Reading. Why I love and hate it.

As I believe I have made clear before, I was a hyperlexic child. That is, my command of the English level was not merely years but almost a whole decade ahead of where it should be, and remained such until mid to late adolescence, when others began to finally catch up.

I smoke two joints when I play videogame… and at every ten thousand points…

No, I do not really smoke two joints when I play a videogame. It is a quote from a song, Smoke Two Joints, by The Toyes. If I did smoke two joints at every ten thousand points while playing some 1990s-era videogames, I could well be the first person to die of marijuana overdose. And really, what better way could there be to introduce a rambling about the subject of videogames from prior eras, namely before the whole mass-marketing bubble, that I would gladly throw everything from this era into the sewage in order to play again?

Writing is hard. Especially when…

If you have been reading my most recent posts, you may, very likely have developed an impression that I am not physically, emotionally, or just generally, well. You would be correct in this impression. Yet day in and day out, I persist in writing like I have never written before in this journal and elsewhere.

My name is… and I play WOW *far* too much

They say that when you are doing something so much that it interferes with your other activities in life, the relationship you have with that activity may well be unhealthy. It might even be an addiction. In that spirit, I would like to talk about the videogame known as World Of Warcraft.

Designing a good fantasy race

One challenge that all fantasy authors face when they decide to write characters that belong to a different race or species than the stock-standard Human is how to keep track of the relative abilities and shortcomings of the different races. The disadvantage of writing designs for each race in one’s stories is that it involves a lot of homework and researching things about how other authors have written characters of similar or even identical racial traits. And if your characters are anything like the characters in my stories, one also has to figure out how one is going to depict how being born of parents from two different races is going to affect the resultant child. So the question to ask oneself first is how are the peoples of different stock-standard races designed, and why? Why, as a question, is an author’s best friend. When an author is struggling to come up with material, asking why Trór Gravewater should be noticeably taller and heavier than other Dwarrow can give them a few thousand words to divert into whilst thinking over the story’s next move.

In that spirit, I will show you a rough translation of all the notes I have in my collection about the different races of Kali-Yuga and how they differ. Differ both in function and abilities. Take note that these are only guide notes and not game design notes. None of the rules given here should be taken as absolute, especially since one of the spices of writing longform fiction is to turn characters into individuals.

The first race of Kali-Yuga we shall concern ourselves with in this writing is the Humans.