Tag Archives | muse fodder

Now THAT’s Some Pretty Chainmail…

Posted on April 10, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

made by Todd Lockwood

Made by Todd Lockwood, found via Women Fighters In Reasonable Armour.

This is actually quite a bit like I imagine the armour worn by Cassidi Whitefur and her White Guard: Silvery, flowing and very light. The huge difference is, Trarr don’t use leaf-motives, they go for claws, teeth, the moon and the snaky-dot symbol that signifies Chalcara. And well, they don’t use chainmail as material, but some woven kevlar-type Spider-silk stuff. Which works much better against bullets and guns.

Hm. I still have to suss out how the Trarr would protect and armour their tails. Suggestions for that? How would you put armour onto what’s bascially a boa constrictor growing out of your butt?

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Concepts Of Self In Different Cultures.

Posted on February 23, 2012 in Thoughts & Musings

In traditional Haitian culture, there is no direct equivalent of the mind. The self is made up of a three components. The corps cadavre is the physical body; the ti-bon anj or ‘little good angel’ loosely represents what we would consider as agency, awareness and memory; while the gwo bon anj or the ‘big good angel’ is the animating principle that manages motivation and movement.

“The mind is a guess” via mindhack

Cultured Bias is in the oddest places.

I have to freely admit,  I’ve never thought about the fact that our body-mind dichtomy is actually a cultural artefact, I just took it as given. I mean, intellectually I knew that there must’ve been differences, but still… It’s very interesting to see how different the answers to the age old question of “what is self” actually is and that those answers greatly influence a culture.

I’ve covered the self-soul dichtomy1 in my worldbuilding for ToC, but I didn’t even think about questioning what definition of “self” the Trarr have.

Gotta fix that. Can’t let such a juicy bit of worldbuilding just laying around.

Anyway, “The mind is a guess” is a short column, but worth a read.

Footnotes:

  1. Trarr don’t believe in an incorruptable soul, but in an “ahma”, the echo their lives leave in the halls ↩
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Boobplate, no boobplate and Skyrim got it right.

Posted on December 16, 2011 in Thoughts & Musings

This is an armourer’s take on it -  good article, plus, it gave you that wonderful equation above.

 

If you need some good example for realistic female armour (in case you feel the need to differ armour between the sexes) go, check out Skyrim. That’s something it did really, really well.

 

All the ladys 1, look definitivly female but still badass and, most importantly, their armour looks as if it indeed does protect their important bits. Frankly, it’s a good thing Skyrim this right. The game is going for utmost realismn on the armour and graphic front, and boobplate woulda pulled people out.

Incidientially, another thing Skyrim does well is maintainging fair and interesting relationship between the sexes despite being set in a classic, high fantasy mediavial/greek/nordic society. Skyrim basically is the poster child for Rated M for manly, where proud vikings wrestle polar bears, and yet it manages to have heaps of respectful treated women, who are genuily complex characters2 and actually do something.

I can’t help but feel that those two things are related.

Footnotes:

  1. Including my thieves guild armour wearing, firebreathing, dragon-slaying kitty lady, although, now that I play on maximal difficulty, the dragons tend to slay HER ↩
  2. I am particular fond of Legate Rikke (General Tullius Second in Command) and Igrod Ravencrone (the jarl of Morthal) ↩
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Guess which Video Game series I am lately obsessed with?

Posted on October 30, 2011 in Adventures in Video Games

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHseWNr7iKk

 

Just with the difference that my Shephard ain’t generic, white, male spacemarine #19, but a fiesty lady redhead.

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Flashes of Memories, Inspiration and Staying Power

Posted on February 15, 2011 in On Traces of Chaos, Yay, art!
Chalcara, Portrait (2006)

Chalcara (2006), art by me

Do you ever got those small, sudden memories?

For example when you smell something and suddenly remember your Grandma baking cookies on the Fourth Advent (the last Sunday before Christmas), with the churchbells ringing out there in the frozen darkness on the other side of the glittering window pane, while here in the brightly lit kitchen the fresh dough smells after cinnamon and butter and candied orange peel?

Inspirations

For me, inspiration is just like that. A sudden flash of what feels like a memory; a certain character yelling a certain phrase, a smell, an action, something special the characters do, a mood they’re in, a dead body they carry.

It sometimes happens when I’m playing a game, hearing a song – or if I read an interesting sentence or fascinating word somewhere. Or an interesting statistic. A physics formula. It could be everything.

I’ve had stories which grew out of a single news headline1 and characters who grew out of  single picture.

I’m never wanting for ideas, I’m even glad I forget one or two – see, I’ve got at least one idea for a story everyday and if you’d put me on a spot I’d come up with at least a dozen more, just gimme ten minutes or so. There even might be some good ideas among them.

Ideas are a dime a dozen; I’ll always have far more than I can write in a lifetime. The problem is to pick out the worthwhile ones, because, well, most ideas are crap eitherway.

My criteria to differ between mleh and worthwhile ideas?

Staying Power.

 

Honestly, it’s the single most important deciding factor if I will create something based on an idea or not. If the idea sticks around, if it doesn’t get replaced by other, new and shinier one, then it idea actually might be worth committing to.

It’s kinda vexing afterall to find out mid-story that the idea you fell in love with is a flaky, shallow, uninteresting thing and ultimatly unable to pull its own weight in a story.

Example time: The Birth of Chalcara

Duty, 2003

Duty (2003), art by me

Chalcara herself came to me in a picture on the right. A nameless cat-anthro person-thingy, she stood in the rain just when the sun broke through, overlooking the sea, which barely covered the destructions of an just-fought battle2. I really liked her and what little I knew about her fascinated me. So I named her after a similiar character who’d played a major role from a story I’ve been toying with for quite a few years at this point.

I called it a day and concentrated on improving my art, because I wanted to get that picture into a certain online gallery with tighter than usual quality standards and the bastards kept rejecting me, and damn them all to Molten Core, I would get that fucker in! And well, I’m nothing if not stubborn.

But the-Chally-from-the-picture never let me go. She had far more staying power than her prior incarnation.

Eventually, the Chalcara from the picture merged and finally displaced the original Chalcara3 – And the story changed to suit its new center.

It fell apart and came together again, better than before. Same themes, same basic idea, the same kitty people, but a far more interesting setting and mood. The story grew. It matured. It now had an idea with staying power at its center.

It became Traces of Chaos.

Stories need time to mature.

But Chalcara still had to change and grow a lot till she was a workable character. I trimmed some things out, built others up, did (and am still doing!) all the crap necessary to make a character pull its weight in a narration. It’s a long progress, and if I had grown bored by her, Traces of Chaos would’ve died years ago.

Part of it was to restrict Chalcara’s powers, to move her out of her position as protagonist without dimishing her impact4 and pass off some of her more… odd traits to other characters, but all in all she’s still how she fist came to be.

She’s still the strange anthro in that picture, just all grown up. Unlike the hundreds of other characters I invented Chally stuck around in my head and still manages to fascinate me.

And that’s why I am telling Traces of Chaos.

Footnotes:

  1. Like the second chapter of ToC – the original headline actually stayed in the story so far. That’s unusual – normally the inspiration seed either doesn’t show up or gets replaced by something more fitting for the setting. ↩
  2. I never managed to get the ruins right in that picture, so I left them out. Since they’re not even in the picture itself, I’ve never mentioned them before – if art needs an explenation, it ain’t doing it’s job.
    But that’s the hardest part for me, struggling with my limitations in my writing and art. It’s disheartening that I’ll never do my inspiration justice. I’ll never be able or good enough to show you what exactly I can see.
    But this is a topic for another day. ↩
  3. This is a lesson that stuck with me too. Different characters must be named differently, even if they do not share the same universe – otherwise I end up with a merger between those and that has far-reaching and often unintended effects. ↩
  4. Chally, due her sheer awesomeness, is best viewed from afar for her, yours and the story’s protection. She’s got the Vetinari problem: Spent too much time in her head and she’ll lose her badassery.
    This is why I invented Siendes as viewpoint character, who, so far, is the ONLY major character who was concieved out of necessarity – I needed a new protagonist. ↩
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