The Veil War

Scalzi has a post that gives a name to the point I raised earlier about the uncanny valley in storytelling.

When my daughter was much younger, my wife was reading to her from a picture book about a snowman who came to life and befriended a young boy, and on each page they would do a particular activity: build a snow fort, slide down a hill, enjoy a bowl of soup and so on. The last three pages had the snowman walking, then running, and then flying. At which point my wife got an unhappy look on her face and said ‘A flying snowman? That’s just ridiculous!’

To which I said: ‘So you can accept a snowman eating hot soup, but not flying?’ Because, you know, if you can accept the former (not to mention the entire initial premise of a snowman coming to life), I’m not sure how the snowman flying became qualitatively more ridiculous.

‘The Flying Snowman Problem’ works as well as a label for the issue as anything, and better than most. Consider it named.

This is interesting, if I do say so myself. And in this case, I do.

In the context of the Veil War, thinking like this will be relevant in two ways – one, the eventual defense of the earth will come to depend on this sort of thing. And also, the reasons why the medieval knight became extinct on our world as a result of arms technology outstripping armor technology may not obtain everywhere. And societies will change – or not change – in consequence.

I’m trying out a new blogging tool for the iPad, Blogsy. So far, I’m liking it.

Up until now, my primary blog tool whilst on the go has been the free WordPress app. It’s adequate in most respects and actually as good or better than most of the paid apps I’d tried, like BlogPress and others. A key feature is that it allows me to manage comments and check stats easily. Where it falls down is in what one might imagine to be a core competency – ease of actually writing and posting. The interface for composing and editing posts is unintuitive and aesthetically lacking. And it makes many things that should be easy… not so easy.

Having played with it all morning, I think this app will be a clear improvement in the posting and writing department. The writing interface is clean and simple, and all the nifty tools for simple formatting, link-adding and media search are arrayed in two menu bars across the top and right.

One nifty thing about this app is a slick built-in media adder thingy.  For example, you can pull up Google image search or a Flickr account from within the app and drag images and whatnot right into your post.  Say I’d like to have a picture of a pretty unicorn.

Boom. That took two seconds. Trust me. It’s a lot easier than copying and pasting image code or other, more frustrating techniques of getting images into posts. There’s also a bookmarklet for sending an image link to Blogsy, but I haven’t tried that yet. Might could be useful. And apologies to Indigo R. Wake for copying, altering and redistributing his pretty unicorn image. Lighten up, Francis.

The big downside is that Blogsy entirely lacks the ability to check stats or manage comments. Which means I either keep the WordPress app for those things, or else do them in Safari or use WordPress on my phone. Or I can download more apps… I know there are stats apps, but is there a comment management app? Probably.

If I ever need to post from my phone, which is actually fairly unlikely, I’ll just continue to use WordPress. There’s no Blogsy for iPhone and probably that is a good thing. Cramming all that into the iPhone’s limited screen real estate would likely be a disaster.

That covers mobile. As for the big computer at home, I’ve tried desktop blogging tools at various times. But really, the browser interface for WordPress is pretty slick in most regards and paying $40 or more to get the same functionality from MarsEdit just doesn’t make sense and the free blogging applications have generally sucked.

One useful thing, if you’re a Mac user, is Fluid. This is a nifty app – a browser wrapper that allows you to make an app out of a web page. I’ve used Fluid to make a gmail app in the past (though now I use Sparrow – a wonderful gmail client) and now I have a veilwar app in my dock with a custom icon. Having a web page behaving as an app is useful because you don’t have something crucial buried among thousands of tabs. Best thing, it’s free.

I apologize if you’re a windows user and/or Apple hater. This post won’t be very helpful to you. But I’ve been a mac user for about four years now – which started about a year after I spent two weekends rebuilding every machine in my home from the ground up after a pretty nasty virus/rootkit incident. My loathing for windows solidified somewhere around the third time I reformatted, reinstalled XP, set up the security software, reinstalled all my programs, and re-migrated all the essential data. The next computer I bought was a MacBook.

Now I think I’ll have to go look at stats apps…

I think this is a good theory on why the nitpicking seems focused on certain topics here. (Mind you, I don’t mind the nitpicking. But you weren’t complaining about bulletproof magical armor.)

The folks over at io9 have compiled a table of the rules of magic from fifty different books, series, tv shows and movies. I can assure you that magic in the Veil War doesn’t work exactly like any of those.

I suppose its not too early to start thinking about the cover art for an eventual Veil War book. The picture at the top of the page here is something I found on the internet, by Gustave Dore from his series on the Crusades. The significance of that will become clearer somewhere around Part VIII. And it will be downright obvious for the rest of the book. (Dore has done a lot of cool stuff. Check out especially his illustrations of the Crusades linked above, but also his Paradise Lost, Orlando Furioso and Dante.)

Here’s The Battle of Nicaea from the Crusades:

I have a friend back in Ohio – a talented artist and sometimes telemarketer – who has done work in that sort of intricate style. I thought that if I could get something done after the style of Dore, but including an Evans with his Barrett, or a Captain Lewis in utilities with his new sword- – well, that would be just keen. An antique style cover – lithograph with Marines – would buck the trend of the usual fantasy cover style that trends toward the florid oil painting with bikini armor-clad chicks and the like. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. But sadly, I rarely get back to Ohio and my friend doesn’t believe in the internet.

But I ran across, in the typically utterly random manner of the internet, this:

I like the style of this, more restrained and kind of the dark feel you get from the Dutch painters of the old school. From the artist’s web page, it seems that this is a photoshop of different elements, but a really well done one. (You can see other stuff here.) It doesn’t seem that the artist has any huge commissions – perhaps she’d be willing to do a cover on spec for the Veil War?

Does anyone know of any good artists willing to work for cheap?

Today is a singularly appropriate day to give thanks – so, a sincere thank you to everyone who has read the Veil War. And a double heaping platter of thanks to those who have commented, shared and passed the word – I am truly grateful.

The response so far – so early in the game, really – has gone far beyond my expectations. This will be an especially good Thanksgiving for me, thanks in part to all of you. I hope that all of you will enjoy good food, good company, and be thankful for all that is good in the world. Happy Thanksgiving.

I have screamed my last scream of rage at Ulysses. I finally got frustrated enough with the limitations of Ulysses as a tool for my background notes and moved it all somewhere else. And that somewhere else is Yojimbo. After one day of use, I’ve got to say I am pretty pleased.

I got Yojimbo as one of a bundle of apps I bought a while ago. I noodled with is for a few minutes, stored a few things in it from time to time and otherwise ignored it for well over a year. Many people swear by it, though, and it was in the back of my head that it might be a possibility – as I mentioned in my last post, in fact. I can say that it does what I need it to do, and really, what more can one ask of software?

My two needs in a background notes tool were a) good organization and b) ability to view multiple pieces of information simultaneously.

Yojimbo doesn’t have nested folders, but what it does have actually works better. Yojimbo has collections and tag collections. A collection is an actual bucket for stuff. So, I put all my notes (as .txt files) in a collection called ‘Veil War.’ That was step one. Yojimbo wants you to tag everything, and makes it really easy to assign tags. So for each item as I put it in, I assigned a tag, like goblins, US military, dragons, whatever fit. That’s step two. Step three, you can create a tag collection that will show everything with that tag. You can even get fancy and create tag collections that only contain items that have two or more tags.

The main window has three sections. The left sidebar of the Yojimbo window shows collections. The middle area has a file listing, and a view area which shows the contents of the item selected above. And on the right is a tag cloud. Now, I can get right to any item I need in my notes in no more than two clicks. Win. Double win, actually, because Yojimbo is a slickly-designed app that is pleasant to look at.

The real advantage Yojimbo – and now me – have over Ulysses and all the other apps that I’ve tried is one specific option. You can right click on any item and “Open in separate window.” In the main window, I can only view one file at a time, which would suck. But I can pop open anything I want in another window and arrange it however I like. And then I can open another, and another. Since I have a two monitor set-up, I can arrange multiple notes – like a cast of characters, timeline and some relevant background – in the smaller screen, and have the big screen left over for writing.

One window lets me find anything I need quickly and easily. I can rearrange my files simply by changing or adding tags, yet all the files are still located in a big pile where I can’t lose them. Then, I can open whatever specific files I need at a given moment and arrange them with maximum flexibility. I can edit the files in either mode.

I really think this is the best solution I’m likely to ever find, and I think I will start using Yojimbo a lot more for other projects. Sadly for those of you who are not Mac users Yojimbo is not available on Windows or Linux. But if you are a Mac user, I recommend it highly and not just as a writing tool. (In fact, I don’t think that’s really what the developers had in mind at all.)

And now, I’ll have to check out the Yojimbo iPad app…

That people are coming here from a variety of places. Twitter and Facebook, in dribbles. A couple web searches on google. But the largest portion are coming from two places right now: Isegoria and the EN World gaming forum. Isegoria gets the Special Presidential Medal for Blog Promotion Excellence  (SPMfBPE) for linking me three times in a week and a half; dude, you’re my new hero.

For everyone who did not get here from EN World, I can recommend this thread which discusses the idea of a fantasy army invading the Earth from a D&D perspective. While I can tell you without giving too much away that magic in the Veiliverse doesn’t work like it apparently does in D&D (my last encounter with that game was more than two decades ago, and I gather that things have changed at least a bit) there’s a lot of interesting speculation there on the relative advantages of technology and magic.

One of the most interesting things in laying out the background for this story is coming up with a plausible rationale for high-powered fantasy infantry. If the invading goblin hordes were equipped like the Swiss Landesknecten, or Roman Legions, or an early Medieval spear levy they would stand exactly no chance against the modern-style military in a stand up battle. Hell, look what happened to Saddam’s army in ’91 and he was equipped with technology only a few decades, not centuries, behind the current state of American military art. The battle of 73 Easting was a turkey shoot.

If you have an army, even a very large army, of essentially non-magical creatures with a few chocolate-y nuggets of magic embedded within, the non-magical part gets rapidly attrited until all that is left is a few powerful magical creatures or wizards in the middle of an abattoir being targeted with lots and lots of artillery, missiles and – if all else fails – small tactical nukes.

I looked at it this way. If you live in a world where magic works, magic will be part of the way you live your life. You – or the skilled craftsmen and enchanters who make your stuff – will begin to include magic in everything. First in the high value artifacts, eventually in damn near anything. Look at what’s happened with computer chips here in our world. First, they were used for extremely critical national defense needs like decryption and calculating atomic bombs. Later, big business started using mainframes. Later still, personal computers. And finally, there’s chips in your toaster and throwaway toys from Happy Meals.

This doesn’t mean that every fantasy world dweller is a wizard that can cast a fireball any more than every American citizen is a Chinese or Indian integrated circuit designer. But the residents of the fantasy worlds will increasingly, over time, benefit from the diffusion of magic into smaller and smaller crevices of their lives, barring only some cultural prohibition on the use of magic or some sort of serious side effects from prolonged magic exposure akin to the brain tumors we all get from using cell phones. (You don’t have a brain tumor? Wow, lucky you.)

So a fantasy army that has ubiquitous magic is not one where everyone is a wizard, but rather one where everyone has access to reasonably powerful magical artifacts – enchanted armor, enchanted weapons, etc. And that eliminates one major advantage of a modern military force – the fact that each American soldier or Marine possesses an automatic weapon that can shoot very far and very fast.

Other issues, like logistics, air power, long range artillery – well, we’ll have to deal with that, too. But we haven’t even added dragons and wizards to the mix yet.

1. Write a novel
2. ???
3. Profit!