Tag Archives: Stories

February 8, 2023 · 22:28

When the pool is too deep

Twi days ago I wrote Brain switch, it was me on a joyride through my brain as I was reengineering IP over and over and it went faster and faster. I got a handle on it by playing Hogwart Legacy. You see gaming is more than an escape for me. It is a passion that allows me to take my mind away from things and that is at times a good thing. It allowed my subconscious to work on Engonos, the story of the grandson of Hades. Weirdly enough I was inspired by Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Or better stated, he gave me the idea to take a trip to the right. In part I was already doing s in another way, but I suddenly realised that I could enhance one character to get a lot more out of the whole. It is in part a little bit of a drag. You see, I can go memento on that character to keep the story in line and not give away too much, but that too has its advantages and drawbacks. The advantage is that two characters are drawn into the story, one makes sense already, the other one does not on the surface of things, but in Olympian lore it does. As such I tend towards that part of the solution, even though one of them already has a larger role to play and I set that in motion. Now that these roles are staged and partially set, I need to build the background stories for all involved. As such the memento approach, the other one is a historic jump, it seems cleaner, but it opens up too much mesh. A combination has benefits, but at that point I need to be cautious how I approach the matter and I need to script some elements, but that is not a problem. One lesson I learned a long time ago, when a problem is too big, chip it into smaller manageable pieces. That was all good and fine, but that suddenly gave me a few more ideas towards some RPG designs I was entertaining, to be made freely available for exclusive Amazon Luna materials.

I get that this does not make sense, but the reason is simple. Microsoft made valid steps in gaming, we might not like them, but they did what any corporation did, set yourself apart. Yet they did so by buying Bethesda and making parts exclusive to the Xbox. This is a valid, but unappealing approach. This setting changed when Avalanche launched Hogwarts legacy and they set the bar way higher than Skyrim ever was, making it a problem for Microsoft. You see if Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 are on par with Hogwart Legacy, Microsoft loses a lot more than they bargained for. Now if I can add to that pain by giving Amazon Luna developers a sight to more software that is close to on par with Microsoft (not an easy task) they will feel even more pain and that is what I had been after. I expected this to be a lot harder, but Avalanche gave me a trump card, they surpassed Bethesda (what they had up to now), this is not unexpected because Skyrim is 11 years old. Yet it makes my work a little easier. The RPG has storylines, it has a balanced economic system and it has evolution, I only need to set a new stage that has a new kind of nemesis system. Not some copy of Shadow of Mordor, but something new, something we haven’t seen before. I want to counter grinding to some extent. I have one side which is a much larger map, the other side is a new kind of adversarial system and I want to add to that. But it needs to enhance what is, not replace what could be. This is hard to explain for now, but it is in the works, in the meantime, those thoughts are helping me to give larger rise to Engonos, which was what I had in mind all along. Cogs within cogs, not the most elegant of explanations, but it will do for now.

Identifying a new stage

That I something we all have to do at times. I (for the longest time) have been contemplating whether Keno Diastima required a fourth season. There was something close to immaculate to the open ending and there were questions within me. Why certain things existed, why certain steps were made and then I got to thinking part of what would have been a goal? There is something towards triggers, we all do, but what happens when the trigger is happening towards an automated process? You see, the automated process takes (for the most) time out of an equation. There can be two reasons behind this. Th first is the fire and forget process where the instigators look at what comes after, the second is a little harder to explain. Consider a small room, in that room an African bee is released, to be safe you must kill the bee. That process can be monitored, but the stage is difficult and to get the killer bees in place requires an engine. My mind started to ask ‘But why?’ And then I remembered. It is perseverance, resisting temptation. This got my mind to an optional fictive stage that was once said to happen in Las Vegas, they played with artificial pheromones to keep people in a stage of continuous gambling and happiness. Now, I do not know whether this was ever true. The stage came to me from some Lawyer series, I forgot which one. But the stage had an interesting side question. How to infect the right people whilst keeping the others untouched. This led me to the brainwashing stage. Brainwashing can be achieved in psychological ways with additions of chemicals, isolation, debilitation and exhaustion. It is the balance that sets a stage and that can be used in many ways. Yet then we get to Sun Tsu. What if the need is Living spies, reverse spies and/or inside spies? How to create them and better how to keep control? That solution is in part seen by the stage where they are unaware that they are in the first place. And now we have the beginning of a stage. I am also cautious not to give anything away regarding the control lines of the first three seasons. And at that point I had unintentionally created the opening to continue the series (no spoilers).

It is that stage that creates a new cast of leads and a very new cast of antagonists. You see we assume one side, but what happens when the roles are inverted? How can we see good from evil and more important, does it matter? The soldier tells us, we do not murder, the enemy murders, we merely kill them and protect ourselves. Adrian Furnham (in The Psychology of Spies and Spying: Trust, Treason, Treachery) teaches us the concepts regarding the rigorous psychological analysis of the personality and motivation of individuals involved in spying. Yet if they are unaware motivation is taken out of the equation, the personality of a person can be adjusted to facilitate processes and as such identity is take out of the equation. And with both out of the way you get more than who is good and who is not, we get the making of a faceless scout and that was when the idea struck a much larger stage, a much longer game, optionally something leading to a timeless one. Yet, who would prosper? It was at that stage when my mind went back to WW2 and the idea that at that point corporate espionage, espionage conducted for commercial or financial purposes could have had another option. Alfred Hitchcock touched on it with the movie the 39 steps, but the people never realised what an amazing and dangerous piece of work it was. You see industrial espionage seems limited (like Microsoft on IBM), but what if the stage is not that, but what happens when the stage defines where we invest, where we look and where the diamonds are? What if that party is to identify players that make a difference? It would be a much larger game, a game that has no borders. A setting we never faced before.

And with that I had the beginning of season 4, but how to connect certain parts and make is ‘realistic’ enough to make the generals in Kremlin, Pentagon and Zhongnanhai cry like little chihuahua’s? Well perhaps not the Kremlin, they have bigger problems (like getting the bulk of their systems to actually work in wartime without losing over 80,000 troops). But the setting gives me two parts, the engine itself and trying to identify the parties involved and I do like a twist or two, like Pakistani intelligence in Homeland season 4. And the longer we do not know who or what we are facing, the term suspense at the tip of your chair becomes very acceptable. Like any writer who perks up when they hear the radio announcer scream ‘Did you see the plot twist last night? Holy F%#&!’ Any writer lives for such a moment, and I is no different.

But the revelations my mind gave me during short nap is making my brain hurt, I need to try and work out the story whilst I know I have to edit from word one with every iteration of facts. This is going to take a while, and that is merely season 4, with a related season 5.

Just my way to pass the time when sex is not an option, the universe is massively unfair at times.

A dark matter of factuality

It was something that had been nagging at me for a while. Whilst I was working on an idea for TV, an idea that was in ‘And a little more’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2022/04/04/and-a-little-more/) and a few articles before then (and one after), the setting was a little too vanilla, too sweet. Yes, it works when you have a pilot and you need to slowly submerge the viewer into this person. But after that you need to have something more and the dark place is at times so much more rewarding. So what happens when loss, loss that would drive any person insane is part of all this? No matter how we slice it, lets say a child is lost to drunk driving, to whatever reason and that person gets off on a technicality, not something that happened now, but something that happened decades ago. So when some events come back, so does the avenging rage. But not like the timeline. But a timeline that is distorted, as memories come back together. So how would that go? That is what I am contemplating. The vengeance is that he takes the life of a family member every decade. A hunt going on for decades and the family is scared beyond believe because this had been going on and they have no idea who to blame. When you know that EVERY decade on the dot a family member dies extremely brutally, how would YOU react? That is the stuff I am trying to add to the idea. You see the dark appeals to all, the need for vengeance appeals to all. In our lives as we add water to the wine, as we add compromise to our values for fairness, the dark gets a free turn on all of us and that side is appealing to all. Yet the power is not to hide it in some lame ‘conspiracy’ setting. We have seen so many of those, but what happens when the deaths also allow for something more? Lets not forget that this is the story of the grandson of Hades. And that is before we get to the part where his father is Ares. Yet that implies that he has another grandfather. All settings that seem to be clear in season one, so what gives?

A stage where decades of corpses set a line in place, a line that I am trying to give volume, but I cannot yet tell in what direction, because I do not know what the direction is yet. That is part of the thrill of creating stories. You need to keep everything in mind, just like an RPG. And this story needs to have angles, sharp sides, soft sides and surprises. It is setting a ying and yang, but shaped like Hesiod and Plato. The dialogue goes better if there is some polarisation, some opposition to either view whilst the bulk of both views are accepted. That is the stage I need to create, and if I succeed the story becomes a lot better and that is what every storyteller tries to do, create the most enticing story. And that setting works when one side is dark, really dark whilst both sides accepts the darkness and shines their own light on that darkness. You see, shadow die in the absence of light or darkness. Both are needed, a shadow cannot exist in absence of either, the first truth all storytellers learn, most often in the midst of their first story and they rewrite it.

I am no different, although I started when I saw the story became too sweet, too vanilla.

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Filed under Stories

Tagged as Ares, Hades, Hesiod, Plato, RPG, Stories

February 3, 2022 · 22:54

When a story makes for fictive IP

Yup, I have my IP, yet this time around it is not real, it is a fictive concept. It is my my way of giving the people at DARPA the bird (not in an insulting way) and explaining them procedure NA5 (na, na, na, na, na). So my playful mood was taking up the baton (aka the demon on my right shoulder) was calling me a pussy. It usually works and today was no exception. So as I was reading ‘Havana Syndrome may be caused by ‘directed energy’’ (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-60237839) the brain went into overdrive and I started considering a few elements from the story. You see, I have had an experience in that direction, but I did not get sick. I learned a few years ago that when I am exposed to certain light levels AND white noise (like a projector or the sound of certain displays) I fall asleep. I cannot stop myself and drinking coffee after coffee does not help. When I sit down, coffee or not, I am out like a light. Works like a charm and annoys me to no end. So when I saw “in the last year, they have been taken more seriously with US officials encouraged to report similar symptoms. That has led to a flood of cases, numbering at least a thousand from around the world.” I put 3 and 3 together and got 27. You see it takes a specific brain with specific light, you see Paris in January has the winter sun and the winter sun in the early day is intense, but not too bright. Havana has bright most of the day and I reckon that when they start considering light intensity (not strength, or time of exposure) they will find a level of common ground. The white noise will hit everyone in different ways, but specific stressed people (generals, spy masters, command staff) will get a certain exposure. It will not hit all exactly the same, but it will hit them in similar ways. I reckon (and speculate) that those people who got sick will see over time that their ability to focus and concentrate will have been diminished. Consider that, a small white noise transmission, could be specific and might be just at the edge of hearing will do the trick. The issue is that not everyone is hit in the same way in the same time frame, but a specifically engineered projector lamp might do the trick, then that stops there will be a dozen other ways to expose people to white noise. What a way to disable military power. Not incapacitate them, but reduce their effectiveness. So when I saw “The panel found that psychological or social factors could not alone explain the symptoms although they could have compounded some of the problems for those affected. It also found that they could not be explained by environmental or medical conditions.” So when we get “non-standard antennas could create the effects on the human body. Such a source could be concealed and require only moderate power. It could also travel through the air and through walls of buildings” my mind had completed the hypothesis. A combination of light AND white noise. I wonder if they ever considered measuring and collecting the setting of white noise. The best solutions are the simplest ones. Consider Tinnitus a decade ago, it was casually dismissed and the people who had it had to grow a pair. Now consider the application of White noise and light, the light source cannot be managed, but there is this large disc in the sky that does it for us and the less elements that can be considered, the harder the cure will be. Those exposed to above certain stress levels and white noise could burn through synapses. Now, this is not fatal, it does not kill you but it will make you sick. You can heal from this, but the synapse is burned, it has an effect and I am speculating that it leads to reduced abilities in focus and concentration. Consider intelligence personnel and staff officers hit with that, it could impair armies.

So this is not IP, it is merely a fictive setting (for a story for example) to keep my mind busy. So thank you Gordon Corera for giving me this idea. Have a great day and consider that writers like John Le Carre started with the simplest of concepts to make the greatest of stories. Or in my disturbed language Hasta Lasagna! And do not skip the cheesy part.