Plotbunnies
Jan. 6th, 2024 05:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithI was granting a wish for lebateleur as part of ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge and realized that 1) I want to save these and 2) other people would probably enjoy them also. DO NOT read with mouth full.
>> Hm. I'm in a writing rut, so how about this—Do you have a prompt for: (list of fandoms in stickypost) <<
RELEASE THE PLOTBUNNIES!
Current Obsessions:
Good Omens
* If you want to succeed as a writer -- any kind of writer -- London is the place to go. Nobody knows quite why, just that it massively raises your chances of sudden success.
Why: because Aziraphale secretly loves writing workshops and author events and all that bookworm stuff, and he hands out little miracles like they are candy. You still have to finish your manuscripts and submit them, but from there he's got you covered.
* Crowley goes on a tremendous tear about humans driving plant species to extinction and curses the shite out of someone he deems responsible. Because we all love seeing Crowley totally losing it.
Forever Fandoms:
Discworld: All of the Deaths at an amusement park trying to figure out what "amusement" is. The most successful is the Death of Rats, who meets Templeton the Rat (from Charlotte's Web) and learns about the joys of gluttony. Of course, now he's going to be singing that song forever...
Farscape: Moya likes to compose treatises about the evils of slavery. But for someone who thinks in colors and quantum physics, they're a little difficult to translate into something that humanoid species can understand.
Lord of the Rings: If you are a crafter of anything whatsoever, you know how ... messy ... the creative process is. So what happened to all the rough drafts that Annatar and Celebrimbor flung all over the forge? "Let's use an opal, that's fiery--" "Are you DAFT? Opals are fragile, it'll crack. We'll use a diamond." "What? No, everybody and his dog uses diamonds." *throws rough draft across room*
X-Files: In the age of "alternative facts" and deepfakes, Mulder attempts to come up with a program that can distinguish "the truth is out there" from nonsense. And his program becomes sapient, whereupon it ravages society because humans actually HATE the truth. Scully tears her hair out trying to do damage control without, you know, actually taking the side of internet trolls.
My Fandoms of One:
Paraic O'Donnell's The House on Vesper Sands: Connect the missing girls in this novel with other aspects of violence against women, e.g. global sex trafficking, missing and murdered indigenous women, attacks on female-presenting gender-variant people, etc. None of that is new, it will all have its own variations in the Victorian setting. They've always been targets, always "disappeared" into the cracks ... and sometimes strange things result.
Sugiura Shiho's 終点unknown: That which is unknown is powerful. Knowledge is power, but it is always limited. What is unknown is unlimited, and therefore stronger. To know is to hold a tiny candle in a vast, windy darkness. You can never know everything; there will always be more than you don't know than what you do know. And that's maddening for characters who seek to make the unknown into the known.
Old Flames:
Bleach: This show is a lot about self-awareness, because the powers are basically expressions of your inner self. And it's mostly handled with a fairly serious take on meditation, martial arts practice, etc. Now there's one exercise that is downright notorious for that sort of thing: The Doorway Exercise. It's maddening and everyone knows this. Enter We Didn't Playtest This at All. You have to do things like shout "Aaah! Zombies!" at the beginning of your turn or zombies will eat your brain and you lose. Suddenly the mindfulness is hilarious instead of tedious. Now what is that going to do to a character's manifestation of combat powers?
Firefly: Two by Two, hands of blue. The thing about a group of characters who always do the same thing is it's a huge vulnerability. So let's find the factory where the blue gloves are made -- because you know there's only one, it's got to be a secret -- and pour contact poison into the process. Something slow-acting that takes days to show symptoms. Then watch these extremely uncreative people scramble around trying to figure out why their operatives are suddenly dropping dead.
Harry Potter: The stories just make me want to drown every adult in Wizarding Britain. So let's just cross this with Hy-Brasil and say that some magical accident is causing Britain to sink.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: After the release of all potential Slayers, it turns out that magic runs on identity not presentation. So now there are scads of trans and other gender-variant Slayers running around, not all of whom conventionally look like "girls."
MCU: Erik Lensherr and Steve Rogers meet, secretly, in coffeeshops to reminisce over a time that few others remember. One day, Steve shows up with a battered Bucky in tow. "Found him." "And you brought him here because...?" "Well, first, he's from my time too. And second, I figure if anyone knows about fixing busted-up supervillains, it'd be you."
Enduring Interests
Anime: Let's have some fanservice! I want to see a blowoff of a male character doing a nekkid transformation with a sparkly star covering where his dangle should be. Like The Hawkeye Initiative, but anime.
Books: America is in a book-burning mood again. Pretty much every bibliophile knows the Curse of Ashes -- if you burn books, their ideas fly away on the wind to inspire other people far out reach from the arsonists. Because ideas never die. But what if someone discovered the Blessing of Ashes instead? You cast it, reach into the ashes, and pull out a previously burned book. Now watch the censors lose every last speck of their shit. This should work in any magical setting, but particularly bookshop canon or AU, magical school, or monster hunters who use reference books.
Calligraphy & fountain pens: We've all seen "modern person (often self-insert) gets dropped into historic/fantasy setting" AU stories. Now I don't know about you, but I'd be all, "WTF no, I am not spending the rest of my life writing with a goose feather. You there, smith! This is what a metal nib looks like. This is what a ballpoint nib looks like. Is there a chemist in the house? We're gonna need some new ink, I don't know how it's made but I can describe its performance properties. A fountain pen has a package of ink inside it, so does a ballpoint pen. This is what a screw press looks like. I don't have a fancier printing press permed but here is how movable type works. Is there another linguist in the house? We need your language's alphabet in order of frequency." "Erm ... we're going on a quest? To slay a dragon?" "Oh right, yeah, gimme a minute and I'll barf up a xenobiology text on dragons and how to analyze any species for weak points. But first, let me finish revolutionizing your literacy tools, kthxbye."
Foreign language learning: Suzette Haden Elgin once observed that "Writers will put their characters through any horrible experience, except learning a foreign language." LOL no, that is one of my favorite challenges. I especially love dumping characters on an alien planet where they don't speak the language and have to get by "somehow." No universal translator, no Babelfish, no Spell of Tongues, zip-nada. You have your brain and your senses, any human languages you may know, so good luck prying open the window that evolution painted shut when you were 7 or so. For bonus points, include a thumbnail sample of the alien language, how it does at least one thing that no (known, surviving) human language does, and how the characters melt down trying to cope with that.
Gardening: In a permaculture, sometimes Gaia throws in things you didn't actually pay for and plant yourself. So what if She's busy, tired, and forgets which plants or animals belong in which dimension and puts something in the "wrong" garden? Believe me, after the wild grapes, elderberries, cup plants, and a pair of bald eagles using my yard as a romantic carpet under their courting flight ... I wouldn't be that surprised to walk out one morning and find a symurgh staring at me from an enchanted fruit tree. "Ah you better not have brought any invasive species with you, you fluffy bugger! Are there any pests on that tree? Any pollinators or do you expect me to come up there with a paintbrush?" *Symurgh gives a flustered ruffle and inches away*
Irish traditional music: An enchanted harp bestows the Bardic Gift on those who play it ... but only works for vision-impaired players.
Manga: In order to make the spellbook work, you have to read it "backwards" from your usual language. So everyone thinks it's a fake and doesn't work, until the otaku picks it up and opens the back cover by sheer habit.
Roleplaying games: My rule for character construction was that you can build whatever you are able to build, and play it -- and I will scale the challenges to match. So I thought it'd be fun to make a megascale roleplaying game where each player is running a different deity (fantasy or horror setting) or force of nature (science / SF setting) and your collective job is to construct a world (realm, universe, solar system, world tree, whatever) together. You might be lighting stars, sculpting planets, trying to figure out how to keep the planes of Fire and Water from exploding each other, designing lifeforms, drafting laws of magic or science -- whatever floats your boat. To make this accurate to what we know of science and of cosmologies from world religions, each player character has at least one other PC they can't stand and at least one other PC they ally with consistently. This campaign is run not by a Dungeonmaster but by The Highest Power.
Tabletop gaming: Design a pocket game. The game engine must fit on one sheet of 8.5x11" paper (can be printed on both sides). Any additional tools must also fit into a typical pocket (a real masculine pocket, not a fake ladypocket or one you can't fit your damn hand into), such as a d6 and a pencil. Your smartphone counts if you wish to code an app instead of drafting a hardcopy game, but the game must be playable on a table not on the phone itself. Part of the game mechanics is that it incorporates some number of small portable objects found in the immediate vicinity (e.g. what they players have in their pockets or purse, what is visible in the room and can be commandeered without causing a problem), which you then place upon your table and use in some fashion to play the game. You must include a summary of at least 5 broad categories of objects (e.g. diningware, jewelry, game loose parts, currency, trash from a garbage can) and how each category performs in the game. (Note that pocket games tend to sell really well on Kickstarter, if anyone wants to build this.)
Tarot: The deity of divination has spilled their deck. Only some of their cards remain usable. To simulate this effect, the game master shuffles a Tarot deck and then removes at least 1/4 of the cards without looking. Next, turn over and write down which cards are removed from play. Now it's up to the players to determine 1) which cards have been removed and no longer perform divination in the material world and 2) how to devise a new divinatory tool that can take the place of Tarot without using the concepts from the "lost" cards.
Yoga: Describe a set of at least 10 asanas or mudras for a nonhuman species who does not possess the same number and orientation of limbs, digits, etc. as a standard human but who desperately wants to do yoga with human friends. If you're into high school or college tropes, the motivation is ready-made young people want to do what their friends are doing; for adults you might need to stretch a bit further.
>> Send it my way! I can't say if or when it will ever become a finished piece of writing, but I'll do my best and appreciate having the nudge no matter the outcome.<<
If you do write something, I would love to get a link for it so I can read it.
(And that goes for anyone else who might decide to play with these.)
lebateleur as part of snowflake_challenge and realized that 1) I want to save these and 2) other people would probably enjoy them also. DO NOT read with mouth full.>> Hm. I'm in a writing rut, so how about this—Do you have a prompt for: (list of fandoms in stickypost) <<
RELEASE THE PLOTBUNNIES!
Current Obsessions:
Good Omens
* If you want to succeed as a writer -- any kind of writer -- London is the place to go. Nobody knows quite why, just that it massively raises your chances of sudden success.
Why: because Aziraphale secretly loves writing workshops and author events and all that bookworm stuff, and he hands out little miracles like they are candy. You still have to finish your manuscripts and submit them, but from there he's got you covered.
* Crowley goes on a tremendous tear about humans driving plant species to extinction and curses the shite out of someone he deems responsible. Because we all love seeing Crowley totally losing it.
Forever Fandoms:
Discworld: All of the Deaths at an amusement park trying to figure out what "amusement" is. The most successful is the Death of Rats, who meets Templeton the Rat (from Charlotte's Web) and learns about the joys of gluttony. Of course, now he's going to be singing that song forever...
Farscape: Moya likes to compose treatises about the evils of slavery. But for someone who thinks in colors and quantum physics, they're a little difficult to translate into something that humanoid species can understand.
Lord of the Rings: If you are a crafter of anything whatsoever, you know how ... messy ... the creative process is. So what happened to all the rough drafts that Annatar and Celebrimbor flung all over the forge? "Let's use an opal, that's fiery--" "Are you DAFT? Opals are fragile, it'll crack. We'll use a diamond." "What? No, everybody and his dog uses diamonds." *throws rough draft across room*
X-Files: In the age of "alternative facts" and deepfakes, Mulder attempts to come up with a program that can distinguish "the truth is out there" from nonsense. And his program becomes sapient, whereupon it ravages society because humans actually HATE the truth. Scully tears her hair out trying to do damage control without, you know, actually taking the side of internet trolls.
My Fandoms of One:
Paraic O'Donnell's The House on Vesper Sands: Connect the missing girls in this novel with other aspects of violence against women, e.g. global sex trafficking, missing and murdered indigenous women, attacks on female-presenting gender-variant people, etc. None of that is new, it will all have its own variations in the Victorian setting. They've always been targets, always "disappeared" into the cracks ... and sometimes strange things result.
Sugiura Shiho's 終点unknown: That which is unknown is powerful. Knowledge is power, but it is always limited. What is unknown is unlimited, and therefore stronger. To know is to hold a tiny candle in a vast, windy darkness. You can never know everything; there will always be more than you don't know than what you do know. And that's maddening for characters who seek to make the unknown into the known.
Old Flames:
Bleach: This show is a lot about self-awareness, because the powers are basically expressions of your inner self. And it's mostly handled with a fairly serious take on meditation, martial arts practice, etc. Now there's one exercise that is downright notorious for that sort of thing: The Doorway Exercise. It's maddening and everyone knows this. Enter We Didn't Playtest This at All. You have to do things like shout "Aaah! Zombies!" at the beginning of your turn or zombies will eat your brain and you lose. Suddenly the mindfulness is hilarious instead of tedious. Now what is that going to do to a character's manifestation of combat powers?
Firefly: Two by Two, hands of blue. The thing about a group of characters who always do the same thing is it's a huge vulnerability. So let's find the factory where the blue gloves are made -- because you know there's only one, it's got to be a secret -- and pour contact poison into the process. Something slow-acting that takes days to show symptoms. Then watch these extremely uncreative people scramble around trying to figure out why their operatives are suddenly dropping dead.
Harry Potter: The stories just make me want to drown every adult in Wizarding Britain. So let's just cross this with Hy-Brasil and say that some magical accident is causing Britain to sink.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: After the release of all potential Slayers, it turns out that magic runs on identity not presentation. So now there are scads of trans and other gender-variant Slayers running around, not all of whom conventionally look like "girls."
MCU: Erik Lensherr and Steve Rogers meet, secretly, in coffeeshops to reminisce over a time that few others remember. One day, Steve shows up with a battered Bucky in tow. "Found him." "And you brought him here because...?" "Well, first, he's from my time too. And second, I figure if anyone knows about fixing busted-up supervillains, it'd be you."
Enduring Interests
Anime: Let's have some fanservice! I want to see a blowoff of a male character doing a nekkid transformation with a sparkly star covering where his dangle should be. Like The Hawkeye Initiative, but anime.
Books: America is in a book-burning mood again. Pretty much every bibliophile knows the Curse of Ashes -- if you burn books, their ideas fly away on the wind to inspire other people far out reach from the arsonists. Because ideas never die. But what if someone discovered the Blessing of Ashes instead? You cast it, reach into the ashes, and pull out a previously burned book. Now watch the censors lose every last speck of their shit. This should work in any magical setting, but particularly bookshop canon or AU, magical school, or monster hunters who use reference books.
Calligraphy & fountain pens: We've all seen "modern person (often self-insert) gets dropped into historic/fantasy setting" AU stories. Now I don't know about you, but I'd be all, "WTF no, I am not spending the rest of my life writing with a goose feather. You there, smith! This is what a metal nib looks like. This is what a ballpoint nib looks like. Is there a chemist in the house? We're gonna need some new ink, I don't know how it's made but I can describe its performance properties. A fountain pen has a package of ink inside it, so does a ballpoint pen. This is what a screw press looks like. I don't have a fancier printing press permed but here is how movable type works. Is there another linguist in the house? We need your language's alphabet in order of frequency." "Erm ... we're going on a quest? To slay a dragon?" "Oh right, yeah, gimme a minute and I'll barf up a xenobiology text on dragons and how to analyze any species for weak points. But first, let me finish revolutionizing your literacy tools, kthxbye."
Foreign language learning: Suzette Haden Elgin once observed that "Writers will put their characters through any horrible experience, except learning a foreign language." LOL no, that is one of my favorite challenges. I especially love dumping characters on an alien planet where they don't speak the language and have to get by "somehow." No universal translator, no Babelfish, no Spell of Tongues, zip-nada. You have your brain and your senses, any human languages you may know, so good luck prying open the window that evolution painted shut when you were 7 or so. For bonus points, include a thumbnail sample of the alien language, how it does at least one thing that no (known, surviving) human language does, and how the characters melt down trying to cope with that.
Gardening: In a permaculture, sometimes Gaia throws in things you didn't actually pay for and plant yourself. So what if She's busy, tired, and forgets which plants or animals belong in which dimension and puts something in the "wrong" garden? Believe me, after the wild grapes, elderberries, cup plants, and a pair of bald eagles using my yard as a romantic carpet under their courting flight ... I wouldn't be that surprised to walk out one morning and find a symurgh staring at me from an enchanted fruit tree. "Ah you better not have brought any invasive species with you, you fluffy bugger! Are there any pests on that tree? Any pollinators or do you expect me to come up there with a paintbrush?" *Symurgh gives a flustered ruffle and inches away*
Irish traditional music: An enchanted harp bestows the Bardic Gift on those who play it ... but only works for vision-impaired players.
Manga: In order to make the spellbook work, you have to read it "backwards" from your usual language. So everyone thinks it's a fake and doesn't work, until the otaku picks it up and opens the back cover by sheer habit.
Roleplaying games: My rule for character construction was that you can build whatever you are able to build, and play it -- and I will scale the challenges to match. So I thought it'd be fun to make a megascale roleplaying game where each player is running a different deity (fantasy or horror setting) or force of nature (science / SF setting) and your collective job is to construct a world (realm, universe, solar system, world tree, whatever) together. You might be lighting stars, sculpting planets, trying to figure out how to keep the planes of Fire and Water from exploding each other, designing lifeforms, drafting laws of magic or science -- whatever floats your boat. To make this accurate to what we know of science and of cosmologies from world religions, each player character has at least one other PC they can't stand and at least one other PC they ally with consistently. This campaign is run not by a Dungeonmaster but by The Highest Power.
Tabletop gaming: Design a pocket game. The game engine must fit on one sheet of 8.5x11" paper (can be printed on both sides). Any additional tools must also fit into a typical pocket (a real masculine pocket, not a fake ladypocket or one you can't fit your damn hand into), such as a d6 and a pencil. Your smartphone counts if you wish to code an app instead of drafting a hardcopy game, but the game must be playable on a table not on the phone itself. Part of the game mechanics is that it incorporates some number of small portable objects found in the immediate vicinity (e.g. what they players have in their pockets or purse, what is visible in the room and can be commandeered without causing a problem), which you then place upon your table and use in some fashion to play the game. You must include a summary of at least 5 broad categories of objects (e.g. diningware, jewelry, game loose parts, currency, trash from a garbage can) and how each category performs in the game. (Note that pocket games tend to sell really well on Kickstarter, if anyone wants to build this.)
Tarot: The deity of divination has spilled their deck. Only some of their cards remain usable. To simulate this effect, the game master shuffles a Tarot deck and then removes at least 1/4 of the cards without looking. Next, turn over and write down which cards are removed from play. Now it's up to the players to determine 1) which cards have been removed and no longer perform divination in the material world and 2) how to devise a new divinatory tool that can take the place of Tarot without using the concepts from the "lost" cards.
Yoga: Describe a set of at least 10 asanas or mudras for a nonhuman species who does not possess the same number and orientation of limbs, digits, etc. as a standard human but who desperately wants to do yoga with human friends. If you're into high school or college tropes, the motivation is ready-made young people want to do what their friends are doing; for adults you might need to stretch a bit further.
>> Send it my way! I can't say if or when it will ever become a finished piece of writing, but I'll do my best and appreciate having the nudge no matter the outcome.<<
If you do write something, I would love to get a link for it so I can read it.
(And that goes for anyone else who might decide to play with these.)
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Date: 2024-01-07 12:30 am (UTC)Yes ...
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Date: 2024-01-07 01:46 am (UTC)You know a lot of Alchemical texts were written backwards, had all kinds of hidden or missing steps and so on... I can just see some Otaku who's a chemist nerd getting hold of one of those and making it work...
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Date: 2024-01-07 04:43 am (UTC)Ascendance of a Bookworm is a anime series that was adapted from a manga adapted from a light novel series. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ascendance_of_a_Bookworm
The basic idea is that a modern Japanese girl who was going to be a librarian is dumped into a different world but she is in the body of a sickly child. She has to deal with her new body, not knowing the language, culture and worse of all not having access to any books! Her family is pretty much illiterate due to their status & the culture.
I highly recommend it in any form. I first watched the anime but I've also read some of the novels as they were available at my library. The novels go into more detail on some things liek cultural practices. Plus the novels are complete. The show has several seasons with the next one confirmed but not out yet.
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Date: 2024-01-07 07:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
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From: (Anonymous) - Date: 2024-01-11 03:08 pm (UTC) - Expand(no subject)
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Date: 2024-01-07 06:33 pm (UTC)If destroying a book is on par with melting down a car and recovering the metals from it, that's going to make it a lot less common.
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Date: 2024-01-07 10:54 pm (UTC)Humans have been able to learn each other's languages since we figured out where the exit from the Rift Valley was. Pointing and charades, shouting and arm-waving, and lots of show and tell.
Aliens who have cephalopod bodies. Inventing yoga for octopods might be fun. And to me the unknown is exciting - it's a huge stack of unimaginable holiday presents, just waiting for someone to come along who knows how to open them.
And I want the Blessing of Ashes. An endless supply of books I haven't read yet!
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Date: 2024-01-09 03:26 am (UTC)The world being crafting castoffs would explain a lot. Also, what if there is an Island of Misfit Toys-esque world for all the odd projects that failed to make the cut or just plain failed?
>>And his program becomes sapient, whereupon it ravages society because humans actually HATE the truth.<<
This part has been done. See the early scifi story A Logic Named Joe, by Murray Leinster (Which also predicted the invention of personal computers, internet...and some of the issues with those things.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Logic_Named_Joe
Come to think of it, you could also look at Fae, truth spells, and moral obligations of truthspeaking.
>>This show is a lot about self-awareness, because the powers are basically expressions of your inner self. And it's mostly handled with a fairly serious take on meditation, martial arts practice, etc.<<
This sort of thing could be played as a Disability Superpower. Like:
- someone who has massive mood swings can regulate their emotions in a mood-sensitive Fisher-King Otherworld better than a normie.
- Ditto for the person that gets possessed by a demon who tries to corrupt them - but fails, because dealing with obsessive thoughts is the same skillset whether it is OCD or an irritating demon joyriding your brain.
- And someone with shapeshifting powers might be unexpectedly good at operating multiple very different brains if they are used to having different mental-state personas.
>>The stories just make me want to drown every adult in Wizarding Britain.<<
A lot of that could be explained by cultural differences...so now I want to see a HP fanfic where there is a Culture Clash between the Elizabethan Divine Right of Kings wizards who consider public executions to be family fun and workhouses to be dangerously innovative with the Muggles who have laws against animal cruelty (and cruelty against children), state-funded healthcare, and health-and-building codes.
While I have seen fanfics that incorporate bits of this, I don't think I've seen one where it was the main focus.
Also, even if Dumbledore's logic was "Welp, the Dursleys are better than a workhouse/Dickensian orphanage," that still doesn't mean I think his decision was right.
>>Erik Lensherr and Steve Rogers meet, secretly, in coffeeshops to reminisce over a time that few others remember.<<
Somewhere there's a good genderbent fic where Stephanie Rogers (among her other activities) befriends an elderly WWII veteran in the present day, because they both understand their shared experience in a way most other people alive cannot.
>>Let's have some fanservice! I want to see a blowoff of a male character...<<
Not an anime, but I did read something once whare the guy got himself morphlocked in a way that resulted in him wearing being stuck fanservice-y clothing that was basically strategically-placed fabric and jewelry. Then the whole situation was basically used as an Aesop about how sexual harassment is bad...and insisting that people being harassed have to be nice about it is, mildly put, inadvisable.
>>We've all seen "modern person (often self-insert) gets dropped into historic/fantasy setting" AU stories.<<
...very few of which illustrate the difficulty folks would have with all sorts of things: language barriers, different tech (skinning game and cooking it over a fire, for one example), dealing with problems (improvising menstrual products or losing adaptive equipment), being unaware of hazards (don't pet the fart squirrels, cobras /do/ spit poison), etc, etc.
(For some reason they do seem to love to play with the "Socialized to a different culture -> get attacked by the current likely-superstitious culture.")
>>Is there another linguist in the house? We need your language's alphabet in order of frequency."<<
Speaking of inventing linguistic stuff, I wonder if it would be possible to invent a writing system for a tactile-modality language. (Current tactile writing encodes verbal languages, and while people have experimented with visual-modality writing, I don't think there is one in particular that has caught overwhelming popularity yet.)
>>"WTF no, I am not spending the rest of my life writing with a goose feather.<<
Why does no-one in these settings ever seem to complin about the quality of rushlight vs candlelight, or have trouble with using the quill-pen, and so on?
>>Foreign language learning: Suzette Haden Elgin once observed that "Writers will put their characters through any horrible experience, except learning a foreign language."<<
Well, you need a scenario where it makes sense, and furthers the story. Also, if using something that doesn't go through Google Translate, any foreign dialogue takes longer to write because you have to translate it manually, and that assumes it is even a language that can be written down.
Seriously, try writing sign-language dialogue that is being observed by a non-signing focal character. If you want to do anything more complicated that "..and with that, Bob shooed them out of the room with a teasing grin," you need to know enough about the individual signs, and sign language grammar, and be good at descriptions. Even then, you might mess up if you are using a sign language you are not fluent in!
That said, there are a handful of good stories that use this concept, and there are also a handful of tricks that can be used to play with languages in a way that is both realistic and interesting to readers.
This might be an interesting topic to write a post on, if you are interested in doing so.
>>For bonus points, include a thumbnail sample of the alien language, how it does at least one thing that no (known, surviving) human language does, and how the characters melt down trying to cope with that.<<
Meltdown frequency would likely be affected by other languages known, prior experience in language-learning, general communication skills, and the record-breaking-ness of the alien language on human brains.
>>The game engine must fit on one sheet of 8.5x11" paper (can be printed on both sides).<<
I could cheat by using a mini-notebook. Art skills for the win!
>>Any additional tools must also fit into a typical pocket (a real masculine pocket, not a fake ladypocket or one you can't fit your damn hand into),...<<
Maybe this could be Extreme Mode?
Seriously, there's a reason I keep altering my pants to have actual, sensibly-sized and working pockets...
>>Describe a set of at least 10 asanas or mudras for a nonhuman species who does not possess the same number and orientation of limbs, digits, etc. as a standard human but who desperately wants to do yoga with human friends.<<
That sounds interesting...if I knew the yoga poses and didn't have do desinn the aliens.
I did try coming up with body languague for beings with different bodyplans once. That was fun!
>>If you're into high school or college tropes, the motivation is ready-made young people want to do what their friends are doing; for adults you might need to stretch a bit further.<<
Social bonding or curiosity might still get someone to try at least a single session. Their coming back might depend on additional incentives (like "humans who do yoga have such relaxing auras" or something).
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From:Yes ...
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