#mcgerridae

Oh I'm fine, thank you :D (It's morning in the US while I'm posting this)

@alcindora was asking me earlier whether I had taken a break between Updates, and I feel like the answer to that is an equivocal yes, yes, though not because I don't think I have anything good to say.

The trouble with making posts in which I read more than a sentence of my own writing is that in order to keep posting in that direction, I have to just write something really clunky and inane. For the posts to be worth reading they have to be sufficiently self-contained that one could imagine them sitting down to read one sentence and immediately getting to the meat of the subject matter. This is not a very interesting sentence:

This is how I feel about today's update: I feel like the update has been a bit all over the place, but I did enjoy the story's first serious conversation with Dave. I also liked the conversation with Dirk because it was nice to see Dirk's less annoying side and I was reminded of the importance of friendship. Overall, though, it is hard for me to have as much fun as I did with A4A about a week or so ago when they were talking about what they were going to do with their lives at age forty.

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The problem is that this is all just kind of flotsam and jetsam, and there is not much to say about it.

The conversation with Dirk, for instance, is a conversation rather than the sort of "meaty" story post that I'm used to posting on here. I'm reluctant to post things like that as they don't really constitute "updates" – they don't have the energy of the A4A stuff, but they're also not exactly insightful by nature either.

The post that I just made (the whole thing, not just the quoted bit) is both more "meaty" and less "informative" than usual. It's not really an attempt to say something about Homestuck in a way that other people might want to read; it's an attempt to read the passage I quoted, plus other bits from the update which have been bugging me for days, into a single post for the sake of clarity and brevity. The result is a kind of monologue about Homestuck that is, I think, pretty boring to read if one has only had a brief exposure to Homestuck and no particular reason to care about what I've been writing about.

I don't think the fact that it's boring to read means that I should avoid posting it. The point of my tumblr is that I do this stuff because it just comes out of me, and if I just channeled everything into Serious Posting, I'd have a blog with a much narrower scope. This isn't me, it's what I'm putting into me at this point in time.

(I guess the point I'm trying to make at the end is that reading this stuff is a low priority for me. There are plenty of times when A4A isn't as interesting as it usually is but I still post it anyway because I think the points it makes are important or that others will appreciate the points it makes. This is different; even when I want to read and appreciate Homestuck, reading Homestuck isn't a top priority for me. I keep talking about this so that you will not be surprised if you see me talk about Homestuck on here at irregular intervals, and not in a way that tries to be "informative" in any way. I will probably keep talking about Homestuck at irregular intervals, and will try to keep you apprised of the frequency of these intervals.)

To conclude, I guess I didn't explain that well. This really is just a post where I read Homestuck's A4A and quoted a few sentences for the sake of brevity and clarity.

Depends on how you define "planet."

There was a time when "planet" meant a roundish mass of rock and gas in a distant solar system that's big and cold and might have life (although it was probably too big to be geologically active).

In this sense Venus/Earth/Mars are all planets, but I also like some of the moons of Jupiter/Saturn and Titan, and a couple of the moons of Uranus are cool too.

This definition is actually not that different from the one astronomers use for planet Pluto, except Pluto is also treated as a planet because it's round and was originally classified as a planet. The same goes (not quite) for the asteroids and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

But once the idea took hold that non-round planets (e.g. Quel'ta/Eris) weren't (necessarily) planets, you run into the danger of defining out whole solar systems, so it becomes harder for me to think of the idea as anything other than arbitrary.

Nowadays people define a planet in a weird different way, as being the heaviest body, excluding the sun, that itself can't sustain nuclear fusion, i.e. it's not like we decided Pluto was a planet or found new planets. This definition is a lot more arbitrary than the "roundish mass of rock and gas" one, because there's nothing magic about the sun.

However, the reason we talk about planets at all is because they might capture other bodies into orbits around them, where the presence of other bodies with mass is necessary for nuclear fusion to happen. So now we don't talk about the sun as a planet, but we still treat the Earth as a planet, for historical reasons that have nothing to do with the classical definition of a planet.

In this sense the Earth is a "planet" (even though it's spinning and orbiting the sun), but the dwarf planets Ceres, Pluto, Makemake, and Eris aren't as planets. You could easily argue that the sun is a planet under this definition, but I think it isn't.

(Technically the dwarf planet "Eris" is only 590 miles in diameter, but it's bigger than the asteroid Vesta, which is 377 miles across, so Eris is bigger than two-and-a-half Vesta's.)

I haven't thought much about it, but a fantasy version of HS seems like the kind of thing that could be interesting (there have already been a few games along those lines, I think, although I've only seen the odd one). For instance, we'll have the ability to play as any character, but it will be harder for players to "cheat" by choosing characters whose stats are just about what they want (I'll call these "perfect fits" because it makes the metaphor obvious, even though in many cases that's not true). As a result, players will have to really think about what they need and make choices that aren't perfect fits, which would mean that the characters they choose won't necessarily be perfect fits from a game design/storytelling standpoint.

And if there are players who actually want "impossible" stories that have to involve hard choices, they may have to choose "unfitting" characters (at least at the beginning of the game). This is the kind of scenario that I think would really get people thinking; it's a game that you play with tradeoffs, which is very different from a lot of what is commonly done in video games these days.

My ideal feature set (for a fantasy game) would include

all of the characters are different from each other, more than you get in typical RPGs

all of the characters have their own personal set of stats (strength, constitution etc.) that matter to them and which are always used

a fairly complex set of stats that are important from the outset

as many stats as possible, so people can specialize if they want to

as many stats as possible, so that people can track the impact of their decisions

no mandatory "unmovable" objects that are standing in the way of the story, like the Final Fantasy 6 cast

the game doesn't penalize you for trying to use "unfitting" characters

My current idea is that you get to choose a "suit" of characters or "gadget" (I haven't decided exactly what these will be called) that you "fit" to the story by choosing a set of stats that you think would be appropriate. If you choose an inappropriate one, you'll be "repurposed" down certain pathways in the story system, which will affect the story in some way, but you'll still be able to play along a "permadeath" branch if you want to.