't quite get.

'i got a girl' is, as i mentioned elsewhere, bega's account of all the small parts of women he steals. bega plays a sailor who is faithful to exactly one girl in each port. but he's building a sort of metagirl with the parts they leave in him.

'she tastes like cola' is a love affair with a girl who, in a real sense, actually is the coca cola corporation. austere, impenetrable, sweet. and classic. she don't need to change and she don't need to slim down, because she is the product we deserve already. a condemnamtion of pepsi, of new coke, of change, and of the little guy.

??!?? im not sure. whats the other mambo? how can we know which mambos are canon and which are apocryphal? especially if we havnet even heard them yet. we will have to do our own research. maybe the fourth mambo does not exist because we have not written it yet.

lou bega is a world traveller, an indomitable multiwomanist, a romeo and a poet but not a true engineer: a man of mixed ancestry. ugandan, italian, german. the classic three styles of latin brass electro-pop.  artifice, estrangement, and longing-for-a-simpler-time. more than just a clone of perez, because he's adding stuff. a hybrid. people used to want this, you could ride a hybrid to the top of the charts in 1999.

can you copyright stuff like patterns or pictures on clothing? in other words, is my ironic acid wash wolf tshirt protected by copyright law?

anyway, if (and that's a big if) affordable consumer level robotic looms ever become a thing i could see the fashion industry lobbying to change copyright laws everywhere to include clothing.

idk man if this is possible then the games companies would be able to do it now. like you can't copyright the idea of being an angry birds, otherwise angry birds itself would not exist and everybody'd be writing love letters to Joey Betz and Chris "ConArtist" Condon.

so what does angry birds do that other games do not do well? it markets itself. sells toys. puts is name and face on every other product. appropriates, colonises every space for the angry birds agenda, and not for those filthy green pigs in their castles of flimsy stone. shoots itself into your house. gets in your head.

the weakness of copyright is good for us though, thats our bread and butter. all of us steal, all of us pretend not to. noone even remembers how to do it right though, and we're teaching all these values to our robot childs, whether we know it or not. we gotta break the cycle, steal stranger goods from outside our comfort zones, if we want new ideas. we can steal coke, but lets steal also drinks that are not just-coke. not just one coke but all cokes. maybe a scotch and coke. we don't need to make games that are lies for children, we can make lies for adults too. lou bega is a message for the every-nerd. thats how you climb the charts. lets have hybrids and electricks and alternative fuel sources, not just dinosaurs. what about the self driving car? you have approximately 10 years to figure out how to make enough money to survibe when the machines go wild. 10 years? we just don't know. they might have done it fifteen years ago.

 we need the 11-9 to counter 9-11. lets get back to getting freaky with games, and not worrying about getting them through customs. you dont have to carry a physical copy of the game these days anyway, its all virtual these days. the archive is too long and we don't read it. hows the cop even gonna know where to look?

anyway. long live terry pratchett. he was the king of all this stuff. go read a book or something, all you ephemero-punks.

[tok]

ITS TIME WE TALK ABOUT RACE AND CLASS AND ALL THAT SHIT
thats what the game is made out of after all,
at least on the player end. first of all, a man informed me that i dont truly understand racing. in the pub. 'why's that guy so excited'? a punter, watching a horse race. 'he's excited about the game'.

it is a game though. anyway i know about races: there are four.

ELVES
the race to the top. each elf tries to get one over on a next elf. for elves, the best possible outcome is ENLIGHTENMENT. elves get bigger over time.

GOBLINS
which is a race to the bottom. every goblin trying to get one under a next goblin. fuck over the guy in charge. goblins are racing to THE GRAVE. goblins get smaller over time.

DWARVES
which is equilibrium. a good dwarf has an eye on the future and an eye on the past. he wants to stay where he is. the race towards FREEDOM.

HUMANS
which is the classic race around the board. MONOPOLY. the ouroboros.

what about class?

there are four classes. on the bottom, you have THE LIZARD PEOPLE.
that is, the peasantry. and the working class. and the guy, you know the one you don't like. all these little landless bastards.

then its the STONE-MASONS. the guilds and merchant classes. the self-mades. the bourgoisie. these guys are early adopters, wise as fuck, old as time, universally despised by the people above and below.

then you have your ILLUMINATI. the ruling classes. the guys hiding behind the curtain. the secret-keepers.

then, on top, its the LIZARD POPES. these guys even get to run shit. but they are lizards truly, just like the rest of us.

bonus content: gender

listen: too soon? gender is as old as fuck.

there are exactly two genders though: men and women and nonbinary and agender.

[tok]

sorry for butting in before you continued that thought, but: I finally took the time to read through all of this thread. I really enjoy your writing, thank you for sharing it and I will be following anything new you post. Also I realize you are atoji on DA which is awesome, I remember your ancient rite of dragons mockup from a long time ago and I adore it. I can't wait to see what game you make, I'm sure it will be really rad!

i want to say again that this is a really sweet reply and thank you, dont ever worry about butting in to say something nice, i basically dont stop ramblingin here. but its a rare event to hear a nice words and i appreciate any kind words i can get. thanks. i always loved the jumping and the neat physics tile puzzlin in your games, the couple of ones i played.

[tok]

some stuff im supposed to be working on, WHICH IS TO SAY, MY CURRENT LOG OF PROJECTS THAT IS STILL EXCITING TO ME NOW TODAY EVEN IF progress is slow, thats how things actually are in information technology rather than just-technology, computer science rather than just-computers:

-the tritaton itself, the physical object, an artIFACT; dice and victory points for WATCH THE SKIES (on hold until someone else on the board pays for me to buy the stuff to make it)
-the 1001 nights stuff in the ONE EYED MONK namespace on abulafia (tba)
-a tile editor for the video game (and the corresponding palette and pixel editors)
-the keys to the worlds, an addressing scheme. this is a real project im not saying it just to be poetic.
-cards as bits
-the alice game, d&d locally, working off the new zak smith book
-the babylon dog lands books, from my own campaign, which i dont have time or energy to run
-the books of GNOSIS and PRAXIS, business strategy, how to run an evil empire.
-poker playing robots that bluff and cheat
-story and programming and animation tutorials for tigsource
-managing a design team at uni for the next approx 3 weeks
-a beep protocol for transmitting data between robots + the hardware prototype for that
-a punch card printer + a punch card protocol
-paying my guild dues for uni (I KEEP FORGETTING THIS ONE BUT I GOTTA DO IT OTHERWISE THEY KICK ME OUT OF UNI)
-the actual assignments for uni (i keep forgetting to log on at specific times and do quizzes and stuff, but tbh what a shitty way to assess dudes)
-fixing an old and busted rpg community on googleplus enough that people will actually buy the books when i do get time to write them, which is to say, all the social justice im doing shutting down shit nerds to build a consumer market for the games i wish to make, plus marketing myself
-etc
(edit: trying to keep an updated version of this list on the first page)

i didnt get permission to make all this stuff, i'm just gonna make it.

people keep telling me im not doing anything but actually im hard at work on all this shit. it would be really easy to do a shit version of each of these projects but i want to do them CORRECTLY which takes HARD WORK, i do a lot of hard work around here, and for free. so excuse me if i squeeze three things together into the same essay, i save a lot of time this way, less logical overhead.

i might as well post a quick apology here to all of those nerds i've been short with lately. apologising doesn't cost anything. but actually i have had to be mean to you dudes, because you refuse to listen to good ideas. anyway i am sorry where i've been mean.

[tok]

i've been arguing a bit about elves and dwarves and consonants. on googleplus, where the dwarrows dwell.

the conventional wisdom is they should be elves not elfs and dwarves not dwarfs because that's what tolkien used.

tolkien will tell you though that 'dwarrows' is correct and 'dwarves' (the elven-scandinavian style) is just a personal preference but 'dwarfs' (middle-english) is heretical, any editor who would do 'dwarves --> dwarfs' is a shitlord.

tolkien is the ultimate shitlord though, we treat him like he's god, he lords over all this shit.

tolkien just literally made it up though. this is a common theme so pay attention: we can make up our own shit.

what we're talking about is technology-acceptance-models. if i prefer dwarfs and elfs, noone else does, how can i get everyone to adopt dwarfs and elfs?


+ASH LAW:
"Elfin can be applied to pixies, fairies, even small humans with fine features. Elven applies to elves."

me:
"elfen or elfish. because i like it and because fuck tolkien"

"nah tolkiens alright sorry baby you know i dont really mean it

im more of an enid blyton style elfmancer"

"im a little tired of the americans coming in telling me how to write english.  that's scandinavian, jrrt-dogggg, tolk my man (oops, tokien is himself english, but whatever. he's too modern and overfond of the past)"

"tolkiens an englishman. he seems very american to me, very hollywood, a bit much. im a low elf."

"need all the f's i can get"


+ASH:[to me]
" Tolkien was English. If you want scandinavian then it would be 'alvenes' (norwegen) or 'elven' (swedish) or 'elven' (danish) or 'haltia' (finish). Elfin as a word arises late in the 16th century from the Middle English word 'elvene‘ which is pronounced 'elven' and means 'of elves’. Elfin means 'having elf-like qualities'.

So Legolas is an elf who carries an elven longbow and has elvish features. The singer Björk is elfin, for she has elfish features. Elvis Presley has Elvis features.
Legolas doesn't have elf-like features: he is an elf so his features are those of an elf (elven). Björk isn't an elf, and her elf-like features are like those of an elf-- but are not those of an elf (elfin). Elvis eats a burger (yum)."


me: "yeah more bjork less legolas, too many vs not enugh fs. thats my point. middle english not old norsk. i want the low elfs, the filthy woodsy elfs and guttery elfs and the elfs in the cornerclubs, plotting to overthrow the empire, which are mer, but if we must use th el namespace they are doom-elfs not doom-elves. i dont have much use for the other sort.
 there are no old elves truly, we'll have to make our own. so elfstone, which you snort, you take it, because you wish to. and not the elverblud, which is inherited from your rich dad. an identity rather than a race.  they gets bairns from the villages. all my fave elfs are trans. the children of elves are changelings, they steal them away into weaker houses and takes the good children for themselves. so the little people get left with the filthy crying bastards, goblinkind.

 bjork is more real than legolas

i care about elfkind but im tired of being asked to care about elvendom
its something like the elfish people themselfs instead of the elven institution
the elven tradition is dying, they lost all their wars. but the elfish peoples live on, and they are hard working spirits of the earth. and what do they get for their labors? a wave of the hand.

"elves!" we say. a curse.

 but not all elfs know history, because not all elfs can read, because not all elfs have been educated like you or i have been.

so yeah: perhaps elfs are latecomers, but i prefer latecomers. they find new things to say."


+ASH (to me): "ah, you mean pixies."


me:
"elfs i say, but, yeah. the piskies and nyxlings. the low-elfs. puck and the like. good fellows.

the other thing is elves are latecomers too from the elder god's pov. they just style themselves older than they are. an elf in the bush can be a good enough dude but we shouldnt trust the elves to run shit, they only care about themselves."

"i like roguelikes more than rogues and i like elflikes more than elves. i think im not so much in disagreement liek we can have both kinds, but i'm advocating for lowness instead of highness because high elves are snooty eladrins from the feywild but lowly elfs are cool kindred spirits, students of an earthly nature, weather-beaten individuals, that i'd hang with. their feet touch the ground.

like i know legolas is supposed to be a wood elf but he's not low, he's a prince in actual fact, and so i don't need him in my stories. its a rich versus poor thing. lowly wizzards and rich tourists.

like twoflower's cool too but i wouldnt trust him at my side in the dungeon when the kobolds are knockin, hes never had to learn when to run, those guys are only good for shieldin ur meat because they're gonna be all bogged down with like truth and honor and whatever

so like its cool if youre a bit elfin but elves go too far like 100% of the time with their schemes to like, idk, laugh at us when we're just looking for a point of light, a safe harbor in a world of ghosts and beasts that will eat us if we go to sleep. and maybe some of those honeyed wafers and maybe some boats or some shit for the hard times ahead. some country hospitality.

 but instead its all fucking mirthful songs sung in shrill elven tongues. bunch of rich jerks if you ask me."


i will now continue to argue with nerds about this forever because i have been asked to form an opinion and i have formed one and it is the correct opinion. next: dwarrows.

[tok]

alright heres the next part of that. i posted this on evil baboons:

DWRV
DWRN
DWRW
DWRF
DWRL
BLDN
BZDN

Dwarves
Dwarven
Dwarrows
Dwarfs
Dwarelden
Dwarldr
Balden
Bzarrdun

-furries
-asexuals
-wanes
-dwarrows

(that ones basically just a list of cultures i've had to have to explain to my parents and ancestors; for whatever reason, they have not heard of these, to be honest, this could be an endless youtube series)

Hav, Helv, Heln
Hawn, Hallow
Helk, Half, Hallo
Holden, Holme
Ham, Holdr, Hallen
Henk, Hello, Helrik
Hlar, Helf, Helfen
Hlad, Hardn, Hawk,
Habn, Halzen, Hazel
Hezzar, Hellzen, Hazz

(its a little confusing but bear with me because i am willing to explain myself)


in the comments on that:
(me)
+ASH LAW +Alex Hakobian  got me thinking about this shit an now i can't stop so thanks i guess

(to which alex)
I'll be honest. I don't know wtf you're saying half the time.

(me again)
thats ok so long as i do good ideas in the legible half.

i'll respond to questions.

so what im saying is we can create a lot of dwarven cultures just by thinking about human languages, tolkien, the consonants they use, and a map of possible tolkiens, and the consonants those cultures and tolkiens might have used. tolkien literally just made a bunch of shit up! and we treat him like he's god. but hes not tho. every human culture can contain dwarves even though they are a a northern innovation on the fairies which are a persian invention - persian perries. the best book on this is thomas keitley's book, 'the fairy mythology" each of us has a tolkien inside us, we can write the stories tolkien forgot to write, or dint have tiem to write. but if we do not write them noone will. the henks and helfs is different versions of the same name as you move around the map. you can also have different names that dont start with h- but the drift is gonna be similar

(and)
noone understands this shit but its ok, there will be more days to understand than just one. you will get multiple chances to comprehend all this shit.

and i'll teach a nerd a thing but only if bother to put all this stuff into the question

like people have said that tolkien is racist but he could hardly be, he's read all mythologies. he's just focused on one part of the history.

the rest of the world is there though, waiting to be written down and rewritten into elves and dwarfs for us d&d nerds, we will have to do this if we are to compete, we can't all make the same d&d, noones gonna want to play that

and people have said that tolkien is sexist but we can see from the parable of the not-man and the witch-king that he has thought about women and what they are for. he just doesn't use them very much. we can do better than tolkien on this


returning to languages: tolkiens focus on semitic dwarves and scandinavian elves: there is no good reason for us to adopt this framework
 or consider it as the only-good-framework, this is the worst idea

im a southern hemishpere guy so i have had to learn to recombine, teh old symbols do not work here. the moon and the stars themselves are different, there are no wolves and bears here. so we will need a more open framework for fantasy and so we will need to make up our own elfs that suit us better than the default elves

i need support for these ideas and so i'm talking to +ASH LAW and +Alex Hakobian who have indicated some kinda interest in this scheme

i might need some way to incentivise people to use this technology

(ASH)
+Mungo Scott Park Rundle I have no idea what you are talking about. You might want to slow down a bit and share your ideas in a more cogent format.

(me)
well i dont want to do that. ask me better more relevant questions and i will clarify things for you

(ASH)
well sadly we are at an impasse then. It seems like you have an idea that you are very excited about, but I have no idea what that idea actually is.

(me)
ok. basically. there are many versions of all these goofy fantasy races that we could use. tolkien uses many different names for all these races. but not enough. his focus is on a sort of scandinavian-middle-east area of the fantasy world map and we can go outside this, we should do. because w're making rpgs and its ebtter if they're not all teh same because there's a market for that but ideas that are all the same are bad.

if we treat tolkien as the canon we lose all the good not tolkien things we might have. tolkien's not so good that it's worth doing this thing.

so we should get excited about making up our own language maps, because mapping is fun and because languages are cool and because tolkiens been dead a long time and we should have a conversation about elves and dwarrows that actually travels to new places and doesnt just tread old ground.

(ASH)
Aha! I agree, however there is an argument to be made for linguistic clarity. For example if you say "dwarf" or "dwarve" the audience will expect Tolkienesque/Gygaxian dwarves: short, beards, axes, songs about gold, etc. If the things that you call "dwarves" are in fact a race of rock-eating elementals crafted out of ice by the goddess of the sea... then it will only confuse the audience of whatever game you are writing for. In which case an alternate name that better fits the race should be sought.

I'd encourage you to check out fantasy settings such as Talislanta or Glorantha that handle fantasy races in a non-tolkienesque way.

(me)
thats cool. i think everybody should do a different thing and then argue about why their thing is the best and all other things are crap. in fact we do this already. but tolkien is not more-good than everything else, as many people hereabouts seem to think (very vague wave of the hand indicating some space that we seem to be occupying)


see also:

THE FAIRY MYTHOLOGY,

ILLUSTRATIVE OF THE

Romance and Superstition of Various Countries;


BY
THOMAS KEIGHTLEY

i referenced this book inline but you might wish to read it, it is the best book on this topic:
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41006/41006-h/41006-h.htm

[Quicksand-T]

I'm curious now, what are "wanes"?

[tok]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanir

wanes are the vanir, the vangard for the asgard. the old gods. sort of analogous for the titans of greek mythology, they represent an older viking culture that was overthrown by this later viking culture that was later overthrown by the christians.

wayne is my stepdad, my mum's husband. he's real weird. plays lawn bowls, pillar of his community, kinda hates muslims. like he'll hang out with a muslim and be cool about it. but he thinks halal is bullshit, why should the indonesians get a tariff on the price of our pork. arent they just gonna use it to fund militants? so he buys ozemite which is dick smith brand vegemite, which is owned by dick smith (an australian kook) and not fred walker (an american one). so the money stays in australia. conspiracy theorist, but not a conspiracy theorist like me. kind of older style. i dont really care about vegemite, and i don't really care about sports. lawn bowls is a sport.

so if i talk about wanes its kind of a goofy way of venerating my step dad. i like that dude, he's weird. self-made, broken, mental, respectable. we dont always get along, tho. if i am honest i have lots of dudes who i know online and through their writings who are weird internet step dads and i venerate those dudes also.

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=15095.0

i made a game about the wanes one time, vanamodr. it was not well recieved on tigsource. which is why i no longer make games in teh tigsource style, those guys don't really care about what i care about. 'vanamodr' would mean roughly 'wrath of the wanes' kinda like 'asmodr'. i don't reallk know norsk.

[tok]

pokemon type damage chart + some more notes on the video game
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LrZK6aa_9wOFUNaBxTXdIgsbYZR9UZJgxO4_lMSUe04/edit?usp=sharing

[tok]

MATT RUNDLE PRESENTS
a new meandering essay in the matt rundle style
HOW TO WRITE AN ADVENTURE THAT ISNT SHIT
this one abould baldness, boldness, bald-faced lies, tracks, and traction.

HOW TO LIE TO THE PLAYER
there's nothing strictly speaking wrong with baldness: bald flesh and bald tyres and bald lies. they are slick, though, which means NO TRACTION, especially under wet conditions. if we test these things in damp situations they they will not hold ground - they will slip, they will not hold water. If we test them in dry conditions they might well be good enough. But there are many kinds of players, wet and dry. You could play with  bunch of dry persons  but this seems much more boring and potentially less lucrative than to accept all comers.

there's an assignment season coming up, assignments come in threes or fours or whatever, they all come at once. saying you'll do a thing and then not doiing it is considered unacceptable: however, all the thing you want to do don't meet the assessment criteria, and you want to get the most utility out of the least amount of work. that's the scholarly way, and it's also how to be a good game master.

in any case i am writing this essay right now, and not one an assigned one. why? because if i do not write this shit down I will forget it later.

anyway: i've spoken about four things that have ambiguous meanings. bald lies an hairy lies. dry players and wet ones. must I define these things? no, I must not. some terms must remain ambiguous. you, the reader, must define these things. If i allow these terms to remain ambiguous I can reutilize and recombine them in heroic ways. you may solve for these terms, as the player. but as the developer I must not define them for you. The game is afoot.

WHAT ARE GAMES
Paranoia is a game. I played paranoia yesterday. Let's talk about it.

Greg Costikyan is the first name in the credits on Paranoia, same guy West End Games Star Wars, which is the Good Star Wars, same guy Toon (with Warren Spector), same guy Manifesto games, same guy playthisthing. There are other names on the list of Paranoia designers: Dan Gelber and Eric Goldberg among them, games are rarely made by just one person. But you guys must know who kostik is. because you should know.

In paranoia, society has a strict class structure: everyone is a clone, a communist, a nazi, a mutant, and a traitor. and all clones are color coded by the friend computer for security clearance. usually you play as a group of red troubleshooters. that puts you over the black masses and the infrareds, but still low in the heirarchy of troubleshooters. As a red troubleshooter, you have a little bit of power, just enough to shoot yourself.

If you're red, do not touch or look at things that are more-than-red. they are beyond your clearance. to know about them is treason, and treason is punishable by death. Of course all the players actually are commie mutant traitors, but they must keep this a secret from all other troubleshooters at the table, staying true to the mission, even while they pursue their secret goals. the best way to hide your treachery is to accuse everyone else of treachery and to praise alpha complex. all hail the computer.

Anyway, that's a game. You can play it now, you know the rules. You might want a story though. Maybe you will.

WHATS A STORY
The main divide in rpgs is between those people in the game camp, the LUDISTS and GAMISTS who only care about the game, and those NARRATIVISTS and STORYHUGGERS in the other camp, the other heretics, that only care about the story. Like every such divide; this is a false one. It's the fucking player-developer thing again.

In a game-game it's very important that the GAME MASTER acts as a COMPUTER, who runs the game, and the players act as TERMINALS that simply input commands into the system and see results.

In story-games though... there's fucking no security at all. Players are allowed actually to control parts of the game, there may in fact be no GAME MASTER. Won't this destroy everything though? actually it's pretty nice.

It's silly that RPG players are so divided among themselves because most people don't play rpgs, they have no idea what an rpg even is, so it's really all of us versus all of those people, who don't even fucking know. There needs to come along some company, some apple-but-for-rpgs, to come along with a product that gets everybody on board, not just the nerds and the hipsters but the majority. So that people will have actually heard of this technology and know how to use it, instead of this slow spread by word-of-mouth, table to table, against the stigma of nerds and demons, like a slow virus, and to end this we must have a DOOM BUT FOR RPGS. an rpg people have actually heard of. one they are willing to play. Because rpgs are a strong technology. They will reach market saturation someday. But there will have to be a product which unites us. DUNGEONS & DRAGONS is not that game. anyway I have digressed, but think about this. you might be the one to develop that game. what would it look like?

WHATS A STORY TOCKY
so someone asked me yesterday, how do you even write a story for paranoia? I think it's probably pretty easy. you want to send your red troubleshooters through some green place they aren't allowed to be in order to complete the mission. Even the computer makes little mistakes like this sometimes, in fact it makes them constantly. But to say so is treachery. All hail the computer.

so: have a mission. there is a crate that must be moved from one place to another. have a secret purpose for the mission, do not tell the troubleshooters what this is, all they know is that it is vitally important that the crate-or-whatever be moved from one place to another. give each troubleshooter a secret society mission, that contravenes what the group has been told. Then at stations between the BRIEFING ROOM and the DESTINATION, put hazards, things that should not be in the way of the mission but are. The nature of alpha complex is such that noone knows what anyone else is doing until they're in the way.

That's a story. It's a bald-faced story, because we have not had to do very much work. The player fleshes out the details, as they play. But it will be a hairy story in the end. That's all there is really, just steal this model. it's better than whatever else you were gonna do.

[Torchkas]

I thought you were just rambling nonsense for quite a while, but I just started reading this stuff and it's more insightful than I thought. It may not all be truthful, but that's not the point of the posts.

My only real complaints if that you usually go off on too much of a tangent in your posts. You raise a point, you compare that with another point, and then you compare that with another point. The problem is that it never really comes back to the first point. It just gets stuck in a loop.

Good stuff so far though.

[tok]

thanks. you are too kind. i am loathe to remain in one place for long, and i often forget what I am doing. but i have values and points and stuff. there's a goal.

[tok]

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1HKu6C6VygwTZG0txZVNIUYF_q7rGtVfE_lIHWzHihc4/edit

A QUICK MISSIVE on the OLD ONES, on one page; useful as a table reference or perhaps as a handout for strangers on the street; a helpful and informative guide to forbidden knowledge.

[tok]

WHAT I KNOW SO FAR

SO there are the five sons:

-writing (and i could stand to know a lot more about stories. i will study keightley, study grimm, 1001 nights, etc. )
-code (build. web dev as well, the interface between web and games is pretty opaque. how computers actually work. )
-music (which i never have time for. )
-design (everyone thinks they know this. at best i know it more now than i did before. but there's a lot of stuff in game design, and i have studied it an i know what i'm talking about. probably. and noone knows what they dont know )
-art (animation, color theory, perspective, etc. criticism. how to see. easy to teach this, the methods are established. people are keen to learn it. but good tutorials are still few and far between. )

anyway, i can try to teach all this stuff, im some kind of expert on all this stuff (well, probably not music). but we can spread ourselves too thin this way, and not really achieve anything. I do want to teach though, I'm not just in this to make a game and promote it, there's a whole community we're trying to have here.

so the main three sons for me are design, code, and writing. sorry other son, perhaps every other developer will serve you better. these other sons are lovely but we spent too many resources on them already, and starve the others. minimalism would serve us better. minimalism against what? against final fantasy, to be honest. lets have more fantasies after that one.

what else? what i want to teach also is justice, philosophy, and statesmanship; because we will need these. build a community that supports itself. and how to run that on a skeleton crew. so chaos theory as well. am i qualified to run this and teach this? probably not. but lets do that anyway. qualifications dont really mean anything.

anyway, noone wants this but i like talking about it so i'll probably teach it, in any case it all goes in the game. games tend to have a world history in them; and so they will be political. the games themselves contain political parties and so we will need to know how to build these. as skeleton crews.

so tocky-brand social justice, what is that.

first of all, know history. know the history of philosophy, if you dont want to learn this - well, i will learn it for you. but it can not be ignored, these lessons are about what we are about, all these fights are very old. and because we done had these arguments already and we cannot fail to listen to the learned persons who came before us, we do not have this option. that means first of all, the physicists, the sophists, the platonists, and the stoics. and then the enlightenment dudes. and the eastern canon, about which i know almost nothing. and the kooks. theres a lot to learn. but we must learn it because we must learn how to argue. because we're arguing anyway. but most people are sophists and we need more platonists and stoics. and buddhists and taoists, is my guess. fewer abrahamists imo but if we must have these then lets have more focus on the lessons and less on the prophets and the worship of these. none of you nerds are going to heaven.

second of all, know feminism. we can hardly have a social justice without a knowledge of feminism. the feminisms, there are many. three waves, but really this waves model gives us a sense that things are moving forward but in truth... we are stagnant. if you want to do a new feminism you must fight all the feminists, each sort in turn, and this is just to begin with. you must fight all the sjwahs and all the anti-sjwahs, because nobody agrees on anything.

but um, if the fems can agree on anything its that all men are gross. and the antifems seem super excited to prove this to them. so we need that third kind of heat: non-binary.

so third of all, understand the non-binary logic.

there are three kinds of argument that i know.

-you have your MODERATION. shut the other guy down. delete him. everybody knows this one. moderation is weak because it says nothing. this is why forums are going out of style.
-you have ABSURDISM. which is recombination. show the guy that his one thing is really two things that are strange bedfellows. show that his two things are really one thing and not opposites as he claims. in short, show that the guy doesn't know what he's taking about. this is better because it asserts something, it shows that arguments can happen and we can make our own interpretations. and then,
-you have ACCELERATION. keep pushing towards your conclusion. whether the other guy gets it or not. they will have many chances to get it, and you are not his dad. assert a thing, assert your thing.

you can see why i like these better. its a weapons triangle: moderation beats acceleration beats absurdism beats moderation. but moderation only works if you're on top, or if the other guy believes you are. these others only work if you are right, and they help you to rise up and destroy the moderator in your head (mods willing). it is better to be right than to be on top, though.

heres a bunch of games i need to remember to describe in a future post
-the other games i played at the con the other week: final girl and steve dee's warhammer-nights-dream larp.
-these new roguelikes. dungeon of the endless, deepest dungeon, these are broken into rooms-and-encounters rather than the strict grid-step semifreedom that is roguelike traditional. we get these turn based and realtime hybrids. this is kind of an odd way of reckoning time, a strange dungeon time economy, kind of like 4th-edition-d&d. pillars of eternity which i think is a baldurs-gate-like but also has the encounters-as-time-reckoning thing. all these games have terrible game names that are hard to tell apart.
-infinifactory again. i'm playing this much more slowly now that the new-gam-excitement has wore off. i like it a lot but so far no open free play mode in sight. maybe there isnt one? disappointing if true.

[valrus]

first of all, know history. know the history of philosophy, if you dont want to learn this - well, i will learn it for you. but it can not be ignored, these lessons are about what we are about, all these fights are very old. and because we done had these arguments already and we cannot fail to listen to the learned persons who came before us, we do not have this option. that means first of all, the physicists, the sophists, the platonists, and the stoics. and then the enlightenment dudes. and the eastern canon, about which i know almost nothing.

If you're interested in an "eastern" counterpart to Russell's History of Western Philosophy, check out Feng Youlan's "Short History of Chinese Philosophy".  It gives a good overview of a lot of important philosophical schools (like the Mohists) that Western descriptions of Chinese philosophy often overlook, but is nonetheless easy to read from a Western philosophical perspective.  (Feng was a student of Dewey's and considered himself part of the "analytic" school.)

I don't happen to know of anything along similar lines for India.  (Although Feng does cover one very important period in the history of Buddhism, the origin and split of the Chan school.)

[tok]

thanks valrus, excellent response. the book goes on the list. have lots of points. 

[yeahjim]

Hello Mr. Tok. I'm a fairly linear thinker and this whole devlog gave me a mental nosebleed, but I enjoyed it.

Wanted to say a few things---

1) Thank you for creating stuff. You're a pretty smart dude! How have you resisted the whole become-the-shibboleth thing, given that you seem to be very active on the (homogenizing) internet?

2) Would you consider going into battle against that fascist guy who talks about shooter games a lot and calls everyone a faggot? It would be like watching the Monkey King fight an angry giant.

3) What do you think it is about Morrowind that makes it so special? I think it's because it feels like a dream.

4) I think you should make a RL game that reflects, on a simplistic level, your philosophical shtick. A pantheon of glyphs and their attendant supporters, a monolith they all inhabit together. The glyphs/ideas maybe influence areas and attract certain types of creatures with certain behaviors (dumb example: say you've got the Order area intersecting with the Despair area... you end up with an intricately patterned, crystalline, mazelike level that surrounds a stagnant swamp.) A sim of the ecosystems of the collective unconscious. And the PC has the ability to play with those glyphs somehow.

[tok]

(i been depressed so i havent been writing so much. its not a good idea for me to either believe in myself or to doubt myself. theres a fine line in there somewhere where i am, sorta, up enough to be productive and also down enough to be lucid.)

ok so theres this datatype i want to build and work with which is a 4d sprite, but which should be represented logically as a map of 32 bit integers to 32 bit integers.

oh wait i should mention what this is for i guess. for sprites, levels, palettes and particle effects. (and cards maybe? i havent truly figured out the cards math yet) and whatever else i can think of that it works for. im thinking about sorta 4d voxel applications. this sounds kinda dumb and unnecessary but listen: its not. if you have trouble imagining 4d spaces it might be easiest to think of it as like an array of cubes. why do you want that? voxel animation.

keys to values - thats really easy to do in python, its just a dictionary.

so yeah: a map of 32 bit integers to 32 bit integers. the key is a place in the sprite, the value is whats represented there. you could have one data point for each cell in the hypercube but thats gonna be a pretty big data - hard to parse. its probably an empty dictionary with just some points represented. the limitation is you can only have one value at each point, but of course you can have an array of hypersprites if you want to have multiple things exist at the same point. i think in general i explicitly dont want that- i want to do per point collision detection.

im pretty sure thats just a dictionary in python. im pretty sure you can make games in python using pygame or pyglet or pyopengl, cocos2d, something like this. there will be a python graphics library that i like, that can be used, that doesnt suck. they tried to teach us graphics at the uni using the turtle library which is dumb, a waste of time. fucking logo. im paying for this.

the values up to 24 bits are colors, using the web color space. the last 8 bits of the value will correspond to lambda functions or whatever, theyre configurable. something something metadata. i want to use those on game levels the same way rpg maker uses events i guess.

( @yeahjim, thank you for your reply, sorry i havent responded, (1) thank you (2) no (3) bugs, mushrooms, xenophobia, bad graphics ghosts, the first person perspective, scary sound effects, characters who are talktoable, and dusty lore. in short: michael kirkbride. (4) i dont fucking know how to make games anymore tbh. perhaps i knew it once. i will try, my friend. i dont really know what the game youre talking about but it sounds interesting. )

[tok]

ok so its about borges library have you read that: http://hyperdiscordia.crywalt.com/library_of_babel.html

basically all of the books that can exist do exist on some shelf in some space. that is borges library. borges library also contains all the books that can not exist: books that would not have been printed.

all the texts are nonsense, like:

 æmrhlhh,ndæhotzr,nyƿo,pmxkhȝd xk sæ
lȝv ylærnælƿtxȝxhdyhi.xæbpfb,ytzr,d lb,dl
ƿinytxhnækȝnzpfyz.mzy.ms,vbonyrtnp.nb,
sƿvtdysrpztsixkynb.iȝȝzzl,,rik pmniþkhæpz
btþmiæyhs .ædmȝhȝoodsþhzpnormȝtxtƿftl
lnælhȝlolþ oæyþonlþms,læ þryrz st,nytyp
æyioþsypkozy.lrhipȝy,þdpækȝytzpzoȝfbbm
.i.þs.hyizlæbdlnhyzƿ,þtns,.æxdȝhyȝƿsxytp
bbƿbmziæhfp,xpy,sltzx,b.odofyphtkizv,æ,p
pvodhhlvhi siæyȝmvsyxrdkvr rorikkd.nlzm

liek that, right? nonsense

but we have books that contain all combinations of letters in this way, and we have all books, so we also have teh complete works of all authors that might exist. and somewhere there’s an index that explains where to find these books, there must be. you’ll just never find it in all the noise.

so many of these in fact that you can’t find an intelligible book in that library, if you search for all your life. but borges library only contains books, all books, and what would be neccessary to house the books, and the people to read them, and what would be neccessary to house those librarians, and a way to navigate, and nothing else.

the real universe also contains all those books that can be printed, on some shelf, somewhere. but it contains a lot of things that are not books. so the mystics of our world are constrained to the things that exist in our world, but in borges library they are constrained to those things that exist there, and what can be imagined by extension from the things that exist there.

borges can be described simply as a blind librarian for the sake of argument, in truth he contains multitudes, all men, all stories - but let us say he is a blind librarian and so he is only this one man, and he can think of only this story.

so the mystics of that world imagine rooms in the library that contain books that are god, prophets who wander those halls who have known books that can be read. but in our world we have different constraints and so the prophets of out world can know about things that are more than books. but its a similar constraint. we can only know what can be known from what we have.

so a roguelike, right? containing books that can be read, books that can be read are better than books that cannot be read. but containing other things as well probably: potions, wands, swords, armors, slimes, goblins, etc.

(this is the standard set, you can supply your own non-standard set)

wario dynamics are very important. if youre not willing to comtemplate luigis and warios youre not truly willing to contemplate mario. like, what it means for there to be a mario. mario is not a deep and broad character. but the field of possible marios is very deep and very broad. imagine marios with different shapes, colors, moustache structures, laughs. we are not constrained to the form of the exiting marios. we can transcend.

waluigi just makes sense ok. if we are going to have a luigi and a wario there must therefore exists some waluigi. but more than this, we need a waluigi in 2015. we need a stretched out twisted corrupt mario, a purple mario.

we can make our own waluigi.

[tok]

my goals are kind of unusual and i’m not sure  if they can be achieved. what im trying to do is very odd and im not sure if its is valuable. this is either a part of a spec for the game or lore that goes into the game. listen, it doesnt have to make total sense right now.

ok – so what do we want, ultimately?

all spaces defined.

so - if we talk about a programming language - all functions and all values specified. so that all functions accept exactly one value (of the all-type) and return exactly one value and do exactly one operation on that value. all input is accepted, all output is possible. so that each operation that can be done is specified exactly once in the language, and does one thing exactly, so that everything that can be done is specified within the one program, the only program that can exist - the game itself.

if the all-type is a deck of cards, what is the all-deck? well obviously the all deck, the true all deck, cannot be specified but let us specify a large deck, that can be our - you know, the small infinity that is not the true infinity but which represents for us the true infinity.

the all deck is 13 suits of 13 cards each. the names of these cards and suits are likely to change but ultimately it is likely to be similar in structure to whatever i’m specifying here. i will try to lead you to all spaces but ultimately my mind only leads one way and you will have to investigate the other paths for yourself.  all spaces may not be possible. we will have to make choices eventually, maybe we can’t make every game and eventually we will have to make only one game.

but for now let us say - the suits are

hearts,
shadows, snakes, rats, flames,
spades, clubs, wands, swords,
coins, cups, diamonds, crowns

and the orders are

fool,
ace, deuce, mage, knave,
knight, bishop, witch, master,
rook, duke, queen, death

so - imagine a monastary where monks gather, they do monk stuff like scribe and grow vegetables and do rituals build monuments and whatever. every monk carries some subset of the all-deck. everybody plays the game, and the game is the way that ultimately all things are decided.

im not sure if this is possible, but let’s live in the all-space for now. all games are valid. that means that, in the language of the game, each function contains a set of cards, accepts a set of cards, returns a set of cards, and does some operation over a set of cards. all functions are specified.

ok we have a monk, monk 0, his name is ababab because he’s the 0th monk and thats the 0th name in the dictionary. when he was named he drew the fool of hearts three times from the starter deck, and so he was named ababab. so he started with three copies of the fool of hearts, and that was his deck. nowadays he has different cards probably. anyway, like everybody else, each day he draws a day card from his deck and carries it with him for that day - it affects everything he does in a minor way. as he goes around the monastary he meets and plays card games against other monks through the course of his daily duties, this is discipline, praxis - the permutations of the cards are the names of the god. and maybe he scribes something or grows some vegetables or mows the sand or whatever and ultimately when he goes to sleep he has slightly different cards. thats basically the structure of the game, from the monk’s pov.