Coral

Peggy
September 15, 2014

We are coral reefs.

We secrete these structures of calcium. We live within and upon them.

We pull against these structures to move them about.

It's a pretty good gig. It's luxurious enough that we can afford to blow a significant chunk of our energy on a knot of coral that just talks to itself. And comes up with ways for us to pull against our calcium structures to make the world around us even more luxurious for us.

Or at least that's the way I like to look at my body sometimes. (Yes, I know we are not descended from coral. It sounds a lot prettier than “colonies of cells”.

changes

Peggy
September 11, 2014

Starting to experiment with contact lenses is having interesting effects: I’m starting to feel like I want to move my style around a little… and I feel like it may be time to get my nipples pierced.

The latter is probably a really bad idea on the week before three back-to-back conventions*. But I’m dropping this here to make it easy to remember ‘hey how long have I been thinking I want my nipples pierced again?’ if it’s still sticking around after cons are done.

I dunno. Seeing myself in the mirror without glasses for the first time in something like twenty years is subtly powerful. The last time I wore contacts with any regularity, I was still Paul. Now I’m Peggy, and I’ve worn glasses for the entire time I’ve worn that identity. It is also possible that I’m having a subtle reversion to Who I Was When I Was In My Early 20s due to this change in the apparent shape of my face, and now want to act like a Young Adult instead of a crazy fortysomething lady…

* Rose City Comic Con, Rainfurrest, and APE, if you happen to be attending any of those.

oh boy, another deadline!

Peggy
September 10, 2014

A while back I sent this little comic about postfurry spider babes to this call for submissions and forgot about it.

They just wrote back. I now need to write “an artist statement on your work and this comic in particular of no more than 500 words, by Oct. 3, 2014”.

It’s kinda tempting to just reply with one of the little bits of microfiction I wrote about the asteroid spiders, but I wrote something in normal English instead. (And while I was looking at those old stories I did some slight edits to fix a few places where my prose got way too packed. I still want to do The Spider Show someday, and probably manifest it as an artbook too – about a dozen large, detailed images, and a similar number of pieces of evocative microfiction.)

convenience

Peggy
September 8, 2014

While reading some critical essays on the women of the Discworld, I was struck by an urge: I would like to re-read Discworld. All forty books of it. In publication order.

I could probably get them all for free with a minimum of searching. Hell, I might even have them sitting around my computer. And arguably I would not be making any major moral mis-steps by doing this, as I used to own copies of them, purchased one by one as they were written. But it’s not without its toll; I’d have to trawl through various sites that are more interested in serving up ads and viruses, or guiding me to pay memberships, than they are with spreading culture. And the files I’d acquire that way would be of dubious quality – they might be copies of the official e-books, or they might be a badly-OCRed scan of the book, with pages missing, and probably no cover image.

I could also probably get them all as used paperbacks without any significant searching. But I’m loathe to carry physical books on the plane now that I have the iPad; I read fast, and I have no desire to return to humping six or seven books around in my bag just to make sure I have sufficient things to amuse myself during the flight. (I’ve tried to draw on the flight, but laptop plus wacom tablet takes up more space than I can routinely expect to have, and then of course there’s the lack of oxygen as well.)

Or I could spend six bucks apiece on Amazon and be done with it. I like that plan. The time I’d spend hunting down good copies feels worth that.

My time has value to me. Truly, I am an adult now.

The Circle of Life

Peggy
September 8, 2014

Another fall begins in the University District, bringing with it new upstairs neighbors who have never lived in an apartment building before and need to be politely reminded that there is a bedroom right beneath them and can they please be so kind as to refrain from playing dance music at 2AM.

They look younger every year.

(I always try to be as chill about this as possible. It is my hope to never be that cranky old bitch downstairs.)

The Seduction of the Glorious Self-Defence Force

Peggy
September 5, 2014

thumbnail – click for glorious full size.

Illustration for an article a friend wrote about a Japanese video game where you collect and marry war machines. Read it here.

He suggested that the end result might be better if I did not dig up images of the actual game before drawing this, and I think it was the right choice – my drawings of Cute Lady War Machines ended up a lot crazier than the actual game art.

noticing a skill

Peggy
September 1, 2014

Today I wandered down to “Seattle Indy Expo”, which was basically ‘some local devs who couldn’t get into PAX putting on a n event near PAX’. There were several competitive multiplayer games. I tried a few.

Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.

I guess this is what happens when you play video games for like thirty years, and never try competitive multiplayer stuff except in game genres you never play – I mean, try to get me to play Smash Bros and I’m just lost, because I don’t have much Fighting Game skill.

noticing a skill

Peggy
September 1, 2014

Within two or three rounds, I was beating the pants off of everyone who was not a developer of the game I was playing. I feel like I have discovered a skill I didn’t know I had.

riffing on games

Peggy
September 1, 2014

Idle thoughts towards a Paradroid clone that preserves some of what I like about the game. Mostly inspired by Puppygames’ Droid Assault, which does not.

More realistic art: each droid class has a different unifying color scheme, to aid in quick tactical decisions. “Oh shit this 400 class droid is about to reject me, and all I see is 7/8/9… oh YES there’s a 200.”

I think I would make the fog of war more obvious: render unseen areas in a more schematic view. Like Monaco. Make it VERY OBVIOUS that you can’t see enemy droids because they’re Out Of View.

TWIN-STICK SHOOTER.

Must have a transfer game. Every single damn clone of Paradroid drops it. Having this separate little thing to master was part of the fun; being able to take over the 999 with the 001 is totally An Achievement that should go into your virtual trophy case.

Randomly-generated ships? Paradroid the Roguelike. Or not – design different decks to present a different kind of mood.

It’s definitely a game set in a Place rather than a series of Levels – you can stealth your way to the command deck and take over the 999 as your first action, if you want.

Oh hey look here’s an arena shooter that comes as source with Unity. Well that’s a good chunk of the basic work then.

Ramp the reflex up: some bots should be total bulletstorm. (Adaptive difficulty: alert level determines power level of bots. Or is there an explicit EASY/NORMAL/BULLETSTORM difficulty setting?)

Visual style: as much flat color as possible. Possibly every object has 3 colors, white/midtone/dark, as per its droid class? Similarly, each level has its own hyper-limited palette applied to the standard tiles.

(Maybe a 4th accent color that shows you where the droid is in its class? ie, a 304 has some of the colors of a 2xx, while a 389 has some of the colors of a 4x?)

Button to turn on ID numbers above droids?

Lights? Would add cast shadows as a way to notice other droids.

Smart-bomb: you emit a bulletstorm, at the cost of a dramatic amount of your host’s energy. You probably can’t do it at all on low-power droids. Maybe one-shot energy tank pickups?

Is upgrading your host/yourself possible? I want to say no. The heart of the game is “get better equipment by transferring”.

Each droid has a sentience rating. At the end of the game you are told how many droids you killed, and what their combined total human equivalent was. You do not get points or achievements for this. You just know.

Hmm. Narrative: what if the droids are just going ‘fuck this war thing’? There could be the odd NOT A GUN moment. Some ‘bosses’ are heavily armored, and try to reason with you before opening a can of whoop-ass. You can join them at which point the game ends with a cinematic of the fleet flying off into the unknown. (If I am insane enough to do a sequel, this is what it assumes you chose…)

(There is an achievement for choosing the ‘be loyal to your human masters’ ending, and an achievement for choosing the ‘be loyal to your fellow software people’. They are both called “Loyalist”.)

Some terminals have extra features… if you can win the hacking game with them. It’s the same game as taking over a droid, less is more. Lock all doors. Change alert level. View security cameras. Also basics like ‘ship map’ and ‘droid database’.

There are places only small bots, and only hovering bots, can go.

You do not gain allies. This is single infiltration, not squad combat.

Hacking game. Research existing ones.
Paradroid
Neuromancer
Bioshock (and its sequels?)
Uplink?
Oddly enough, not Hacker.
Invisible, Inc.
System Shock 2
Ratchet and Clank?

the dream of the Realm of the King

Peggy
August 30, 2014

This morning, I dreamed I was reading a book. It was full of gorgeous full-bleed illustrations of techno-mesoamerican-hindu architecture floating in the sky. Everything was rendered in a palette of deep, saturated brown, an intense turquoise, and a golden yellow. It was all supposedly drawn by Jack Kirby, but didn’t have any of his signature handling of black – it was all flat color without lines. Each illustration had a small bit of text laid over it Like a quarter of the page, I think.

Then I was interrupted by a small dark-skinned child, who asked me what I was reading. I started to explain it, then decided to show it to him, but as I flipped through the book all I got were pages full of text. They were in the same colors, with the page in the blue, and the text in the brown, with occasional use of the yellow in bold for emphasis.

It very much felt like a glimpse into Kirby’s version of Vallhalla, to be honest.

Edit. I decided to spend some time drawing that. I kinda got lost in filling in the text instead of drawing the city; I may come back and add more to the city. The composition is straight out of my dream; the text is me basically googling a bunch of Aztec randomness and asking myself “What would Kirby do with these elements?”.

I am not going to start writing this as an illustrated story. I hope.

I will however note that I figure “Ixtab” totally dresses like a superhero. And is ultimately possessed of some sort of reality-bending power that makes the whole story vanish up its own asshole. Seems about right for something I half-remember from a dream.