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Anna von Hausswolff, that is all

One of the best features of the film Groundhog Day is that it doesn’t explain why Phil relives the same day over and over. No one explains to Phil/the audience “oh you did this wrong, and so you are in this purgatory until you become a better person, and this was done to you by fate/Zeus/Mr. Mxyzptlyk/whatever”. The outlines of the basic morality play are pretty clear without explanation and any exposition would ruin it. It makes sense that Phil spends time asking what this happening to him (beyond the literal description “he is reliving the same day”), but it’s good that the movie doesn’t answer.

The movie Yesterday does the same thing. One character has a bicycle accident at the same time as a nationwide blackout (iirc), and when he wakes up, he is in a world where no one else remembers the Beatles. And as a movie it doesn’t work. I think the issue here is partially that some things are under-explained (why does coca-cola also stop existing if the Beatles hadn’t existed, but Coldplay does still exist exactly as before?) but really I think it the larger issue is that you can only set aside the how questions if you are doing a good job of delivering on the why questions.

In Groundhog Day you don’t need answers to how questions because the obvious focus is on why. Why is this happening to Phil? He’s a jerk, but he doesn’t have to be. If he gets enough chances, and learns from his mistakes he can become a better person, he can connect with other people etc.

In Yesterday, what’s the point of this world where (mostly) only one person knows about the Beatles? The story isn’t about tempting him with an easy path to success; or else is would follow the beats of Faust. It’s not about whether the Beatles were right time-right place, or else you wouldn’t have everyone floored by how good the music was when he “composes” it. It’s not about integrity of the artist because he never tries to put his own music in among the Beatles stuff. The why seems to be “wouldn’t it be worse if this music weren’t around, we’d be pretty glad to have someone give it back to us” but…okay? Just make a fawning Beatles documentary then?

If you aren’t going to trace out how things might actually differ with no Beatles, then my pitch for a moderately interesting thing to do with the premise would be for the main character to be scrupulously honest, and everyone considers him to be doing a performance art bit? (Some of this is assuming you don’t get to use the music for a movie that posits people wouldn’t love it so much if it were released today). So the albums all still get released and everyone thinks he’s a weird conceptual artist who won’t drop the act. By sticking to the truth he makes his life harder, gets isolated from his friends and family, and he could start lying at any time to make things easier on himself (or just stop sharing the music). So the why question here would be about truth/honesty even when it isn’t going to work, alongside the need to share art.

Most people don't need me to tell them this, but sometimes obvious truths are worth saying.

This post brought to you by me appreciating the story "When it Changed" from "The Future is Female" volume 2.

Joanna Russ also had some super interesting contributions to this Khatru fanzine symposium, and there is a Library of America collection of her works out now, and that is probably the thing that is most challenging my one year moratorium on new book purchases at the moment.

The book club has finished reading The Future is Female (Volume 1), and started on Volume 2. I thought I'd write up a bit of a retrospective on the stories from the first volume, and some of my thoughts and reactions.

Overarching thoughts

I think reading short stories in a book club is one of the best decisions I've made.

Reading four stories at a time gives you a lot to talk about each meeting, and you can balance each story's share of the discussion a bit, in case one story or another isn't prompting much from people.
You get some built in discussion prompts from the juxtapositions of the pieces you read (strengthened or weakened by the curation of the anthology, obviously, but no matter what, you have immediate shared context for thinking about the strengths and weaknesses of the story at hand).
No matter how much you dislike a given story, it is short. Sometimes they might feel long, but you will be done with it, and have three other stories to talk about and think about that week.
It is really, really great to be going through these stories and hearing what other people are seeing in them, getting out of them, and noticing about them. The stories are so rich and have so much going on, and I would be missing so much of it if I weren't talking about them with other people.

So, this was a great decision, and I am really happy I've been reading these stories with people. I've learned a ton, and it has really deepened my appreciation of the writing, and even some stories that I was kind of meh on coming to the meeting, I left the meeting with a much deeper appreciation of.

Story Highlights

Some of the most impactful stories in the volume for me were:

The Black God's Kiss (1934) - C.L. Moore
Created He Them (1955) - Alice Eleanor Jones
Pelt (1958) - Carol Emshwiller
Baby, You Were Great (1967) - Kate Wilhelm
The Barbarian (1968) - Joanna Russ
Ninelives (1969) - Ursula K. Le Guin

These are the ones that stuck out to me because I really came away from both my own reading and the group discussion wanting to read more by the authors who wrote them. I'll say a bit more about each of them and what I liked, and then I'll talk about some of the other work in the volume.

The Black God's Kiss is an immediately compelling story (though I did spend much of the read wondering what this sword-and-sorcery story was doing in a sci-fi volume (not that I am trying to gate-keep, I just wanted to understand the choice). Part of my theory is that this Moore story was picked because of Moore's influence on Russ and on the Alyx stories in particular). The end of this story is not merely unsatisfying, but angering. Other than ending on that sour note, though, the prose is gripping and excellent, the characterization draws you in, and the worldbuilding and surreality of the magic/otherworldly spaces are so intriguing. Loving this story so much even in spite of its ending, it was no surprise I liked the later Joanna Russ story so much.

Created He Them was bleak horror, and so chilling and unsettling. Set in a the wake of nuclear conflict and dealing with severely constrained resources, Alice Eleanor Jones looks at a scene of domestic horror driven by a patriotic duty to reproduce. With subtle but highly effective hints to construct the world outside the scenes we see, and unflinching view of the horrors the protagonist faces, this story was deeply unpleasant but doing everything it sets out to do so well.

Among the stories on my highlight list, Pelt is the one that left me with the most questions. It feels Emshwiller has more of a world in mind beyond what we see here, but our access to it is limited. The perspective character is a dog accompanying a fur-poacher to a planet, and I thought the non-human narrator was done very effectively. Part of why I don't have all the answers that I want is that the protagonist and I were interested in different things, and she never went off to investigate some of the ones I was curious about. The story is richly described and thought-provoking, but I'd have the hardest time saying what this one was up to.

Baby, You Were Great felt almost prescient. It is about a woman whose experiences get recorded and re-broadcast for entertainment purposes, from the perspective of the scientist who developed the technology (and to a lesser extent the businessman who markets it). I'm very excited that I am about to read another Wilhelm story for our next meeting. I learned from other bookclub members that this is a story that gets anthologized a fair amount, and that is no surprise. It's poignant, heartbreaking, makes really good choices about where to center the narrative point-of-view (another great point raised during the book club discussion; thanks Marissa!), and of all the stories in the volume, most felt like it had captured something prophetic about the future. The premise is just a rock-solid identification of the coming wave of celebrity culture, 24 hour cable, reality TV, and general content-ification of life, and how the false promises of celebrity consume and destroy the people who get pulled into the spotlight (and how complicit the spectators are). I was watching a season of Love is Blind as I read this, so the accusations of the story felt pointed and accurate.

Joanna Russ's The Barbarian was the second time I was reading a story in the volume and wondered if maybe it was supposed to be in a fantasy anthology instead; the first being discussed above. Except this time, distinctively sci-fi elements showed up as the story progressed. Suddenly we were in a world with sword fights at taverns and people handing out quests to assassins and thieves, but also high tech machinery. The protagonist Alyx is highly reminiscent of Jirel of Joiry from Moore's stories. The story had so much of what was appealing about Moore's tale, but with the kind of added complexity and detail that the stories had been developing in general over the course of the volume from the 1930s to the 1960s. I am currently partway through a year of not buying any new books, but I immediately had put Joanna Russ on my list of authors to acquire more from when I am buying books again. And I just learned that LOA has a Joanna Russ collection out, so good thing I am waiting.

Last, I've read a lot of Le Guin before, but I'd never read her short stories. A cautionary tale about cloning, Ninelives was interesting because the story itself was compelling on my first read, and I am always on the lookout for the Taoist themes in her work, so I spotted some of those right away, but this was a great example of how intricate and detailed of things there were going on in the text, which I was missing on my own read that came out in the discussion. Points about how and when the non-clone characters were speaking Argentine or Welsh, and how that was supporting broader themes. Teasing out points about the biological similarity of the clones versus the very different upbringing they received to defuse overly simplistic readings of the text. The role of capitalist exploitation and connections to themes from Dispossessed. It's fitting that a text celebrating diversity in perspective gained so much by talking through it with other people who brought different perspectives to it.

Some other thoughts about the volume:

The Miracle of the Lily by Clare Winger Harris is the story that had some of the most interesting discussion to come out of it but is not very high on my list of stories to re-read. It's sort of emblematic, in a way of the best features of the early half of the volume: apart from a few stand out pieces: some very interesting ideas but often the science is distractingly disconnected from how we understand things now, and the prose is often a bit underwhelming. Much of this worked out really well for book club, because we could talk about the pieces and get a lot out of the discussion, but not a piece I'd want to sit down with again and read through again.

Space Episode by Lesli Perri is the piece that I misjudged the most from my read versus where I came out afterwards. I came away from my read feeling like it was a story where basically very little happened, but there was a crisis on a ship and the woman sacrificed herself to save the day. The discussion and analysis with the group revealed so much more being done in this story, and so much careful thoughtful work being done to establish various elements that I came away from the discussion with a drastically revised view of the story.

The only pieces I put below the line, really, on whether it was worth it to read once are The Conquest of Gola and Another Rib, the former was a very simple trope inversion story, and neither the prose nor the alien biology were enough to make up for that. The most interesting feature it had was that the first wave of human explorers were commercial rather than military, and attempted economic conquest prior to military conquest, but that thread wasn't explored in any interesting way either. The latter seemed like a defensible inclusion in terms of "this is reflective of some of what was being published at the time" but it was a Marion Zimmer Bradley/John Wells piece that manages to spend a lot of time on themes of gender essentialism, gay panic, and adults having sex with extraordinarily young women.

What do L. Frank Baum, P.L. Travers and JRR Tolkien have in common?

~~Poe wrote on both~~.

Writing fanfic about Hey Diddle Diddle

A mostly reality-constrained depiction of the events of "Hey Diddle Diddle"

I am going to introduce you to the single greatest genre of visual art that exists. That genre is "depictions of the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle"

Now I am sure you are thinking to yourself "surely there are artistic accomplishments that rise above this genre". Or perhaps you are thinking "come on, seriously?" But what you should be thinking is, "how many different depictions of Hey Diddle Diddle is Lewis about to share with me, and how much will my mind be blown?"

Let's start with a fairly basic version. Cartoony illustration, but nothing particularly jumps out at you. I think this is a fine baseline to start with. Compare it to this second option, though. Just take in not merely the vastly different artistic style overall, but the fairly distinct choices made by the artist. The cat is not dressed. The dish has a face and arms and legs, but the spoon is not anthropomorphized at all. In both, the Cow is not literally jumping over the moon, but still has a capacity to jump that is entirely incompatible with physics and cow musculature. In one the moon is anthropmorphized, but not the other. Appreciate, for a moment, how different the moods are for the two cats.

Please take a look at this folder full of illustrations, and consider: is the cow literally jumping over the moon? Is the cow jumping over a rising or setting moon? Is the cow jumping over the moon's reflection? Are the dish and the spoon people? How are we gendering the dish and the spoon? Why does the cat get to wear clothes so much more often than the dog? Why are there so few illustrations where the cat doesn't have the ability to hold a bow and perform fine manipulations of violin strings? Why do people have such weird views about what it means for a dog to be "little"? Maybe the fiddle is being played by a rat, technically that's consistent with the nursery rhyme. Actually, lots of things are technically consistent with this rhyme if you think about it. Questions abound.

There is a clear best dog. There are many great cats. I think there are at most three I would hang on my walls. Guesses welcome.

Dear Yuletide Letter Writer,

This is is my third time participating in Yuletide!

I am very excited, and I largely continue my trend of selecting fandoms with really, really sparse fanfic or no pre-existing fanfic whatsoever. Some of the stuff in this letter is copied verbatim from my letter last year, because my letter worked really well last year at getting me fic(s) I really enjoyed!

I am providing information to be helpful, because I've read advice on this process and I've seen that it is often helpful to be given some indications of who you are writing for and what that person would want to read, but I also know that ODAO, and that takes pressure off of me!

I had trouble formulating DNWs at first because I feel like most things I could put in a DNW could work in the right story, done in the right way, etc. etc. Also, the fandoms I was requesting do not have an abundance of fic written for them, so it is not like there are certain tropes or tendencies that I felt like are specifically overdone for those fandoms. I did sort of settle on some clearish DNWs for some of them, though (listed at the start of each fandom-specific section, below).

About Me:

I am a philosophy professor. I like to play roleplaying games and board games. I am a huge fan of the band the mountain goats. In my spare time I also like to do online puzzle hunts, and I cook/bake. I'm a big reader, and I like to watch tv (sci-fi/fantasy/spec fic, but also other stuff, for example, I have endless thoughts about the gilmore girls). I recently read the Steerswoman series and have become entirely obsessed with it. I cannot do more justice in recommending/describing its virtues than Sumana Harihareswara did here. These books are just so fantastic.

Situation Normal — Leonard Richardson

DNW: Not saying there's nothing I would get icked out by, but a lot of the things I might be tempted to put are also things that just legitimately are things you might explore as part of worldbuilding in this fic, maybe exploring the alien societies in these books in the fic takes you down that path and I don't want to constrain you: I'm gonna leave this to your discretion.

This is a book about everything going wrong six different ways. And you get some wonderful juxtapositions of alien outlooks and cultures. The Terran Outreach and the societies that make it up, and the Fist of Joy and the conglomeration of species that are hanging around composing it. Leonard Richardson comes up with such a fascinating panoply of alien races/biologies/societies, they have cool and interesting cultures and weird biology, but there is so much plot happening in the book, so you don't get to just see what else happened or is happening or will happen, or how they get on outside the context of the story that happened in the novel. It's clear that there is more of a world beyond that story, though, and I am curious about it! The Quennies cosplay religion, Jammer Readout, Uhaltihaxl religious views, the way that Brands work, or how rre behave. Even just the bureacracy of a cityship in space vs. once it has landed, these are all suggestive of so much beyond what we see on the page. It's just a lot of cool world to explore. I have no problem with seeing the characters from the novel, but I am more interested in seeing more of the world than I am attached to seeing more of any particular character.

The Tick (2017)

DNW: Explicit Sexual Content

Optional details: So much superhero media is grimdark and brooding, and I feel like The Tick (2017) managed to simultaneously comment on and subvert the trend in a way that was lighthearted enough to pierce through that grimness rather than just overwhelming you with it more (like The Boys). It has enough of the 60s batman spirit to throw the darkness on its ear, while still feeling like it is a product of the more contemporary media landscape. This is why Overkill and Dangerboat are probably my favorite part of the show (and Dot, also). Overkill is almost the avatar of the grimdark nature of superhero media, and Dangerboat is just refusing to enter the same tone or vibe as Overkill, for the most part, making the comedy work, and also undercutting all of the grimness that Overkill tries to bring to it. But the pinnacle is definitely when Overkill and Dot do the thing.

Over the Garden Wall

DNW: Sexual Content, explicit gore.

This is the largest fandom I have requested. I love Greg. I seriously considered getting a Rock Fact tattoo. I am glad that the show is completed, because I don't think it needs any more episodes, it is perfect. But also, the unknown was not fully explored. There are more weird corners of those strange woods that Wirt and Greg didn't visit. And the vibe of it is so...it's just such a vibe. So I really would love to just hear about more places like the frog ferry or the inn the animal school. I just want to bask in the vibe of that show a bit more. Don't need to have Greg and Wirt feature, really just want to know what else is out there in those woods.

Murder on Sex Island - Jo Firestone

DNW: N/A

My ideal here is some other case Luella/Marie solved prior to the one we hear about in the book? I really just love the awkard humor, competent but not suave detecting skills, and in-over-her-head style of the book. So, anything that captures that vibe would be great!

Hey Diddle Diddle

DNW: N/A.

I am going to assemble and link to all the illustrations I can find of this poem. [Edit: I could have found more, but these are the ones worth perusing.] It seems like everyone has different ideas about what's going on. But there isn't really any version of it that exactly jives with how cats, dogs, cows, dishes and spoons behave in the real world, so like, what's going on? What's the deal with this world that dishes and spoons elope? Dogs are so easily entertained? Cats are this skilled at violin? Cows have that kind of vertical leap?

En Attendant Godot | Waiting for Godot - Beckett

DNW: N/A.

What was Godot doing the whole time? We got Vladimir and Estragon's story. I just want to know what Godot was getting up to.

In Conclusion

I hope this is a helpful addition to the prompt for letting you know more about me, and my interests for the fics. I appreciate that you are willing to participate in this exchange, and I can't wait to see what our shared love of one of these works produces!

I saw someone else's letter say that treats are welcome and that is very much the case for me, so I will include that here also!

Thanks!

JS_Thrill

my current list of upcoming reads (indeterminate order) include:

Situation Normal - Leonard Richardson (re-read)

Steerswoman Series - Rosemary Kirstein (re-read)

Radiance - Catherynne M. Valente (new read)

Parable series - Octavia Butler (new read)

Hands of the Emperor - Victoria Goddard (new read)

Autobiography of a Chinese Woman: Put Into English By Her Husband Yuenren Chao - Buwei Yang Chao (new read)

Complete Works of Dashiell Hammett (new read, mostly)

Complete Works of Raymond Chandler (new read, mostly)

Half the World is Night - Maureen F McHugh (new read)

China Mountain Zhang - Maureen F. McHugh (re-read)

Here is Alice Eleanor Jones:

Alice Eleanor Jones, wearing kick-ass glasses and with a cool haircut

Here are 5 stories she published in 1955:

Life, Incorporated

Created He Them (content warning: domestic abuse)

Miss Quattro

Recruiting Officer

The Happy Clown

Boom

One year, five sci fi stories. And that's it (I think). She has a bunch of other writing that I haven't tracked down yet, but that was her busy year of science fiction and then she was back to journalism and lots of other stuff, but blaow.

Created He Them appears to have been anthologized at least a handful of times. It is not surprising to me. It was a powerful, affecting story, and well written, in my opinion. Having read Life, Incorporated and The Happy Clown, I think Jones also seems to have been interested in themes of anti-conformism and anti-consumerism, which are interesting reactions to a 1950s context. The Happy Clown predates Harrison Bergeron by like 6 years, but has some real presaging of the themes it is known for.

I don't have anything big or summarizing to say here, I just have been really enthused about her as a writer since the book club I am in got to her story (Created He Them), and didn't want forget to record my enthusiasm.

I loaned out the copy of China Mountain Zhang that I repurchased after loaning out my first copy of China Mountain Zhang, shortly before or shortly after commencing my year of not buying new books. I have a library card. I probably could get my hands on a copy but part of the plan is to work through books in my to be read pile, so intentionally getting my hands on yet a third copy of China Mountain Zhang would be a quasi-subversion of the plan, even if it doesn't actually undermine the rules, and even if the thing I am going to do instead is quickly re-read all four Steerswoman novels rather than dive into Piranesi which is actually in my TBR pile.

I also don't regret loaning out China Mountain Zhang! I am glad the person I loaned it to got it and got to read it! And book loans are basically gifts.

But, in this instance, if that book were on a table or shelf near me I would pick it up and start reading it today, I think.

Anyway, I realized I'd been avoiding Dreamwidth because I had turned it into large scale posting projects rather than a place to write up thoughts I was having and then I was avoiding the projects, and that was silly of me.

Here are some of the books I have added to my list of books to think about getting when my book purchase moratorium is over:

- The Bacchae (which translation?)
- Dog Years: A Memoir (P.S.)
- Exedelic
- Books by CL Moore
- Beowulf Audiobook (Headley)
- Heritage of the Star
- Beyond the Tomorrow Mountain
- Or rather: Children of the Star Omnibus
- How to Build a Girl [Catlin Moran]
- China Mountain Zhang (again)

I liked the show Mrs. Davis and I want to talk about it with people. The premise of the show Mrs. Davis, at least, the part that seems fair game to talk about is that Betty Gilpin (who you might know from GLOW on netflix) plays Simone, a magician-debunking nun who is also particularly set against a popular/powerful algorithm/"AI" (the eponymous Mrs. Davis), and Mrs. Davis seems keenly interested in securing Simone's services.

Before the cut, I am going to put some stuff that I think can help you decide whether it is a show that is for you:

My take on how to decide if you should check out the show (the bulleted list is not spoiler-y, but the paragraph after has some things that might very loosely be considered spoilers, so you may want to stop reading before then, if you are super-spoiler averse). All other spoiler-y discussion is behind the cut:

if you like Betty Gilpin! (GLOW)
if you have interest in fiction that deals with AI safety/“alignment”
if you have interest in themes about faith, belief, and skepticism
if you like plots with mystery box style intrigue
if the humor/tone of the show appeals to you or at least doesn’t turn you off

I'd also say that there are some benchmark episodes to help you figure out whether you will really be on board for what the show is doing, because it is a mystery box show, and while I think it sticks the landing well (or well enough), a lot of what it does is revelations that recontextualize earlier material. Stop reading now if you are super averse to spoilers. Major revelations in episode two reshaped my expectations of what was going on, and I think if you like it at that point, there is a good chance you will continue to like it. Major revelations in episode four were also pivotal for the show, and if you aren't on board by then, or if it loses you at that point, I would be very surprised if anything later won you back.

( Without further ado )

My summary of our Avatar the Last Airbender: Legends Session Two

Sheriff Woong hurries our heroes into his parlour, destroys the potentially incriminating document they have brought back to him, asks if anyone saw them approach, and then at them, flabbergasted. Po, Opal and Kallik say that they weren't observed on their approach, but want to know why the Sheriff was delivering this paper outlining the partition plan to them.

Woong says that when he saw that they were nosing around in his plan to get Yong and Pushi to safety, he was hoping to put them onto something that was actually more relevant to their goals. Po, refusing to mince words (straight shooter), tells Woong that coded messages and subtle signs seem like an obviously worse approach than simply telling them, with words.

Woong confesses that when he discovered his daughters gift at waterbending, and simultaneously realized that his wife had waterbending heritage, he was overcome with pride, but also horror. He had never cared much about the nation-mixing ways of Zeng Chu Cove, but as the tensions had been rising of late, it was obviously becoming a major issue for everyone in the village. His only thought had been to protect his family, and to keep his head down until they were safe. If he steps out of line, the mayor can simply replace him, and he's having enough trouble keeping order just with the refugee influx, and rising gang violence, and so on. He doesn't want to see this partition plan put in place, but he doesn't know what he can do to stop it. When he saw some hopeful idealists gearing up to try to make changes, he figured they should know what was coming.

Opal used her long trained skill of reading people (suspicious mind) to get a read on how forthcoming he was being. Woong genuinely doesn't want the partition plan to come to fruition, but his primary goal is to protect his family. His pessimism about his chances to effect change mean he won't be the strongest ally, and can't be fully relied on, but he will put his thumb on the scale in small ways, when he thinks he can do so.

He lets the three of them look at some dossiers he has of a few people of interest, since he wants them to wait to leave until later in the evening when there is a smaller chance of them being seen. Dusty Miller, the council member who represents the port interests and who has postured as sort of ambiguous when it comes to Earth Kingdom First vs. Integration rhetoric, had a number of individually non-suspicious but jointly concerning items in the dossier which the gang sorted together and realized point to possible involvement with or backing of the Greenbands. Council Member Kyung, who represents the farming and fishing interests, seems to be an all-around affable and likeable workaholic, who genuinely cares more about meeting people's needs than any political divisions. And Beryl Qiang, of Beryl's Barrels—who Hanna wants Opal to support for an expanded council seat— seemed to be having money trouble before the Tsunami but not any more, and seems to be signaling Earth First loyalities ("Barrels Proudly Made in the Earth Kingdom", etc.). The file just has a question mark about these financial irregularities, as the Sheriff's department hardly has time or manpower to track down something like this.

The group heads out when it is late enough for Woong's comfort, and as they get back to their part of town, they hear other footsteps. Suddenly, they are encountering a group of five Greenbands coming out of an alley.

Greenband Punk: What are you doing out this late in our neighboorhood?
Opal: This is my neighborhood, what do you think you're doing?
Greenband Punk: We're the neighborhood watch!
Opal: We don't have a neighborhood watch!
Greenband Punk: Oh yeah? Watch this! starts earthbending

The leader of this Greenband Gang put up a suit of rock armor. It became clear that one of the group was a little kid, hardly old enough to be doing anything, let alone joining a militant gang. The other three advanced forward to engage Po, Opal, and Kallik. One of them tried to pin Kallik in a pillar of earth, but Opal, sensing the danger to Kallik sliced that pillar through with a pillar of her own (using a hold she had from Kallik being her ward). Next, Po threw a net at one of the two non-bending attackers, and they each tried to stab Opal and Po with knives. Kallik created a patch of ice beneath the three that had advanced on them, and Opal flung a rock barrier at the leader, which he strode through, wearing down his armor. Another round of blows was exchanged (which I don't remember in full detail!). The forward three were stunned and thoroughly out of commission, the little kid took off, and the leader said "oh, no, I'll be in big trouble if I lose track of my little brother. I'll get you lot next time." And skedaddled. Two of the other three gang members also retreated when they stopped being stunned, but the one trapped under the net was not quite able to get away.

Po and Opal play a little intimidating cop, less intimidating cop with their hostage, and agree to free her if she answers some questions. They realize from how she is dressed that she is a refugee from an Earth Kingdom village that was destroyed in the Tsunami, and has started up with the Greenbands because it is hard for a late teen refugee to make their way in Zeng Chu Cove. They suggest she (her name is Fern, they learn), would perhaps have better luck as a member of Hanna's organization, rather than the Greenbands. She seems open to the suggestion. They remove the net and let her go.

Upon their return to Continental Drift, they discover that Garnet Cho, the merchant, has requested a meeting with them, and that Beryl Qiang has made reservations for an upcoming night. They decide to schedule the meeting with Garnet after the dinner with Beryl.

Beryl comes in for dinner, and seems to be hinting at something about Opal's intentions to attend the Feast of the New Moon. Opal tries to get a read on the situation, but comes up short. It's clear that Beryl is saying something about Opal getting her hands dirty in politics and how it's better to run a kitchen with clean hands, but Opal can't really figure out what Beryl is on about, and anyway, Beryl seems like a jerk!

The meeting with Garnet is more interesting. Garnet is a bit older, and wants to know lots about Opal's business. Why did she hire a refugee as a waiter? Is she planing to get involved in politics? How does her restaurant's niche demographic relate to the political tensions in the town? His fish investment would benefit from a more integrationist tide in the city, so he is keen to find out her plans, he says. Po has questions about his plans, so she puts it to him straight. Is this really just about the money for him? Well no, he says. It's not just about money. It's about one's job or role. Everyone has a job and it is important to do your job well. He wants to excel at his work. Who doesn't? So that's why he puts so much effort into learning how things work here from top to bottom! Po decides (again) that Garnet sounds like a spy, rather than a simple merchant, but doesn't say so to Garnet's face.

The group tries to learn a bit more about Aster Li, the other merchant who sounds suspiciously like a spy from people's description of their behavior, but Aster is hard to get ahold of...seemingly intentionally so.

Hanna reaches out to thank Po for the referral, and to remind a hesitant Opal of the benefits promised for trusting her and following along with the plan: Patrols to protect business and family, cheaper supplies for the restaurant, and Hanna's help with her goals for the town.

There is a website that features a lot of useful tools for running RPGs, like random name generators for NPCs or cities or taverns, and it even has a calendar generator based on specifications you input, those sorts of things. I went to see if that site had Avatar Legends name generators or animal hybrid generators, and it did not, but I saw the donation links while I was looking, and since I had used it a bunch in the past for DMing other campaigns, and I decided to donate via the "buy me a ko-fi" link, and just mentioned in passing in the donation note that I had stumbled across the donation link while looking to see if there were avatar: legends name generators.

If you just google for ATLA name generators or ATLA hybrid animal generators, you get pretty meh results. The book gives you a long enough list of example names to get started, and it gives you some basic outlines about how the naming systems for the different cultures work in relation to real world cultures. Which is perfectly serviceable for me when I am planning out specific NPCs in advance, or if you are a player making a character. Earth Kingdom names, for example:

The Earth Kingdom is vast with a wide variety of cultures among its people. Earth Kingdom names are composed of one or two syllables—many of these appear in the other three nations’ nomenclatures, so feel free to use these names for Fire, Air, and Water characters as well. Use one or two syllables for both given and surnames. Or you can use names of precious stones (e.g. Garnet, Amethyst, Pearl), plants (e.g. Peony, Camellia, Willow), or concepts (e.g. Faith, Hope, Joy) as Earth Kingdom-style given names as well.

And there is also a decent-ish length list of Earth Kingdom names, with their real life culture of origin included.

So you can just pick a name from the list, or you can use this and the description above to guide you in how to pick another name that fits this pattern, if you are planning things out ahead of time for your own character or for NPCs you know the players will meet (as the GM/ST/DM). But, if you are playing the game, and the players turn left when you expect them to turn right, and you suddenly need a name for a character you hadn't anticipated, this list is sort of sparse. You could just have a whole town full of Bowens, but it is nice to have a bit more variety. This is part of what makes donjon's site so good. A lot of the random generator sites are just basically recycling the same small set of names for you, which isn't much better than me having this list in front of me. Most of them wouldn't pay any attention to the block of text that notes that precious stones, plants and concepts are also in the mix.

The person who runs the site got back to me very quickly, and asked what was unsatisfying about the existing name generators. So I explained the above. And also went through the issue with the existing random hybrid animal generators [one], [two]. The issue with these hybrid animal generators, in my mind, is that they seem to basically just have some stock list of animals, and then pull two different entries and give you the result (one of them also adding a random adjective for no apparent reason). But the bulk of and most iconic hybrid animals in the world of ATLA are not just random mash-ups (though there are some hybrids that seem random-y). Badger-moles are a combination of two creatures with big "digging" energy. Turtle-ducks are hybrids of "live near water, spend lots of time in water, but aren't fish". There are lots of hybrids that seem to work in that sort of way, where there is a sort of conceptual linkage between the species. Compare that to these results:

In an ideal world, you'd want to have traits that you could select for, and then it would pick a random combo with the trait in common; unless you were seeking one of the rarer cases of off-the-wall truly random combinations. Whether that shared trait was natural environment, or being a predator, or ability to fly, or whatever.

Anyway, I started all this on Saturday, and (in part because one of the random name generators donjon offers already had names from the various cultures drawn on by ATLA, not even a full two days later there is already an ATLA Legends character name generator!

My summary of our Avatar the Last Airbender: Legends Session One

We pick up immediately where we last left our heroes, ushering Kallik's wounded ?th cousin, Tapisa, back to Opal's restaurant Continental Drift. In the kitchen's stock room, a cot is set up, and Opal tries to tend to Tapisa's leg, as Tapisa implores Kallik to help with Tapisa's mission as a member of the Northern Water Tribe military. Tapisa has heard that someone in Zeng Chu Cove's militia/military has made arrangements to get a boat through to the Northern Water Tribe, and is supposed to investigate. He is still planning to go, but his injured leg prevents him. Kallik agrees to investigate. Meanwhile, Po has excused herself to the kitchen and gotten permission to use some of Opal's cookware ("not the good pots!") to whip together a painkiller, and she won't be upset if it also has some side effects that loosen Tapisa's tongue a little bit. After all, the group's mission is to protect the peace and the culture of the town, not to work for the Water Tribe army. Plus, she wants to see whether Tapisa is reluctant to accept medical help from someone who isn't a straight-up water tribe member. Tapisa accepts the pain-relief tea, and opens up a bit more about how he wound up in Zeng Chu Cove. The increased hostilities post-Tsunami led a number of merchant ships to request undercover military presence on trading ships, and in this case, Tapisa just happened to be sent along with the secondary mission to look into the potential incursion by the Earth Kingdom. Excitable as Tapisa was about the possible outcomes of looking into this secret military boat, it seemed to the group that Tapisa was genuinely aiming to prevent escalation of the conflict. They agree to help, and get the information about where the ship is being docked.

Po and Kallik head off to the marina to do some initial reconnaissance. The boat itself is non-descript. Not impressive enough as a vessel to be a warship, but being guarded by a number of undercover militia members, they'll have to get on-board to find out what is going on. They return to the restaurant and Po proposes a plan: damage the boat and offer to repair it. Initially she proposes making a small batch of acid that Kallik could waterbend at high velocity at the boat's hull, but if Kallik doesn't hit the right place, or time it correctly, the boat might sink. Not knowing what—or who—is on the boat, Opal is not sure how she feels about the risks of this plan. Po suggests they could instead have Kallik waterbend some obstructions into the rudder so that the boat will start to angle at the boat next to it at the docks. If the folks guarding it are trying to keep a low profile, they will very much want someone to fix it before it starts colliding with it's neighbor, giving her and her assistant (Kallik) an opportunity to get onboard. Opal is more comfortable with this plan, but not wild about Kallik heading into the dangerous situation.

At the docks, Kallik waterbends a little too well, and instead of a leisurely drift towards the neighboring boat, their target boat is basically whooshing straight at its neighbor. Kallik compensates for this by waterbending a wave to adjust the boat positions and buy some time back, which knocks two of the guards off the boat. Po and Kallik then smoothtalk their way onto the ship, Po explaining that she can tell that something's been caught in the rudder mechanism; and as someone with a background in boat construction and repair, she could help fix it so that they don't have any risk of dockside collisions. Due in part to the level of success on Po's roll, here, the Guard in question is extremely helpful, pointing out not only how to get to the area of the ship that would be useful for conducting the repairs, but also explaining that a certain room is off-limits, even to the guards, and that no one is permitted to go near it, except Sheriff Woong. Po and Kallik proceed to head down to the lower level of the ship, and excuse the (very helpful) guard while they get to work fixing the rudder. Po realizes that the off-limits room is serviced by the same dumwaiter that goes to the captain's cabin, and sends Kallik into the dumwaiter for recon purposes only; basically spying through the cracks in the dumwaiter door, rather than opening it. Kallik sees two people in the room: a woman and child, they seem to be nervous, but not scared. They have a general sense of danger, though this doesn't seem to be an invasion force of earth benders like Tapisa was worried about, or some sort of secret weapon. Thinking back to his own experience as a refugee, that's the most similar thing Kallik can think of to what he is seeing about their mood. As they are departing the boat, the overly helpful guard thanks them profusely, mentioning that he'd have been in big trouble if the boat had been damaged since it was slated to depart tomorrow.

Kallik doesn't know the people in the room, having just arrived recently. Po doesn't recognize them by description, having just gotten back to town. They hightail it off the boat and return to Opal, who does. "That sounds almost exactly like Sheriff Woong's wife Yong and daughter Pushi." Tapisa jumps into the conversation: "Aha! So it is an invasion force of powerful earth benders!" Except Woong's wife isn't a bender, and as far as anyone knows, neither was his daughter. "Then why would he be making such complex secret arrangements to send them to the Northern Water Tribe?"

They brainstorm some possible theories as to what could be going on, and realize they need to talk to people who might know more. Kallik says they should just go confront Sheriff Woong with what they know. Opal worries that this might be dangerous. Po says the alternative is for her to talk to her parents, who have lived in the village for their entire lives and probably know lots of details about people like the Sheriff and his wife. "So, I guess Kallik's plan it is," Po says. Tapisa suggests they could get a trinket of some sort and make as if they are returning it to the Sheriff's daughter, to see how the Sheriff reacts. They pick up some earrings at a nearby store, and go to Woong's house. Kallik attempts to "return" the earrings to Woong, saying they were left at Continental Drift, and the Sheriff blusters at the suggestion his daughter would eat there. He is proud in claiming that she has strong earth kingdom heritage. Kallik extracts a promise to return the earrings to her, and trips the Sheriff up slightly when mentioning how impressive his daughter is. The sheriff notably calms when Kallik says that she is impressive academically.

The group returns home, now highly suspicious that the Sheriff's daughter is potentially water tribe, or not really his own daughter, or something of that nature, but still in need of confirmation. Po invites her parents to Continental Drift for dinner. Between heavy servings of guilt and fish stew, and bizarrely passive aggressive compliments from Po's mother towards the restaurant, the conversation does eventually turn to the matter of mixed heritage families. Despite Po's parents being a mixed marriage themselves, this is a topic they are very reluctant to discuss. ("I don't see why people need to put labels on things, or announce it to the whole world, you can just quietly be who you are and keep your head down!"). Eventually, though, they get what amounts to confirmation that Yong's father was water tribe, though this is definitely not widely known, and was almost certainly not known to Woong when he married Yong (it may not have even been known to Yong herself).

After another serving or two of guilt, Po's parents depart, and the group asesses what they have figured out. Though they remain unclear on Woong's motives, they are fairly certain that his daughter must have recently manifested water bending, and he has gone to great lengths to arrange to get her out of the village. Since he has been publicly quite indifferent to the issues facing mixed-families and refugees, many questions remain, but one question that arises now is: how did Woong get the money to arrange a special boat, hire guards off-the-books, bribe members of the water-tribe blockade, etc. On the other hand, it was time to tell Tapisa that this doesn't seem like any sort of military threat to worry about.

As to the money question, the group went to go see their ~~good~~ ~~friend~~ new associate Hanna and inquire about Woong's finances. Hanna invites them in and says "what brings you by?" to which Kallik begins narrating the events of the day and evening more or less verbatim. Opal and Po's jaws drop as they are stunned that Kallik doesn't understand how information exchanges with underworld figures work (though, in fairness, Kallik is a 14 year old refugee, and so it is not exactly surprising). Hanna just starts taking notes on what Kallik is saying until the adults step in and suggest it might work better if there was some sort of exchange of information. Eventually, Hanna reveals that Woong has taken out loans which, indirectly, she holds, in part because she thought it was better for her to hold the loans than for someone nefarious to have the Sheriff in their pocket. She had simply assumed the Sheriff had a gambling probem, but she is not intrigued by the information about what the money was really needed for. She inquires about whether there was some reason for her to try to delay/stop the ship's departure, but the group is not interested in preventing the Sheriff's wife/daughter from getting to safety. Before leaving, Hanna encourages Opal to attend the upcoming Banquet of the New Moon in a week's time, as a reputable business person, and a) put a word in the ears of council members that the council is in need of expansion, given the recent growth of the village, and b) try to throw some support behind Beryl Qiang (owner of Beryl's Barrels, who is under Hanna's thumb, as a candidate for the new council seat. The more successful the group is at this task, the more Hanna will throw her organization behind things like better fish prices for the restaurant, safety patrols in their neighborhoods, etc. Classic back-scratching arrangement.

The next day, Tapisa was well enough to be moved upstairs, so that the restaurant could re-open with lower chances of the water tribe military member slash spy being found in the kitchen, and the group decided to do some recon on people who might be at this banquet. Po invited the head of the dockworkers to Continental Drift but he suggested dinner at Wang's Wings ("Best Turkey-Badger Wings in all of Chenbao!"), because he doesn't like that fancy food with all the weird spices. At the meal they talk about who might be in the market for a boat, since that's Po's line of expertise, and he mentions some obvious candidates (rattling off some rich people in town, basically, and anyone who lost a boat in the Tsunami), and then does eventually think of two merchants who are new to town: Aster Li and Garnet Cho. These merchants work separately, are not particular about what they buy or sell, and are very keen to learn the whole supply chain, from who makes the goods and how it gets made, to how it is shipped and stored, etc. Po thinks to herself: "these sound like spies, and perhaps, much better spies than Tapisa."

Later in the day, back at Continental Drift, after the departure time of the boat with Woong's wife and daughter, Woong enters Continental Drift and loudly announces that he has looked into the report that Opal filed about the incident at her restaurant, and that it was without merit. He warns her off of filing frivolous reports at the sheriff's department in the future. Quietly, before he leaves, he hands a folded paper packet to Kallik and mentions that his daughter said that these were not her earrings.

He then leaves, reminding Opal and everyone there not to cause trouble or file false reports. Kallik tears open the packet and examines the paper, which appears to be from a council meeting, or at least from a council member, and references a plan called "Peace through Partition" for addressing the refugee issues and rising violence/disarray by redistricting the village to create separate areas specific to different groups. The plans are not entirely present on the paper, but it appears to have been written in a way to woo the mayor (focusing on how to calm/ease the post-refugee influx tensions), and again, Woong's motives in delivering it were not fully scrutable.

Kallik immediately runs out after the Sheriff to follow up but Opal grabs Kallik and suggests that discretion may be warranted.

That night, the group heads to Woong's house, and as they are about to knock on the door, he opens it, rushes them inside, and demands to know what they are thinking showing up there. "Were you followed?" Kallik takes out the paper and Woong is aghast that they still have the paper, let alone that they brought it with. He tears it up and destroys it.

(and that's where we ended).

I have been awaiting my Avatar Legends Kickstarter rewards for a very very long time! And they arrived! And I had people to play them with!

Yesterday, we did our session 0/character generation session. The system for ATLA:Legends is built on top of Powered by the Apocalypse, which is the game system used for Dungeon World, Monster of the Week, Masks, and many other games. There are a lot of things i like about the core system, especially for rules-lite/narrative forward RPGs. Some of the things I particularly like are:

A) Players basically always roll 2d6 and add a fairly intuitive stat. This is relatively low rules overhead for the player to internalize. There may still be a lot of other stuff for them to pay attention to, but it's good that basically all the dice rolling revolves around the same idea: roll 2d6 and add the relevant stat.

B) Roleplaying/narrative depth is mechanically rewarded. Even newer D&D—which is less based on tabulating how much XP each monster is worth—hasn't really gotten its head around encouraging roleplay through game mechanics. And I understand that some people want simulation-y rules that go on while you roleplay, but I like when a game's structure supports and encourages the roleplaying, so, for example, the PBTA systems, as a baseline, tend to give you XP at the end of a session when you acted out your character's central motivations or played up their core characteristics, etc.

C) Character creation is often based around integrating the characters backstories. Lots of games have the issue where you are like "and why do these characters spend time together? I guess just because otherwise we wouldn't be playing a game?" But a lot of the PBTA games encourage you to work out elements of your character that bond them to one another so that, during play, you don't constantly wonder "why are we putting up with this guy again?"

So that's general thoughts about PBTA. The people I roleplay with locally tend to be much more into heavy-crunch systems that are more traditional in their structure, though. We've played D&D, L5R, Aberrant (which was very messy, but did have a lot of rules!), and some others I am forgetting. We tried playing Blades in the Dark recently and it was not for them. I like Blades, personally, but I think it just varies whether a group can get into it.

On to Avatar Legends. The first thing you do, or at least, are instructed to do (as we will see, we did switch up the recommended order on things a little bit) is pick an era to play in. This is actually a pretty substantial choice! Several of the eras exclude PCs getting to be Airbenders, for example. I mean, you can houserule things, and you don't have to obey canon, I guess. But if you are playing an Avatar the Last Airbender RPG, it is probably because you love the series, and care a lot about, at the least, some of the very basic elements of the canon, so deciding that, actually there are a bunch of other Airbenders after all, during Aang's lifetime, would be a Big Weird Choice. If you want Airbender PCs you pretty much have to play during the Kyoshi Era, the Roku Era, or the Korra era. And those are very different choices! Kyoshi era is when the four nations (as we know them) are pretty much having their borders established. Roku era is the one that had the least established about it before the RPG came out and added some plot details for you to put in your campaigns; most of what we knew were fire nation flashbacks. The Korra Era is all tech'ed up with cars and movies and so on. Anyway, we chose the Roku era, in part because one of our players hasn't watched Korra, but it also allowed us to worry less about stepping on canon stuff.

People were interested in the water tribe and the earth nation, in particular, and the book's info about the Roku era had some interesting historical developments that seemed like a good way to give us wedge into that:

The Northern Passage

For years, the Northern Water Tribe and the northern Earth Kingdom state of Chenbao have been embroiled in a dispute over local fishing and trade routes. Both nations have engaged in minor skirmishes and militarized the waters in-between as a show of force. A massive tsunami swept through those waters and struck the northern coast of Chenbao, nearly setting off a military conflict between the two sides. Chenbao blamed Waterbenders for sending the tsunami, while the Northern Water Tribe blamed Earthbenders for creating an underwater earth- quake. The truth is that both sides suffered losses from a natural disaster—the tsunami destroyed several Earth Kingdom towns and completely wrecked a Northern Water Tribe fleet. Greater tragedy was averted when Avatar Roku—supported by several airbending masters from the Northern Air Temple—intervened before a full-scale war broke out. Though both sides backed down, their navies remain in the waters ready to act at the first sign of wrongdoing from the other side. And the conflict is on a path back to greater tension as the governor of Chenbao now tries to tax any Water Tribe goods or ships traveling through these waters...

The book also included some specific current consequences of this conflict.

The first thing the group is supposed to do (before they even think about their own characters) is figure out the group's purpose in the form of a central verb.

To defeat [dangerous foe]
To protect [place, idea, culture, person, thing]
To change [culture, society, place, person]
To deliver [person, thing] to [place, culture, person]
To rescue [person, thing]
To learn [idea, culture, training, history]

So, this list is fine, but it is jarring that this is before you even are told to think about who your character is, at all. Now, partially, I love this idea. The group is central to what you are doing. But at the same time, it is fundamentally hard to think about the group when the people in it are all just placeholders. So I do think it is probably okay (maybe even recommended) for people to do a bit of light thinking about characters along the way.

We sort of landed on Protect/Change, but you don't just pick the verb, you need to fill it out, and that's where the world-building detail above was so important.

The players got really into this idea that the border villages in this Northern Passage area had been pretty mixed heritage before the Tsunami (and presumably just generally in the time leading up to the present-Roku era). Water-Tribe people married Earth Nation folks, and vice versa, on both sides of the passage. But the rising tensions, the Tsunami, the attitude of the current Avatar, are all combining to threaten that. And that's something the players think is valuable. So they settled on protecting the mixed-heritage culture of the border-area in the Northern Village. (I may not have phrased this precisely correctly).

You might think "okay now you make your individual characters." NO! Next you answer more questions to flesh out the group goal, and then, you still don't make your characters, you try to sketch the plot of the (approximately) pilot episode of the tv show about your group. still without any development of the individual characters.

This is the point where we broke with the book's instructions, and everyone did a bit of working up a character concept. The characters were: Kallik: a water tribe member whose family had died in the Tsunami (timeframe: 8 months prior to Start of Game), Po (short for Porphyra, but she'd rather you not call her that), a character from a mixed family who had gone elsewhere to study technology, and was returning in the wake of the Tsunami (to check on family), and Opal, a character from a large earth nation family who owns a fusion restaurant (northern sea fish cooked in an earth-nation style) that has been suffering due the tsunami and the rising tensions. This level of detail made it much easier for us to actually do the next step, which was, sketch out the pilot episode!

OUR PILOT EPISODE

Act one: Po has just returned to Zeng Chu Cove, and is the only customer at Opal's restaurant for lunch. Kallik is working there as a waiter. Someone on the street spies Kallik waterbending while doing the dishes, and comes in trying to do an intimidation routine. No overt threats, but it's pretty obvious what his attitude is. Plus. this punk flashes a green armband that some people have been using to signal "Earth Nation first" support on the down low. Opal comes out to defend her waiter from the low key intimidation tactics, and the punk leaves. Opal recognizes that the punk is actually the son of someone on the village council. Also, she and Po, who were merely "nod and wave" acquaintances before, seem to share a recognition now that they maybe share something a bit more important that memories of what the local school was like. There is also increasing anti-water tribe graffiti around the village.

Act two: Opal goes to report the intimidation and rising hostilities to the local authority: Sheriff Woong. Sherrif Woong is overworked. His inbox is overflowing. The town has grown from around 1000 before the Tsunami to closer to 1300-1500 now, with refugees coming here from the villages destroyed in the Tsunami. It's not a huge number of people coming in, but it's a big adjustment for a town that didn't have a lot of infrastructure. Woong is giving Opal the brush off, in part from being overworked, but in part he seems to not really care about the "crime" she's reporting. She glances at his desk and spots orders from an Earth Nation general indicating the strategic importance of keeping Zeng Chu Cove a solidly Earth Nation asset. Crestfallen, Opal leaves, and tries to figure out who, if anyone she can trust with this information. People who have been around seem risky. Her new waiter is obviously not going to be against the water tribe, though. And Po just got back to town...plus, she's pretty sure one of Po's parents was from the water tribe! She gets this small group together, and tells them the horrible news. They come up with a plan. If we can't appeal to their humanity, let's appeal to their coin purses.

Act three: Crime in Zeng Chu Cove isn't organized yet, but Hanna is working hard to fix that. Opal and Hanna went to school together, which was a tenuous connection, but enough to get a foot in the door. Plus, Hanna heard that Opal and her friends had something against the Green armbands, and Hanna really doesn't like when other people start organizing crime in her town. An audible interrogation/beating can be heard going on down the hall from where Hanna is conversing with Po, Opal and Kallik. Po proposes sharing some helpful boat upgrades in exchange for Hanna's support with the group project. Hanna says she needs information on the Earth Nation and information on the Northern Water Tribe. "We're well connected in the water tribe!" the group lies. "See" they say, pointing at the orphan Kallik. "He's got plenty of connections to the northern water tribe! You need someone on the inside with the northern water tribe, we've got you covered!" Hanna says, "We'll just see about that." And nods to a lieutenant, who has them drag the prisoner in from the other room. Through bleary eyes, this prisoner shocks herself, and everyone else..."Cousin Kallik?" Kallik strains to remember this distant cousins name..."Tapisa!" Hanna's jaw drops. She's good at reading people and was sure they were lying. Duly impressed and now happy to have connections to water tribe on her side, she makes a deal with the group, and allows them to take Kallik's cousin, a member of the Water Tribe army, with them.

End of Pilot!

Okay, so, I won't go through the rest of character gen in as much detail.

Po's playbook is The Bold, and she is a technologist.
Opal is a Guardian (her ward is Kallik), and she is an earth bender.
Kallik is the Idealist and he is a water bender.

Some of the details I included in that summary of the pilot episode are things we didn't actually flesh out until after (like character names!), while others of them are things that we worked out as we went, but I put them in as though they had been established in situ.

There is a lot of the process that is great because it is collaborative. Maybe my favorite moment was that I wanted to make sure we had some Water Tribe plot hooks in there so I said before we started act three "think about where a water tribe army character could fit in here, her name is Tapisa" and someone threw out the idea that maybe it was a distant relative of Kallik's. But we didn't have a reason they would have been coming to look for Kallik directly, so we put a pin in Tapisa for a bit, and thought about what their next step would be, which was going to figure out if they could get smugglers to help them politically put pressure against this military order, since smugglers would also prefer not to have the town become militarized. Then I figured the smuggler might have captured a water tribe ship and be interrogating the army member they found on board when the group got there, and the earlier seed of being related and the group's spontaneous lie about knowing people in the water tribe came together like magic.

There is a lot of great material and depth to the characters that I didn't cover here, and we haven't actually had a session yet where we played the system, this was all prologue, really. One thing I want to emphasize: I went in with basically zero planning on my part, before this session. I familiarized myself with the rules, but I didn't plot out any of the stuff above. I didn't know what era people would want to play in, and that meant I couldn't easily make plans because three airbenders in the Korra era are very different in terms of what adventures they would have from a fire bender and two water benders in the Aang era. But the system did a (mostly) great job of getting us to a point where we just naturally have a group identity and roadmap for where to go from here. I probably could have come up with the start of an adventure if we were playing straight through after character generation, but I am glad to have some time to plan before the actual first session.

I'll tag posts about this particular game with "entering my roku era" so you can find them all.

Today when extended family dinner was being arranged, people's pizza preferences were being sought, and instead of just saying "I'm good with whatever" since surely some pizza they got would be one that I would eat, I said I liked BBQ chicken pizza. And then several other people said that pizza sounded good. So one of the pizzas we got was BBQ chicken pizza. And many people liked that pizza best (which is a good side effect) but more importantly, I got the pizza I wanted.

I am *not* do this?

Oh also, was the previous post related to me being in a particular emotional and anxiety space in advance of spending a lot of time around family? Yes, yes it was.

My experience in therapy, at least, this most recent time I've gone, where I've found it very helpful, has had a lot of moments that felt like huge epiphanies of insight, which, when I try to explain them to other people, are difficult to relate in any way that don't basically have me telling someone else that my huge insight from therapy was something like if I stop putting my hand on the hot stove, I won't get burned as often. This insight is true, but usually, the reaction is either for me and the other person to laugh that I needed someone to help me figure that out, or for them to worriedly inquire as to how often I was jamming my hand onto a hot stove.

This is why I'm sort of obsessed with my personal spin on the pagliacci meme:

Heard joke once: Man goes to doctor. Says “It hurts when I do this.” Doctor says “Treatment is simple. Don’t do this.” Man bursts into tears.

“But Doctor, I *am* do this.”

Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.

In the original "Doctor it hurts when I do this" joke the punchline is a goof on the doctor being bad. You want a fix for not being able to raise your arm above your head, and the doctor says to just avoid the thing that triggers the pain. But in a therapy context, I kept finding myself in the other scenario. I would be like "dating apps are making me miserable." "Well, get off the dating apps." The Pagliacci twist to the punchline, is crucial (for me!) because I so often don't want to give up the things that are making me miserable. They are part of who I am. And that is the joke. I am literally making myself miserable, and so, the reason the advice seems to insightful is because it's actually difficult to see that I don't have to keep jamming my hand onto the stove, when my self-conception is the person who grabs hot things off the stove.

So, one day, my therapist was all prepared to explain to me how to identify and avoid emotionally unavailable women. She had spotted a pattern in the people I had been dating. And she asked if I thought that would be useful, or whether I needed that. I think her exact question was, "do you think you know how to tell when someone is emotionally unavailable." And I said "oh, they usually tell me, like explicitly, by saying something like they aren't ready to be dating", and she was flummoxed. Because she was assuming I would need like, help spotting the people so as not to pursue them. So she like put her stack of notes aside and said "okay, maybe you could try, when someone says that, not trying to date that person, and trying to date someone else instead?" And I was like "hmmm...interesting." Because that had not occurred to me.

So, that insight was "when someone says they aren't ready to be dating, don't date/attempt to date them." That was a really big insight for me. But it is hard to explain succinctly why that isn't blindingly obvious. It's like saying if you stop putting your hand on a hot stove, you won't get burned as much. Hard to fault the accuracy, but wow, did you really need to be told that? (Reader: I did.).

Now, in fairness to that insight, we will eventually notice a thread running through all these insights, and so, there is a non-obvious insight lurking behind the scenes.

I sometimes felt listless and like I couldn't get myself to do the things I needed to do, and I just wanted to watch netflix or whatever instead of doing the things i was supposed to do. My therapist (this was the next therapist, because the previous one had a medical thing that required her to stop seeing patients), gave me this advice that was so good and worked so well I like wrote it down and took a picture and put it in a place so I could make sure I would have access to it when I needed to consult it again. And then next time I was feeling listless I went to look up this brilliant advice: "if you are feeling listless and tempted to spend all day watching netflix/avoiding responsibilities/etc., ask: what am I feeling, what made me feel this way/what set me off, then do something to process/release the feeling (cry/rant/discuss)”

This one is less full-on obvious. But it does boil down to "ask yourself how you are feeling, then engage with your feelings." And again, this does not feel like super sophisticated advice. A lot of this advice reminds me of when I started to take flute lessons in my late 20s. The flute instructor was explaining to me how to breathe. And I mistakenly thought I knew how to breathe, since I had, after all, been breathing for my entire life. But actually, no. I did not know how to breathe, and some very obvious things about breathing were just completely alien to me. So, I had to learn about breathing in my late twenties. And similarly I am learning about feelings in my forties. Like what you do when you have them (apparently "avoid them" is not the correct approach).

But doctor, I *am* do this.

I used to answer the phone whenever my mom called. It didn't matter what else I was doing. Watching a movie at home, out with friends, etc.. Pretty much anything besides if I were teaching a class, if the phone rings, and it was my mom, I'm going to pick up the phone. And I am very bad at ending phone calls. I don't know how to say I want to go. I can say I need to go, if there is something that requires me to leave, but I don't know how to say I am done because I want to be done. My therapist asked me if I was annoyed sometimes that my mom's call interrupted a movie I was watching, or something else I was doing. And I said yes. And she asked why I didn't just let it go to voicemail and then call back later, when it was a good time. And I didn't have an answer. Because I didn't know why I didn't do that. It was a good plan. I started doing that. I was less annoyed on the phone with my mom. So this insight was...to not answer the phone when it wasn't a good time to talk.

Here's where things take a turn for the less obvious (or maybe you know me and have heard this, or maybe you just know how these patterns go): I've complained, before, many times, to many people, about how much I hate that my mom will answer the phone whenever it rings. It doesn't matter what is going on, it doesn't matter the circumstance, she picks up the phone. Even just to tell the person she will call them back. It drives me nuts. My therapist didn't point this out to me. I drew this connection myself. I was like "wait, how did I not realize I do the thing?" I don't do it the same way, I don't answer every phone call, I don't answer in all circumstances, but it's very much the same thing. I answer the phone, especially from my mom, even when it is inconvenient, putting whatever I was doing on hold. And my therapist was like "the solution is: don't do that."

But doctor, I *am* do this.

I mask my sadness a lot (less now than I used to!). And I don't like to talk about my feelings, so I am very good at reflexively flipping the conversation around to what's going on with you instead of me. I've been consciously trying to undo these habits. It's hard. My therapist suggested that I try just telling people how I felt. This is among the three scariest pieces of advice I think she's given me. But again, we're still in the zone of very obvious things to try. I was talking to my friend Julia, who is a very good friend, and often has pithy ways of putting things, and I asked her once why my friends can't tell when I am lonely or sad. Is it just that they don't care? And she was like "what do you say when people ask you how you are doing?" and I said "I said I'm doing fine" and she said, "well maybe the issue is that you're lying to them." And I wanted to protest that I wasn't lying to them, but it was hard to dispute that given my own contribution to the discussion. So, in this case, the advice was some combination of "tell people what's going on, and/or maybe stop actively concealing it" (sub-advice: don't hold it against people for not seeing it when you do hide it). And again: this advice is super obvious. I've come to call this one the Princess and the Pea principle. I can't hide my emotions under a hundred layers of mattress and then decide that my only true friends are the ones who can detect it behind all of that padding. I mean, I can, but that's is a recipe for disappointment and isolation. It goes in tandem with another nonsense rule I had invented, which is that help I ask for doesn't count. True help (according to the made up rules I invented) is offered without being asked, and so if I have to ask for the help, it's just fake help being offered begrudgingly and isn't real friendship or affection. So, my only friends are psychic mind-readers who know I am feeling some kind of way, and figure out what i need without being told, and then do it without being asked. Then I feel sad and lonely and unloved, but it's not my fault! (Reader: it is a bit my fault!).

"Tell your friends how you feel or they won't know," and "ask for the help you need, or you won't get it" are, again, not earth shattering strategies to be getting from therapy, but they were things I needed to hear.

The not quite as obvious common thread through all of these pieces of advice, really, is that if you ask yourself, "who wouldn't find this advice obvious?" or more pointedly, "what would be going on with someone, where they would consistently be missing the obviousness of these things, and need to have it pointed out to them?" and to get there, I am going to talk about Grover. Specifically, "Grover Goes to School".

"Grover Goes to School" was a book I read so, so many times as a kid. It had an audio tape that came with it, so you could listen along while reading it. It may have had a record instead of an audio tape, I don't remember.

a kid version of grover standing up at a desk saying "I am Grover and I want to be friends with everybody"

I am going to describe the plot of the book, and then you will probably get to the moral of this story well before I did. Grover is excited to go to school, but also nervous because his new school is not on Sesame Street and he won't know anyone there. But he really wants to make friends! He brings his new school supplies, some toys, his lunchbox full of delicious food he likes, and heads off to school. He introduces himself, and then throughout the day, other kids are like "hey that's a neat pencil case, want to trade?" and Grover thinks "Oh, I want them to like me, I better say yes." so he trades his nice pencil case, or his jelly sandwiches, or his toy truck. He offers to clean up after recess so other kids can go get snacks, so that they will like him. Then, he has an emotional breakdown and starts crying in class. (Like Grover, I had emotional outbursts in school a lot. Mine went well past the age when it was socially acceptable. I would run out of the room crying, and go hide in the bathroom. When it got to be junior high and it was still happening, I just had to make it stop, so I just sort of didn't let myself cry.). One of the other kids asks Grover what's wrong, and Grover says he didn't want to give up his pencil case or trade his sandwich and no one saved him any snacks after recess, and he didn't want to play jump rope he wants to play jacks, and the other kid doesn't know how to play jacks but is willing to learn. So they play jacks, and have fun. And then someone asks to trade whatever else Grover has, and Grover says no, he likes what he has, and it turns out it is okay, because being someone's friend doesn't depend on giving them things to make them like you. So Grover gets home and says he had a great day because he made two friends. And the moral of the book, which is very clear, is that Grover shouldn't keep placing his value in how he can serve others, but instead, he should more or less trust that he is a likable monster, and value himself accordingly.

I read this book so many times. It's sort of shocking to me the extent to which the lesson I am still trying to learn is the really simple, obvious lesson of this children's book that I read and loved. The sort of person who misses all these obvious lessons is the anxious little monster at the outset of the book. The one who doesn't value themself, and who doesn't have a sense of their own worth. The one who places their own sense of value in the approval of others, and so tries to make themselves useful and pleasing to others, and stuffs away or ignores their own happiness and desires. They take on burdens that aren't theirs, and tell themself that they don't expect anything in return, but then resent that their needs and wants aren't being met. But of course, they aren't telling anyone what they want or need. So, they resent the failure of reciprocation, but from the outside, everyone else thought it was a gift, not an exchange.

And since we are talking about me, really, not Grover, when I was wrestling with a sort of half-awareness that I was upset with people for not doing things that I didn't ask them to do, or for not returning favors that they weren't obligated to return, I felt guilty about having expectations that I knew were unfair, while also not having ever addressing my original anger or sadness or whatever else was going on with my unmet needs to begin with.

When groups of friends were trying to figure out where to go for dinner, I used to not weigh in if my preference was slight, because I was worried that if I said I preferred Thai, people would treat that as a stronger vote than it was, and we'd go for Thai food when the other people weren't really excited about it. My therapist told me that she doesn't usually give outright instructions to patients but that I should definitely stop doing that (I already knew that, before she told me, to be fair).

The thing is, it's hard to untangle your self-conception. I've thought of myself as someone who is helpful and useful to others for a really long time. And it's not like I am aiming to replace those features with their opposites or anything, but when, in the same year, I am reading the Zhuangzi and re-discover Grover Goes to School and getting more and more of these obvious epiphanies from my therapist, and they are all telling me that I should stop placing my value in how I can be useful to others, it does seem like it is time to redefine myself.

But doctor, I *am* do this.

Current Mood: anxious

“But human speech is not just a blowing of air. Speech has something of which it speaks, something it refers to.”

I've dawdled a bit in writing about the second chapter of The Zhuangzi. There are themes in it that resonate with me a lot, but it is a bit less accessible to me in some ways than the first chapter. It opens with this discussion between two characters about whether the world is like an instrument and the sounds of nature are like music, and transitions into a discussion of whether words differ from mere air being blown.

The issue here is that speech has aboutness. When I say something, I am not just making noise, the noises I make are words and the words have meanings.

“Yes, but what it refers to is peculiarly unfixed. So is there really anything it speaks of? Or has nothing ever been spoken of? You take it to be different from the chirping of baby birds. Is there really any difference? Or is there no difference? Is there any dispute going on there? Or is there no dispute? Is anything demonstrated by it? Or is nothing demonstrated by it? How could any course of activity become so concealed and unnoticed that there could be any question about whether it is a genuine or a false course? How could any act of speaking become so concealed and unnoticed that there could be any question about whether it is right or wrong to say? After all, where could any course veer off to without that course thus being present there? Where could any speaking be present without that speech thus being deemed acceptable there?

The text in this chapter is, I think, more didactic, and less narrative, which, oddly, should have made it easier for me to get my head around, but after all the work I did getting myself to understand the mode the first chapter is written in, was a strange shift. And, of course, it's not like it is written as an essay or a treatise, it is still written in the form of anecdotes, but they contain these longer digressions. I think part of what is happening is that The Zhuangzi is here engaging with a point about the treachery of language.

The issues in chapter two, especially the early passages, are things that I have thought about and wrestled with in other contexts before, but The Zhuangzi has very specific targets in mind. It calls out the Mohists and Confucians by name, it references the White Horse Not Horse paradox, in some ways it is a very reactionary text. Plus, I've been told it is full of puns and jokes that are not always captured in translations (this chapter in particular has a bunch of wordplay about this/that and right/wrong that turns on character overlap in classical Chinese that isn't preserved in English, and is hard to translate).

I've been spending a lot of time thinking about the transition from the treachery of language, in the first part of the chapter, to what seems to be a bolder metaphysical thesis, as the chapter progresses, about the indistinguishability of things themselves. The first bit, about the inadequacy of language is an easy pill to swallow. Language really can't (despite the apparent success it has in the practical arena) do the full job demanded of it. But this seems to be a failing as language, and not something that bears on the shape of reality.

At the same time, The Zhuangzi seems to comfortably transition:

What is acceptable we call acceptable; what is unacceptable we call unacceptable. A road is made by people walking on it; things are so because they are called so. What makes them so? Making them so makes them so. What makes them not so? Making them not so makes them not so. Things all must have that which is so; things all must have that which is acceptable. There is nothing that is not so, nothing that is not acceptable.

This passage descends from what we call acceptable (unacceptable) to what is acceptable (unacceptable), and then combines the making of roads with things being called by a label. This is the passage (as I read it) where we get a clear collapse between the linguistic and the metaphysical. But I am not sure I understand why.

So I will probably spend some more time in the future reading this chapter and thinking about it, because this portion is perplexing to me, and doesn't sit comfortably with me yet. The next bit coming up, though ("three in the morning"), I have an easier way into, because it is about tricking monkeys into being less grumpy, and that is an easier thing to get my head around.

I am not sure I will stick to a strict linear progression through the text, because, if there is one thing I feel like i have permission to do here, it is wander freely through it, but also, I did want to talk about this part, which is opaque to me and somewhat frustrating, so I felt like better to go through than around.

I was writing a pretty long post that was ostenisbly about alignment systems in RPGs, and how much I liked this one that is organized around demeanor (outward presentation) vs. nature (inner motive/drive), but it was taking several days of off-again, on-again attention to write, and somewhere in there Chrome asked to relaunch for updates and I forgot that the auto-save on dreamwidth is finicky so when I relaunched and it asked if I wanted to restore and I said yes, it just gave me a blank screen, and I'm not going to re-type the whole thing, so I'll just give you the executive summary.

Here is Wirt and Greg from over the Garden Wall, the image, I think captures them fairly well.

It turns out that post was really about how I act like Greg but inside I am Wirt, which makes sense because Greg also acts like Greg to mask his inner Wirt, and the post was morphing into a meditation on the nature of anxiety, or at least, my anxieties, which means it was about to just be a discussion of either Grover, or the Rabbit, Pooh, Eeyore triad, and who knows if that was going to be coherent. At any rate, I am not going to re-write the whole thing but I am pretty sure that's what I like about Greg. Also somewhere in there I was going to explain how this exchange makes perfect sense, despite seeming like a contradictory claim:

me approvingly commenting on someone saying they are easy going as long as everything goes precisely their way

Dear Yuletide Letter Writer,

This is my second time participating in Yuletide!

I am very excited, and I continue my trend of selecting fandoms with really really sparse fanfic or no pre-existing fanfic whatsoever. Some of the stuff in this letter is copied verbatim from my letter last year, because my letter worked pretty well last year at getting me fic(s) I really enjoyed!

I am providing information to be helpful, because I've read advice on this process and I've seen that it is often helpful to be given some indications of who you are writing for and what that person would want to read, but I also know that ODAO, and that takes pressure off of me!

I had trouble formulating DNWs at first because I feel like most things I could put in a DNW could work in the right story, done in the right way, etc. etc. Also, the fandoms I was requesting do not have an abundance of fic written for them, so it is not like there are certain tropes or tendencies that I felt like are specifically overdone for those fandoms. I did sort of settle on some clearish DNWs for some of them, though (listed at the start of each fandom-specific section, below).

About Me:

I am a philosophy professor. I like to play roleplaying games and board games. I have a dog named Scully (but I am not as intense of an X-files fan as her name might suggest). I am a huge fan of the band the mountain goats. In my spare time I also like to do online puzzle hunts, and I cook/bake. I'm a big reader, and I like to watch tv (sci-fi/fantasy/spec fic, but also other stuff, for example, I have endless thoughts about the gilmore girls). I recently read the Steerswoman series and have become entirely obsessed with it. I cannot do more justice in recommending/describing its virtues than Sumana Harihareswara did here. These books are just so fantastic.

Constellation Games — Leonard Richardson

DNW: Not saying there's nothing I would get icked out by, but the things I was tempted to put here (character death, gore, incest), were really circumstantial, maybe exploring the alien societies in these books in the fic takes you down that path and I don't want to constrain you: I'm gonna leave this to your discretion.

This is a book about first contact, and it is centered on an unlikely human to be at the center of these events. So the narrative is very focused on that human. And don't get me wrong, I love the book! It is one of my favorites, I've read it more than 15 times, and I've bought it for like, 7 or more people. BUT, insofar as I am giving a prompt here, the thing that is great to me about the book is the humor and fun of thinking about the really alien aliens! And I'd like to see and think more about how they interact with each other, in a way that is less filtered-through-a-human-intermediary. Tetsuo is my favorite character in the stories, both his speech patterns and his sense of humor generally, and Curic is also a fantastic character (a sharp, no-nonsense personality who is warm-in-their-own-way, but absolutely not up for hugs), and while most of our exposure to the two of them comes from how they have to deal with Ariel, they are great personalities in and of themselves, and have stories worth telling just in terms of their lives as members of a first contact mission. I went with "worldbuilding" because I really just love how there are all these alien races, and all these strange civilizations with their weird cultures and traditions and video games and we only got partial glimpses of them due to Ariel's interests and perspective. I'd be keen to know more about any of the alien races and what they were doing before they got to earth, or what they were up to on Ring City during the events of the book, or anything like that. The Bonus story "The Time Somn Died" does the sort of worldbuilding that I love here, but I'm not saying I want another story like that one in particular. There is just so much that doesn't get explored, and I'd love to see what's going on with any of it! I guess my main thing is that, given how heavily human-focused the book was, I'd be excited to get more alien-focus (not necessarily Alien focus), in the story. I just didn't want to nominate a specific Gaijin character like "He Sees The Map He Throws The Dart" because I didn't have any particular attachment to a story about that character over some other members of the species, etc.

The Architect's Brother — Robert and Shana Parkeharrison

DNW: Explicit Sexual Content

This photo series is amazingly gripping to me, and each image has a rich narrative. I keep coming back to them and looking at them, impressed with the artistry and the effort that went into them, as well as being drawn into the world created by the artists. I really just want to know what stories other people think of for that world. To my knowledge there is no fic yet for this, so I am kind of excited by the idea that this is the chance to build this world.

China Mountain Zhang — Maureen McHugh

DNW: This is not a true DNW but the main thing I don't want is more than a cameo, really, from Zhang.

Optional Details: I read this book for the first time a few months ago. It is such an affecting book. In some ways it is like cyberpunk in that it deglamorizes sci-fi, but it is so much more personal and small scale than "typical" cyberpunk. It really is about the banality of sci-fi future when you have to still live out the day-to-day tedium of depression and oppression and scarcity and so on. One of the most fascinating things about it is its mosaic novel structure. Alternation between Zhang's story and the story of someone who intersected briefly with Zhang. Almost, but not quite, a novel wedded to a short story anthology at once. I opted for world-building because I feel like Zhang's story is as complete as we need. There are no loose threads or open ends that I want answered. But lots of the people whose lives intersect with Zhang, we only get partial pictures of what is happening with them, where they have been and where they are going. So, I wanted to see more of what is happening with them, or people even less connected to Zhang in this world. Building out more of the mosaic.

In Conclusion

I hope this is a helpful addition to the prompt for letting you know more about me, and my interests for the fics. I appreciate that you are willing to participate in this exchange, and I can't wait to see what our shared love of one of these works produces!

I saw someone else's letter say that treats are welcome and that is very much the case for me, so I will include that here also!

Thanks!

JS_Thrill

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Lewis Powell

March 2024

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Lewis Powell

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