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http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?684690-Setting-Riff-Luci%E9rnaga-Post-Spanish-Civil-War-Firefly
Not a deeply developed idea yet. Posting mostly to tweak James.
Not a deeply developed idea yet. Posting mostly to tweak James.
Years ago I read Paul Ekman's Emotions Revealed on emotions and facial expressions. He identifies seven major emotions:
major emotions: my adaptive annotations
fear: don't eat me
anger: don't eat my child/food
sadness: someone ate my child
surprise: what's that?
disgust: that wasn't food!
contempt: you're beneath me
happiness: i ate/i had sex/my child done me proud/etc
Later he breaks happiness down:
16 possible positive emotions: 5 for pleasure from each of the 5 senses.
Amusement, excitement, contentment, ecstasy, wonderment, relief, fiero,
naches, elevation, gratitude, schadenfreude. He's not sure the last three are
emotions as opposed to other emotional states.
elevation -- feeling uplift from seeing surprising moral acts.
fiero -- From Italian. Pleasure-pride in a difficult accomplishment.
naches -- From Yiddish. Pleasure-pride in the accomplishment of your child or student.
There's an odd pleasure I experience a lot, which I don't know a name for. I guess it's closest to fiero, though sometimes secondhand or like elevation (pleasure from someone else's difficult accomplishment.) It's like solving puzzles, but these aren't deliberate puzzles, more like using a set of tools someone else provided in a surprising way, or making sense out of nonsense. I guess it's related to hacking, like building an operating system out of elisp, or a one-line program that generates cool graphical patterns. I should just give examples:
Firefly: eventually we realize that the show isn't just being coy about FTL or not, that there is no FTL, and that there's dozens of habitable and terraformed worlds in one system. At first this seems like bullshit, even with the humility proper to current planetary science. Then they say "multiple" stars and you're still skeptical. But then you learn that Castor is a real sextuple system in like the orbit of Pluto (two binary stars, themselves in a binary setup, and with another binary star revolving around the other four), and that there's another known sextuple (two triple stars), and you go huh. And gas giants can hold lots of large moons in a small space. And then you read some semi-canon explanation with artificial gravity and sent-ahead terraforming probes, and moons and dwarf planets being compressed for a more Earthlike surface gravity, and you remember Paul Birch's ideas for mass stream momentum transfer to change orbits and rotations with tech we could do today, and you go "huh. Unlikely, but more possible than FTL."
Or (lots of RPG examples now), you known Dungeons and Dragons, and the magical spells and items and item creation rules provided, all meant to model vaguely medieval fantasy, but someone figures out how to make a post-scarcity society with wall of iron spells and decanters of endless water and you feel proud of them for building something surprising. (But if they notice that a ladder costs less than two ten foot poles, that's just exploiting an obvious bug and stupid.)
Or there's D&D's Great Wheel cosmology, based on a two axis moral alignment system that has never made sense, with planes of existence that have their intrinsic cool elements, and someone preserves most of those elements while using order/violence axes that make a lot more sense, and in fact making many of the elements even more sensible and attractive as variant afterlives, and you vow to use it should you ever run Great Wheel D&D.
Or there's Exalted, with a semi-standard fantasy trope of gods powered by prayer and worship built in, but later someone publishes a goddess who's found a niche as a voice mail service, taking messages in the form of prayer and passing them on in dreams, and you go "cool, yeah, that makes sense", and then you remember that the gods are in a Celestial Bureaucracy, and imagine underlings who run the equivalent of mailing lists...
Or looking at the Blue Rose magic system, and realizing that if I dropped the Shaping Arcana, the rest could emulate a lot of Tolkien magic, including the corrupting sorcery, pretty well, even to building the Rings of Power. But Blue Rose was designed for romantic fantasy, not epic! Go me!
Or again in Exalted, my combining some obscure Charms and rituals to create a society of enlightened mortals with a Sidereal patron and integrated afterlife and Wyld polders, and I'm proud of having built this out of the provided elements, even if I haven't properly written it up yet... but if I try to imagine a fantasy society on my own, free of any constraints or strong influences, my mind blanks out at the sheer openness of it all. Magic can do anything, until you pick constraints, but picking my own? Feels artificial, I should go do something useful...
So yeah, partly it's hacking RPGs. But also married to that "making sense out of incoherence" a la Firefly and the Great Wheel, which also applied to reading Mere Christianity and seeing Lewis give a metaphor for the Holy Trinity that almost made sense. Doesn't quite seem like hacking. A joy in rationalization? Mystery-solving? I don't know. Maybe it's entirely unrelated emotions that I happen to associate because RPGs are often both hackable and nonsensical, whereas computer programs and (theology or sloppy SF) tend to be separate.
A friend calls it lateral thinking, which certainly applies to some of the 'hacking' "make it do something unexpected" stuff.
major emotions: my adaptive annotations
fear: don't eat me
anger: don't eat my child/food
sadness: someone ate my child
surprise: what's that?
disgust: that wasn't food!
contempt: you're beneath me
happiness: i ate/i had sex/my child done me proud/etc
Later he breaks happiness down:
16 possible positive emotions: 5 for pleasure from each of the 5 senses.
Amusement, excitement, contentment, ecstasy, wonderment, relief, fiero,
naches, elevation, gratitude, schadenfreude. He's not sure the last three are
emotions as opposed to other emotional states.
elevation -- feeling uplift from seeing surprising moral acts.
fiero -- From Italian. Pleasure-pride in a difficult accomplishment.
naches -- From Yiddish. Pleasure-pride in the accomplishment of your child or student.
There's an odd pleasure I experience a lot, which I don't know a name for. I guess it's closest to fiero, though sometimes secondhand or like elevation (pleasure from someone else's difficult accomplishment.) It's like solving puzzles, but these aren't deliberate puzzles, more like using a set of tools someone else provided in a surprising way, or making sense out of nonsense. I guess it's related to hacking, like building an operating system out of elisp, or a one-line program that generates cool graphical patterns. I should just give examples:
Firefly: eventually we realize that the show isn't just being coy about FTL or not, that there is no FTL, and that there's dozens of habitable and terraformed worlds in one system. At first this seems like bullshit, even with the humility proper to current planetary science. Then they say "multiple" stars and you're still skeptical. But then you learn that Castor is a real sextuple system in like the orbit of Pluto (two binary stars, themselves in a binary setup, and with another binary star revolving around the other four), and that there's another known sextuple (two triple stars), and you go huh. And gas giants can hold lots of large moons in a small space. And then you read some semi-canon explanation with artificial gravity and sent-ahead terraforming probes, and moons and dwarf planets being compressed for a more Earthlike surface gravity, and you remember Paul Birch's ideas for mass stream momentum transfer to change orbits and rotations with tech we could do today, and you go "huh. Unlikely, but more possible than FTL."
Or (lots of RPG examples now), you known Dungeons and Dragons, and the magical spells and items and item creation rules provided, all meant to model vaguely medieval fantasy, but someone figures out how to make a post-scarcity society with wall of iron spells and decanters of endless water and you feel proud of them for building something surprising. (But if they notice that a ladder costs less than two ten foot poles, that's just exploiting an obvious bug and stupid.)
Or there's D&D's Great Wheel cosmology, based on a two axis moral alignment system that has never made sense, with planes of existence that have their intrinsic cool elements, and someone preserves most of those elements while using order/violence axes that make a lot more sense, and in fact making many of the elements even more sensible and attractive as variant afterlives, and you vow to use it should you ever run Great Wheel D&D.
Or there's Exalted, with a semi-standard fantasy trope of gods powered by prayer and worship built in, but later someone publishes a goddess who's found a niche as a voice mail service, taking messages in the form of prayer and passing them on in dreams, and you go "cool, yeah, that makes sense", and then you remember that the gods are in a Celestial Bureaucracy, and imagine underlings who run the equivalent of mailing lists...
Or looking at the Blue Rose magic system, and realizing that if I dropped the Shaping Arcana, the rest could emulate a lot of Tolkien magic, including the corrupting sorcery, pretty well, even to building the Rings of Power. But Blue Rose was designed for romantic fantasy, not epic! Go me!
Or again in Exalted, my combining some obscure Charms and rituals to create a society of enlightened mortals with a Sidereal patron and integrated afterlife and Wyld polders, and I'm proud of having built this out of the provided elements, even if I haven't properly written it up yet... but if I try to imagine a fantasy society on my own, free of any constraints or strong influences, my mind blanks out at the sheer openness of it all. Magic can do anything, until you pick constraints, but picking my own? Feels artificial, I should go do something useful...
So yeah, partly it's hacking RPGs. But also married to that "making sense out of incoherence" a la Firefly and the Great Wheel, which also applied to reading Mere Christianity and seeing Lewis give a metaphor for the Holy Trinity that almost made sense. Doesn't quite seem like hacking. A joy in rationalization? Mystery-solving? I don't know. Maybe it's entirely unrelated emotions that I happen to associate because RPGs are often both hackable and nonsensical, whereas computer programs and (theology or sloppy SF) tend to be separate.
A friend calls it lateral thinking, which certainly applies to some of the 'hacking' "make it do something unexpected" stuff.
Alright John, you can envy me now.
Yesterday G and I went up to Las Campanas Observatory. First he showed me the Magellan telescopes, and later I got to see an image being taken, one with a possible Oh My God Particle event, given a cosmic ray track (or artifact) that amazed all the observers. Today I saw the 100 inch ("It's like my 8 inch Celestron, only much bigger") and 40 inch telescopes, and Indian petroglyphs in the region, and heard the rocks that give the mountain its name ("the bells"), iron rich rocks that ring when you strike them against each other. But last night was the light, when he hauled out his aforementioned Celestron up on the mountain and his Nikon Eagleview binoculars and we went stargazing in the Southern Hemisphere. First we saw the thin crescennt of a two day old Moon, and the Mercury/Jupiter/Venus conjunction. Craters on the Moon, Io Europa and Callisto around Jupiter, Jupiter's banding, the phase of Venus -- old hat for some, but new for a city boy like me, where stargazing tends to mean looking at the Big Dipper or Orion, or finding Polaris.
But then Hemispherical stuff. Upside-down Orion, Canopus, then fuzzy patches visible only out of the corner of one's eye -- the Greater then Lesser Magellanic Cloud. But soon they were visible, even obvious, to direct view. And the Milky Way came into view, not as obvious as it was on Catalina for freshman orientation, but still pretty good. The Southern Cross, actually more of a kite. At the end of the evening he pointed out Alpha Centauri coming up over the horizon, pointed to (along with Hadar) by the short limb of the cross.
We saw a satellite; later, while looking at the nebular glow of the Pleiades through the telescope, I think I saw another satellite zip through the field. I caught a meteor, too. He picked out the Crab Nebula in the scope; I with the binoculars found some open star cluster that he recognized but couldn't ID, above the Milky Way in the south. It's got a wavy line of stars in the upper left, and an M of stars in the lower right, with a band of darkness running between.
S has used the term "house farms" for the monoculture development housing tracts in Southern California; G's translation "granjas de casas" for the Chilean equivalent got instant recognition from Chileans.
There's an 'official' map of the Firefly universe:
http://www.fireflyshipworks.com/2008/11/map-of-the-verse/
G mentioned actual support by Joss; there may be a more informative link somewhere. The construction is a close star cluster with lots of hot jovians and thus moons. Fans have imagined the latter but it's the star cluster that helps to expand the habitable range, or range of zones (maybe). And Blue Sun corporation comes from... a blue sun. And all those Asians we never saw might have been on some world we never saw, there's over 200 of the things. Though I still like the B-Ark interpretation (was that me, or James, or someone else?)
Yesterday G and I went up to Las Campanas Observatory. First he showed me the Magellan telescopes, and later I got to see an image being taken, one with a possible Oh My God Particle event, given a cosmic ray track (or artifact) that amazed all the observers. Today I saw the 100 inch ("It's like my 8 inch Celestron, only much bigger") and 40 inch telescopes, and Indian petroglyphs in the region, and heard the rocks that give the mountain its name ("the bells"), iron rich rocks that ring when you strike them against each other. But last night was the light, when he hauled out his aforementioned Celestron up on the mountain and his Nikon Eagleview binoculars and we went stargazing in the Southern Hemisphere. First we saw the thin crescennt of a two day old Moon, and the Mercury/Jupiter/Venus conjunction. Craters on the Moon, Io Europa and Callisto around Jupiter, Jupiter's banding, the phase of Venus -- old hat for some, but new for a city boy like me, where stargazing tends to mean looking at the Big Dipper or Orion, or finding Polaris.
But then Hemispherical stuff. Upside-down Orion, Canopus, then fuzzy patches visible only out of the corner of one's eye -- the Greater then Lesser Magellanic Cloud. But soon they were visible, even obvious, to direct view. And the Milky Way came into view, not as obvious as it was on Catalina for freshman orientation, but still pretty good. The Southern Cross, actually more of a kite. At the end of the evening he pointed out Alpha Centauri coming up over the horizon, pointed to (along with Hadar) by the short limb of the cross.
We saw a satellite; later, while looking at the nebular glow of the Pleiades through the telescope, I think I saw another satellite zip through the field. I caught a meteor, too. He picked out the Crab Nebula in the scope; I with the binoculars found some open star cluster that he recognized but couldn't ID, above the Milky Way in the south. It's got a wavy line of stars in the upper left, and an M of stars in the lower right, with a band of darkness running between.
S has used the term "house farms" for the monoculture development housing tracts in Southern California; G's translation "granjas de casas" for the Chilean equivalent got instant recognition from Chileans.
There's an 'official' map of the Firefly universe:
http://www.fireflyshipworks.com/2008/11/map-of-the-verse/
G mentioned actual support by Joss; there may be a more informative link somewhere. The construction is a close star cluster with lots of hot jovians and thus moons. Fans have imagined the latter but it's the star cluster that helps to expand the habitable range, or range of zones (maybe). And Blue Sun corporation comes from... a blue sun. And all those Asians we never saw might have been on some world we never saw, there's over 200 of the things. Though I still like the B-Ark interpretation (was that me, or James, or someone else?)
A review.
I should mention that when I linked to Jordan's review of "Rescue Party", that was meant in a positive way, not in a "share the Internet stupid" way.
--a lusty whitemale
I should mention that when I linked to Jordan's review of "Rescue Party", that was meant in a positive way, not in a "share the Internet stupid" way.
--a lusty whitemale
Our Mrs. Reynolds.
Because projecting the racial issues of today's United States (Australian author, BTW) onto off-planet people 500 years in the future makes so much sense... I wonder more about the "deep cover to make feminists look bad" possibility, frankly.
Because projecting the racial issues of today's United States (Australian author, BTW) onto off-planet people 500 years in the future makes so much sense... I wonder more about the "deep cover to make feminists look bad" possibility, frankly.
Aka "Inara is raped! Zoe is raped! Kaylee is raped! Joss's wife is raped!"
Ah, radicals. Giving feminism a bad name since (insert year here).
From James Nicoll; funny comment here.
Ah, radicals. Giving feminism a bad name since (insert year here).
From James Nicoll; funny comment here.
