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[OOC][META] Writer dropout
[OOC][META] Writer dropout
#1
(01-13-2021, 10:11 PM)Bob Schroeck Wrote: Rajvik has contacted me. He's okay, but he's basically leaving the forums for political reasons. He notes that yes, he can still be found on SB and SV.

So, what do we do with Gulfside Rest?
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#2
I've been talking the matter over with Labster in the Discord server.  We somewhat disagree with his Avatar-Character's ultimate fate in the story.  My preference is that his character step down as a building manager in the face of the backlash from his residents in trying to feed them propaganda.  Labster wants to send him off to work in Trump's administration.

Nominally, I'd be fine with Labster's idea, but it leaves the implication that Raj's character would show up from time to time.  I'm not sure if Raj would appreciate that (considering how we feel about Trump and how we would paint his actions while in-office), and aside, I'd rather that the character receive the Lyman treatment to avoid any potential issues - both on the Watsonian and Doylist ends of the spectrum.

As to the residence itself...  The characters from Firefly strike me as having too much story telling potential to leave to an NPC-Residence.  They remind me of the one line from Repo Man - "An ordinary man spends his life avoiding tense situations.  A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."  And the crew of the Serenity definitely strike me as the type to get into stressful situations by their own volition.

The NGE characters, on the other hand... not quite so much, as many of them would probably appreciate the opportunity to live a quiet life.  With the possible exception of Asuka - she's a bit of a Rip The Skirt kind of girl.
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#3
(01-14-2021, 04:45 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: I've been talking the matter over with Labster in the Discord server.  We somewhat disagree with his Avatar-Character's ultimate fate in the story.  My preference is that his character step down as a building manager in the face of the backlash from his residents in trying to feed them propaganda.  Labster wants to send him off to work in Trump's administration.

Nominally, I'd be fine with Labster's idea, but it leaves the implication that Raj's character would show up from time to time.  I'm not sure if Raj would appreciate that (considering how we feel about Trump and how we would paint his actions while in-office), and aside, I'd rather that the character receive the Lyman treatment to avoid any potential issues - both on the Watsonian and Doylist ends of the spectrum.

Considering what comes up at the top of a DuckDuckGo search for Lyman, I don't like the sound of "the Lyman treatment"...

Put the SI on a bus ride. If the writer returns, then the bus can come back, and there will be no harm done to the SI (except that the character won't have any of the XP that the rest of the PCs have been getting - he'll have to work hard to catch up). If the writer never returns, we won't have to guess how he'd react in any particular situation.

As for how, maybe something along this line:

"If it was up to me, I wouldn't be here - you're good at creating wrath in other people, and I like that in a human. But one of my duties for Lord Phantomhive is to clean up the messes made by my co-workers, and Lord Phantomhive is displeased by the mess that he sees in what you are failing to mention in your regular reports."

"You're imagining things. How can somebody read something that isn't written down?"

"Please don't insult our employer's intelligence. He is an successful businessman who is quite capable of identifying trends in data - and the data you have been providing to him makes it quite clear that there is a major issue at this lodging."

"I'm doing what my contract says I have to do."

Sebastian shook his head in annoyance, "You should already know from your interactions with the other residence managers that that isn't enough. Every other manager is doing much more than the minimum. As much as I usually enjoy watching people spread the deadly sins around, needing to clean up after them gets tiresome after a while. Mr. Bostwick, to quote the politician you like so much from his TV show... you're fired."


If the writer comes back, the SI can get his job back.


(01-14-2021, 04:45 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: As to the residence itself...  The characters from Firefly strike me as having too much story telling potential to leave to an NPC-Residence.  They remind me of the one line from Repo Man - "An ordinary man spends his life avoiding tense situations.  A repo man spends his life getting into tense situations."  And the crew of the Serenity definitely strike me as the type to get into stressful situations by their own volition.

Give Kaylee a wish - she'll want her engine room back, right? That lets the Serenity go explore the Solar System (no FTL drive), and be the ones who make first contact with various spaceborne displacees. Plenty of room for stories there! (Hmmmmm... maybe have them relocate to the Valley Forge once they discover it in orbit around Saturn.)


(01-14-2021, 04:45 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: The NGE characters, on the other hand... not quite so much, as many of them would probably appreciate the opportunity to live a quiet life.  With the possible exception of Asuka - she's a bit of a Rip The Skirt kind of girl.

As for the NERV staff and the Children... The work they're from isn't Sailor Moon or A Certain... or Girls und Panzer, and it isn't actually set in Ottawa. Thus, I don't want them for Ottawa. Maybe Montreal - let Asuka and Rin get along like a house on fire. (Plenty of flames, plenty of spectacle, and somebody has to call the insurance company in the morning - the other sort of "get along like a house on fire" is boring.)
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#4
I'll go ahead and post my tiny bit I wrote, and talk about it afterwards

Quote:"What ever happened to James, anyway?"

The dark butler replied, "Oh, Mr. Bostwick?  Well, I called up an old friend, and managed to set him up with a new job."

"Wow, that's ... surprisingly charitable of you," Brent said, his words dripping with suspicion.

"I simply offered him a place where his abilities will be appreciated.  And indeed, Mr. Bostwick jumped at the chance to work in President Trump's communications office.  It is merely what he deserved after his service."

Brent squinted as he facepalmed.  "That sounds like a Hell of a job."

"Now, Mr. Laabs, I cannot have an employee embezzling my lines," Sebastian mock-protested, glad that someone 'appreciated' his work.  "I can always find similar accommodations for you."

"No thank you, sir."  Brent had expected to work for an heartless, evil corporation at some point in his life, but hadn't expected it to be quite so literally demonic.

I thought this seemed like a nice way to nod to the out-of-story cause, while making a choice his SI would probably make.  I mean, Raj himself might make this choice.  It leaves open the chance of returning -- the WH communications office was notoriously tumultuous place to work, even early on.  If he returns, he could say something about his old job like "omg it was awful, I had to get out" or "it was great, but fucking RINOs forced me out" or any of the honestly hundreds of plausible reasons to leave.  It's also not a position that intrinsically implies any dishonor, especially not in 2017.

I really don't think it would imply a return to the story either.  The guy spent a few months working at a new job, then got a different job.  This happens thousands of times a day, and I haven't run into any of my old coworkers lately -- and I've only ever randomly run into one guy who I went to university with, once I moved out of town.  People move on.  If we give it a sufficient air of finality, readers won't question it.

I dislike Rob's implementation, because it makes James out to be a bad guy, and Sebastian tips his hand too much.  The approach might be good, though.  I think we can integrate all three of these ideas:
 1. Tenants start to grumble about James, possibly online and upstream
 2. James defends his values on the forum, because people are wrong on the internet!!1!
 3. Sebastian thinks that perhaps James isn't working out, causing him problems, but actually thinks he can be useful to his purposes.
 4. Sebastian uses his political connections (I'm sure Ciel has some in both parties) to get James another job offer in DC
 5. James accepts, because he finally gets a chance to work with people who share his values, and to help shape the country
 6. How good or evil he is in politics is his choice, but happens entirely offscreen.  And the other apartment managers are the ones still literally working for a demon.

I just want us to do a better job than what we normally do in RPGs where a person leaves the game.  Just imagining that they run off on some other unnamed quest or whatever isn't fun.  I thought maybe we could do the equivalent of "gets a feof from the local king".  There was one game where I ended up playing a former player's character -- which is how I ended up playing a black South African neurosurgeon who liked animals much better than people to an often amoral degree, and was followed around by a silver fox spirit animal.  All not choices I would have made, but he was fun to play!  But in this case there isn't really enough characterization for any of us to play James in his stead, so anyone coming in later would want to run their own group.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#5
As far as the Evangelion characters go, as I recall, Windsor still has plenty of space (I estimated there's 60+ apartments in the building, mostly 2 bedrooms/unit, though some have 3 and a small number only have 1.)
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#6
After thinking about it, I'll be willing to accept Labster's idea for dealing with Raj's character.

I still have concerns in dealing with the tenants, though.

While working on another story, Rob and I have already established that being without the supervision of an apartment manager is... well, it isn't that it's not allowed, per se... but it puts a person on the Demons' radar in a way they might not find to be comfortable.

And Mal and his crew are now on Earth That Was.  You honestly think that they're not going to want to hang around to see what parts of their history is actually Alliance Propaganda?  Or enjoy some culture that is absolutely unfettered with the taint of the Alliance?  Yeah, sure, they're gonna want to run around the system a bit...

...But the thing is, there's nothing out there.  Nothing worth doing much with, anyhow, in the little time that they're supposed to be there.  And Sol system, when compared to the star system they came from, is downright puny.  Yeah, having Valley Forge out there orbiting Saturn is a cute idea, but we're getting ahead of ourselves with that.  That's Season 2 material - the point at which the shit really hits the fan and fictional cities and orbital platforms start showing up.  We're still dealing with Season 1 for the most part where it's mostly just the main characters and a few of the more popular side characters.

That said...  Sure, they can go prospecting.  But there'd be no point to it since the implication during Season 1 is that everyone's going back in about a year or so.  They'd only be able to just barely accomplish the initial stages of a small mining colony, which are the most hazardous.  There'd be no real payoff for making that investment.

Sorry to seem like the Fun Police here, but we are trying to at least keep this somewhat deconstructionist.

Another thing to consider is how little Raj submitted while he was with us.  If we are having his character "re-assigned" near the end of Season 1, then that's a lot of filler material we'd have to come up with.

And besides, I can't see something like the situation we've concocted being a slow-boil thing.  Ritsuko, Kaji, and Misato will all be quick to call the fowl, and Mal would be quick to side with them for the sake of protecting the Pilots, because what Raj's character pulled was some Alliance-level BS.  And let me tell you, he ain't havin' any a'that!  Even Jayne would think it's a pretty scummy thing to do - tricking someone to con them out of goods or money is one thing, but trying to trick someone into buying into your beliefs?  Yeah, he'd be all, "Fuck this shit, I'm out."

All that said, I would really like it if these characters were more active in the setting.  The question of, "What do Big Damn Heroes do when they're forced to take an extended vacation?" is an interesting premise to write about, even if it is more slice of life than anything else.  And I'm sure that we can come up with some suitable antagonists if we really need to.

For my part... I would like it if Mal and his crew came to Westwoods for one primary reason: Inara.

For one thing, there's her terminal condition that needs to be dealt with.  Washu would probably want her to stick around for a month or so to monitor her condition just to make sure its licked for good.

For another, Ben would REALLY appreciate her being there to act as a sort of safety observer for the relationship between himself and Fate and Nanoha.  He wants to love those two very much, but they're still just kids, which means they really need to wait.  Inara would be the perfect person to have watching for developing problems and gently nudge them down along a path that has the best outcome.

For the Evangelion crew...

There's a LOT of unresolved issues there.  Sebastian might say that the series ended on one Hell of a note, and he'll mean that literally.  But now?  Rei is back to being part of the Human Race instead of being the Human Race, but that's still going to be a lot for her to unpack.  Asuka and Shinji are both ready to start healing, but they still need to go through that process.  The Adults (Ritsuko, Maya, Misato, and Kaji) all need to get their heads around what the hell they just went through.  Touji, Hikari, and Kensuke... are more or less okay.  Confused as all hell, but okay.  They form a critically needed clique of friends for Shinji and Asuka - people that they are familiar with who are more or less normal (at least by their standards).

And there'd be a lot of opportunities for good interactions with the rest of the Westwoods residents - particularly with the FMP crew.  They'd probably get along well enough that they might even want to go back to that world instead.  There's not much left for them in their native timeline, anyhow.

Sooo....  Thoughts?
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#7
(blows dust off thread)

Just to let folks know we're finally doing something with this, since it's now at least tangentially affecting two active writers' plotlines. (Specifically, should a particular scenelet appear in one writer's story, which needs to be completed before another writer's story can proceed.)

Folks with wiki access -- and, yes, that does still include Rajvic -- might notice that most of the story pages for September 19-24 are now larger than they were a month ago IRL. That material is still in draft status; much of it needs re-writing, and a small part of it is still marked with a placeholder line. So it's nowhere near ready to share with everybody... yet.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#8
Are we going to relocate Asuka across the state to Baka Raton? Asking for a friend.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#9
I should note that Douglass Gardens is big. I wouldn't want to from a story-writing perspective (because it would be unwieldy), but realistically speaking it could house a hundred or more people than are currently there.
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#10
Likewise the (npc) Windsor place has dozens of free beds.
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#11
Henrietta Street may not be the best place for them, but does have some level of free space and it's well away from anywhere exciting.

Well, somebody has to live there while the girls are out on tour

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#12
I'll just confirm that there is not room for them in Ottawa.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#13
Also a reminder:

1) Westwoods has *plenty* of free space as well.

2) Sensible reasons for their presence (e.g.: Kaylee wishing to have her engine room back, presence of well-seasoned giant robot pilots...)

3) Willing to write the characters.

Also, I can't help but feel like Tenchi would be an ideal older brother figure for Shinji.  They both share a common trait of wishing to be normal people while being thrust into extraordinary circumstances, and Tenchi actually does pretty well at coping with this.  Benjamin only has to remind him about it from time to time.

Really, the honest truth is that I've been in need of other characters around that can associate with each other so that I can have stories that are Not About Benjamin In Particular.

Other Examples:

Aeka and Inara becoming fast friends.  Inara is Aeka's kind of "proper lady", including her willingness to throw down once things get dicey.  Inara herself would appreciate Aeka's efforts to maintain her poise despite her nature that makes her so very easily carried away (read: acting like her mother, Queen Misaki).

River Tam and Alicia Testarossa.  Need I say any more?  Big Grin

Asuka being mentored by....

...Ryoko.

Why?  Because Ryoko knows what its like to be a hot-head with a thing for picking on others while also harboring feelings of affection.

Zoey and Melissa Mao.  Not sure what will happen here, but they make for an interesting comparison - one a career mercenary, the other a combat veteran who's now an expecting mother.

Shepherd becoming the de facto spiritual guide for many of the displacees.  It helps that many people from other places tend to visit already.  (Also, I'd love to see/write more Shepherd-Arturia stuff.)

Simon Tam becomes Washu's apprentice.  "He's not quite as brilliant as his sister, but he definitely shows promise.  It helps that he actually has a great bedside manner."

Mal lived through Serenity Valley.  Serenity Valley was Sousuke's childhood.  Include Shinji here, because the things he's experienced were pretty traumatic, too.  "Kids like them should'a never had to live through that gorram shit."  They go on fishing trips together, possibly with Book along as well (shepherds and fishermen, you know).

Kaylee would think Mihoshi is absolutely adorable.

More Kurz Webber and Jayne Cobb shenanigans.  Guns, Girls, and Booze, oh my!

I'd write more examples, but I have errands to go run right now.  I'm pretty sure you folks get the idea, though.  Wink
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#14
I like this.
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#15
I love this plan. I'm excited to be a part of it. Let's do it!

EDIT: Although we'll need to work up to it. Like so, from a story I'm working on set on November 11... (grumble) ...right, can't use CSS on the forums, and need CSS to paint the medium. Have a screencap instead. Gray text bubbles are Hikari Horaki, green bubbles are Ruiko Saten. The link in one of Hikari's bubbles goes here. Click on the screencap for a larger version.

   
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#16
Oh, and also: Ristuko and Maya apprenticing under Washu, and teaching Simon what they know about Metaphysical Biology - because from the sounds of things in the other thread, this is going to be instrumental in treating the more magically gifted residents if they ever suffer magically debilitating injuries.

Also, pretty sure that Washu will think Maya is freakin' adorable.  Not that Ami isn't, but Maya seems to be more self-aware of this and makes it happen.

Kaji would probably be joing Mal, Sousuke, and Shinji on those fishing trips.  I know that Calaveras Lake over here - which is used as a cooling and feedwater reservoir for the old Calaveras Power Plant (coal fired boiler type) - is usually kept well stocked.

Gonna have to see about getting a boat for these guys to use.  Let's see....  OH.  PERFECT.  The price is reasonable, too.
https://sanantonio.craigslist.org/boa/d/...85228.html  (I'll download the images later for reference, maybe see about contacting the owner to see if I can use them on the wiki.)
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#17
(11-17-2021, 09:39 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: Also, pretty sure that Washu will think Maya is freakin' adorable.

Well, yeah...

[Image: __sakaki_and_mayaa_azumanga_daioh__cdbba...259c5d.gif]


What? "Wrong Maya"?
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#18
<envisioning Mayaa at a console in Central DogCatma>
-- Bob

I have been Roland, Beowulf, Achilles, Gilgamesh, Clark Kent, Mary Sue, DJ Croft, Skysaber.  I have been 
called a hundred names and will be called a thousand more before the sun grows dim and cold....
RE: [OOC][META] Writer dropout
#19
There's a part of me that thinks the culture shock about coming here would be interesting.

Open drug-dealing on the city's main boulevard. A random bag of weed dropped on the street corner, being consciously ignored. The homeless. The utter rundown state of everything. Except the brand new hotels and overpriced apartment blocks. The general 'Dirty old town' feel of things.. The fact that there're maybe two buildings taller than 9 floors in the entire city. Two taps at the sink at home, instead of one -- leaving the immersion heater on - flooding the gaf by overfilling the bath - the amount of old stone floating around.

The city with a notorious heroin problem has a giant needle in the centre of it.

I love the smell of rotaries in the morning. You know one time, I got to work early, before the rush hour. I walked through the empty carpark, I didn't see one bloody Prius or Golf. And that smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole carpark, smelled like.... ....speed.

One day they're going to ban them.


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