Everything Humans Do Is Art

I suppose I'm asking if you just write a character raw or have some sort of master dossier on their personalities, histories, and [SPOILERS], or a secret third thing? How do you distil a character? Do you, or does story come first?

Maybe that just sounds like "How do you write?" or "How do you move from a concept to a formal construct?" but I've recently been alarmed by the "Created Using Generative AI" on Ao3 and I refuse to use it, even for 'structure/continuity' so while I'm at it, I thought I'd ask you about your process.

This is an interesting question and I'm not sure I fully understand it. When I build characters I don't have a specific method for organizing their traits - I don't mix up qualities between characters, I don't lose sight of who's got a dead mom vs who's got a code of honor or a lot to prove. It's not an unattributed list of character qualities in my head, it's all firmly under the umbrella of each individual character's disparate facets. They could be broken down into character reference sheets or bulletpointed bios, but I've never felt the need to do that; most of my character details are in miscellaneous notes files scattered across fifteen years of irl time.

The trouble you might be having is seeing characters as lists of qualities rather than networks of interconnected forces and consequences. A character can have a bullet-pointed list of salient character traits (strict personal code, unsociable attitude, has a cool sword) but in my experience it's more useful to consider what aspects of a character's life have shaped them and how. What things have happened to them, and how has that thing affected them, and how does it inform how they react to future things going forwars?

Complications and smaller problems are a natural consequence of your characters being characters and not just plot-executing automatons. If your characters feel too married to the plot to have non-plot wants and needs, it might be worth going into your mind-palace and asking them a few questions:

What do you do when nothing needs doing? How do you relax? CAN you relax?

How do you handle peace? Do you enjoy it? Do you trust it? Do you look for distractions, or for threats?

What would you be doing if the plot wasn't in the way? Have you ever really thought about it?

Now that things have slowed down a little, how do you feel about the stuff that just happened? Do you need to talk about it?

I'm the writer, so I know what's coming next, but you don't. What uncertainties are currently preying on your mind? Do you want to do anything to resolve them? How do you handle it if you can't?

What goals do you personally have that aren't shared with the rest of your crew? Do you have an opportunity to pursue that right now? Do you think anyone else in the crew might want to help you with that?

The camera mostly focuses on the important plot beats, but what do you do when the camera's off? What's your morning routine? What do you do for dinner? What does a Normal Day look like when the plot's not intruding?

Whatever I’m looking at or using or seeing someone else look at or use, I feel the need to understand. I like to know what’s going on inside and what can be done with it outside.

The more prevalent and in use something is, the harder it is to understand, because too much of what goes on with such things is unquestioned and presumed upon.

As a result many of those things have taken me sixty odd years to get a handle on and many I don’t really have a sense of at all.

As a writer and reader of fiction as a maker, GM, and player of RPGs and as a viewer of movies, TV shows and various other videos, I have been struggling for a long time to get a sense of what characters are.

I’ve known since I began writing that characters are not people. This can be seen by examining certain basics.

Characters speak in monologue and converse in dialogue. People don’t. If you look at a transcript of an actual human discussion, you will see little that resembles either monologue or dialogue.

People actively adjust and change what they are doing very rapidly in ways that are difficult or impossible to put into words. Characters follow paths of action until they encounter something that might alter their trajectory.

These are ideas I had forty odd years ago. I’ve done a lot of stuff involving characters since then and I’ve picked up and discarded a variety of models for what they are.

One more fact bubbled up over time that I think is vital. We don’t have problems interacting with characters at different times in their lives or when their lives are reinterpreted by different writers, actors or players. We may disagree with those reinterpretations but we mostly don’t have problems with the fact that they can be reinterpreted.

The conclusion that I came to recently is that characters are bundles of pasts treated as a unified whole.

What I mean by a bundle of pasts is a collection of things the character experienced and things they did that matter in how we think about the character and their actions. These pasts also provide the source material for foreshadowing, dramatic and comedic irony and implication and ideas for fanfic, new interpretations and, of course, argument.

These pasts include things that are presented as present or future. The present of a character is not “what they are doing” it’s “what they will have done.” The future is not what they will do, but what past is now being foreshadowed in the past that is made relative to that future.

These are not the tenses that humans experience. Our present is where/when we can take action and experience what is actually happening to us. Character presents have a distance of framing narrative and a lingering sense of something being talked about that already happened.

Note that this can be a complex overlap when roleplaying a character. The player is experiencing an actual human present, but that present is being used to generate the past the character went through after the fact.

Writers, actors, directors, players and gamemasters can all plan for a character’s future but that planning is a matter of framing a possible future as a past they might go through that might become part of their bundle of pasts.

I’m still working through the ramifications of this as they play out in the book and game I’m now working on as well as everything I’m reading and watching at the moment.

And the kids are like "but they get into our bug traps" and "we didn't catch him he followed us home"

And their parents are like. Please i do not believe that 6 fucking pixies smuggled themselves into our garage on the underside of your bicycle saddle and then set up shop in the old dolls house. These are living beings they're not toys it's not kind to treat them like this

And the kids are like we are NOT treating them like anything you said we're not allowed to trap them and they always get into our traps so we always run away when they see us and then they follow us and get inside our backpacks and stuff

And the parents are like

Stop lying!!!

And then they set up wildlife cams and not only can pixies apparently do all of that and are very desperate to hang out with these human kids (who have fun life-sized toys and are covered in wonderful things like glitter and are a free source of fresh bugs and pop tart crumbs)

But they can also like. Fully just pick locks and shit.

Never repeated, never pointed to by any other passage, not even given in an index or glossary, just secreted away in a seemingly random spot like a game of Where's Waldo in a 200+ page text.

This isn't meant to be venting, it's genuinely perplexing that an approach so specific and so counterproductive seems to happen so often. What's the deal?

Most tabletop game designers are very bad technical writers.

The Little Ice Age, 1400-1900, put Europe in a deep freeze.

And clothes got Big.

Come see 500 years - and the aftermath - of unprecedented cold and what it did to fashion!

#ArtHistory #FashionHistory #EducationalVideo

When it's cold, clothing goes Big. And the Little Ice Age, between roughly 1400 and 1900 CE, was the coldest Europe and North America had been since the start of the Holocene, nearly 12,000 years go.

It was so cold London held entire frost fairs on the ice of the Thames, multiple times. (View from the north. The old medieval London Bridge is to the left.)

Like this 1841 plate from the French magazine "Le Follet."

The original plate, from the collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, is on the left. Their collection is superb, and the plates are in excellent condition. Even so, as you can see, the paper the plate is printed on has discolored over nearly two centuries and distorted the original colors.

My attempt at digital restoration is on the right. It's not exactly an attempt at a "like new" look. I have made the paper background a purer white than it would ever have been originally, mostly for the value of seeing the colors clearly.

And when I did that a bright lavender-purple blotch in the middle of the skirt on the right figure suddenly became visible.

I don't know for certain, but I hypothesize the original dress may have been painted with a fugitive lavender pigment that has changed over time. In the mid-nineteenth century there were exciting new pigments that were sometimes adopted by painters before their fugitive nature was fully understood.

So perhaps the dress on the right was originally bright lavender and over time it slowly changed to a sort of drab pinkish-brown, except for that one blodge.

As a side note, I mostly focused on this plate because I loved the rainbow-dyed ostrich feather on the right figure's bonnet, and I had some idea of posting this for Pride Month.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?