Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I haven’t made any sculpture in years, and I’ve never used Sculpey to do anything but make little beads. So we’ll see how this goes. I’ve gotten a lot of help from the extraordinarily kind and knowledgeable artists over at the Concept Art fora.

Lots of pictures of this Warrior of the Southern Heart of Ashlesa 5.2, so look after the break. As with all art on the site from now on, you can click images to get a belargened slide show.

Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’m not sure why I avoid reading io9. I think it’s because I’m so frequently disappointed by science fiction media properties. But I keep winding up there anyway, in no small part because Judd Karlman sends me a link to the site daily, and it’s always something interesting.

Well, he didn’t send me this interview with Neill Blomkamp, the director of District 9 and several really excellent SF shorts. So there, Judd.

In it, Neill talks about the double-edged sword of large budgets.

In a recent interview with the L.A. Times, Blomkamp made it quite clear that he wants nothing to do with $100 million budgets and major studio releases. The reason for this, he explains, is that he wants to be able to tell his own stories in his own way, and that just isn’t possible when such massive amounts of money are involved.

But that’s just the beginning of the good stuff.

If you look at the most meaningful science fiction, it didn’t come from watching other films. We seem to be in a place now where filmmakers make films based on other films because that’s where the stimuli and influence comes from. But go back and look at something like [Joe Haldeman's 1974 novel] “The Forever War” – that is very much rooted in his experience in Vietnam, that’s where the stimulation comes from.

He even addresses my problems with District 9.

Neill Blomkamp, will you make me Mrs. Blomkamp?

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Matthew J. Neagley wrote a nice review of Shock: over at Gnome Stew a couple of weeks back. People say nice things in the comments, too!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

(note that this and subsequent pictures can be clicked to see a lovely embiggening process.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

51:04 long & 49 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss major changes to the game, spend a lot of time with feedback, and discuss how Jewish someone has to be in England.

We took some during-the-show notes. If you have Google Wave you might be able to take a look at the Wave we created while recording. For those of you without, you can check out the Google Docs transcription

- The Weird Jews Livejournal group that Joshua joined
- The Tenth Amendment to the US Constitution
- The Alas, A Blog entry about the New York Times piece on England and Jewishness
- Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit
- The Starship Troopers and Robocop films
- Feedback from Doc Holaday, Luke Crane (sorta), Vincent Baker, Jj
- cat and man!
- We know who the game will always be about now!
- Larry Ellison
- Rutgers and Yale Universities
- Blackwater Worldwide
- Postmodernism
- On Mighty Thews, by Simon Carryer
- Frank Frazetta
- The Draconis Montreal convention

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Taffy Lewis’ Night Club” by Vangelis.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

An Afghani Jingle Truck

An anonymous friend of mine who works for the US Government studying contractors tells me:

“In Afghanistan, [shipping]’s not as big a problem [as between Kuwait and Iraq] because the shipping companies are mostly local and they know who to pay off. If you look at pictures of Afghan and Pakistani trucks online, you can see they are covered with jewelry and paintings, which serve to announce their alliances.  They call them ‘jingle trucks’… that’s why convoy security isn’t as difficult in Afghanistan.”

“Holy crap,” I said, paraphrasing myself for this post, “That’s the Silk Road. Still.”

Lest we forget as creators of fictions, I will state this: systems, including Modern systems, are not perfect. They don’t make a homogeneous, Star Trek world. There are local needs that aren’t satisfied by distant, putatively benevolent systems of control. There are traditions that are kept, social mores that evolved for the particular requirements of that area of the world. They don’t change just because there are teleporters.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A warrior's front hydraulic limbs, shell, and two views of an individual.

In the geyland called the Southern Heart lives a species called “warriors” by the explorers who first discovered them. They’re herd animals, living among twenty or thirty of their kind. They’re about 1m tall, to the top of their banners and eyes and about half as long. Their front feet each contain a circular mouth on the bottom, covered in raspy skin that they use to scrape minerals and microfauna off the ground. On the front of those feet single spikes. Their paired eyes are at the top of a tall tower at the front of their smooth, tortoise-like shells. Sprouting from their backs through a small hole in their carapaces are two tall feather-like banners in shifting, bright colors and patterns. Their hind legs are thick and strong, but the front ones are lithe and move in quick, snappy motions.

Warrior herds graze within eyesight of one another, no more than 12m away from each other. The twin banners on their backs are for herd communication. Each herd has a unique pattern that varies with context.  The better the food, the broader the stripes, for instance, with herd members moving closer to individuals whose stripes indicate a better food source. They also sound the alarm, signaling predators and seeing other herds. The high eye towers allow them to see over other herd members while they graze, and quickly see changes in the environment and alert others to that change.

The muscles of the warriors, like those of most creatures of the Southern Heart, are hydraulic and work in compression, rather than the tension as most terran muscles do. Like many arthropods on Earth, they have very limited tensor muscles, gaining their real strength and speed from their hydraulic system.

When an individual warrior sees another herd, its banners suddenly change color into vibrant stripes that are clearly distinguishable from those of the other herd. They then charge into battle at a glacial pace, their thick hind legs pushing them forward and their front limbs working together to lift the keel of their shells off the ground. As they approach, the banners of the individuals change patterns subtly to indicate tactical openings they see. They coördinate themselves like this, inching themselves into position until they stand close enough to other individuals that they can strike with their barbed forelimbs.

But this battle is not for territory or resources. The barb on the creatures’ forelimbs are injectors of spermlike structures, carrying the individual’s genes into the circulatory system of the struck individual. It also contains a hormone that causes the struck individual to stop fighting and signaling, recovering over a few hours, recovering completely only well after the fight has ended. The spermoforms are carried by the recipient’s circulatory system to an ovary, where they gestate for several days, eventually to be born in a 2cm sack, its eye tower collapsed along its back. The mother helps tear open the egg sac and the newborn climbs onto the mother’s back, where the eye tower erects over a few minutes. While on its mother’s back, it begins mimicking the coloration of the banners in its own herd.

The shell hardens over a few days and the newborn begins grazing alongside other individuals. Over the course of a season, it will grow to full size, now part of its mother’s army.

If you have any questions about the warriors, the geyland of the Southern Heart, or anything else about Ashlesa, please put them in the comments and I’ll be sure to pass them on to the proper Ashlesologists.

Want to know more about Ashlesa? There are several articles on this blog. As exploration continues, more will be posted.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

We all know cephalopods are interesting and amazing. They’re also brilliant and absurd. See this out outfoxing its predators by hiding in a coconut that it carries around with it for just such a purpose.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE I AM A COCONUT PLEASE CONTINUE ON YOUR WAY

Most absurd is the tiptoeing gait.

But most fascinating is the fact that they seem to have learned how to do it.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Several views of Polar Piglets

In the northernmost geyland of Ashlesa live the Polar Piglets. The 35 cm long, waddling creatures are highly social in nature, spending as much time as possible in close proximity to several other individuals.

They mineral-rich water flowing up from below forms large, bulging rocks wherever vents open to the surface. These rocks are filled with microfauna — there being no true “plants” on Ashlesa — that eat the inside of the rocks, expanding colonially and through the underground streams and rivers. They’re the primary food of the polar piglets, who look for the rare tiny holes in the rocks where the microfauna dig too far. When they see such a hole, they waddle up to it and insert their 20 cm prehensile radula, rasping the microfauna off the interior walls of the hollow rock.

Once the piglet has been satisfied, it stops completely digesting its food, forming it into little balls in a crop and mixing it with packets of its own genetic material.

When a piglet sees another up against a rock, it will amble up and attach itself by its soft mouth to the cloaca of the grazing individual. It will stimulate the grazing individual with its radula, receiving the balls of semi-digested food and genetic material. Chains are made this way as much as four individuals long, each receiving the passed-up food and genetic material of all the individuals ahead of it. Past four, there is little nutrition and the genes are too jumbled to be much use. The last in line lays eggs of all the combinations of genetic material, with each individual’s material being combined with the material of each and every of those behind it in all possible ways.

Consumptive and procreative purposes aside, the piglets spend much of their time so attached. They travel around in chains of two or three, and when groups meet another, they’ll often form rings and knots in an ecstatic, wiggling, chirping pile.

Do you have questions for the researchers on Ashlesa? Please ask them in the comments below.

Please keep comments polite and scientific. HAB members, this means you.

(please see the thread on the previous Ashlesa post for questions and answers there.)

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A raccoon skull, found behind the house last Autumn

Comcast has now switched to all-digital channels. We do not wish to pay for it. That means I get to draw and do other stuff that’s way more fun than watching the stupid TV.

Above is a life drawing of a raccoon skull. I’m not wholly happy with it and expect to do more drawings of it.

A beaver skull from the LIFE Nature Library book, The Mammals

This one’s copied from a photo in a book. Check out the size of this thing’s jaw. Holy crap. No wonder they can chew down trees.

Note the different way the eyes are supported. The raccoon’s are supported by the cheekbone with no superorbital ridge, while the beaver’s are supported by a huge superorbital ridge and its massive jaw.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

An Octoform ignores a Human photographer

When humans first orbited Ashlesa 5.2 (the second moon in orbit around the fifth “planet” — itself a brown dwarf — orbiting the star Ashlesa) , they were struck by its geology. A single vast plain, desert-like, with the occasional oasis dotting the landscape, broken only by chains of geysers, some thousands of miles across. Subterranean rivers ran under the hard crust, emerging only rarely. Life flourished both outside and in the geyser chains, but they seemed completely distinct. Not only was life in one of the “geylands” (as the explorers called them) different from that outside, it was distinct from every other geyland. They were each an entire closed ecosystem, biochemically (and in one case, physically) separated from the rest of the planet.

A team landing near the equator were met by titanic, 8-limbed, starfish-like creatures, slowly walking in a widely separated herd. Each “foot” was an obviously sensitive organ, feeling along, apparently sniffing and grazing on the thin scum that covers much of the broad plain. Its limbs were dotted with small, black, featureless eyes, largely facing up. The creatures, “Octaforms” as the explorers called them, completely ignored the human explorers.

A flying pentaform harpoons a running triform.

Landing near the Boreal geyland, the explorers discovered 40 cm wide,  three-limbed creatures they called “triforms” happily grazing on some sort of biochemical sludge at the edges of the glacier. While observing them, the explorers were startled when a harpoon shot from the sky and speared one, followed by a crack like a gunshot. Floating silently in the air above the triforms, its shadow cast to the north of its prey, hovered a balloon. Five arms reached out and hugged the envelope. A small cloud of steam drifted away on the wind. The remains of the triform’s small herd had galloped away, turning like wheels, scattering like birds. The speared one struggled for mere seconds before it went completely slack.

The harpoon remained embedded in the creature and the ice below it for several minutes while the surveyors noticed that they prey was becoming a dry husk. After a half hour, there was so little of the creature that, when the zoölogists approached later, there was nothing but a dry skin on the ground.

The balloon had retracted its harpoon and was drifting away slowly, directing its flight subtly with small barks of fire from the appendage from which it had fired its harpoon. It drifted up and away until its form was no longer distinct. “It’s like lightning that wants to hit you,” said one awed researcher.

A triform, dissected.

A boreal triform was discovered, partially eaten by some other animal. The team lost no time in dissecting the fresh specimen. It is completely symmetrical, each limb being a complete copy of the others. It is covered in a thick skin that responds to electrical pulses, itself a fine muscle. Underneath the skin are many thick bands of heavier muscle tissue, supported by a fibrous, almost plastic quill running the length of each limb. This particular species has soft, fine “fingers” along each limb, each with a small orifice.

At the base of each limb are what appear to be several clusters of nerve-like fibers. Experiments with living triforms — and indeed, every other planar form of life on Ashlesa shows that the distal nerve clusters control reflexes and autonomic activity of the limb. The most proximal body, on the other hand, seems to be involved in communication with the other limbs. With their simple eyes, this is the only way the creatures can assemble complex vision. As it is the largest nervous body, this is apparently a challenging task.

Coming up:

Polar Piglets. Warriors of the Southern Heart. The closest thing to a “plant” on Ashlesa.

If you have questions about life on Ashlesa, please ask in the comments and I’ll pass them on to researchers in the appropriate field.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve really always wanted to do just this, but been put off by the extraordinary work necessary. The result is even more beautiful than I’d have guessed.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

57:39 long & 52.8 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) discuss the abilities of the hunter-fog-cloud thing, talk a bit more about the tech web, then get into brainstorming some of the possible powers that the different characters in the game have.

Notes taken by Joshua and I before and during the episode, with lots of detail on what we came up with.

- Joshua tells a story about badasses and kukris
- Listener feedback from Renato Raimonda, Dave Michalak, and Noah Trammell (02:54 – 10:00)
- Archetype / Dramatic role as a class / race combination
- Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World
- Ibrahim Dahlstrom-Hakki’s (aka “Slash”) board game, Salah Ad-Din: Rise of a Leader
- We tried to use Google Wave, and there’s a public Wave to look at from our planning session (you need a Wave account)
- The James Herbert novel The Fog, which Joshua conflates with the Stephen King novella, The Mist
- The German boardgame Keep Cool (you may be able to buy this if you speak German), and Vincent Baker’s Mechaton
- The Steven Spielberg sci-fi film Minority Report
- The limbic system (for those of you perplexed by Joshua’s “limbically”)
- The unlinkable but cool Chris Moore game, Psi Run (it was an Ashcan Front game
- Return of singularitarianism
- Return of the tech web!
- Brennan Taylor’s Mortal Coil
- DARPANET

Listener homeworks (2 of them):

1) Give us a name for the cloudkill
2) Give us a name for the little quanta of information the cloudkill gets on you

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Games Without Frontiers” by Peter Gabriel.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Fellow students of game publishing, the Game Design Studio is open once again. If you have rules that you’ve playtested, layout you want help with, concepts you want to clarify, come and enlist the aid of others while offering your help in return!

As last time, the doors will be open for a finite time. When useful critique has ended, we’ll shut down so everyone can head back to their home studios to work on their stuff some more.

Before you do anything, read the rules for presentation, please.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Peter Watts comes up with a super-punchy Shock material. In this one, he notes that placebos are getting stronger over time. And that the logical conclusion is the prohibition of modes of thought that heal one’s body. Hot stuff.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Captain Estar Goes to Heaven is an intense science fiction comic series, done over seven years. It feels like an 80s or 90s indie comic like Fringe, Grendel, or God’s Hammer. It’s about depression and trying to make the world as bad as you feel. Gnarly, Shock: style ending, too.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

As beautiful as this art is, I look forward to the day when it’s the content, not the mere obvious presence, of an illusion that makes us marvel. I think that’s part of what makes Moon such a great movie, in fact.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

54:46 long & 50.2 MB big

In this episode, Robert Bohl (designer of Misspent Youth) and Joshua A. C. Newman (designer of shock: social science fiction) finish developing the character-based situation for the game they’re designing — before your very ears! — then move on to discussing some ways that characters can be pushed to change away from baseline humanity

Rob’s during-the-show notes, the document containing the complete write-up of the relationship map, and Joshua’s ideas on the cloudkill technology.

- Rob does a staged reading of the lyrics to “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants
- We reflect on how much podcasting is like The King of Comedy
- Obligatory references to Vincent Baker, Radio Lab, and Paul Beakley (we also talk about Ben Lehman)
- COINTELPRO
- The film Jarhead
- The Wire, Generation Kill, and Battlestar Galactica
- John Dillinger
- Toxoplasmosis, Brilliant Gameologists podcast, and Peeps by Scott Westerfeld
- Hampshire College, the college Joshua graduated from
- Crank, which has a sub-standard sequel
- Mortal Coil
- My Life with Master
- Cloudkill
- A Scanner Darkly
- JiffyCon
- There are mysterious goings-on on the Facebook page for shock:

You can subscribe to the show by plugging the RSS feed URL into your preferred podcatcher. You can also use the one-click iTunes button thingie:

The intro music is “Gotta Whizz” by Boris the Sprinkler, from the album Mega Anal. The outgoing music is “Prevenge” by They Might Be Giants from the album The Spine.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

A very nice gentleman named Jeremy just set up a page for Shock: fans on Facebook. To be honest, I’m not sure what capabilities that gives anyone, but I’ll certainly become a fan of my own game. Meet me there!