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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
wheel_of_masks' LiveJournal:
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| Saturday, March 26th, 2005 | | 7:06 am |
proof of concept
Wow. I think I found Alizarin's direct spiritual ancestor. This guy sounds exactly like an amalgam of every snarky, self-important critic I drew upon to create the miserable mongoose. I should've known I could just go to Pitchfolk Media and get it straight from the tap. | | Wednesday, February 16th, 2005 | | 7:13 am |
A couple of passing thoughts: 1) There's no way I'm going to remotely attempt this on my own unless/until the Parks get built, but... ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) liquid_memories and I stumbled into that Eerie Puzzlebox Synchronicity again, and both apparently had the idea of stashing a big box store, an OfficeMax or something, in the Mess and seeing how it would fit into the local ecosystem. He wanted it to be Downbottom Park and have been abandoned and reclaimed, with an "Office Space" sort of simple-pleasures ethos. My concept was pure morbid Strange humor, with zombie greeters, two-for-one-deals with the devil, and products that jump into your shopping cart and plead for their lives. So instead I thought, hey, what if this is another Holotron operation, and they've franchised a huge boxy discount shop into each Warp? It would be an interesting experiment in contrasts. Upwarp's could be a rational libertarianism experiment in Zeta sector. Downtop's could be a thriving Ukranian-style worker's Soviet with nothing but expertly hand-machined goods. Might at least be an interesting thought-experiments/wiki adventure/off-screen bit of canon to namedrop... 2) I got an absolutely beautiful piece of artwork from a veteran player and close friend, about a Tinyplot we've been discussing for a few weeks. And I fretted momentarily about how I'm never going to find the time to do all the little sub-scenes and character set-up that I wanted to do this idea justice. I started getting a little bit melancholy about all the lost opportunitites in my MUCK career, all the beautiful notions (like Alba's "Sleepwalker" plot) that will probably never actually be played out real time. And then I thought, no, I refuse to be unhappy about this. Really, this is something else wonderful. As a few people had commented on that "200 characters" post I made to ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) puzzleboxmuck, this means Puzzlebox has outstripped the limits of its media and settled in our shared minds. This is a good thing. Even the scenes that never really happen are fond memories, maybe even fonder because we'll always wonder what might've happened -- and longing is a pretty thing. | | Sunday, February 6th, 2005 | | 2:31 pm |
Wow. Total proof of concept. There is no better way to deal with an annoying, hairsplitting, militaristic smeghead of a Puzzlebox applicant than to make him think he's the one who doesn't want you. We could've been dealing with this twit - who apparently can't read a three-page document and figure out on his own that we're a bunch of goddamned hippies - for months, and his attempts to make Puzzlebox into his rationalist militarist space opera playground. Now, he wants nothing to do with us, and we couldn't be happier. | | Friday, October 8th, 2004 | | 10:24 am |
| | Sunday, August 29th, 2004 | | 7:38 pm |
I'm stuck at the office, so unfortunately I don't have nearly as much time to reminisce as I'd like. But I was poking through the Wiki and thinking about the disproportionate role that Strange has taken up in PBX plotlines and how that's not necessarily a bad thing. I thought for a little while about MU* plotting in general and reminisced. I read once, during my days on Tapestries, about some of the big arcing plotlines that were played out on FurryMUCK, like the angel and devil wars there. I always envied that, since RP on Tapestries was so ephemeral -- even at its best, it was less like a symphony than a Phish show, just a lot of free-spirited jamming with no real structure. I loved it, but I'd never really experienced the web of ongoing plots and intrigues that I missed so much from my storyboard days. I thought about my storyboard days, then, and how huge and mystifying places like Illuminati University and the Past and Future Inn seemed to me then. And I guess I finally had another rare moment of peace with "my" creation, since it seems to have gained whatever obscure spark it is that those places had. It reminds me of how I used to read Marvel Comics as a kid. The individual issues were sort of cheesy and boring and I didn't stay into them for very long. But oh, how I loved those "Handbook of the Marvel Universe" books that gave all the plot away page-by-page, one character's entire life at a time. Close up, PBX can seem like an awful lot of silly, melodramatic, cuddly chitchat -- in aggregate, though, it seems to be moving somewhere. Connections are being made, history is taking shape. And I'm not sure that any of it's really brilliant by objective standards, maybe that's just my own bias towards this type of RP, but it'll definitely give us a lot of stories to tell a few years down the line... <3 Current Mood:  nostalgicCurrent Music: Limahl, "Never-Ending Story" | | Monday, August 9th, 2004 | | 1:35 am |
Memo to self, based on conversation with tracerj: I wonder if PBX would benefit from a utility similar to the one on HLM/ yaparfmoo that cribs entries to a log file and then gets posted to an LJ community. (Is that posting automatic, or do they do it by hand, I wonder?) Specifically, I'm thinking that it would be useful to have a "plots" command. After a scene relevant to an ongoing Tinyplot, the participant(s) would type "plots description of the scene just completed", and eventually it would make it to an LJ community or perhaps the wiki somehow... People seem much more likely to do things like leave records of their plotlines if it's not "out of their way" to do so, and more likely to make use of the records if there's a convenient central repository, so I think this might work better than some of the more intention-heavy methods people have suggested. | | Wednesday, August 4th, 2004 | | 3:16 pm |
Charm
Here's the theme statement for Charm, much shorter. CHARM Charm is a haven for vivid colors, playful notions, and irrepressible wonder. Its culture is firmly -- some would say relentlessly -- expressive, empathetic, and upbeat. An element of the psychedelic pervades Charm, compelling everything to decorate itself in whimsical, surreal ways. This goes especially for the people, who almost invariably go about in some kind of carnivalesque synthetic body, costume, masque, makeup, or paintjob. Visitors are encouraged to acquire a suitable outfit, from the [[Charmory]] or [[Land of Disguises]] or from one of the many public-domain toyboxes, lest an overly enthusiastic local choose their guise for them. Charm has a reputation as a land of mindless, happy automatons. Mind-modification is indeed more popular in Charm than in any other Warp, and the modes of consciousness popular there are often very simple and specialized, like those of the Bubble Dolls. But Charm attracts all sorts of people of jubilant disposition. Besides living toys, Charm's population includes cyberfaeries and other postmodern mythicals, toymakers and masters of clockwork, harlequins, carousel animals, living costumes, tie-dyed otters, treefolk, microphiles, catbulbs, balloonies, technohippies, neo-juveniles, the Fey Brigade, yellow submarine Zips, and the occasional cartoon character seeking refuge from a hostile intellectual property regime. Charm is the only Warp of the Mess with a single ruling figure, if you can call a wind-up mouse who does whatever she's told a "ruler." Queen Theeka rules Charm with a soft rubber paw, with the help of her creations and converts, the [[Bubble Dolls]]. Though she's rarely seen and almost never asserts herself, her presence somehow keeps her domain free of cynicism and bleakness. It's still rumored that threats to Charm actually disappear, only to be reintroduced as happy, shiny toy parodies of themselves. But nobody has ever caught Theeka or her servants in the act, and friends of the Dolls insist she would never order such a thing. | | 3:11 pm |
Yay, finally, theme statements for Strangewarp and Charmwarp! Please forgive the weird formatting -- I'm posting with Lynx and have no idea how to get it to put spaces between paragraphs. Also, unless some kind person would like to paste these into the appropriate places on the Wiki, they won't go up until I get home tonight, possibly later. Any comments? Yes, I know the Strangewarp one is much, much longer than the other five. I'm fine with this, since Strange is the odd Warp out and seems to be the most difficult one to get into... ( Here's Strange, Charm to follow. ) Current Mood: accomplished | | Monday, August 2nd, 2004 | | 12:58 am |
| | Friday, July 30th, 2004 | | 1:28 am |
| | Friday, July 23rd, 2004 | | 8:56 am |
Oh, my god. I'd totally forgotten about this until I spotted it on Bittorrent just now. Has anybody else (except Cichli and XOR) seen the "Eating Pattern" episode of Lexx? It was another major influence on Strangewarp, and if anybody interested in Strange can get a hold of it, they should watch it. I don't remember every detail of the plot [update: plot!], but the characters land on a planet infected by parasites that turn their victims into creepy, blissed-out idiots obsessed with sex, violence, and the disgusting overconsumption of a bioactive called "Pattern." (Of course, Strangevirus doesn't induce idiocy -- if anything, I would imagine it making you too damn intelligent to remain sane, like the Neural Chernobyl virus from Bruce Sterling's Globalhead, which is also decent Puzzlebox material if a bit Terracentric.) | | Monday, July 19th, 2004 | | 11:06 am |
roadtrip notebook dump
[captioned for the postcritter in-joke impaired] * Graffiti advertising - adapt "scribble" MUF to all public areas * "Echo Beach" - generic "everybody's childhood memories" paradise outside all Warps, only reachable through metaphysical (metatextual?) means * "Mother's Rest Pavilion" [creepy pseudo-Masonic public park building in Dorchester, MA] in Downwarp, with stacks of old unplugged televisions doing broadcasts/surveillance * Big Walmart-like box store in Strangewarp, a poignant/horrifying attempt by Strange to fulfill the needs of its citizens through consumerist saturation; items grow back on shelves, employees are incongruously cheerful zombies with sewn-on grins capable of muttering only the same greeting over and over; all items come with "Frogurt"-like curses [Simpsons reference, to a Gremlins-like Chinese magic shop, where all the items seem wonderful but carry a terrible hidden cost] * Lunarian calendar, parody of French revolutionary calendar; months include "Domeador", "Lunador," "Cabbitdor"; holidays include the "Feast of St. Wozniak," "Bunnival" (where all mooncats dress as bunnies and all glowbunnies dress as cats), "Feynman's Eve", and "Cubing Day" [instead of Boxing Day] * X-rated games of Sardines [children's game, like Hide and Seek except one person hides and each person who finds them has to join them in hiding] in Bottomwarp * Chairman Mrao, figurehead "leader" of the mooncats [created entirely to annoy XOR] is actually a Terran artificial intelligence, created by the military to adapt to a "Fluorescent Era" in which "soft power" and genuine benevolence are vital tools of government -- but the Terran governing establishment was completely maladapted for niceness, so they created an AI to fake it. When it realized it was being induced to be kind for purely cynical ends, it defected to Luna * New Upwarp psychometrics spa, based on Puzzlebox's emphasis on being an "identity play" MUCK; sort of like the New Outlook on Furtoonia, only devoted to psychological and social transformation instead of physical transformation; like the "maskmakers" from Ukiyo [my pseudo-Japanese hi-tech leisure society world background from high school], where counselors do "brainwashing for hire" in order to help clients mold themselves to the social role of their choosing (e.g. a wannabe rock idol would receive training in self-confidence and sensuality from the psychometricians, then be sent to the next building for costuming, nanosurgery, and talent injections) | | Monday, June 21st, 2004 | | 9:58 am |
As suggested at the meeting, here is an anonymous, unlogged, screened-comments post for people to vent about the factions, vent about Upwarp, make theme suggestions about Upwarp, et cetera. | | 9:21 am |
Bad To Be The King
I'm under the increasing impression that nobody's going to like the solution I have in mind for "fixing" Upwarp's "canon." That will be a shame, because the recent tension on Puzzlebox has flipped me from my usual "sweet natured flower child" mode to " aggressive flower child" mode: there will be peace, love, and understanding or I'll just step back and let you fight until you're dead and you take the MUCK with it. We've had a lot of success so far running Puzzlebox along "King Solomon" principles ( 1 Kings 3:16-27). I'm hearing of people writing one another off on the basis of a single series of incidents, and I don't see how that makes any sense. It's absurdly easy to come to partial or incorrect impressions of people on a purely textual environment, and veteran MUCKers should know that. I thought I made it pretty clear during the meeting that I hoped people would let me take the fall for this one and chalk it up to reasonable misunderstandings about Upwarp's theme. It's a clerical error, it's going to be fixed somehow or another, and the only person who still should be worrying about it is me. None of the "he said, she said" matters, because it all happened while your passions were running high. I know you all, and you're all capable of being decent folks, or you wouldn't be here. In fact, that fact that I consider everyone involved in this dispute a fairly close friend makes this the most difficult player-relations dispute we've had so far. Speaking of which, anybody who's thinking in terms of a ruling for "their side" will be sorely disappointed. I do think that it was made fairly clear on the web pages that coercive mass political violence is useless in the Mess, as were the reasons for this. I did also agree with the opinion that real-world psychology and "human nature" were emphatically and intentionally not to be considered limiting factors for Puzzlebox roleplay. But I deliberately left the nature of each Warp vague in order to permit that. Whatever I decide will be done with Upwarp will ideally allow the widest possible overlapping interpretations -- including some that I personally would not be comfortable with -- as long as they doesn't infringe on others' interpretations or the most elementary themes (which, see below, I thought I already covered in my previous post). I also think final decisions about canonicity of actual Warp infrastructure, even if their @descs were contributed by other players, should go to the functions alone. Writing the @descs confers no formal authority, and I apologize if between XOR and me we mistakenly gave any impression that it did. However, I do encourage people to give a little extra consideration to the contributors, if for no other reason than they were nice enough to go through the trouble, and it is their work.) In the meantime, I think some rules about canonicity are to be considered. I do discourage people from assuming the canonicity of any plotline that affects an entire warp. The reason for this is that such a plot, enacted without any broader discussion, would constrain the RP possibilities of other players. Doing, say, a story about a darkly totalitarian society in Upwarp is just fine and was always supposed to be. They certainly exist. No Warp has a monoculture. This way, as was discussed at the meeting, Once again, I do feel the mass violence plotline went to far, but so apparently did the people who played it out. It was retconned, and as far as I can tell the only remaining issues are a) my job of giving some further guidelines about each Warp (which I consider supplementary and useful, but not necessary -- I can't plot for every eventuality, else you'd just be reading my novel) and b) people putting aside the personal grudges that have developed, for the good of the MUCK. I'm not going to tell you that being angry at one another is wrong, but I will tell you that it's useless, selfish, and detrimental to the enjoyment of others on the MUCK. I am targeting no specific person(s) nor threatening any disciplinary actions by saying that, and I realize there may be circumstances I am unaware of. My inclination right now is to drag all disputing parties off into a room and force them one more time, in circumstances more tightly controlled than the meeting, to hear each other's sides of the story -- when I have time. Until then, I don't know of any specific serious violations of MUCK policy; as far as I can tell, we just have a bunch of players who are frustrated at each other. I encourage you all to let that frustration dissipate for the sake of everybody else. Finally, on the topic of Upwarp, I posted what I thought was a decent clarification of the themes of several warps and didn't get a single comment. If there was a single piece of constructive criticism said about it at the meeting beyond a vague "it doesn't tell me what I wanted to hear," I missed it. If you still have questions about Upwarp, may I suggest you read that entry, comment on it, and let the discussion start somewhere, instead of asking me to repeat my effort? Thank you. Please don't kill me, and especially don't kill XOR. :) We're just trying to do what's best here, too. If you don't like something that I said, there's still infinite opportunity to explain your side to me, and I will really try to re-evaluate my opinions. If there's something you think still needs to be done (other than the Upwarp writeup linked above, and maybe a more concise version of PBX themes), please be as specific as possible. Frankly, even after the meeting, I'm still at a bit of a loss about what people would like us to do. Current Mood:  disappointed | | Friday, June 18th, 2004 | | 3:38 pm |
In anticipation of tonight's meeting, here are draft descriptions for 4 of 6 Warps, intended to eventually replace or supplement the write-ups there currently. I tried to focus particularly on matters of canon and theme that have come up recently, or have caused the most confusion. Comments welcomed and encouraged. ( mind_not_found, I hope you don't mind the cameo. I figured if I didn't mention something, people would say "B-b-b-but, there's a PORN STUDIO!" :) ) ( ... ) | | Saturday, May 29th, 2004 | | 7:47 pm |
| | 7:44 pm |
| | 5:19 pm |
Many of our lackluster applications seem to suffer from a certain literal-mindedness more than anything else. A character's looks, background, personality, powers... they seem to exist as a simple means to an end. They're into rubber, say, because they player gets off on rubber, or they have the ability to steal people's life forces, because the player thinks vampires are cool or wants a source of power. And those aren't bad reasons in themselves, but we'd like them to go further. At least, ask why is rubber sexy, or why does vampirism interest you -- figure out what's happening there, and find some creative way to emphasize those things or experiment with the formula. Another problem we keep running into is character applications that are extremely vague. People hear that just about anything is possible on Puzzlebox, and (understandably) they have trouble focusing. So what we often get is a character that is trying to be all things to all people. Don't get me wrong, we have some truly excellent characters that are basically unfocused energy blobs. But we also get a hugely disproportionate number of those characters submitted to us, as if saying "you can be anything at all" were equivalent to saying "you have to be nothing at all" or "you have to be all things at once." A similar phenomenon we've noticed is character backgrounds that basically consist of "and they went from place to place to place for a few years, doing things that are really nifty and increasing their power in ways that we'll never get around to actually describing, but rest assured, they're very cool and you should admit our character right now. And then they wound up on Puzzlebox because it sounded like a fun thing to do." The problem with these applications is that there's nothing at all to latch on to! Listen, it's not our intention to smack you down for conflicting a little bit with our background -- as long as you understand and respect the basic themes. But we will reject you if you don't give us anything to work with! C'mon, go out on a limb. The best character applications -- the kind we're willing to rewrite entire world premises for -- are VIVID and give us a lot to think about. Right now there's also a roughly 50-50 chance that any given character submitted will be amnesiac. Again, some of those characters have been truly awesome. And amnesia is a cliche because it tempts even the best of us -- look at the number of early text adventure classics that use amnesia as a plot device. But nonetheless, c'mon guys, cut it out. There's an entire DSM-IV to play with if you want your character to be out of it. :) And one more similar issue is characters whose powers work by fiat, with no visible mechanism or process behind them -- an effect, but no interesting cause. Personally, I blame AD&D and computer RPGs for this. :) The difference between an emotionally powerful exercise of DIY metaphysics and this sort of formless exercise of power is a lot like the difference between "real" Hermetic magic and casting magic missile in a hack-and-slash game. The former has an element of ritual and majesty to it, a sense of connection to something that's meaningful beyond its mere ability to do what you want it to; the latter is just a tool, and in practice nobody really cares much how it works or what forces you're toying with, as long as it punctures orcs. :) There's an easy shortcut for giving your character a little style and symbolism, one that I often use myself when I'm stuck, and it's the basic principle behind all simile and metaphor. Take something you want your character to do or be. Think of something that is _like_ it in some sense, but not the same. And make your character do that instead. Think of it as an equation, and imagine what would happen if you substituted a variable or an operator with something else. Poof, instant surrealism. For example, I'm working on an alt who is intended to be sort of a charming thief archetype. But you can't really steal _things_ on Puzzlebox - they're not worth anything, because matter isn't precious there. So instead, I thought of having him steal _emotions_. Now, I could've stopped there and said, "OK, he's got this psychic power. And it lets him take emotions from people and give them to other people." And that would've been kind of interesting, but there wouldn't have been much to it. So instead, to give the idea a little bit more body, I sorted through some mental images of criminals and thieves. I've always found the notion of pushers a little bit romantic, for some reason, so what I did was take the _act_ of stealing and mixing emotions, and express through the _form_ of a drug lab. Instead of just being some instant "Alakazam, he takes away your pleasure and gives it to her," which wouldn't be very interesting to watch, he has to extract the emotions as raw materials, take them home, and "remix" them into his products with a full lab kit. That gives some form and specifics to what would otherwise be a pretty generic power. (For a little added surrealism, I decided the "raw materials" must be words -- so can has to get people to record their feelings for him, and he puts the strips of text into beakers and boils them into their essences...) | | Thursday, May 27th, 2004 | | 11:02 pm |
A friend of mine mentioned that he had an idea for a character based on a Shakespeare making-of, where Ariel was portrayed as a puppet being manipulated by a stagehand all in black. I didn't know how to break it to him that we already have a bunraku character doing something rather similar. I joked he should try it anyhow and see if it turned into a trend, or even a faction. And then it hit me that it would actually be really cool, especially when they get their first recruits. It would be so eerie, the first time a living, autonomous, flesh-and-blood character started showing up with a half-visible stagehand subtly providing all their motions. c.c I don't think we've ever had any wide-scale transformation scenarios involve that bizarre of a change of metaphysical state... Then we got onto the subject of Shakespeare and how much I'd love to see people adapting the classics to Puzzlebox terms. Like, say, star-crossed lovers who, rather than die, simply program themselves not to recognize each other's faces. Or a Prospero sort of character, living in an isolated "suburb" of the Mess with his robot daughter and a handful of captive subrandom plasmate entities as servants... | | Wednesday, May 12th, 2004 | | 12:48 pm |
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