Teyrnon

This is a brief introduction to most of the Spooky Season material I’ll be posting this year. Every year, I try to post a few things around this time to help myself and, hopefully, others, get into the mood for the season. I used to do that mostly on Facebook, but that site has gotten weird about everything. For the time being, I’m calling it Cozy Horror, but if there’s a label you feel is more appropriate, please let me know.

"Excerpts from the Flintworth Paranormal Society" is an exercise in what I suppose could be labeled as Epistolary Fiction. It’ll mostly be presented in a message board post format or field reports. If you were following me on Facebook between 2019 and 2023, a portion of this material will look familiar.

To start with, we have a Flintworth Paranormal Forum thread about Molly Parker.

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I’ve decided the best way to handle the variety of ships in the Last Empires setting will be creating its own ship design and combat systems. I’ve looked at several systems in games I’ve played over the years and a few more that were suggested by folks who responded to my various posts about it on Facebook, Mastodon, and a number of gaming-related message boards.

I initially thought I could take one of the existing systems, like the one in Cepheus Engine or D6 Space, and make a few modifications to make it fit, but I realized there are too many hidden assumptions in even the most generic systems that aren’t compatible with the setting at hand. Sorting all of that out and making the necessary changes and adjustments strikes me as more intensive than just building a new system from the ground up.

It can’t be too fiddly. If a spreadsheet is needed to track what’s going on in the design process, I’ve failed miserably. I’m thinking a modular system with large pieces that can be fitted together and fine-tuned into a ship will be the way to go. How I’m going to do that, I haven’t figured out. Starship geomorphs anyone?

There should be no complex formulas at any point in the design process. I want this thing to be as friendly as possible for anyone with worse dyscalculia than mine. It might be a tall order, but I want to try.

I don’t know of any system that can account for tech-level disparities of tens of thousands of years, and I’m uncertain if it can be done in a way that comes out looking remotely sensible. Although it might be amusing to pit a single Avalonian Cruiser against a fleet of Saryillian battleships…

The system needs to be able to handle anything from single-occupant pods all the way up to twenty-eight-kilometer warships and freighters.

It’ll have to be tied to the setting. There’s no way around that.

Disparities in tech levels should be a factor of component manufacturers and shipyards. Your basic Sky-Dancer will have drastically different shorespace drives and hull strength when built at the Avalon yard than if it came out of the shipyard at Tefgid Foel.

I think that if Twitter goes the way of MySpace or sites so forgotten that I can't think what they were I'll make more effort to post my random thoughts and musings here instead of FB, Twitter, or any of the other toxic meme dumps that make up modern social media.

Random Thought: Claire was bullied mercilessly in life and murdered on the night of her senior prom. If you summon her spirit on Halloween, beware that if your name is Roger, she has made many friends since she died. You'll be meeting a few of them during the night. Chief among them is a ghostly biker gang quite intent on chasing you through the night until the dawn comes, and they must return to their rest. They will gladly do to you all the things that the Roger who bullied, Claire in life, did to her.

If you share a name with any of her three murderers the legends have nothing clear to say about what happens. None of those were ever seen or heard from again.

Random Thought: Of all the inventions of contemporary humanity, social media is the most likely to hasten the extinction of the species. Every time your cat pounces on your keyboard while your checking Facebook or Twitter or hides your phone by lying on it, it is an effort to save not just you but your entire species.

Random Thought: A hiker spots a flying saucer and executes the classic thumb-up gesture. Is s/he surprised when the saucer zooms in for a landing ten feet away?

As I write this Facebook has been down for several hours and this is looking like it's probably not the usual downtime. Is anybody here?

Welp, I'm just sitting here watching the tumbleweeds drift past. So, is there anyone else wandering through these lost halls of the 'net past?

Hello to anyone reading this, it's been over a year since my last entry here and I decided it was time to make an update. This might the only update I make this year if I continue the trends of the past few years. I'm still working on my website. I have a change log on the site that I try to update every time I make changes. I've moved away from large and complicated web apps for this incarnation of the site. Instead, it'll be mostly static HTML pages with a few bits of javascript and the occasional PHP page that I've written myself. My intention at the moment is for there to be no code on the site that I don't understand fully what it's doing.

I haven't figured out a good way to facilitate a way for site visitors to send feedback. Once upon a time way back in the early days of the world wide web, I would have stuck a mailto link on the main page and left it at that but that isn't viable these days. The email address would just get scooped up by scrapers and the mailbox would be choked with spam in a very short time. For the longest time, I had a feedback form page that used a CGI script that Dreamhost provided,  to send an email to me without actually revealing the address to the world at large. Sadly, that script is no more. I've tried to write one in PHP but I've yet to figure out how to do write it in such a way that doesn't leave an opening for an exploit. I'm wary of anything that allows a user to open end text to the website. I need to study the language more and figure out a good solution. For now I've placed a link ro my Twitter on the change log page as a means of contacting me.

In other news I continue to be plagued by health issues and I'm still writing with the occasional short story or novella published under my pseudonym from the LD days.  If you don't know what that is don't worry about it. I'm not telling! :)