収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

Remember that novella I’ve been writing, On Overcoming the Fear of Spiders? It’s finished. 32 chapters, a bit under 35,000 words (there is a canon digression linked at the appropriate time, but not contained within the primary volume, that boosts the word count), and I’m rather pleased to hear from a couple of readers who do not know anything about the Overwatch world that it makes sense even to them. They know there are emotional beats they’re missing, but it still works as a story.

I wasn’t specifically trying to do that, but I’m really quite pleased that it happened.

If you don’t know the lore at all, but are interested, here’s the original animated short introducing the world of the game, and here is the animated short “Alive” that featured Widowmaker. You’ll see the latter story in short form in Chapter 10, but in the cinematic, the chemistry between Amélie and Lena is absolutely smokin’, which spawned a lot of ships.

(If you really find yourself getting into the lore, here’s the official site, including the comic that confirmed Tracer – the literal face of the game, she’s on the cover of the box – is a lesbian.)

Also, you should know that in canon, in-universe, we ‘know’ that Amélie Lacroix was kidnapped by Talon and recovered apparently well but in actuality neurally reconditioned to assassinate her husband, the head of anti-Talon operations at Overwatch. After that, she went on to become a supposedly-emotionless assassin who feels only satisfaction at the success of her kills.

We are also given a lot of clues in both lore and game that this is at least in some parts a pile of lies, and that we are supposed to figure that out.

Anyway, this has been an experience like few others for me – it is literally more fiction than I’ve written, combined, before, in my life, and I actually tried writing fiction for real in college. I even got published once, in a little Ontario small-press magazine for a token $20 payment. But it was always like pulling teeth, whereas this was more like just trying to stay afloat on top of the tsunami as it carried me forward. I’ve had that feeling for individual songs before, but never for fiction.

I really liked it. I hope it happens again.

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It might be silly, but for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing something I have almost never done before, and never this much: I’ve been writing fiction, and lots of it. Overwatch fanfic, to be specific.

Over the winter holidays, Overwatch held a couple of events, and released a comic, called Reflections. It’ the one where we find out completely and totally unambiguously that Tracer, the literal face of the game, the character on the box, is queer. We meet her girlfriend, they smooch, it is inarguable text.

It was like a second Korrasami just fell out of the air and landed on us, and it was wonderful.

But we also see a single panel of Widowmaker, from the back, standing, looking to me despondent, at Gérard’s grave. (For those who don’t know: he was her husband, and her first official target as an assassin.) It’s one of what I consider to be several hints dropped that her official backstory is a lie. And there have been a bunch of people – since the beginning – shipping Tracer and Widowmaker, which to me is nonsensical in canon, because Lena would never forgive Amélie for killing Mondatta in the cinematic video “Alive.”

Lost yet? Sorry, there’s no way out but through. Anyway, one of these shippers did a marvellous and touching comic set a few minutes after that single frame of Widowmaker, with her and Venom – the version of Tracer who is with Talon, not Overwatch. And I liked it so much, I started thinking, “How would we actually get here? What would it take?”

Now, I’ve never really been a fiction writer, but I can make take characters’ lives and seriously fuck them up, but good. And, unlike certain writers (cough cough m*ff*t cough) I care about trying to make it work in character. And the analytical engine in the back of my brain started churning.

Then a couple of weeks ago, it just started falling out. I feel almost less like “writer” here than “transcriber.” It’s still short – a novelette – but Chapter 12 went up today. There have kind of been 13, but one is out of continuity and not listed with the main work, because it’s kind of an AU-to-my-own-AU aside.

Fortunately, it’s not all I can think about, but holy crow is it dominating my brainspace. I have new relationship energy with writing? Apparently? Or something? I don’t even know. (Seriously, it feels like NRE. It’s goofy.)

And since I’ve checked with actual writers and am told this is a thing that happens, I’m willing to admit to this story about my story.

I was in spawn point one on offence in Gibraltar, as Tracer (of course), and looking out the upper-floor window to see how the defence was setting up. Surprisingly few people do this, given how useful it is.

And Widowmaker came up beside me, to do the same thing, in full Talon-wear, and we said hello, like you do, and she looked through her scope to get a better view, and suddenly I saw her through Venom’s eyes.

Now, I have issues with Widowmaker’s character design, and a lot of them are probably pretty obvious, but leave those aside for the moment. Seeing her as Venom – as my Talon Tracer – sees her… even for for just that moment, she literally took my breath away.

If that’s what the tracermaker shippers have been seeing this whole time… hoo boy. Now, I really get it.

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My partner Anna and I are off to the hospital. Don’t worry, it’s a planned visit, even though it does involve sinus surgery, for her. When she was a very little kid, her brother accidentally broke her nose, and over time that turned into a deviated septum, and, over time, that has turned into sleeping problems, so – we’re off to get it fixed.

It’s fairly small surgery, and outpatient, but any surgery involving general anaesthesia is a big deal. We’ll be there most of the day, and there will be a couple of weeks of recovery. But the blog will be back to normal tomorrow, I hope!

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Livejournal’s new Russian Federation-compliant Terms of Service has a lot of bad things in it – seriously, real bad, like, half my journal bad – but this is probably the tripwire for me:

[The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0-18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.

Any mention of anything LGBT-related (with some exceptions for condemnation) is 19+ in the Russian Federation, by law. It’s part of the legal structure they use to beat down on queers.

They also have a big “no” on “political solicitation materials” and that’s also pretty fatal for me – seriously, have you read my LJ – but this, yeah, I will not mark my journal “adult content” because I’m queer. Fuck that, and fuck them.

So the only question really is whether I hit accept on the ToS and just ignore it. Or whether I delete my journal (which goes back to when it was running in Brad’s dorm room at UW) and then open a new blank one with the same name just to keep the user account solarbird, or some dumbass thing like that.

As of this morning, despite crossposting being disabled since Monday pending acceptance of new terms, I have the 364th most popular LJ, at least in the Latin character set side of the world. It’s pretty obvious now that we’re done here.

(More bits of analysis here and here – both are Dreamwidth links.)

eta: Important translation of applicable Russian censorship laws here, on Tumblr. This is 400% about speech repression.

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Turns out it’s not just me having racism and misogyny problems in Overwatch competitive. I saw Wil Wheaton reblog this article from mic.com about it, as well as this thread on the Reddit Overwatch forum, and yeah – it did get a lot worse in Season III.

And so far, nobody official seems to be doing much about it. And people doing it won’t stop until it hurts them, so I’m definitely going with my announcement and plan as a de rigueur thing before all competitive matches in Series IV.

Meanwhile, back in quickplay, I’ve started singing what I call the Tracer Tank song again, because Tracer is a tank in the right circumstances and the right levels. NO, SHE IS, REALLY. I have golded so many times for objective time as Tracer that it’s hilarious.

Tracer tank / Tracer tank
movin’ the payload
’cause somebody has to

where the fuck is Reinhardt?
where the fuck is D.va?
i could be that Reinhardt
if i really wanted

let’s all move the payload
i said everybody
okay fine I’ll do it
objective gold again

I mean, think about it. If you’re on offence in a payload level, and you’re good at her dodging motion/blinking/rewind, it works out to an effective hitpoint/armour total of easily 350 points, assuming only one rewind – much more if you’re lucky and good. I have beaten back one-on-three facedowns across the payload, more than once.

How does that work? Base health/armour of 150. Near-double that to 290 from your own health, doubled, with use of rewind. You get 10 points per second back from being on the payload; survive five seconds – not hard if you are good with her movement – and that’s another 100 points (with the single rewind), which gets you up to 390. Survive 10 seconds, that’s 490. Survive 15, 590.

Survive, oh, 2:09 like I did in one game last night as Tracer Tank? That’s 2580+300 hit/armour points (tho’ that assumes more rewinds, as it would), for a total of 2880.

Bulletproof. Reinhardt? Roadhog? Paper people.

And that’s not even getting into how the payload is functionally a motion-restricted shield with infinite hit points and infinite duration.

Tracer is a tank.

(Really, of course, Tracer shouldn’t be your group’s tank. For one thing, this whole shtick falls apart if they have a Sombra who knows what she’s doing. Even without that, it’s not Tracer’s best mode, and usually if I’m doing it, the team I’m on isn’t very good. But we all know the number of people that just won’t get on the goddamn payload, right? I was on one of those a couple of days ago where I literally solo-escorted the payload from Objective A to (just short of) the Eichenwald castle gate entirely by myself. It was hilarious.)

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Is it just me, or is Overwatch competitive mode becoming kind of a cesspit? I had to drop from another game due to misogynists going on – at me specifically – about feminist “cunts.” I’ve had to drop other games due to people going off on killing all the “ni**ers” and just chanting white supremacist horseshit into voice chat, too.

I actually called this round’s douchebag leader on a lighter weight rant a couple of minutes before, when they were going off about horrible feminists, saying, “I’m trying to figure out how to respond to this, as the actual feminist on this team who is the also only one actually taking the point,” and they shut up for a minute or two after I’d captured half of the point solo. (We’d’ve taken the whole thing right then if anyone else had showed up, but I can only play one-on-four for so long.)

But after we captured the first point and started our first big push on the second, they doubled down, so mid-push I just said “You know what, fuck this, fuck all of you, enjoy losing, I’m out” and dropped, leaving them five-on-six and without their time-on-point and kills leader.

Unfortunately, while that does cost them, it costs me more than them in ranking. So I’ve come up with something better. Next time I’m in competitive, I’m going to go on team chat first thing and say some variation on:

Hiya! Tracer here. So, apparently, this is a thing you have to say now, which is horrible, but:

If you’re going to hijack team chat to go on some racist or misogynist rant, my response will be to go back to spawn and practice wall climbing and stuff until you quit or we lose. I’m not joking, that’s just what’s gonna happen, ’cause I don’t game with dickbags.

So if that’s anybody’s plan, please, go ahead and drop now, it’s not an official game yet, and we can all go play with better people.

Nobody? Great.

I haven’t done this before now because I’ve been too antsy about getting back into competitive at all, because of how nasty my last several experiences have been. But that is nonetheless my plan.

In related news, in quickplay yesterday there was someone with a Pepe-the-Frog-type name on enemy team. He may have been backfill, because I didn’t spot him at game start. But once I spotted him in the game, I went after and killed him immediately, and made it my first priority the rest of the game to find and kill him first, without fail.

I killed him like five times. As far as I could tell, he was never a factor in the game again, and we completely steamrolled his team. (Even before that. I just accelerated the process, because fuck you you kek-worshipping neofascist numerologist shitfiend, just fuck you.)

So I encourage everyone else who is not a total douchebag Overwatch player to join me in one or both of these routines, ’cause there’s sure as hell no way PSN is going to do anything about it. I’ll probably get some shit – particularly for the speech – but I don’t fucking care anymore, I’m sick of this.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love this game. I was in pretty early and re-optimised our network and even bought a PS4 Pro so I could play it better. (Minion Paul’s PS4 was crashy.) But you pull this crap, and I will make it cost you, on my team or not. And if I earn a rep, so be it. This is a rep I am perfectly fine with earning, because I am done.

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Several months ago, Klopfenpop loaned me a teenage engineering CA-16 pocket operator, a.k.a. the “factory” model, a synth-sequencer-noisemaker in pocket-calculator form. And then Anna bought me one a few weeks ago! Which was amazing.

I’m still pretty confused by it (I’ve never used a sequencer for anything except drums which is somehow totally different even though it’s not) and I am trying to get my head around the actual feature set. I’m not traditionally good at interfaces that require you to just kind of remember what’s stored where? So I’m going to have to learn to use this thing by actually reading the instructions, which is totally unlike how I have learned every other instrument ever, which has always been “fuck with it until neat sounds come out.”

Like, right now I’m kind of confused about the factory patterns vs. patterns you store yourself and I’m not sure if the ones you store yourself overwrite factory patterns or not. I’d think they must but the instructions are not specific and being a “Never Erase what you Can’t Replace” person I’m hesitant just to, you know, try it. Because DATA.

(yes, this is goofy. but still true.)

But I certainly like making it make really annoying noises so I guess really it’s all okay. 😀

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All those posts I made about data cleanup and old hard drive data recovery got someone I know from my old SF club interested in his old Amiga hard drives, which he sent me, and which I imaged for him, and did as much file recovery as I could.

One of them was just fine – complete image, files pulled off separately as well, life is good. The other…

This is what’s actually in the disk’s partition table.

And for those who have no idea what that means: disks can be divided up into smaller disks, more or less. There are reasons to do this, mostly on servers, mostly not workstations, but whatever. These are called partitions.

This particular drive is cut up into six, count ’em, six partitions, sort of, except that two are completely broken and one is made up of parts that are also at the same time parts of two other partitions, and just kind of… overlayed atop each other.

Spoiler: this don’t work.

It’s like if you got to chapter two of a book, and midway through, chapter three appeared, overprinted and interleaved with the second half of chapter two. And after chapter two ended, chapter four picked up, printed underneath the rest of chapter three, making chapter four unreadable. But you can still make out chapter three if you squint.

There is no partition utility in the world which would let you do this.

The amazing thing is that I managed to recover the contents of both “TWork” partitions, which is a lot like getting chapters two and three from my analogy back and sorted out separately and readable. Couldn’t do anything for chapter four, though. And chapter six… I don’t know what happened there. It’s some kind of goddamn chainsaw murder scene with horror movie implications.

Sadly, both of these drives did the all-too-common very-old-drives-out-of-storage thing, where I managed to image them and pull contents, but after one last heat up/cool down, they just said “aaaaand we’re done here” ’cause that seems to be that. They’ll work long enough to come online, but the Viking won’t even stay up long enough to format it, and the Quantum ST will format, but will only let you write between 10 and 60 megs before taking itself offline and hiding from the controller until you reboot the machine. So no eBay listings for these.

Still, I’m happy. I made enough auctioning off all this old stuff to buy another microphone kit and I am closing in on another toy. Expect more DIY studio gear posts! It’ll be fun. 😀

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The new year is here, which means it’s time for the annual BIG CLEAN! But – living in earthquake territory and surrounded by active volcanoes – it’s also about emergency prep! Because it’s wise to have right the hell now, one-day, and two-or-three days plans for getting out.

(Some people also talk about having a month’s notice plan? But really, that’s a move, and I think it’s silly to think of that as ’emergency.’ Even one week isn’t a whole lot worse, even if you have a lot of junk – most of what people own that takes more than a week to sort out doesn’t really need to be sorted out.)

So! Let’s say you have one day, or worse, Mt. Rainier has just gone up and the Cascadia fault just tripped and everything is completely pear-shaped but a rescue boat is outside. For someone like me, who creates a lot of content, the key to getting out quickly without massive losses is already be ready.

What’s that mean? Well, you hear a lot about the three-day bag, of course. (At least, you do in Cascadia. It’s not really adequate, you should be prepared for at least a week, but three days is a start. Is this just us?) The three-day bag is one you can grab and take out the door as the building is falling down around you.

You should have data in that too. At very least, a recent backup of key data. For example: we back up our servers to USB flash drives. This sounds hilarious but it’s actually pretty good, because it means we can swap the flash drives monthly, and have a completely offline set of backups as well. And the monthly swap means they never have data-loss issues related to being unpowered for months.

Where do those offline backup flash drives live? The three-day pack.

If you have your creative works scattered across a bunch of formats – by which I mean other-than-digital formats – scan your stuff. And have your digital work collected – at least in backup form – in one place, and let that live in the three-day bag too. (But don’t use flash drives for this, they drop storage over time if left unpowered. They aren’t a good archive format.)

Alternatively, back your data up somewhere off-site. But that’s not always the best idea, for a lot of reasons – bandwidth being one of many, but there are many. If you can do it, great.

So as part of this year’s Big Clean, I’ve been getting my data situation together. I’ve made an image of my recording archives, and I’ve ripped all those old Commodore and Amiga floppies, and right now, and I’m scanning those old fanzines I put out back in the 90s, because why not? All that old stuff’s so small it can live in backed-up archive directories on my laptop, and the laptop is effectively part of the three-day kit anyway.

This is me, following my own advice, and being generally ready, like y’should. I was hoping to be done with all of this by the end of the 2nd, New Year’s Day Observed Bank Holiday Whatever, but I’m not quite done. But I’m close.

Anyway, here’s my RIGHT THE HELL NOW list:

• three-day pack (yours should have a solid week of meds, if any)
• laptop
• instruments (at least the zouk)
• phone
• purse (which includes passport)

That gets me almost all of my creative output, food, meds, srs bsns ID, and so on. If you don’t have a passport – or passport card – you should have one if you can afford it. It’s better ID than a driver’s license or ID card, and doesn’t get questioned.

My ONE DAY’S NOTICE list – basically like going on tour with less gear but more paperwork. All of the above plus:

• one suitcase of clothes
• all hard drives
• the One Day Warning box (important legal papers, pretty much)
• studio tablet and custom studio hardware (one box max)

Anything more starts getting into “well, now, it’s just a move,” but with 2-3 days, I’d start with more general lab and studio gear, and favourite books and art.

For an emergency, doesn’t that sound luxurious? I’d have that luxury – all that time – because my Right the Hell Now and One Day plans are together. If you live anywhere that can get Abruptly Dangerous? Yours should be too.

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Check it out – this 5.25″ floppy from a Commodore 128 literally warped. Basically, the outer plastic envelope enclosing the (very floppy!) diskette inside shrank, but only on one side. And none of the others did it either.

It wouldn’t read that way at all, obviously. It threw a “Drive Not Ready” error, which is pretty old-timey hilarious. So I cut the old envelope off along the edges and put the floppy into a different envelope, at which point I got a directory…

…though wow did it still throw a lot of errors when trying to image it. I was thinking, ‘well, 50% is better than 0%, I guess?’ Even though, really, that’s pretty dumb, because there is no real point to this, this is just old Commodore 128 software.

But there wasn’t much Commodore 128-specific software written, so I kept at it, and persistence, sometimes, it pays off!

I still had two block errors, but that’s 99.88% recovery, so that’s pretty awesome.

Most of what I’m looking for here is the first piece of non-mainframe software I had published. It’s on these disks, and it was C128-specific, and 80-column specific, which used to be a thing. And it was kind of a BBSer’s ultimate package – phone book, wardialer, password manager, loadable keyboards so you could talk to PETSKII and AtASCII and IBM-character-graphics systems all equally well (and were attached to each entry in the phonebook, so they’d load automatically), xmodem file transfer, expandable “sidekick” mini-applications like a notecard manager – all written intentionally in uncompiled, interpreted BASIC.

Open source before there was a special word for it, more or less.

But the real point was that I’d just got this amazing new machine, the Commodore 128, and the terminal software that came with the high-speed 1200 baud modem was garbage, and what freeware I could find either didn’t do 80 columns, or, worse, despite being machine language, could not handle the blinding 120 characters per second of 1200 baud modems. They’d drop characters.

So I set out to prove that this was horseshit, and that this machine was being savagely underappreciated. And did. It even got published in a diskette-based magazine called Uptime! – twice. (Version 1.0, which was pure BASIC, and Version 1.1, where I added the sidekick functionality and also said FINE A LITTLE MACHINE CODE IS NOT A BAD THING which added some raw 6502 code to do the xmodem checksum math which made file transfer speeds a lot better.)

Seriously, the terminal emulation loop that did all of these things was 38 bytes long. And it has no apparent exit, because if I had one, it wasn’t fast enough. I’d trapped the system interrupt generated by the RUN/STOP key on the keyboard to use as a COMMAND key, which is a little like making toast with a butane torch, and I’m pretty sure nobody else ever did that. It was hilarious, but it worked.

And that’s how I spent my summer vacation, circa… 1987?

I was a weird kid.

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