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the complete all-american de-anxietized argent
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| drabble: aging into stones |
[May. 19th, 2013|08:29 am]
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it’s unfair that we get smaller as we get older. it’s unfair that our bodies don’t reflect the actual growth we experience over time. age and experience should add strength to our muscles, density to our bones, and capacity to our memories, not take them away. ideally we’d end as giants, slowing and calcifying into memorials. that east-facing caryatid is my mother’s mother, who loved to greet the sun. that menhir, tilted westward, is her husband, who loved to see it off. I live in the shadow of the plinths that were my mother and father, my uncles and aunts.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/740602.html. |
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| drabble: "casual spying" |
[May. 12th, 2013|04:09 am]
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now, you have to understand, I don't normally eavesdrop, it's just that she was so pretty that I just wanted to find out whatever I could about her. when she and her friends started talking about what they'd done in Nacogdoches, and where they'd left it hidden, I knew how I could fix everything. so I settled up the tab and we got in the truck and didn't stop driving until we made it to the demolition site. but everything went pear-shaped from there, now Charley's dead and that
witch has the suitcase and that's why I need bail, mom.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/740150.html. |
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| dungeons and drabble |
[May. 7th, 2013|10:37 pm]
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where is there room in the world for us? the unwanted daughters and seventh sons with the swords and scrolls of our aunts and uncles in our hands, without a silver in our pockets, where do we make our names? where is there room in the world for us? here: deep down, down deep. we dull our blades on the flesh of rat and goblin, dull our teeth on the grit of iron rations, test for traps with ten foot poles, burn our hands on fifty foot ropes. and we die here, so many of us: down deep, deep down.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/740020.html. |
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| batdrabble |
[May. 7th, 2013|12:49 am]
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when he broke his back a second time, Alfred gave an ultimatum: "either you quit, or I do." and there was no question: Bruce quit. he took time off to heal, and to study: not how to be a better fighter of criminals, but how to end crime at the root. surely the mind that devised all those marvelous toys could solve the problems of police corruption and inmate recidivism. and as he wrote checks and gave endorsements to candidates who supported community policing, school vouchers, adult literacy programs, and free school breakfasts, he thought: yes, I can build here.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/739809.html. |
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| here is something you can't understand: how I could just eat a man |
[May. 6th, 2013|09:11 am]
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I like building things in videogames. sportsball sims, manshooters, and MMOs bore me. in strategy games, I like to turtle up, build my bases or cities, do my tech research, and avoid fighting unless I have overwhelming force on my side. (so, basically, I'm a pre-9/11 American.)
I love Civilization-type games, and Minecraft is pretty great, too. but recently I discovered The Unreal World (UrW), a low-fantasy Iron Age wilderness survival roguelike from Enormous Elk Software that's been in development for over twenty years and recently went free/donation-based.
the point of the game is to build your own wilderness settlement and survive independently. sure, there are villages with pre-built resources you can use, and wandering NPCs, but they're not overly friendly, and even if you want to trade, there's no currency, so you have to make things to trade anyway. there's a lot of making things in order to make things so you can make other things. the developer lives in the woods of Finland and actually does a lot of the farming, fishing, and animal husbandry that you do in the game.
it's absurdly deep and detailed from the moment you start a new game, but there's a quick character generator alongside the painstaking point-based one, along with an extensive built-in tutorial scenario, which is good, because the interface isn't at all intuitive, and you'll need to learn the game's intricacies intimately if you want to survive the coming winter. you learn very quickly how to build a shelter, how to chop wood and start fires, how to fish and how to cook, and soon, how to track, trap, and hunt.
this is the kind of thing that can happen in UrW:
while ranging the wilderness and practicing my hunting skills, I came across the one thing I didn't expect: a hostile human! turns out there's a culture called the Njerpez that has steel weapons and, at least at this point in the game's development, is uncommunicative and murderously hostile by default. so the instant I saw him, he rushed towards me, howling incomprehensibly (I imagine) and brandishing a steel sword, a weapon far superior to anything I was carrying, but my spear and my wits won me the day over the savage.
I stripped his carcass of his flimsy linen clothes, far too thin for the climate. but out of which I made cords and bandages to bind my wounds, and claimed his precious steel weaponry for my own. then I reflexively -- accidentally? perhaps -- entered the commands to skin and dress his body, like I would any animal I'd hunted, and the next thing I knew I had a pile of human meat in front of me. (strangely, there was no skin -- you can murder a human being and eat them in UrW, but you can't make man-leather, that would just be immoral or something.)
up to this point, I'd survived entirely on small fish and river water, and this was the most meat I'd seen in several game-weeks of play. having nearly starved myself before over the course of a few unlucky days, I didn't debate much before hauling the pile back to camp and cooking it. I ate about half the meat over the course of the next game-week, and the rest spoiled, but by that time I'd already successfully hunted an elk and had that noble beast's meat smoking at the sauna back at the village to the north, his skin tanning at the riverside not ten strides from my camp.
so here's the point of this: when I first got into videogames, I mean really got into them, I was interested in the stories they told, because I was using them as a substitute for tabletop rpgs, which for all my accrual and collection I basically stopped playing as soon as my friends left for college. but over time I've lost interest in games that tell you their stories, and more interested in games that you tell stories about. if I want a pre-defined narrative, I'll read a book or watch something. but from the games I play, I want to be able to tell stories about what happened.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/739414.html. |
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| bedtime story |
[Apr. 20th, 2013|05:22 am]
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once upon a time there was a ship, which is kind of like a boat, but bigger. the ship was so big it held everything you can imagine: trees and people and towns, dogs and cats, food and guns. even other ships. and some people had more than others but nobody had nothing because the ship had everything that the people on it could imagine. the ship was so big, it was the whole world.
and the ship sailed on an ocean, which is kind of like a lake, but bigger. and the ocean was so big it held everything you couldn't imagine. the people on the ship couldn't imagine those things either, and so they thought they were safe. but the ship sailed into dangerous waters, where even the smallest things that lived in the ocean were bigger than the biggest things that lived on the ship. and those oceanthings, those tiny giants, were hungry. the giants climbed onto the ship to eat the people's dreams, and the people let them, because it felt good to have their dreams eaten.
only the children didn't get eaten, because their dreams were too big for the things to eat all at once. the giants harrowed the children for years, until the children learned how to use their dreams to build their own giants, and they rode those giants to war. and it took a long time, and the children won the war, but the ship was still adrift in the dangerous waters, and the children grew up and became the people and so they couldn't build giants anymore.
and that's why the world is how it is now.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/739278.html. |
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| THINGS WHAT I LIKE: spaceships, neurosis, and psychomagical space elves from another dimension |
[Apr. 8th, 2013|01:16 pm]
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FTL is a game where you have a spaceship (character) and you're running from a fleet of other spaceships across a set of randomized star maps (a dungeon). you travel from star system (room) to star system, where you may fight another spaceship (a monster) or have some sort of encounter (an encounter) where you choose a course of action from two or more options, some of which may also result in a fight, and you may come out of the fight or the encounter with more or less money, or more or fewer weapons, equipment, or crew than you started with. your ship is highly customizable and has multiple stations to which you can allocate energy, assign your crew, and upgrade in capability or energy capacity. you can install a panoply of weapons on your ship: quick-firing pulse lasers and slow-firing heavy lasers; missiles that ignore shields; beams that can cut across multiple areas on a ship; ion cannons that disable systems; bombs that set things on fire. things are often on fire in FTL; you can put out fires by evacuating oxygen from a room, but remember to evacuate your crew first -- they'll probably need to go to the medlab. you can order your crew around, and their skills increase depending on what you've ordered them to do. your crew may be partially or entirely composed of aliens with various special abilities. if you have a transporter installed, you can send your crew to board other ships, but other ships that have transporters can send their crew to board your ship. (I suggest luring them to your medlab and fighting while the medlab heals you.) if you have a drone station installed, you can build drones that attack the other ship or repair your own, or even fight boarders. at the end of FTL, you fight an enormous ship that's significantly more powerful than any other ship in the game, encrusted in shields and spitting out beams, missiles, and drones like pips from a very angry pomegranate. if you complete a game, or complete hidden criteria in the game, other ships and ship layouts are unlocked. if any aspect of FTL sounds at all appealing to you, it's $10 for PC, Mac OSX, and Linux, can be purchased DRM-free from the Humble Bundle store and GOG.com, and comes with a Steam key if that's the kind of thing that matters to you.
Autre Ne Veut's "Anxiety" is smooth R&B for neurotics in love: sexy, skittery, and trembling; raw and reticient; cold electronics yearning for heat. $10.50 for the MP3 album.
Sharon Lee and Steve Miller's Liaden Universe® is something it took me a while to come around to. it's a series of space opera/romance novels that's had a few publishing problems over the years -- not enough attention at Ace, absurdly ugly CGI covers at the now-defunct Meisha Merlin -- but I read a column by Jo Walton for fans of Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga looking for something else like that where they were mentioned in the comments a few times, and then a few weeks later at Second Story Books I found the relatively-new omnibus reprints from Baen, which are only Baen-ugly rather than first-season-of-Babylon 5-ugly. I hadn't realized I'd be reading about space elves, so about a paragraph in to the first omnibus, I was like, "ugh, space elves." about halfway through the first book of the first omnibus, I was like, "I LOVE YOU, SPACE ELVES." the first few books have a strong emphasis on mannerly behavior, obscure and possibly outdated cultural rituals, keeping propriety in the face of overwhelming love and desire, and that sort of thing, without so much of the kick-splode fighty-stealthy-badassery that comes in the later books. I read the four extant omnibi, ordered the three newer books that are available in paperback (I like my books to match), and am eagerly awaiting more. across the sixteen-odd books in the series there's linguistics, math, physics, comedies of errors, tragic loss, scheming, scholarship, sorcery, and lots of eating. they scratch my Vorkosigan itch pretty darn good. (EDIT: OH SHIT SON, the first book of the series, Agent of Change, of the most recent arc in the series, Fledgling, are part of the Baen Free Library!)
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/738846.html. |
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| a late reaction, in which I break down a joke and why it was wrong for The Onion to make it |
[Feb. 25th, 2013|12:29 pm]
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to the Onion twitter account:
baby, I know you just wanted to make deserved sport of the shallow parasites who feed off the oily blood of the entertainment-industrial complex, but when you do it by calling a nine year old black girl a cunt, all you did was belly up to the vein with the rest of the parasites.
because the problem with calling a nine year old black girl a cunt in the fictional persona of “the kind of person who would call a nine year old black girl a cunt” is that people are going to miss that you’re speaking in the voice of a fictional persona and they’ll just assume you are the kind of person who would call a nine year old black girl a cunt.
and they’ll have every right to assume this, because those are the words you used.
in the interests of full disclosure: I saw the joke, and I winced but also I laughed, because my privilege, and yours, is such that we can see who the joke was really supposed to hit and ignore any collateral damage.
because a nine year old black girl is an acceptable casualty to white people like you and me.
comedy, like all art, should comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. and regardless of context or intent, there’s always the danger of further afflicting the afflicted and not making a single scratch on the shiny finish of the comfortable.
which is what you did.
and don’t for one minute think that people didn’t get the joke. people got it. everyone knows the point of the joke was to mock the kind of people who will say any damn thing about any damn body just to get exposure. and to make the joke, you said any damn thing about a nine year old black girl.
but for future reference: if you can’t mock sexism and racism in the entertainment-industrial complex, or anywhere else, without using a nine year old black girl to do it, then the joke doesn’t work and you need to leave it on the floor and write a new one.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/738636.html. |
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| end of day 1/26/2013 |
[Jan. 27th, 2013|07:06 am]
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got a response from Charlie Stross on that last entry, that was kinda cool. Charlie, like any good sysadmin, disputes the idea that laziness is harmful and advocates automation of boring or repetitive tasks, so to clarify: I think replacing work with a very small shell script -- or a very large robot -- isn't laziness so much as front-loading the work, which is different from not doing the work at all.
I love kludging solutions. this one time at my old job, I had a customer whose Apache instance would crash every day at 12:03 Eastern. nobody could figure out why -- there were no log messages indicating a reason for the crash, and the server had plenty of memory, both physical and virtual. the solutions provided by the NOC lead were to either replace the box entirely or keep restarting the process when it crashed. so I wrote a tiny script to check whether or not Apache was running, and if not, to restart it. then I added a cron job to run the script once a minute. we never saw that alarm again.
I'm pretty sure anyone who's done sysadmin work has a similar story, or will have one, eventually.
I'm working on a project involving a vintage gaming magazine that I acquired a complete run of over the past year or so where I re-read it and do a bunch of crazy research and tell you about it in such a way that it's interesting, or at least entertaining, to people who aren't amateur rpg anthro-archeo-sociologist-documentarians. great, my niche of the hobby has a name now.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/738531.html. |
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| end of day 1/25/2013 |
[Jan. 25th, 2013|10:27 pm]
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got out of bed at six and was only ten minutes late to work.
had my first monthly one-on-one meeting with my manager in about six months. I've been falling down a little, so the meeting was not quite at the come-to-jesus level yet, but there was plenty of beginning-of-year talk about goals and projects and what-do-you-think-we-needs and...
one of the most harmful memes in our culture is the one that says we must all reach the pinnacle of our personal and professional potential. every individual has to exceed expectations, every team has to win every time. every metric must be blown past, to be replaced with an even higher metric.
for all of my thirty-five years I've been told I could do incredible things if only I would apply myself. but the people telling me this almost always want me to do things I don't care about, usually to their benefit, so I find it hard to trust their predictions. and frankly, if I haven't managed to apply myself even fractionally to something I love yet, it's going to be nigh on impossible to apply myself fully to something I only do so I can, on occasion, do the things I love.
dear employers: not everyone wants to be a superhero rockstar ballerina dinosaur. not everyone strives for that Employee of the Month plaque or other meaningless scattering of pennies from your bulging pockets. some people are just here for the paycheck. as long as a worker isn't repeatedly inducing states of cascade failure, I don't see a problem in letting growth and development occur naturally, as needs arise, if it occurs at all. laziness is harmful, of course, and not doing your job and expecting to be rewarded for it is foolish, but a disinterest in professional excellence is no sin in a sane society.
oh yeah. that.
This entry was originally posted at http://mark-argent.dreamwidth.org/738223.html. |
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