Lurkily

I think a departure from that darker phase of my writing would be a good thing. So here is a story written in response to the prompt: "Write the story of Star Wars, only you are George R. R. Martin." I'm not deeply familiar with the expanded universe and concepts like Grey Jedi, but hopefully, I didn't delve into enough detail to misstep. Star Wars, by George R. R. Lucas (But not actually by George R. R. Lucas.) “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for.” My mind fogged over. It was hard to think. Only one set of words came easily, struggled to escape, a concept that wanted to take root and grow. “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for.” And it was true. They couldn’t be. I knew something was wrong, but this one concept, this central idea took root in my understanding of the world, fit itself to the core of who I was like a puzzle piece. To remove it would be to leave a hole in my soul. “He can go about his business.” This pressure was tied to the first concept, already firmly rooted, and grew. I fought it, and I struggled. My blaster rose, slowly, sweat dripping into the inside of my helmet. The old man in front of me frowned and intensified his gaze. I could feel my mind being crushed by the growing roots of his influence. “They can . . . go about their business.” “Move along.” “Move . . . move . . . ” As I struggled, the blaster fell out of my hand, and I bent to pick it up. For a moment, I held it in my hands. It wasn’t the grip by which you held a weapon, I was just retrieving it from the ground, but I was aware of the direction it was pointing. He’d already won, of course. He had dismissed me from his attention. I didn’t have to break free, not really. Just pull the trigger. But the grip on my mind forbade it, forbade it so thoroughly that I forgot I even wanted to do it. I didn’t need to pull the trigger on a gun. It was just a lever. I needed to operate a lever, didn’t matter why, just operate the machinery. The blaster fired, leaping out of my hands with the recoil. The pressure strangling my mind was gone. The old man lay dead in his seat, and I cried out for help. “Stop them! The old man was Jedi!” The speeder’s repulsors started up, and I adjusted my grip on my blaster, firing through a repulsor on the side. They all shut down immediately to keep the vehicle from flipping over. The boy tried to make a run for it, and I shouldered my rifle, shooting him through the calf. He bled and cried, until a trooper knocked him out. We searched them, of course, and found no weapons. So the official report said. At home that night, I turned the lightsaber around in my hand, listening to the blade hum. I wasn’t proud of what I did; I had killed a Jedi and his protege. He had probably wanted the same thing I did. But I had known going in that serving light would require an occasional foray into darkness. It was just a part of what it meant to be Grey. I clicked the light saber off and watched the blade collapse. At least the death had served a purpose. I was getting a promotion, a transfer. I would be that much closer to Vader and the Emperor. And now, when I made my move to kill them, I would have a proper weapon for a wielder of the Force.

Photographer Hisakata Hiroyuki spends a fair amount of time capturing cats practicing to be ninjas. My favorite, below.

Woot Woot!

Running the gauntlet. Race mode without a timer, on a stupidly lethal course, and healing disabled. No timer, no score, just the drone's ability to survive the course represented as a percentage. Each course has a scoreboard unique to that course. Moving obstacles, tnt mines, enemy units, weapons fire, hot and cold. Do your damndest to kill us dead. Be cruel.

Any new gifs to share? I want a new dose of ridiculous to discuss.

Chewing bubblegum and kicking ass, then running out of bubblegum. Awesome.

I'm of the opinion that they're photographs filtered to appear to be traditional media. Photoshop has some fairly capable filters in that vein. I also know of a photographer that takes photos of cats that appear to be doing ninja moves. I'll post some in off topic later.

I'm not sure what you mean. You want to set additional tolerances? I think I misunderstand something.

Pig out. It's what these days are for. You get free license to eat like a pig for one day. Don't waste it.

This one comes with a warning. This is one of the first of my darker stories. As usual, the uglier subjects dealt with aren't described; the reader is allowed to explore those aspects as deeply or shallowly as they wish. But they're still there. Torture exists in this setting, as does abuse, trauma, the hurt of innocents. If it's inappropriate to the forum, let me know, it'll be removed, and I'll avoid the darker stuff going forward. There's your warning. This was written in response to the prompt: "When you make eye contact with someone who’s death is near, their life flashes before your eyes." Intimate Moments I walked into the metal room, and the steel door swung shut behind me. The voice was raw, exhausted, accented, muffled beneath a black bag over his head. “Who is there?” In silence, I walked to the single chair as the door locked, and locked, and locked again. My shoes clicked on the floor as I circled him. His shirt was bloodied, torn. The bloodstains were pale pink, evidence that they had tried waterboarding, too. His teeth and nails were unmarred, but if they’d had time to exhaust every avenue, they wouldn’t have called me. “Do not ignore me! Show yourself!” I could scent sour fear from unwashed sweat, copper from his blood, the chemical tang of chlorine from the water, and fouler scents as well. I stopped in front of him and pulled the hood from over his head. “Mitchell. They tell me you planted a bomb.” “I will open your ‘jewel of the skies’ to hard vacuum. There is nothing you can do. I will not tell you where to find it or how to disarm it. ” I began circling the chair, quietly, thinking about his motivations. I didn’t have a lot of energy for it, though. The answer was usually depressing, and I would know them better than I wished by the time I finished. “No. If you’d succumb to cruder means, you would have by now. I don’t have the time to worry about making you talk. We only have a couple of hours.” “You can do nothing if you do not know where to look. None of you deserve to escape the flames. You Orbitals,” he spat the slur like a curse, “you care for nobody but your own. Your moralistic pleas are hollow.” I took a syringe out of my inside jacket pocket, peeling it out of its foil packet. I was a simple man, and I liked simple things. The lack of mess appealed to me. “Don’t worry. It won’t hurt. You just go to sleep for the last time.” “You are lying.” “If that makes it easier for you, sure.” I uncapped the needle and bent to his arm. “Wait! Stop! You can’t kill me if you don’t know where it is!” He was scared, now; it was the first time he had used contractions in his speech. Dying when nobody cared if you died was somehow not the same. I slid the needle through his skin and depressed the plunger. “Sorry. This is how you end.” His eyes were scared, but he was already beginning to drowse. I capped the needle, and cupped his cheeks, forcing him to meet my eyes. “Please . . . just tell her that I . . .” He never finished. I put a thumb over each eyelid, holding them open, and as we looked into each other’s eyes, he died. Flickering before my eyes was a childhood filled with indoctrination. His father’s cult. The beating of his mother, and when she died, the beatings of his little sister. Melissa, too young to fight back. Barely thirteen when it started. He was never beaten – that made it worse. The shame was more painful than a belt. Then there was Melissa’s death after a brutal beating. That broke him. His rebellion against the teachings of the cult was violent, a teenager indulging his anger and vengeance in extremism. The world was a place without compassion. Governments without compassion, companies, religions, the world, humans without compassion. Nobody was innocent in a world that killed Melissa. They would all burn. There were murders. There were studies. There were mistakes. The missing pinky and ring finger were from his first error assembling a bomb; it taught him caution. Then there was THE bomb. It wouldn’t just kill people here; it would take station-keeping offline, and push us out of orbit. The debris would hit some of our most densely populated cities. I saw the electronics cabinet he hid it in, D5-NE-3-107. There were the tricks and traps he used to protect it. He was very skilled, and so, so angry. I saw his capture, his torture, his pain. I saw myself, a government boogeyman, an unfeeling monster with green eyes sent to terrorize him. Suddenly I was merely staring into a dead man’s eyes, and tears were streaming down my face. I crumpled, sitting hard, and folded my arms around my knees. The door unlocked, unlocked, and unlocked again, and someone knelt beside me. “The device is on Deck five. Northeast quad, third ring, cabinet 107. It’s trapped. Don’t re-orient, shake, or vibrate it. The entire assembly is embedded in acrylic. A glass pane is embedded in the front. Find it using laser light, the air pockets between the two will sparkle. Cracking the glass will cause the bomb to detonate. Drill slowly into the acrylic from above, mind the vibrations. You will have to cut open the cabinet to get an angle. Break the wires with the drill, in this order. Red with a white stripe. Blue. Black. Red with a black stripe. White. It will be disarmed and safe to move. Submerge it in acetone to dissolve the acrylic; then you can disassemble it. That’s everything, hurry up.” I heard his pencil scratching as he transcribed my directions, then a radio crackling as he relayed them to the EOD team. I clutched my legs, laid my head on my knees, and I cried for Melissa.

Many other countries also teach British English - common in Africa, I'm told, and probably elsewhere, though I don't have any knowledge of that.

This was in response to the following prompt: "Valhalla does not discriminate against the kind of fight you lost. Did you lose the battle with cancer? Maybe you died in a fist fight . Even facing addiction. After taking a deep drink from his flagon, Odin slams his cup down and asks for the glorious tale of your demise!" It's not the tale of his demise, but then, not being required to stick to the prompt is literally a rule in /r/WritingPrompts. I think I stuck to the spirit of it, anyway. Vishpala, on a totally random note, has a historical basis; a female warrior referred to in the Rigveda (a collection of vedic sanskrit hymns) with a false leg of some kind. The author took for granted that the audience knew the details, so the bulk of her story and of "Khlea's Battle" is lost. Defense Rests. In life, I never drank. In death, it was merriment and partying, and there was no work or reputation to worry about. I drank experimentally at first, then more freely. Soon I was drunker than I’d ever been, though that didn’t say much. Then the man at the head of the table – after all I’d seen, was it possible he was truly Odin? – slammed his cup down, making me jump. “I look at our newest member, and I don’t see a warrior!” His voice carried down the hall of Valhalla, resonant and booming. “I see a paper-pusher! A functionary!” He spat the word as if it were a curse. “Approach!” I didn’t have any choice. I was torn from my seat and thrown at the dais by some invisible force. Odin had turned and stepped out of my path, not even sparing a glance for my body’s passage through the air. I struck the wall and fell to the ground. By the time I struggled to my feet, surprisingly undamaged, Odin was already taking his seat. “Regale us, so-called warrior! Amaze us with your tales of so-called ‘battle’! My head was suddenly, oddly clear, from the moment I had struck the stage floor. Something about just standing here swept my drunkenness away. I coughed, looking around, adjusting the glasses perched on my nose. I didn’t know what I was doing here in the first place. These men, they were hard men. I’d been in two fights in my life, and been beaten up four times. After the first two fights, I had learned that you sometimes took less damage if you just fell down. An approach came to mind, though. I straightened my suit jacket. It was my job, after all, to weave a narrative, support it, and to make people believe it. And I was really good at my job. With that in mind, I put on my game face. I envisioned the audience as my prey, and I stepped up to the podium with calm assurance, like a tiger deciding whether he wanted to eat his prey or play with it. “I find myself in the most esteemed company today! Warriors, legends–” Here, I glanced at Odin. “– gods. Obviously, I am not worthy to be here. Obviously, I can’t belong in such company. Yet I’ve been asked for a tale, and what do you do when Odin himself asks? You tell a damn tale.” “Now, you have no doubt observed that I am not built for combat. I have no tales of war and killing. My battle is with the concept of law itself.” I saw some of my audience had begun to lose interest, and moved on, struggling to regain a little lost ground. “I go before the courts and fight for men and women trying to keep their homes and lives. I know the many blades of the law just as many of you know the blades you use in combat. I have spent my life learning to hone those blades, and learning to blunt the blades in my enemy’s hand.” “And that is the beginning of the battle, not the end. You no doubt noticed that I claim to fight for the poor, and nobody can eat when they are paid by the poor. My office, my employees, every pen and pencil comes from donations. Every day our office fights for its very survival. On the day I died, I had been investing my own money for eight months, instead of taking a salary. There was no other way to pay my employees and keep the lights on. All the monsters I captured are men. I would tell you of the monster that wanted to devour sixty years, the life’s work, of three hundred men and women. But my weapon was an improperly signed document, an error, that permitted them to break contract without consequence. I would tell you of the monster that would have demolished the only affordable housing left in my city, but my blade was a letter, a letter that showed he entered a contract intending to break it.” “My daily struggles would bore you. I do not deliver a blade to a beast’s heart, I put my enemy’s blade to a grindstone and blunt it for months, until they have nothing left to fight with. But, ladies and gentlemen, I fight!” I began to get carried away with my own speech, and I felt emotion cresting. I seized it. It was raw magic in a speech like this, and I let it overwhelm me. Suddenly, the speech seemed to be in control, with me helplessly carrying it to its conclusion. “I do battle! I slay monsters as mighty as any hydra or dragon! I! Am! A! warrior!” The hall was silent for a few moments, then Odin began to clap. With that, the entire room broke into applause. Men and women in hides, in armor, soldiers with their swords, with their crossbows and rifles. I spent a moment catching my breath, and a woman in plate mail climbed up to the dais, shaking my hand. I let her lead me down, and I let her put a drink in my hand. I noticed that she had a limp, but she seemed nimble despite her apparent injury. “I am Vishpala. You did well up there.” “I am Desmond Quinn. What happened? I can’t be the best lawyer ever, so I can’t be the only one here. So why did he pick me out? Is this some hazing ritual?” She looked aside at me over the collar of her armor, which stood tall and protective around her neck. “Not just a pretty face. You truly fight for the poor?” I looked at this woman, wondering where she was going with her questions. She had skin the color of coffee milk, warm hazel eyes, small lips, and dark hair, barely long enough for her to keep tied back. She was slender and her armor unflattering, but she was not unattractive. I moved a little closer, wondering if something was there. She shifted her stance, and her armored knee casually struck my unprotected kneecap. Nope, nothing there. I backed off a step and bent to rub my knee. “Nobody else will fight for them. And you are changing the subject.” She didn’t seem to take notice of my pain. “Don’t let him scare you. He’s especially hard on people who didn’t put their lives on the line. But after that, nobody can doubt that you belong among us.”

You color-with-a-u-spelling people.

Never said it, but this place looks great, works great, very few complaints. Searches are pretty easy, profiles are neat and relatively easy to find a user's content with, mod tools are effective and useful, text editing is pretty fully featured with only very rare and minor flaws. Mobile support is fantastic, too. That's not always easy. There's nothing left out of the mobile site that I can otherwise do on the PC. Good showing.

It's important to remember that most phones aren't tiny little laptops, with the exception of windows phones. They use a different architecture, different OS, different hardware, etc. A port to a phone isn't the same as moving from PC to Xbox - its not as bad as writing the game from scratch because the mechanics exist and the assets already exist, but the programming time is comparable. It's also an ongoing cost. Going forward, it's a commitment to support what amounts to an additional game, with separate effort required for buggies and updates. I don't mean to patronize, so I'm sorry if you knew all this, but it's not an aspect of the problem that's always obvious to players.

That is only useful when your drone's in one piece; if I have a factory churning parts out, the HP total will keep going up, but damage to my main drone will have less and less impact on my total health percentage.

That Oriental Shorthair looks JUST LIKE my cat. Please ignore the fact that with this angle I look girly and my forehead looks taller than my self.

I played Papa and Yo today. It's cutesy and cartoony, but it was rated 'overwhelmingly positive', so I gave it a whirl. It is cutesy and cartoony, but it's a facade around a real story that's very grim, very dark, and will be too real for some players. As you play, you get glimpses of what's being presented, but the game's closing gameplay strips the illusions away from the game mechanics you've been using in a rather brutal way. Anyway. Yeah, I liked it. But I'm shaken. Highly artistic and imaginative, good music. I got real sick of hearing "Leloo!" though.

Birds don't exist.

I wrote this in response to the prompt: "Write a story in which the reader is actively involved in the story." I do enjoy writing a story that's appropriate to the prompt, but still unexpected. This is written from the book's point of view. Generations of Paper I waited. So long, it seems, that I waited. Then, light fell upon my pages once more. It must have been years. The child who once looked at my illustrations in wonder had grown. It seems like you were ready to learn the truth behind the pretty pictures. You were more than you were. You had focus and commitment, and instead of touching the surface of the worlds within me you delved deeply. You immersed yourself in paper and ink and I regaled you with wonders. I told you about heroes and villains, of good men corrupted, bad men redeemed. I taught you about triumph and victory, failure and defeat, how to heal men and how to break them. I taught you the difference between fighting and battle, about friendship and about comrades and romance and betrayal and good and evil. I raised you within multitudes of worlds. Then the darkness came again. I waited. So long, it seems, that I waited. Then, light fell upon my pages once more. It must have been years. The teenager that I had raised among so many worlds was old, now. But the child in the bed was not. This child looked on in wonder, as you once did. “Once upon a time . . . ”

Two approaches to that; plan it, or do it by the seat of your pants. Some people do better with outlines, settings, character sheets. Other people just WRITE, and the details they put down create the world while they write. If you're one of those latter, grab a text editor that hides all but the last line of text; or just tape a sheet of paper over all but the last line of your document editor. And just . . . write. Accept that the start will be rough, and just write. Go off on tangents if you hit a dead end. Word vomit, make a mess, disappoint your mother. For a procrastinator, stopping to edit will murder your book with brutal and malicious glee. Save that for later. Whether you wrote an outline or your brain puked on the paper, the next steps are much the same. Once you get the whole story out, look at the blemished, ugly thing you've birthed, find the STORY in it, and rewrite it, cutting out what you don't need. Trim and trim until that ugly little bush is an elegant bonsai. Reconsider the order of the chapters. Read the dialog out loud, to make sure it sounds real. Now that you have the full elegant sweep of the story with all its richness and detail in mind - you're gonna hate me - rewrite it again. Start from page one with every ounce of rich flavor and detail in your mind. You know what the future holds, your characters are full and your settings rich, and you can do better justice to the first page, now that you know the last. Once you're done, compare your works. sometimes you'll find magic missing after you rewrite, and you can find new ways to craft the passage to recapture it, or even just walk back the changes. At least, that's how it goes for me when I've written longer things. Word vomit is about the only way I can get to the end of the story without seizing with despair, jumping into editing, and losing it. if you lose interest in a story before you're done with a draft, it's very hard to just work through it. But if you have the draft finished, polishing and rewriting is something you can just work through.

We have had a couple recent issues with save files emptying themselves spontaneously; perhaps it's related to that.

Well, while you're coupled, new fuel and energy parts will be filled by other tanks' regen, if I'm not mistaken. As for ore tanks . . . what about an accumulator tank? It would just hoover in resources from other tanks, no other function. On a single drone it'd be a bit useless, but the drone mentioned above could use it to take on resources before strutting off home to the mothership.

Oh, it doesn't have to be mobile to be cancer. It's a cash grab around microtransactions, usually; the game is fun and rewarding if you keep paying. They guide or force you into your first purchase to set the hook, provide initial fast rewards, then they kill the pacing so you're left with frustration, and the memory of spending money as a way to recapture that sweet reward of progress. But as I've said of many things, I do not want to make this a grindfest. Progress can be juggled and metered so it doesn't kill the pacing. The real goal here isn't to choke the player's advancement; it's to make everything he now gets by default into a rewarding accomplishment. I know a balance needs to be struck for that to work, but I'm suggesting we try to strike that balance. To the subject at hand though; factories are kind of tacked-on right now. You can tell that there isn't much consideration to balance and function by the things they break. The crosstalk between subdrones with no way to both control them and isolate them, the utter unstoppability of a core, a few thrusters, and a factory set to mass-produce ten-part orbiters until the planet is wrecked. I don't think there's any effective way to balance a factory with no build limit. I don't see any way to make that possible.