James Baillie @JubalBarca@scholar.social

I actually lost a wordle today - I think that's only the first or second time I've ever done so (I've not been playing them regularly, though). :/

I guess maybe I'm just tired at the moment.

Trying to work on the travelogue I said I'd write. Making a little progress, but it's rather slow: I want to keep it to a bit of a theme, but also summarise my trip well, and I'm not sure I'm managing to write it in a very engaging way, partly because I don't have the mental energy to do as much research as the project wants.

And then there's also the issue that I shouldn't make it unreadably long... halp.

#writing #travel

Just saw an interesting & hopeful discussion on Australian TV regarding conservative politicians highlighting opposition to trans women in sport as a campaign wedge issue: unanimity, including from the Liberal (that is, Australian conservatives) senator present, that it had failed utterly for the Australian right wing as an electoral line and if anything had been derailing for their campaign.

Having a Sarah Jarosz sort of day music-wise:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SYIhhHSJGj8

#music

My throat tension problems have been awful in recent weeks, and it feels very weird and strained if I try to sing with any range or volume: even when the tension relaxes a bit, using my voice doesn't feel right because all the throat muscles are exhausted and strained.

Singing is really important to me having creative vents and it's useful for deal with anxiety, so having it hit so badly by a stress symptom is a real catch-22 :(

I came across this webcomic today, which is a trans Camelot story, I'm enjoying what I've read of it so far and it seems like the sort of thing a fair few Fedi people might like:

http://www.calogrenant.com

#webcomic #medieval #camelot

In The Exile Princes, I've mostly very solidly gone down the freeing-rep route: the game doesn't change significantly according to your character's gender, the romance lines work literally the same regardless (they vary according to characters' social status and personality a LOT, but gender makes minimal difference). But I wonder/worry if that sort of representation just ends up being kind of flattening by not picking up some really big specificities of other people's experiences of the world.

In the real world, societies and cultures do develop in part as a result of pressure and oppression: if you have a world that resolutely doesn't have those things, you lose some stories that are important to people.

Some fantasy creates its own oppression vectors or plays with real ones too: this can square circles by letting a writer have freeing rep for real groups while writing about analogy-oppressions, but it's easy to get wrong & be (sometimes literally) dehumanising in close analogies.

Been thinking about tensions between "experiential" and "freeing" representation in games: when do you try and make a game that says "people don't have the limitations real societies oppress them with" versus "this mirrors reality precisely so we can talk about those oppressions in this story"?

The latter can be got wrong easily & normalise oppressions in fantasy, but the former risks being hollow/not resonating with people's real reactions and cultures.

#gamedev #creativetoots #writing

I think I have about thirty "reference holes" left to fill in this thesis. Made some progress today, but that's still quite a lot. Also keep finding sections where I obviously need to fix wording or left bits not-quite-done, which is frustrating. And I'm getting more annoying tension & stress symptoms, I keep working quite late but I'm being really slow so don't know how else to keep the pace up and when I rest I just start stressing anyway?