April Daniels's Blog

The question authors hate more than any other is “Where do you get all your ideas?”

And the reason we hate it is because our problem is not finding ideas. Our problem is figuring out which ideas are worth developing into a project. Every author I know has more ideas than hours in which to write.

If you struggle to find your own ideas, I have some advice.

Give up on being original. Go all in on being yourself. Write a book that’s just nothing but the shit YOU adore, and don’t worry if it’s been seen a thousand times before. Don’t worry if you only think you’ve seen it a thousand times before. Write something formulaic and derivative. Write something that looks like this:

The Coolest Protagonist In The Universe has a Big Problem. While she (my Coolest People in the Universe are always women but yours might not be) grapples with this, she encounters The Hottest Love Interest In History. They are instantly attracted to each other. However, the Big Problem she’s grappling with prevents The Coolest Protagonist In the Universe from getting with the Hottest Love Interest until about halfway through the story, at which time they have The Best Sex.

At that point, the Big Problem becomes either much more urgent, but now solvable through cooperation that was not possible before The Best Sex, or the Big Problem is revealed to not be much of a problem anymore, because of a new perspective on life brought about by the experience of the Best Sex. Either way, the Best Sex is the highlight of the story, the climax, if you will, of the narrative arc.

Then they live happily ever after, or they split up, or everyone dies. Just end it how it feels right to you for the story to end. Once you have done this, you’ll have a complete story, and once you have a complete story, you’ll have unlocked that part of yourself that understands what making a beginning, a middle, and an end looks like. This part of you is the key to developing new ideas and once you have understood it, ideas will be everywhere. You’ll have so many ideas you won’t have time to write them all down. The ideas will never stop. The flow will never cease.

Then you too will be cursed.

Conservatives in the government want to strip us of our ability to defend ourselves. Reporters covering the issue have heard Justice Department officials call us trannies, and say that on principle we should be disarmed. In my previous post I asserted that should the preferred method of shoving us into the gutter not be fast enough in eliminating us, that stronger measures might be pursued. It seems like at least some actors in the Justice Department want to pave the way for those stronger measures.

Regimes with genocidal intent do not simply flip the switch on the murder machine to on, they have to prepare the way to achieve their goal, just like the implementation of any other policy.

Cis people refused to believe us about who we are for a very long time; now there are some who are so desperate to go back to the days when the social consensus was that we didn’t truly exist, that they will seek to return us there by force. Please do not repeat the mistake of disbelieving us now–this is real, this is happening, they want us disappeared by any means necessary.

There are two phrases you need to understand in order to properly see the genocide against trans people that is now underway in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The first, is epistemicide. Defined here, it means

… the killing, silencing, annihilation, or devaluing of a knowledge system. We argue epistemicide happens when epistemic injustices are persistent and systematic and collectively work as a structured and systemic oppression of particular ways of knowing.

–Dr. Beth Patin

The second, is social murder, from Engels, which Wikipedia has as

an unnatural death that is believed to occur due to social, political, or economic oppression, instead of direct violence.

Any story you see about trans people needs to be red in light of these two concepts. First they want to erase us, and then they’re going to push us into the gutter and ignore us while we die. They want us to disappear.

They are already seeking to erase us, to erase any suggestion that we can exist. This program is advancing in parallel with their efforts to eliminate our health care and make it legal to discriminate against us. All of these efforts will, combined the preexisting brutality of American life, lead to increased mortality among trans people. It is social murder as a policy goal, and they will pursue ever more aggressive policies in this regard until they are satisfied we no longer exist in any meaningful way.

When you see announcements like this, understand they are part of a strategy of genocide. It doesn’t look like bombs or gas chambers or machetes, but the intent is the same. For now the tools are gentler and more indirect, but they’re trying to build consensus for stronger measures as well. They want us to kill ourselves, or to starve, or to freeze–and when that doesn’t work on all of us, I have no doubt they will select more active tactics. They want us to disappear, and for the new generations to grow up understanding that their survival depends on not being trans so they’d better stay in the closet.

This is why they want to blame us all for the actions of a mass shooter. They want to make as many people as possible okay with disposing of us. They want this to continue indefinitely.

More trans people are born every week, which means this program can have no end. If they have their way, a standing policy of destruction will be levied against all trans people, living and yet to be born, enforced by an ever-tightening winch of discrimination against those who transgress ever-more brittle gender norms.

The alternative is to accept that trans people exist, that we are who we say we are, and that we are worth fighting for. There cannot be a middle ground on this. Any compromise with people who want to dissolve our public presence and flush us down a drain will only lead to further attacks.

This problem is everyone’s problem. If you think it isn’t, try this: Think of all the times you’ve seen American conservatives freak out about something trivial. Rage is what gets them up in the morning. Without somebody to hate, they don’t know who they are. Today the Trump regime targets immigrants and trans people. Do you really believe that, once finished with us, they won’t eventually come after you?

Rep. Bonamici,

We are in a bleak time, but I think there is still hope. Several times in my lifetime, power has passed between the parties during a Presidential election, only to be passed back during a subsequent midterm. I believe that is the opportunity Democrats must be seeking starting today.

Two years of unified Republican rule will bring many hardships to our country, but it will also bring outcry. By the time you and your colleagues head back out to the campaign trail, the country will be ready to listen to alternatives.

You must provide them those alternatives. I still believe that Secretary Clinton would have been a fantastic President, but she never managed to crystallize a strong idea of what she was for, only what she was against. That’s not enough. We MUST have a strong Democratic platform, as if 2018 were another Presidential election. You, and the other Democratic members of the House, must come together and form a clear, unambiguous statement of intent–one not pre-hobbled by the realities of passing legislation past a hostile White House, but rather one that is aspirational, hopeful, and honest.

First and foremost, I would argue, the Democrats need to be the party of democracy. Re-instating the Voting Rights Act, or a modern equivalent, must be priority one, but that can’t be the limit of it. Anywhere and everywhere, Democrats should be pushing to make registration and voting easier than ever. We must forcefully push back against claims of voter fraud with a counter-narrative (that happens to be true) of Republican voter suppression and gerrymandering. In two years time, the GOP will have sold off as much of the country to their rich friends as they can. Use that as a weapon–THEY are the party of fat cats and WE are the party of ordinary voters.

Second, we must take a stand against racism and police violence. Every summer now we see clashes between protesters and militarized riot cops. In 2018, those clashes will likely take place during the campaign itself. Democrats must be the party that stands against police overreach. Yes, that may turn off some white law-and-order types, but we must come to accept that Democrats who would demotivate their minority supporters in favor of chasing fickle white voters are ceding victory for no good reason.

Third, we must strongly argue in favor of mandatory financial transparency on the part of all government officials in high office. The senior administration officials, the secretaries of the departments, everyone. The GOP will be neck-deep in crony dealing by the time the next election comes; let’s force them to defend that.

I’m sure you and your experts can see this as well as I can. I hope that you join with your fellow Democratic Caucus members in formulating a unified message and strategy that will help us go big into 2018 and nullify the final two years of Donald Trump’s administration.

We must resist. We must fight. Every inch. Every issue. We cannot allow these kleptocrats to destroy our great nation.

Thank you for your time. I look forward to hearing of the battles you wil fight.

– April Daniels

Okay, I’ve got thinks more or less cleaned up, with a snazzy new theme and a snazzy new preorder button for DREADNOUGHT. (Hint, hint.)

My old hosting company is moving out of the US and I didn’t want to follow them for legal reasons, so I set up a new host somewhere else and started the process of migrating the blog.

Long story short: the XML file I thought was a full backup of my blog was not. I’ve lost all the media I put in my posts, plus the theme, the plugins, the customization. This is foolish on my part and a good lesson for you all–a full backup is a FULL BACKUP, not just the export file.

Also, Filezilla can fucking suck me. One goddamn mistyped key and it completely deleted the main folder for my site when I was trying to get that aforementioned full backup. There was, of course, no undo button.

This means that the site’s going to be ugly for a few days as I put it back together. Such is life.

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start writing!

People like to say that Batman’s Rogue‘s Gallery is iconic because they’re all dark reflections of himself. This is bullshit, and I’ll tell ya why–it’s because they’re actually all dark reflections of American culture writ large.

Killer Croc has nothing to say about an old money white boy with parental abandonment and rage issues. He’s got everything to do with America’s fear of backwoods people. Similarly, Poison Ivy is about when militant ecofeminism gets real, Two Face is about the arbitrary and unjust nature of the American justice system, and Clayface is about the hollowness of celebrity culture. Harley Quinn is not the most popular female character in comics because she’s a twisted echo of something inside Batman; she’s popular because lots of women identify with being in an abusive relationship–notice how she’s become steadily more sympathetic as the writers embraced the implications of her backstory. And it keeps going. Scarecrow? Drugs. Mad Hatter? Date rape. The Joker? He’s about the most fundamental American fear of all. The fear of unbridled chaos, a problem that basically never exists, but which all white Americans are taught from birth to fear, and what White America fears sets the national agenda.

Admit it: nobody really gives a shit about Calendar Man. Nobody gives a shit about Man-Bat. Hush got boring fast. Why? Because none of these characters have anything to say about America. This is not to say that the scores and scores of creators who have worked on Batman-related titles over the decades were setting out to do a long-form collaborative deconstruction of the American id, far from it. I’m simply pointing out that the villains who have staying power, who matter at all to people outside the hardcore fans who love trivia? These villains all have something in common: very obvious symbolism about the American condition. Often, characters don’t pick up this extra layer until they’ve made multiple appearances and developed an extended motif, but you’ll notice that the villains who keep coming back decade after decade become less and less like people, and more and more like symbols.

Now if only I could figure out what the hell Mr. Freeze is supposed to be.

Hahaha, you get it? You get it? Because combined arms is a term for a kind of military action where many different sorts of weapons systems contribute, and brothers in arms is a term for an army, but because I’m me all the NPCs and squaddies are going to be women? Ya get it? Tell me I’m funny. Please.

Anyhow, I want a mech strategy game. We’re getting one, which is awesome, but as much as I love the BattleTech world, their focus has always been on the big stompy robots (They’re not robots! They’re mechs! Fake geek girl! Faaaaake!) to the virtual exclusion of all else, at least in the video game incarnations of the series. Tabletop BT was a little different, with lots of options for infantry, artillery, and tank support, but mainly it was about four to twelve battlemechs on a side slugging it out with each other until the mission was over. That’s fine. They’re great games, I love ’em to death.

But I want a mech combat game where the other combat arms aren’t window dressing and canon fodder. Where you take control of a company sized formation that includes all sorts of units, and each one of those units has a vital purpose. Sure, the mechs may be the stars of the show, but they’re not omnipotent and unassailable.

Here’s what I imagine: You’ve got your mech platoon, your tank platoon, and your infantry platoon. The mechs get the main work done. The tanks are nearly as powerful, and you get more of them besides, but they’re not as versatile and are not as good at spotting the enemy. Infantry are the only unit that can capture and hold objectives, and when they’re dug and have a good line of fire for their rockets, are nearly as powerful as tanks or mechs.

There’s no rock paper scissors in this game–any one of these unit types can be dangerous. But there is a consideration for using the right tool for the job. You don’t let your infantry lead an attack. You don’t let your tanks stray into rough terrain without recon to back them up. You don’t send your rock stars, your mecha, out on a sideshow errand.

Instead of going for a turn based game, I think it’d be fun to make this game real time tactics instead. But real time at a variable pace that can be paused, slowed down, or sped up at any time. You should never feel rushed playing.

Now, I said that I want combined arms, and I stick by that, but come on, giant robots are wicked sick, so the mechs would be the main part of the game. They’re the one platoon you can directly control. The other platoons under you are indirectly controlled by giving orders to the officers in charge. They accomplish the mission as best as they can, though since they were trained to fight as part of a company they will get anxious if you send them away from the main body of the company.

The art style for this should be cartoony, I think. This isn’t a grim macho game for grim macho grognards. People who are scared of bright colors should not play. Your subordinate officers have pop-up portraits when they acknowledge or react to your orders. Through these portraits and their voice acting, you get a sense of their morale, though you can check for yourself at any time as well. As you complete missions, they improve their skills and become more adept at accomplishing the tasks you set them.

The mechanics would aim for being quick to learn, tough to master. Realism–whatever that means once you’ve got giant robots in play–is eschewed in favor of clearly presented information and interesting choices. In real life, you don’t know if you’re well hidden until the enemy either spots you or fails to do so. For example, in this game, once you hide your guys in a copse of trees, they go all shadowy and dark. Lines of fire and lines of sight are clearly and easily displayed, without an overlay feature if possible. You get a preview of what your LOS will be if you move to a given position before you move there. I don’t ever want the player to regret a move on the basis that she didn’t know she wouldn’t be able to see or do what she wanted to do from that new position.

Everything about this game should be geared towards welcoming newbies into the fold, and then building them up to the level where they can be competitive in multiplayer, if that’s where they wish to go. If they choose to stay with the single player campaign and skirmish mode, that’s cool, too. To that end, the campaign should start with a very clear, very simple set of tools at hand, and then gradually up the complexity. Upping the complexity is NOT the same as bumping the difficulty, by the way. The game should start moderately difficult, and then end a bit more difficult. I don’t like single player strategy campaigns that are boring to start and a chore to finish, so that’s not going to happen here.

The single player campaign shouldn’t be too long, either. A big thing that scares newbies away from strategy games is their boasting about how long it takes to complete. I want this game to feel like a satisfying experience in 12 to 15 hours, with robust NG+, multiplayer, and skirmish mode options giving you extended replay options. If you want to put 200 hours into the game, that’s wonderful, but it shouldn’t be required just to finish it or feel like you’ve explored what the game has to offer.

I think a skirmish campaign feature might also be cool. You link a number of skirmish missions together into a dynamically generated (if, by necessity, narratively flat) mini-campaign that can be played in an afternoon. That way the strategic layer remains a relevant gameplay consideration over the long haul.

As for the story? I think that with the cartoonish art style and the nerdy affection for combined arms warfare, a project like this would greatly lend itself to goofy dark humor that doesn’t take the proceedings very seriously.

This isn’t the most cogent thing I’ve ever written. I just put 1500 words into my manuscript and my brain is kind of fried. But I wanted to get this up here.

For you

Because I care.

I’ve got a problem. Every few weeks, I think of a video game that I urgently want to exist in the world. Unfortunately I am not in gamedev. Or maybe it’s very fortunate that I’m not; after all, games seems like a horrible industry to work in these days.

Regardless, I have decided to murder two avians with a single projectile: I’m going to write these ideas down here as they come. This will hopefully get them out of my head so they stop consuming precious creativity cycles in my brain, and also will provide easy fodder for me to increase my rate of posting here on this blog.

So without further hemming or hawing, here’s the first post of this series: Vampire Simulator 2017. (Do not expect creative titles for my game ideas.)

I got this idea while walking to a grocery store late at night. The nearby grocery store is open 24/7, and there’s basically no crime in my neighborhood, so it’s not unusual at all to see people walking around alone at midnight or even later. The town takes on a different cast by night. Mostly, it’s trees casting pools of infinite black in the moonlight, occasionally broken up by a yellow window in the darkness. I passed by a man’s house and saw his garage lit red and orange with night-vision protecting lights as he worked with some tools at a bench.

It’s beautiful, and a little spooky, and it reminded me of ARMA.

Okay, come back, I’ll get to the vampires soon, I promise.

Check out this video.

Pay special attention to the segment about how the lighting engine in ARMA is excellent for nighttime missions. How they have optimized it for large, outdoor spaces with many real time lights. Imagine an entire game played in that beautiful darkness, cut by all the lights and shadows of a modern city at night.

Now imagine how, instead of ARMA, the game is actually fun. Wouldn’t that be sick as hell? (As an aside: The problem with ARMA is that the campaign is buggy, the singleplayer is frustrating, and the controls are janky as fuck. You don’t know what killed you 90% of the time or what to do differently. You fight the controls as much as you use them. And when you’ve finally managed to achieve whatever Herculean task has been set to you in this particular scenario, there’s a 20% chance that the script will simply fail to fire and you’ll lose anyhow. Let’s wave a magic wand and say all those problems get fixed, okay?)

Imagine that instead of vast, howling wastelands where nobody lives and none of the buildings have furniture, the game map was focused on a segment of dense, urban terrain. Check out this map of Portland.

The black lines enclose a hypothetical game area. It’s about 217 square kilometers. ARMA 3’s big island, Altis, is 270 for comparison. Within these black borders, you have an incredibly diverse array of neighborhoods. There aren’t any real slums in Portland these days, but for the sake of gameplay, you could say that close in southeast was having a real bad case of urban blight or something if you really needed a rundown part of town. There’s nightclubs and warehouses, public service buildings and hospitals. Sleepy residential neighborhoods, and gleaming glass condo towers above hot nightlife districts. Let’s assume we have the technology to populate this place with enough NPCs to feel like a living, breathing city.

And then you wake up as a vampire in this city. You’ve got no friends, no job, no place to go back to. Hell you’re not even from Portland. But when you cross those borders you quickly come to realize–there’s no escaping Stumptown. Anywhere you cross out of the map, you get dumped back at some random other location, usually short on money and sporting some new wounds. Sometimes–very rarely–your little sojurns outside of PDX go well and you return home sated and with a bit more spending money. Most of the time, you run into the other denizens of the night who are not happy happy to see you. If you go into Wolf territory, it’s game over.

So you’re stuck here. And you’re dead. And the sun is coming up and oh fuck you’re burning oh god it hurts so much. And you get dragged into the shadows and kept alive by your sire, who gloats and sneers about how much you don’t know and how much you need her. Oh, she’s not going to help you for free, of course. In fact, she’s barely going to help you at all. But she’ll do you a solid to get you on your feet and then it’s sink or swim. She doesn’t need incompetent slaves. If you survive long enough to figure out how to be useful, she’ll have work for you. If not. Well. That’s a self-solving problem, isn’t it? But don’t think about going into business for yourself or (worse) for one of her rivals. Not until you’re ready to kill her–and buddy, she’s had a hundred years to get ready for you.

So now you’re at the meat of the game. Now you’re trying to survive. It’s a game of inches. Just get through the night. Find a place to stay when the killing star comes again. Grab a mouthful of blood when nobody’s looking. Understand that if you get caught or let anyone know you’re a vampire, you won’t survive long enough to regret it for too long.

You learn to hunt. You learn to roost. You learn to anticipate the patterns of mortal life, and how to insert yourself into them profitably. The day-night cycle is real time, and the calendar matters. Friday night downtown is very different than the warehouse district on Tuesday morning.

Soon enough you run into other vampires. Maybe they’re friendly. Maybe they’re not. Don’t worry about getting killed right away because you figure out fast that even among the Damned there are rules. The rules are not for your benefit. You’re okay with that right now, because at least they left you in good enough shape to crawl home. You get to that condemned storehouse you’ve been staying at, and fumble with broken fingers through your stuff. Her phone number is around here somewhere. She told you to call if you ever needed help and you’ll be damned if you–oh right. You’re Damned. You give her a call, she gloats, you bit your tongue and put up with it. Now the word is out that you’re one of hers. You can walk around without being jumped by other vamps. They still don’t want you in their territory, not unless you pay the toll, but in time you’ll find ways to finesse that.

In your feavered dreams during the day, you feel the Blood calling to you. You know what you must do now. You know what you must become. You could go out and greet the sun, but you know you’re not that strong. With a bracing dose of reality, you wake up to greet a new night. You will get your own back. You will learn to survive. One night at a time.

You could break into a house, drain the folks dry, sure. But you know by know that the next night, cops would be squatting the block like they own the place. That’s bad. You’re getting cagey now. Thinking two steps ahead. You break into a different house, ghoul the accountant that you find. Now you’ve got a named servant who goes about his business and generates you money. But your enemies are going to be looking for your servants; now you’ve got to protect him or lose face. So you go to a different neighborhood, a more dangerous one. You find someone who looks like they know how to fight. You mind probe them to be sure–yep, this one can throw down. Ghoul him, too. Now you tell him to be your account’s roommate. They hate each other, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is now your cash cow has a bodyguard and you don’t really have to worry about petty cash anymore.

Suddenly you have a real house to stay at. Suddenly you have a little bit of money.

Suddenly, the centuries stretch out before you, barren and empty of hope.

—————————

This game would have a plot and recurring NPCs and meaningful player choices, but a lot of the time you’d spend simply trying to get through the next night. You want to keep yourself to yourself, or else the vampire hunters might come after you. If the hunters come after you, so will the other vampires–they don’t need you pulling down heat on them.

Your sire openly despises you, but that’s okay because you figure out that she’s not the be-all, end-all of vampire society. In fact, the local society is having a bit of an uproar at the moment, and a canny young revenant could find himself or herself vaulted to dazzling heights of power if they play their cards right.

Vampires move at a glacial speed. Every month or so, there’s a real big party where all the bloodsuckers get together to pretend they don’t despise each other. This month passes in real time. You can spend every single one of those nights hunting, scheming, doing dirty deals. Or you can fast forward to the next exciting bit, and get some algorithmically generated choices to make so that you don’t get left behind by the world. You’ve got 2 years to get out from under your sire’s thumb. Or maybe a decade, who knows? Seasons pass and years turn.

You develop your powers as a hunter of the night. I don’t envision the leveling process in this game to be a straight progression of power from weak to strong, but rather a specialization process. There are different vampire archetypes you could choose to inhabit, and you develop your skills to support them. Certainly your elders are stronger than you, but maybe not so much as they’d like you to believe. Maybe it’s more that they have the home field advantage.

If this sounds a lot like Masquarade, well, yeah. I fucking LOVE Bloodlines, but I’d want this to be uniquely its own thing. In Bloodlines, the sun never rises. You’re always hustled from one quest to another. Your influence on the story is sadly undercut by a few segments of unforgivable railroading. Most of all, it’s missing that feel of quiet desperation. There’s never a reason to flee back to your haven, hoping they aren’t following you. There’s an easy to find black market gun dealer right downtown. Most of all, hunting is restricted to just one or two major strategies–get this mortal alone and drain him. What if I want to seduce someone in a club? Or straight up blackmail them? Or break into their house while they sleep, take what I need, and let them call in sick tomorrow?

This game would be less about a grand, operatic drama about the fate of the city (though that would certainly be a background theme) and more about the struggle to get to the end of the night, the end of the week, the end of the month in better shape than you started it. It’s about being able to walk down any given street in the city and know that you can take anything you see, anything you want, and it will never replace what you’re missing. This game would be about dark freedom and painful loss. About coming to realize that you’ll never smile in the sun again.

It would be about being a smoking hot vampire babe who gives absolutely zero fucks.

I want this game so bad I can taste it. Pity I don’t have the 40 million dollars needed to buy it.