Starfield: The Game that Could Have Been

Posted on August 16, 2024 by tacit

Some while ago, I answered a question over on Quora about whether or not it’s okay to pirate a video game if you can’t afford it. I write for a living, which of course means I take intellectual property seriously. Also, I write for a living, which means I don’t have very much money.

So, as you might imagine, I answered no, it’s not okay to steal other people’s work, even if you can’t afford to buy it, and as an example I used Starfield, the massive single-player role-playing game from Bethesda.

I like Bethesda games. I have, as of the time of writing this, sunk over 1,990 hours into Skyrim and 1,570 hours into Fallout 4. I’ve itched to play Starfield since I first heard of it, but at seventy bucks for the “normal” game and a hundred bucks for the “premium” version, I was like nah.

So, Quora being what it is, one of the kind folks over there bought me a copy, and another friend on Quora gave me a machine that could play it.

Which was amazing.

I now have about 225 hours in Starfield, and it’s so, so close to being a good game, but it just…isn’t.

All the ingredients are there for a truly amazing game except one: the game designers forgot to make it fun.

It’s an innovative game. It’s a pretty game, in places (and in places it’s howlingly bad). It has a bunch of cool, well-thought-out design ideas. It’s just not fun.

So, let’s do a deep dive into why Starfield misfired so badly. Caution: Long essay is long.

Part 0: WTF is Starfield?

It’s Skyrim in space. Seriously, it’s Skyrim in space.

If you know and love Skyrim, you’ll largely know what to expect. You, a blue-collar miner in the ass end of the explored universe, come across a Cosmic Mystery™ that catapults you on an adventure. Along the way, you’ll team up with companions who will guide you (and maybe marry you), you’ll engage in countless battles, and you’ll develop strange powers never before seen, only instead of gaining powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty bow and an overpowered Sneak skill, you’ll gain powers from long-forgotten ancient temples you explore with the aid of your trusty laser gun and an overpowered Sneak skill.

You’ll also gather resources to build outposts on widely-scattered planets, rather than gathering resources to build settlements in widely-scattered parts of Boston.

Honestly, this sounded like pure pixelated crack cocaine to me. (Did I mention I’ve over a thousand hours in both Skyrim and Fallout 4?) Take a mashup of Skyrim and Fallout and put them in SPAAAACE!!!!!™? Sign me the hell up! What’s that you say? I can design and build my own spaceships too? You already had me! Let’s do it!

And yet…and yet…

Somehow, it manages not to be nearly as interesting as Skyrim or Fallout. It’s huge—a hundred worlds with endless procedurally generated terrain to explore—but it feels tiny. The main city in Starfield, New Atlantis, is the largest city Bethesda has ever created, but it feels stifling.

So what went wrong?

Part 1: The Bits that Work

Before I do a deep dive into the parts that went off the rails, I want to acknowledge that there’s a lot to like.

The spaceship crafting is amazing.

This is my ship, Anopheles.

This is a ship I have in one way or another been working on for forty years. Back in my high school days, I played in a Traveller pen and paper role-playing game (remember that? The game where you could die during character generation?) with my best friend down the street and the rest of my friends circle. We flew around in Anopheles, named for the mosquito that carries malaria—a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship, fast and light, with no armor but a hell of a punch.

Later, after university, I ran a hard-SF GURPS Space game for about five or six years, in which the players explored the Rich Cluster, a small globular star cluster with about a dozen habitable worlds all quite close to each other, in which the players flew around getting involved in weird political messes in Anopheles—you got it, a tiny, heavily-armed five-person ship named after the mosquito that carries malaria.

My Starfield ship was again a tiny, heavily-armed craft with a long spine projecting from the front that carries a bunch of particle beam weapons that chew through much larger, more heavily-armed spacecraft.

I had endless fun designing this ship, building it, upgrading it, improving it.

A fair bit of Starfield involves space combat, and the Starfield ship to ship combat system is complicated, with many different classes of weapons (lasers, missiles, railguns, particle beams) that you assign to different mouse buttons. Some weapons are good against shields, some against the enemy hull. You can fire at the enemy in general or target different systems (engines, FTL drive, shields, weapons). You need to use different weapons at different times—projectiles, for example, are effective against a ship’s hull but ineffective against shields, so you use lasers against the shields until they’re down, then switch to—

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, I’m kidding.

I mean, that’s how it’s supposed to work, and during combat you’re supposed to think about how you allocate power between different weapons sysstems and engines and shields and such, but as soon as you figure out that particle beam weapons work against shields and ships, you just stop faffing about with all that, put the biggest reactor you can on your ship, load it down with particle beam weapons, and tear through ships four times your size like they’re tissue paper.

The companions are really well done.

At the start of the game, you end up joining a group called Constellation, intent on uncovering the mysteries of the universe. Many of the companions you can choose from are Constellation members, but they’re all different.

The companion characters’ personalities are nuanced, subtle, and complex. The first companion you travel with is so well done that I ended up not starting an in-game romantic relationship with her because she reminded me in subtle ways of the judgmental bossiness of a real-life ex enough to give me the shivers.

Instead, I ended up marrying Andreja, the introverted, possibly-on-the-spectrum badass with the secret past.

Andreja is BAE. And if you marry her, the wedding gift she gives you is amazing. Not, like, in a game mechanics way, but symbolically.

Fallout allows you to romance multiple characters who are all, apparently, totally on board with you having more than one lover. Not so in Starfield, where monogamy is apparently Very Much A Thing and romancing one character means no more nookie from others unless you divorce first. Limitless technological advancement, suburban 20th century American values.

Some of the quests are amazing.

As with Fallout 4, the companion you choose to travel with can give you quests. The quest you get from Sarah starts out seeming pretty predictable, and about halfway through I was rolling my eyes, certain I knew how it would end…but the game surprised me. It’s really well done and handled with exquisite care.

The quest Entangled has you flipping back and forth between two different timelines after an accident in a research facility. It’s nothing like any quest I’ve played in a computer RPG before, it never stops being cool, and overall it’s an absolute blast.

The same corridor in the two different timelines in Entangled

There’s a whole series of quests centered on rising through the ranks of corporate spy/fixer at a megacorporation called Ryujin Industries that I can only imagine was as much marvelous fun to write as it was to play (tip: bump up your Stealth skill before you do it!).

Ryujin’s corporate HQ

The Music

I mean, it’s Inon Zur. Of course it’s good.

I personally like the Fallout 4 soundtrack better—there’s more variety, and the music is less ambient (the main theme and Of Green and Grey still give me chills), but seriously, that man could write music based on his shopping list and it would be amazing. The only video game music that has ever stuck with me like the soundtrack from Fallout 4 are the songs Nightsong and Outlaw Harbor C, both from World of Warcraft.

The “New Game+” system is…um.

I’m honestly not sure whether to put the NG+ system in the Bits That Work section or the Bits That Don’t. So let’s do this:

Part 1.5: New Game+

Starfield has this thing that happens, that Bethesda called “New Game+”, that lets you start a new game without starting a new game.

Okay, so (minor spoilers for the main story):

The game starts out with you, a lowly miner in a miserable backwater, carving out a mysterious possibly-alien artifact from the rock. The moment you touch it, you have a Cosmic Experience with lights and music and trippy visuals, and so you’re tasked to take the strange artifact to Constellation and that kicks off the main adventure.

As you collect more of these ancient maybe-alien artifacts, you find temples that grant you strange powers, and eventually you learn that the artifacts can be assembled into this nexus that lets you skip between alternate universes.

If you choose to leave the universe you’re in for a different universe, it’s like starting a new game: you start out at Constellation with no money, no possessions save for a really freaky-ass Starborn spaceship (because you’re Starborn now, a member of a rarified handful of people with the ability to cross between parallel universes), except that you keep your character level and all your skills and abilities.

Hence, New Game+. You’re starting a new game, only with on old character you’ve already developed.

The good: You can explore all the various ways to end different quests or all the various factions you can side with without actually starting a new game from scratch. Don’t like the way things turned out? Wish you hadn’t sided with that faction? Leave this universe behind for a new one, where nobody knows you and you haven’t done any quests, and start again! It’s a really cool idea.

The bad: Implementation sucks.

I was sad to leave behind Anopheles but eager to see what I could do with this really freaky alien Starborn ship that I got.

Answer: Nothing.

Nothing. You can’t upgrade it. You can’t swap out any parts of it, or customize it, or modify it. You can’t sell it. You can’t do anything with it except customize the furniture inside, and the layout is so weird there’s really not much you can do even with that. One of the coolest parts of the game, and it just doesn’t apply when you flip between universes.

So you’ll probably want to capture, buy, or hijack a ship in every new universe, just so you can, you know, play with the shipbuilding parts of the game.

The cities are all laid out exactly the same way in the alternate universes; every major non-procedurally-generated location is precisely the same. Yet for reasons I cannot comprehend, they act like brand new locations—you can’t fast travel to them without visiting them on foot first, even though they’re all the same.

You shift between universes with nothing. Not even your spacesuit or clothes. You’re given a new spacesuit to go with your new spaceship, but no clothes, no money, no weapons, no tools, nothing. I think it would be far more interesting if you shifted with your clothes, some money, and perhaps a limited amount of equipment—like fifty kilograms or twenty kilograms or whatever. Enough to take some things that you really like, but with a small enough limit you have to make choices.

In the game, the Starborn are all pretty universally assholes, and after you’ve played NG+ you can see why. When you can just blamf to a new universe to escape the consequences of everything you’ve done, the stakes suddenly get very, very low. It would be cool if consequences somehow followed you. In every universe, you keep getting harassed and attacked for no readily apparent reason by other Starborn who seem to think you’re “unworthy,” but there’s no rhyme or reason to it. Maybe if different factions of Starborn reacted differently to choices you made in the universes you left behind? Dunno, just spitballing.

Part 2: Why The Game Misfires

At this point, Bethesda has such a reputation for launching games in a buggy, half-finished state and fixing everything after it goes out the door that complaining feels like piling on.

But still:

It’s buggy it’s buggy it’s buggy oh my God it’s buggy

When I first got the game, it was unplayable. My game system is AMD Athlon/Radeon based, and for a while it would swear the graphic card drivers were outdated on launch every time, even though they most assuredly weren’t.

It would also crash about 25% of the time on loading screens between locations, until I learned to turn contact shadows off in the game settings, which mostly fixed it.

Later patches of the game gradually improved the stability, to the point where I now play for hours without a crash, but it took a while to get there.

While the game doesn’t crash constantly any more, the procedural generation still needs help. It has a weird habit of putting rocks and random boxes and other elements not touching the ground.

This kind of stuff happens very frequently. There are parts of the game where rocks are supposed to be floating in midair, because there’s an “antigravity element” in the game. This isn’t one of them.

Like most Bethesda games, there’s a crafting system. You can modify your weapons and spacesuits, craft pharmaceuticals, and make other items at various types of workbenches.

And the whole system is buggy AF. A workbench will often say that you can’t use it because someone else is using it even when there’s no human being within a light year of you. (Sleeping on a bed sometimes fixes it.)

Or it will say that a workbench is “obstructed” and can’t be used when it’s not. (Shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it—yes, I’m serious.)

Or you’ll go through the animation to use it and then just…stop, and you won’t be able to craft anything. (Again, shooting the workbench with a gun sometimes fixes it, no idea why.)

The lockpicking minigame

Fuck me, it’s annoying. I actively look for reasons not to pick locks.

Every Bethesda game has a lockpicking minigame. You stick something, whether that’s a lockpick or a bobby pin, into a lock and turn. There’s a “sweet spot” where if you position the lockpick right it opens, otherwise it sticks, and there’s a chance it might break the lockpick. Simple, self-evident the first time you do it, easy…and dull.

So Bethesda said “why not make the lockpick thing an actual game?”

Great idea. Terrible execution.

It’s tedious, it’s complex, there’s almost no on-boarding so you have no idea what you’re doing, and every time you try to pick a lock and give up in frustration you lose a lockpick…and in this game they’re scarce.

It’s not at all obvious how the lockpicking system works, especially when it gets complex with higher-difficulty locks—I’ve read a half dozen tutorials and I’m still often confused (as are other players, judging from the number of tutorials and the comments on them). I predict that it won’t be long until someone makes a mod to skip the lockpicking minigame. When they do, I’m installing it, assuming I ever decide to start playing again.

The outpost system

Jesus Christ on a three-legged tap-dancing camel, the system of establishing colonies on distant worlds is deeply broken—a confusing, poorly thought-out mess that’s the exact opposite of fun.

Fallout 4 introduced a settlement system, where you, the player, can build and secure little towns that attract settlers, build houses, plant crops, set up defenses, create supply lines between settlements, even set up artillary you can use to call down strikes for a certain distance around the settlements.

Starfield takes that system and makes it crappier in every single way.

The ensuckification of the settlement system knows no bounds. It’s complex, obtuse, requires investment of way too many skill points, and the player is thrown into it with no tutorial and no clear guidance whatsoever.

The idea is simple: Different planets have different resources, like iron and titanium and fluorine and whatever. You can land on just about any planet, plonk down a settlement, then place buildings, resource extractors, resource storage, walls, defenses, and so forth. Resource extractors will automatically mine resources, then transfer them to storage bays so you can come collect them later.

Each storage unit can only hold so many resources, though, and it gets tedious to come back and keep picking them up. If only you could make them available wherever you wanted!

Wait, you can!

Maybe. I mean, I think you can? I’m not really sure. I spent hours trying to figure it out and I still have no clue how it works.

You can set up in-system and interstellar shipping lanes between your outposts. Or rather you sorta can, there are ways to do it, but apparently they rely on loading your outpost with Helium-3 or something? That’s what all the online tutorials say, but I was never able to load Helium-3 into any of the transport ships; there’s a place where you supposedly do it, but whenever I clicked on it and hit the Interact key, nothing happened.

I was finally able to set up an outpost on a planet with Helium-3 and connect a Helium-3 extractor to the cargo ship pad instead of to a storage tank and I think that worked. I saw cargo ships come and go, but I have no idea if they actually moved any resources around.

There are dozens of tutorials on Starfield outposts and I read every one and still have no idea how to make it work. Apparently you can move certain resources in certain directions but you can’t link all your outposts to each other like you can link all your settlements together in Fallout 4. They have to be linked in a line, maybe? I don’t know.

While I was fumbling around with it, I somehow got an achievement:

2.6% of all players managed to link five outposts together. That tells me this part of the game is just as confusing to 97.4% of players as it was to me. I had a quest to link an outpost to a city, but I was never able to complete it successfully. Fukifino.

There’s absolutely no in-game explanation for how this works. None. Zero. Zip. I say without exaggeration or hyperbole that if a saboteur had somehow gained employment with Bethesda for the purpose of screwing up their next-gen AAA game, he could not have done a better job of cacking things up than what the game designers did with outposts in Starfield. It’s that bad.

“Poor on-boarding” and “completely opaque game mechanisms” are pretty much the hallmark of Starfield, which I gather from spending a lot of time Googling how to do things in the game put off a lot of players, like a whole lot.

Lord of the Rings is a movie about walking. Starfield is a game about running.

Hope you like big open spaces, because Starfield is the Game of Big. Open. Spaces.

When you play Skyrim or Fallout 4, they feel…dense. You get the sense that you’re actually in a place. Like, a physical place, with roads and shops and pathways through the landscape.

This:

is a pretty typical view from Fallout 4. (Yes, I play on an iMac, what of it?) You have a sense of place. This feels like a real environment. All those buildings? You can go to them, explore them, wander around in them. Every object in Boston was placed by a person.

Starfield gives you 100 planets to explore, but they’re all pretty much the same.

This is a procedurally generated map of a section of a planet in Starfield. It’s a big expanse of nothing with pre-formed buildings plonked down at random locations.

There’s about a dozen or so types of buildings that can be placed: an abandoned cryo lab, an abandoned weapons factory, an abandoned research tower, and so on.

Thing is, every single one of these buildings is identical. The abandoned cryo lab you find on one planet is exactly the same as the abandoned cryo lab you find on a different planet, down to the map, the location of chests, where the enemies are, the location of dead bodies, everything. If you’ve been in one abandoned cryo lab you have, quite literally, been in all of them.

And they’re scattered at random with no rhyme or reason, separated by kilometers and kilometers of empty space, no roads, no nothing. Just “okay, I think I’ll bould a research tower here.” “Yeah, I’m going to put a weapons factory two kilometers away.” “Cool. Is yours abandoned?” “Well, except for space pirates, yeah. Yours?” “Space pirates, yeah.”

You never get the sense you’re actually exploring a space. Even the main cities are just plopped down surrounded by identical buildings placed at random around them. At no time in my 200+ hours did I ever once feel “wow, cool, I am really in a different place!”

Here’s a procedurally generated planet. There’s a randomly placed building in front of me, identical to every other building of its type. 798 meters away is another randomly placed building. If I want to go from here to there, I…

…run almost a kilometer.

No, I can’t get in my ship and fly a kilometer. I have to run. Yeah, it takes as long as you think. You spend a lot of time in this game running across empty terrain from one building you’ve seen a hundred times already to a different building you’ve seen a hundred times already.

In other games, every location is different. You descend into a Dwemer ruin or a grand burial chamber inhabited by undead in Skyrim and they’re all different from each other. Here, you go to Abandoned Cryo Lab #117, pixel for pixel identical to all the other 116 Abandoned Cryo Labs you’ve been in, and filled with the same enemies in the same location…

…and oh, how you will come to hate the Abandoned Cryo Lab. It’s hands down the worst designed dungeon I’ve ever seen in any RPG. (This seems a popular opinion, by the way. One guy online talked about how he simply memorized a path through the Abandoned Cryo Lab and just speedruns through it whenever he finds one.)

The Sooper Sekrit Powers™ Minigame

In Skyrim, your character can unlock “shouts,” kind of like magic spells written in the language of the dragons. Every so often you’ll find a ruin with a “Word Wall” in it. The Word Wall has writing on it in the dragon language, and when you get close, a swirling light surrounds you and you learn a new spell.

Something almost identical happens in Starfield. Every now and then, you find an ancient temple. The ancient temple has a stargate ring-thing in it. You fly through it and you learn a new power, like the ability to alter gravity to fling enemies around, or make a duplicate of yourself in combat.

Pretty cool. Not new or groundbreaking, but pretty cool…

…except that from a gameplay perspective they fucked it up.

When you go into a temple, a Stargate SG1-style ring appears and gravity stops and you fly around. And then you get frustrated because you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you fly through the ring and nothing happens so you get bored and leave.

Then you go online, and you discover that there’s a lot of lens flare around a glowing ball hanging in space and you have to fly through that before you fly through the ring. Nothing in the game tells you that. Nothing. I have no idea how the first player figured it out.

But wait, that’s not really true. See, if you fly through the lens flare then fly through the gate, nothing happens. You have to fly through the lens flare five times (or sometimes four or sometimes twenty, I think it’s on a timer but I’m not sure) and then fly through the gate.

Seriously.

You have to do this over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, every single time you find a ruined temple. Fly through the lens flare five times and then fly through the stargate and then kill me now please this is so fucking tedious it makes the lockpicking minigame feel like a luxury all-expenses-paid Hawaiian vacation please come back lockpicking minigame all is forgiven JFC.

I don’t know what game designer thought this would be fun, but that person needs therapy stat.

Oh, and then a dude comes out and says you’re not worthy so you shoot him.

The crafting system is completely broken

Fans of Skyrim and Fallout will by now not be surprised to know that Starfield lets you improve weapons and armor and spacesuits and such, just like you can in those other games, but once again they’ve bolloxed it up.

This one is a twofer. You get two, two, two game-mechanical misfires for the price of one!

When you go up a level, you get points you can put into various skills. These skills make you a better shot or let you use boost packs (which are really rather fun) or get more power from your ship reactor or repair ship damage in battle faster or whatever, and just like in previous games, if you want to be able to make the best weapon or armor mods you need to spend points in the skills that give you better access to those mods.

Unlike in Skyrim or Fallout, that’s not enough.

After you’ve spent those skill points, you still can’t do the thing until you also go to a research station and research how to do them. Spending skill points only unlocks the ability to do the research. Doing the research then gives you the ability to modify your gun or whatever.

You have to do this multiple times for each part of your weapon or armor you want to modify…

…and it costs a tremendous amount of resources to do that research.

Which you then have to do over and over again as you gain more levels and spend more points.

It makes modifying your gear incredibly expensive and time-consuming, for what is usually fairly modest gain.

But wait, it gets shittier!

You can find resources on planets you explore, like iron or titanium or whatever. And then you spend resources on research so you can spend more research on making new gunsights or making your spacesuit bullet resistant.

But…

…there is a limit to how much stuff you can carry. There is a limit to how much stuff your spaceship can carry. And holy fucknuggets are the resources heavy.

One of the very first mods released for Starfield, before even the ability to create mods in a sanctioned way had been introduced, was a mod that made resources weigh less because after you’ve spent six or seven trips going to and from your spaceship carrying hundreds of kilograms of resources, you get a bit sick of it. (Oh yeah, that’s a thing: a lot of storage chests in this game have weight limits. Man that gets frustrating fast. Resource management in this game suuuuuuucks. People complained about the same problem in Fallout 76 so the game devs were like “hold my beer.”)

Again, it almost feels like they were intentionally trying to take the fun out of the game.

Reeeeesources!!!

While we’re on the subject…

Fuck me, Bethesda, do you understand what a “spacesuit” does?

Okay, so. You’re running (and running and running and running and running) along a barren empty expanse of nothing, just like you’ve been doing for the past ten minutes, and you find a crack in the ground with argon gas coming out of it.

Never mind how inane that is, suspension of disbelief, yadda yadda yadda, roll with it.

Now, you’re in a spacesuit. I want to emphasize this. You’re in a spacesuit.

Argon is a resource, so you walk over to the crack and collect some argon. Cool!

Only now an alarm goes off and you start taking damage because caution danger poison gas poison gas get away.

Let me reiterate this one more time:

You.

Are.

In.

Spacesuit.

You are in a spacesuit. On a barren and uninhabitable, maybe airless, moon. You’re wearing a spacesuit. A spacesuit is the thing you are in.

And somehow you’re being poisoned.

By this argon.

Which is an inert, noble, non-toxic gas.

While you are in, and I cannot emphasize this enough, a spacesuit. Like, the thing you wear in space.

I don’t even know how to even.

Consensus says: Not a sticky game

I genuinely don’t see myself playing this game for a thousand hours.

I’d planned to play the game long enough to get every achievement you can get, but I gave up with one achievement still to go: reach Level 100. I’m currently level 70something…76, maybe? And I just cannot see myself slogging through what it will take to get to level 100. Ugh.

When you get an achievement, for hitting certain milestones or completing certain quests, you’re also told how many other players have earned that achievement. And judged by that metric, things look…dire.

More than half of players quit before they reach level 25—a level which is, just for the record, not that hard to reach. A bit more than a third have completed thirty missions that you can pick up in any bar or pub.

Less than a quarter finish Entangled, what I think is the coolest quest in the game and one of the best I’ve played in any role-playing game…ouch.

Fifteen percent mod a lot of weapons, in a game where modding weapons is a core mechanic…unfff that’s gotta hurt. These numbers speak to me of a game that just plain cannot capture people’s attention the way Fallout and Skyrim do.

Amazon just released a TV show based on Fallout, which is really quite good. I…don’t see that happening with Starfield. There’s just not a lot of “there” there. The procedural generation stuff…I get it, I get what they were trying to do, really, I get it, but oh my God. There are too few types of buildings and they are all…the…same.

And way too much of this game just feels like a chore. Running back and forth and back and forth with armloads of resources, repeating the same minigames over and over again, and the incomprehensibly baroque outpost system that I still haven’t figured out despite being in that rarified 2.6% of players who get the outpost achievement…how did this not get caught early in the development cycle? This is not a newbie company. This is a company that has an absolute talent for producing fun, immersive, addictive games…why is this game so goddamn dreary?

There’s a new addon to the game due in the next month or two, and I’ve been waiting for it with bated…hahaha no, I literally haven’t thought about it since it came across my Steam feed.

Will I get it? If it’s $7.99, sure. If it’s $19.99, no. If it’s $30, as a quick Google search suggests is likely, not just no but hell no. I got the game as a gift and I just cannot see myself spending money to play it any more.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll go roll a new character in Fallout 4.

Engineered Sensation and the Realm of the Senses

Posted on August 5, 2024 by tacit

Earlier this morning, I wrote an answer on Quora that reminded me I’ve spent a lot of time talking about the sex toys I design and make, but I’ve never really talked about the work that goes into those designs. So if the method to engineered sensation interests you, read on!

There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of boutique sex toy stores out there right now, the most famous being Bad Dragon, purveyor of monster cocks of all varieties. And honestly, some fo their designs are quite beautiful. But they, and most of their competitors, seem to have basically a single schtick: dildos of fantasy penises.

Which, don’t get me wrong, is perfectly fine. Hey, if that’s your jam, it’s your jam. But I absolutely think tiny bespoke sex toy makers can do more. To me, and I don’t know if I’m unusual in this regard, what interests me is exploring totally new sensations, so I think of what I do more in terms of designing sensations than designing mythological penises.

Most of my designs go through multiple iterations, refining not the look so much as the way it feels.

For example, the Tentacle Butt Plug went through almost a dozen design iterations:

I am firmly of the belief that if you are looking for a tentacle violation experience, then the tentacles should feel as violating as possible.

This is a prototype about midway through the design process. I added the suckers to the stem and I made the end, where it curves to the right, more prominent (the first design was shaped closer to where the red line is), to make the plug feel more intrusive to the wearer. You can’t ignore it.

I had five or six people test the various design iterations, and unanimously agreed that “violating” is a good word to describe the feel of this plug.

So what got me to writing this?

A question floated through my Quora feed asking how it feels to be pegged by one’s wife. I have, in fact, long been an enthusiastic fan of pegging (I hold a patent on a new type of strapon for pegging), so this was something I thought I could speak to, and the answer is:

There’s no such thing as what it feels like to be pegged. It’s different in different positions, obviously—being pegged in missionary position is much different from being pegged doggy style—but it also depends a lot on what you’re doing it with.

For example, here are two things I’ve created for the purpose of pegging that feel vastly different, both of them being worn by my wife:

This tentacle strapon dildo is…invasive. I designed it to simulate, as closely as reasonably possible, the sensations one might experience in one of those pornographic Japanese anime with the tentacle monsters.

It’s made of a fairly hard silicone (Smooth-On Dragon Skin 20, with a Shore hardness rating of 20). The suckers are deliberately designed to be fairly large and bumpy, and the tentacle twists a bit at the tip to make it feel even more invasive.

The tentacle in the photo is two colors because this was a prototype, a test cast in a brand-new mold, so I poured it with whatever silicone I had left over from making other toys. It works…really really well.

What does it feel like? Intense. When that thing is moving in and out, believe me, you feel those suckers. Most dildos, you can’t actually feel the tip of it because the top is centered and smooth; the tip on the tentacle is slightly twisted so that the very end, with that last sucker on the point, presses against you and you know EXACTLY how deep it is.

The xenomorph hiphugger, on the other hand, is…deceptive. Yes, the “tail” has ridges, but the tip is blunt, smooth, and shaped so it goes into the…err, orifice relatively easily and smoothly. The thing about this design is you don’t really realize just how deep it is until it comes time to pull out and it just keeps sliding out and out and out and out…

It’s also hollow, with a silicone tube running down the center, so that you can pump fluid through it from the reservoir. That feels…odd. Not really sure what to say besides odd. It’s a warm rush that just kinda keeps going.

That, for me, is the thing. Not what the toy looks like, but the experience it evokes, the sensation it creates. I love making art out of sensation. The question is not “how can we make the toy?” but rather “what new experiences can we call forth with this toy?”

It’s Almost Here!

Posted on August 2, 2024 by tacit

London Under Veil, the new book by Eunice and me, is publishing next week at WorldCon Glasgow!

Sadly, I won’t be there, but Eunice will, and she’ll have paperbacks and eBooks with her. (Plus you’ll be able to pick up copies of our other books too).

This is a…strange book. It’s like…um, well, imagine Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy. It’s got a wizarding school, and an alternate reality, and political intrigue, and Brexit, and computer security, and cats.

This book almost didn’t exist. It came into being because of a question I saw on Quora:

I laughed, I showed it to Eunice, I laughed, she laughed, I said “we could totally write a book about a coven of spellcasting sex workers,” we laughed, then she was like “…no, really, we could.”

Inspiration is everywhere.

Fast forward a couple years and somehow we’ve written a novel about a young British-born Chinese infosec worker at a webhosting company in Shoreditch who evades a kidnapping attempt and finds herself drawn into a long-running underground war between an ancient guild of spellcasting sex workers and a group of rage mages who have infiltrated the Tories. Along the way, she befriends Iris, the Guild’s asexual spell engineer, and they have adventures.

There’s intrigue, and chases, and a school of sex magic, and mathematics, and computer security, and sex, of course cats, because every fule know you can’t have spellcasting sex workers without cats.

Here’s a G-rated excerpt, so you know what you’re getting into:

After class, May rode the lift down to the old car park. “Iris!” she sang as she walked into the workshop. “Are you ready to watch me wank—oh. Who are you?”

“This is Lillian!” Iris said. “Lillian, this is May. She officially came on board yesterday. Lillian’s been a member of our little family for about ten months, haven’t you?”

May offered her hand. Lillian regarded her for a moment through intelligent grey eyes in an elfin face, then accepted it with dainty courtesy. “Lilly volunteered to accelerate your education,” Iris said. “Shall we get to it, then?”

“Get to what, exactly?”

“Ah.” Iris fished around the clutter on her workbench, dragged out a compact whiteboard, and balanced it precariously against one of the monitors. “So you know how Madame Sophia has been teaching you how to hold patterns in your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. Think of it like learning maths. The universe runs on maths, yes? Except it doesn’t, not really. The universe does what it does. Maths is the language we use to describe it.” She pulled the cap off a whiteboard marker with a grin. “If I write 1+1=2 on this board like so,” she went on as she scribbled on the whiteboard, “you know what that means. But these symbols, they’re arbitrary, right? They’re just characters that represent things.”

May folded her arms. “Okay, and?”

“Magic is the application of intent to the world. The visualisation exercises you’ve been doing, they’re part maths and part training you how to think.” She wiped the board clean. “Okay, so. Casting spells is just a matter of learning to think in a certain way, and learning to channel emotional energy into the world. Stronger the emotion, the better it works. Any kind of emotion can do in a pinch, but some work better than others. Fear, that’s strong but hard to control, and hard to bring up when you need it. Love and hate are less strong than people think. Rage, rage works really well. But lust, ah. Lust, desire, arousal, those are versatile. The thing about emotional energy is, it’s unpatterned, right? Chaotic. The trick is…well, the skill is letting that emotion flow through you without losing your focus.” She turned to the board. “So you have your home symbol, whatever it is. Don’t tell me what it is. Don’t tell anyone else, either. That symbol represents yourself, your will, your ‘I that is I,’ see? It’s like the number 0 in a mathematical system. Did you know you can build an entire system of maths with no numbers except a symbol for zero and a symbol for incrementation?”

“No.”

“Old hat for me,” Lillian said. “My undergrad degree is in mathematics.”

“Undergrad, huh? What’s your graduate degree in?”

Lillian perched on the edge of the bed. “Master’s in philosophy. Long story.”

“So how’d you end up involved in…all this?”

“Ah.” Lillian grinned. “I like maths. I like philosophy. I like fucking. Where am I going to find another job that lets me put my interests together?” She leaned back on her elbows with a lopsided smirk. “What brought you here? Maths, philosophy, or fucking?” She stretched out a foot in May’s direction. “I hope it’s fucking.”

Iris snapped her fingers. “If you’re finished hitting on the new girl, can I direct your attention to the whiteboard, please?” She drew a letter H in the centre. “Okay, so this is your home symbol, right?” She drew five more symbols around it. “And this is one of the basic visualisations Sophia taught you, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Right. This diagram forms your basic channelling array. This is what you hold in your mind when you want to focus your will on something, got it? This is your simple, boring, one plus one equals two stuff. Now let’s show you what calculus looks like.”

The book is up for preorder on Amazon, and if you’re going to WorldCon Glasgow, be sure to say hi to Eunice!

A year ago today

Posted on June 6, 2024 by tacit

Hard to believe it’s been a year. These past twelve months have been a wild ride. Bits of it have been extremely good, bits (like the death of my mother) extremely bad, but there’s been nothing average anywhere in this year.

Today marks the one-year anniversary of something very, very good.

It began, as these things often do, more than a year ago. A beginning is a very delicate time, I hear, and so it was much more than a year ago that I first talked to her about beta testing some new prototype sex toys.

I don’t exactly remember how we first noticed each other. I know where—it was on Quora—and I vaguely remember seeing her around, thinking she struck me as a good writer and a generally positive person. She said something in passing about trsting sex toys, I had some prototypes, I was looking for beta testers, so I slid into her DMs with something like “I hope you’ll forgive the intrusion, but would you be interested in trying something out?”

We started talking after. She invited me to a pen and paper role-playing game. I grew to appreciate her skill at wordsmithing, of the pragmatic and erotic sort. She called me her Toymaker. I called her my Talespinner.

A friend of hers observed that the Talespinner and the Toymaker sounds like a YA novel. We were both like “You know…”

I said “Do you wanna?” She said “Sure!”

Time went on. I invited her to accompany me to Barcelona with the rest of the poly network. She said yes.

And so, a year ago, I got on a plane to Springfield.

She showed me around her town: a giant alien xenomorph made of scrap iron.

Chrome steel bunnies and a frog.

And a lovely little rum bar, where I confessed I would very much like to kiss her. “Hold that thought!” she said.

She took me to a rushing fountain, where we shared our first kiss, one year ago today.

We went to Barcelona, where she met the rest of the polyfam. Later, she would tell me she was amazed by how warm and welcoming they were—no hesitation, no reservation.

I am so deeply grateful to have surrounded myself with people I love who love me, who have no weirdness, no animosity toward one another. It’s deeply relaxing and wonderful.

The book still marches on. We meet over videoconference to work on it when we aren’t together. We are, as I write this, just over 93,000 words in, which in any other book would mean we’re nearly done, but this thing is a monster—the most complex novel I’ve ever been part of. We’re targeting 160,000 words.

We’re calling it Spin, and it’s grown into something that is definitely not a YA novel, something dark and brooding, something complex and ambitious. Fitting, I think, because our relationship is turning out to be something more than I expected as well.

And she still helps me beta-test new prototypes.

I am profoundly blessed.

Stalking, harassment, and the North American polyamory scene

Posted on May 27, 2024 by tacit

Trigger warning: Stalking, graphic death and rape threats, doxxing, threats of swatting, impersonation

I’ve been putting off writing this for a while now, because it involves dredging deep into some incredibly ugly stuff.

Most of you know that I’ve been stalked for years by a stalker (or stalkers) who has created fake social media profiles in my name to harass other people, and sent explicit, violent rape and death threats to me, my family, my friends, and those who follow me on social media.

This person, or these people, have made repeated rape and death threats directed at me, my wife, my father, and people who have expressed support for me or been rumored to be connected somehow with me online. They’ve sent death threats containing photographs of my partners. They’ve doxxed my family and partners.

The harassment has escalated over the past three years, as the rape and death threats have become more frequent, more violent, and more graphic. The stalker has escalated to threats of swatting (phoning fake tips to the police to have SWAT teams sent to the homes of the target). My websites have been DDoSed.

Last December, as I was leaving for Florida to help care for my mom, who was in the final stages of terminal cancer, I had an unexpected and rather uncomfortable conversation with Portland PD about an email I’d supposedly sent them saying I was stockpiling guns and the voices were telling me to murder my wife.

Fortunately, I have been documenting and reporting the stalking, rape and death threats, and harassment as it’s happened. The nature of the conversation changed once they pulled up the previous police reports and realized this was part of an ongoing pattern of harassment.

So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?

Propaganda and the Poly Scene

So how did we get here? And what does this have to do with polyamory?

My first inkling something weird was going on came when a number of different people, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, all messaged me to say “Do you know someone named Louisa Leontiades? She says she’s a journalist and she’s asking questions about you.” A few of those people sent me screenshots of messages or emails they’d received:

Louisa is a client of a former partner. After the relationship with that former partner ended, Louisa started messaging pretty much every female-presenting person who’d ever interacted with me online, going back through this very blog for decades, looking for women willing to dish dirt.

Next thing I know, somehow there are more “exes” that are accusing me of having “abused” them than the total number of people I’ve ever dated. Few forms of gaslighting are more head-twisty than someone you’ve never dated, never talked about dating, never wanted to date, never had sex with, never talked about having sex with, and never wanted to have sex with telling all and sundry about how you abused her when you were “together.” For a while, I quite literally thought I was going insane.

These “survivor stories,” as Louisa calls them, tended to the bizarre (like the woman who I’ve never been sexually or romantically connected with and never been in the same room with except in passing at a party claiming I abused her by flirting with someone else in front of her), toward the utterly untrue (a former partner claiming I “got her into” BDSM and that a 25-year-old is “too young to consent” to BDSM, when in fact she was interested in BDSM long before we ever met, and the fact her ex-husband wasn’t interested in BDSM was one of the reasons she divorced him), and the technically kind of true if you squint hard enough (my ex-wife claiming she was an “abuse victim” because I yelled at her on the phone once—which did happen—but declining to mention that it happened after we’d separated, when she broke into my house one night while I was out of town, stole a bunch of stuff like consumer electronics, then sold it to buy a new laptop).

As a side note, there’s a lesson here in how to spot the difference between journalism and a smear campaign. If a journalist hears “he yelled at me once on the phone,” he or she will ask followup questions: “Did this sort of thing happen often? What happened?” Ethical journalists also disclose personal or financial connections with the stories they cover.

My goal is not to go through all the rather strange “survivor stories” here. I may end up doing that at some future point, but that’s not the point of this blog post.

Right now, I’m here about the aftermath of these weird, wordy-but-vague accusations, what it says about the way many people see “social justice” as a tool of bullying and control, and how the poly scene’s support for “social justice” led directly to a barrage of rape and death threats against a whole bunch of other people beyond just me.

Louisa published these “survivor stories” from exes and non-exes with results you might predict: the Internet Hate Machine™ cranked up into full gear, I had to lock down comments on my blog because random strangers started posting death threats, I lost friends.

With all the various contradictory stories (“Franklin dated someone ten years younger than he was, he’s obviously an abuser,” “Franklin refused to date me because I’m younger than he is, he’s obviously ageist”), they became a sort of Rorschach test, with different people seeing different things in them. It’s kind of a Gish gallop of accusations.

One dude on social media wrote that I was clearly a bad person, because it was plain to him that I’d written the stories myself as a sort of humblebragging, since the theme to a lot of them is “I knew when I dated Franklin that he was polyamorous but he’s so awesome I wanted him all to myself and he said no.”

Seriously. Someone over on Quora actually said that.

Dr. Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist and author who serves as an expert witness in court for abuse cases, published an analysis of the “survivor stories” that concluded the stories don’t actually describe abuse.

The poly community as a whole thought about her analysis, set aside their first knee-jerk emotional response, said “huh, I wonder if there’s a reason she might have reached those conclusions,” went back, and re-evaluated the survivor tales with a more considered eye…

Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Internet piled on to Dr. Sheff. She was threatened personally and professionally, and received so much harassment and abuse she was forced to back away from the whole situation. You know, classic straight-up bullying.

And it wasn’t just threats. A lot of folks sent her emails that they probably wouldn’t think of as problematic—messages like “don’t you realize you’re just hurting women who have been abused?” and “I’m so disgusted that an academic would support an abuser” and “I used to be such a fan of yours, but this has really made me rethink that,” because they couldn’t even consider the possibility that she might, you know, be right.

After that, things got even weirder.

“I want a just, fair, and equitable society, and I don’t care how many rape threats it takes to get there.”

Now let’s fast forward a bit, to a nonprofit polyamory convention run by a registered nonprofit in London, called “PolyDay.”

COVID interrupted the convention for a couple of years. During the COVID lockdown, a team not previously involved with PolyDay announced they would be taking over the PolyDay name and launching a new for-profit convention under that name.

The organization that owns the PolyDay convention informed these people firmly that it owns a trademark on the name, and they would not be permitted to use it.

Lockdown ends. The organizers of PolyDay announce the convention was on once more. I don’t know if the person who tried to steal the name started the rumor or merely amplified it, but anyway, someone starts a rumor that I own PolyDay, or run it, or somehow profit from it, depending on which version you believe. (For the record, I have absolutely nothing to do with it—I live in Portland, and it is owned and operated by a nonprofit in London.)

As the rumor spread through the North American polyamory scene, people said “Hey, we can look up the history and organization of PolyDay and figure out if this rumor is true.”

Hahahahaha, I’m kidding, that didn’t happen. Instead, a large number of people determined to make a more just and equitable society and stand up for women raced to their keyboards to send a flood of rape and death threats to the scheduled speakers at PolyDay. So many threats of serious violence poured in, the conference organizers canceled the event.

Apparently, threats of rape and murder are how some people think we create a more peaceful, more enlightened Utopia.

Image: Crawford Jolly

And it just kept going. Once this kind of harassment and bullying gets going, it takes on a life of its own. A former BBC and Guardian journalist named Jonathan Kent published a book on polyamory. Someone started a rumor that I profit from the book somehow, or (depending on which version you believe) that I secretly wrote it under his name, or something.

By now, I’m sure you can predict what happened next:

People looked up Jonathan online and realized he’s actually a person, a reporter with a long documented history, and not an alter ego for me? Hahaha no. Of course not.

People harassed him, called for a boycott of his (I mean “my”) book, threatened and harassed his podcasting co-host…because in this brave new world of empathy, compassion, and social justice, that’s what you do. You harass and intimidate anyone you don’t like, or anyone associated with anyone you don’t like, or anyone rumored to be connected to anyone you don’t like, so that one glorious day, if you harass and threaten enough people, you’ll wake to a world of perfect social justice.

Meanwhile, of course, the rape and death threats aimed at me and those close to me kept rolling in. My co-author Eunice and I released a science fiction novel; a bookstore that planned to host a book event got harassed into dropping the event. Some random stranger I’ve never met made a YouTube video about what a terrible person I am, repeating the “survivor stories,” insisted she wasn’t making the video for money, then used it to beg for Patreon donations.

So it goes.

And is still going. People are still following me around on social media, doxxing and threatening my partners, friends, and folks who follow me.

Just like with the “survivor stories” themselves, the stalking and threats have become a Rorschach test of their own. A random woman on Facebook told me, with what seemed like perfect sincerity, I must be making it all up, because men never get stalked, only women have stalkers.

So here’s the thing: The North American polyamory community has a problem.

I want to be clear this is not a problem everywhere. Poly folks elsewhere largely seem to roll their eyes at all this.

But the poly scene in North America is overrun with folks who are okay with using rape and death threats as a way to express themselves, who don’t do even the barest minimum of fact-checking, who are so caught up in righteous fury that sending women anonymous messages saying “I am going to rape you to death, here’s a photo of your house” seems like a perfectly reasonable way to support social justice for women.

Now, if this is you, if you’re one of the people who sat down at your computer to type out threats to Dr. Sheff or to the people scheduled to speak at a conference because you heard a rumor that it was somehow connected to me and couldn’t be arsed to fact-check, this essay is not for you. You are irredeemable and I don’t care what you think of me. I don’t quite understand the mentality of someone who says “I’m going to stand up for women and justice by sending a bunch of people I’ve never met anonymous emails saying I’m going to murder them if they present at this conference,” and honestly I don’t want to. If this is you, fuck off.

If this isn’t you, and you’re on the sidelines saying things like “I don’t know what the hell is going on but I don’t want to get involved,” well, I get it, I really do. I’ve been there myself. I’ve unquestioningly accepted stories because they fit a narrative I believed in, and discovered later that the things I’d been told didn’t actually happen, at least not the way they were presented to me. (I may write about that at some point as well.)

And I’m not saying the fact that a bunch of bullies and Internet trolls have taken it on themselves to send rape and death threats all over the Internet because, you know, that’s how you support women and fight for social justice automatically proves that what I’m saying is true and what they’re saying is false. Only that mmmmaybe it might be worthwhile to look a little closer, you know? After all, if people are wrong about basic things that can easily be checked, like who runs a nonprofit conference or who wrote a book, perhaps it might possibly be worth considering whether or not they’re trustworthy about things you can’t easily verify.

Moving the Overton window

I’d like to believe this is a fairly new thing—that twenty years ago, communities dedicated to egalitarianism and self-determination wouldn’t so quickly embrace this kind of toxic behavior. That’s probably wrong—the same thing was common in the 1970s feminist circles—but I do believe that events like GamerGate brought a new level of toxicity into acceptability.

As a friend of mine put it, “never accept unacceptable behavior, or you make it acceptable.” If you believe bullying and threats are okay as long as they’re directed at people you’ve been told are bad, you make bullying and threats okay.

If you don’t believe bullying and threats are okay, but you really don’t want to (or don’t care enough to!) get involved in other people’s drama (or you really don’t care enough to get involved), so you stay out of it, or you “don’t take sides”, or you choose a default rubric like “believe all women” because investigation is too much effort, well, that’s kind of how we ended up here, in a world where harass and threaten in the name of social justice, because they feel safe in their communities who appear to support them, or at least don’t oppose them.

Just a thought.

Brandolini’s Law, or the Bullshit Asymmetry Principle, tells us it takes longer to refute bullshit than it does to put it out there, and if there isn’t a corollary that tells us this is especially true when people have been told that it’s morally wrong to question the bullshit, there ought to be.

Few subcommunities have figured out how to deal with vague claims of mistreatment that kinda follow common narratives, and anyway few people really have the inclination to try to sort through it all. It’s easier to just assume that where there’s stuff that kinda looks like smoke, there must be fire, and accept a generalized “so-and-so is a bad person even if I’m not exactly clear on what he or she did.” Kinda the way people who still say the 2020 election was stolen say “there are thousands of affadavits about election fraud, it must be true.”

Image: Blacksalmon

I mean, hell, I’ve done this myself. When you want to do right by the people around you, and you know enough about social justice to understand the uphill struggle people have faced for years getting anyone to take abuse they’ve faced seriously, you default to believing whatever you’re told by anyone who presents as an abuse survivor—a noble inclination, but one that is also easy to exploit.

Abuse is about power and control. When the poly scene went after Dr. Sheff, everyone else got the message loud and clear: Do as we say, or you’re next. Believe what we tell you to believe, or you’re next. Don’t ask questions. Keep your head down. Hate who we tell you to hate, or you’re next.

So perhaps this might be a good guideline: When you see people facing off against each other, with both sides claiming they’ve been mistreated, it might be helpful to ask yourself, “which of these two sides is sending rape and death threats, punishing anyone who steps out of line, and controlling the narrative through intimidation and threats of violence?” Because it’s hard to champion social justice and also think those things are okay.

I know the people sending the rape and death threats are a small minority, whose noise and zealotry make this seem more common than it is. That’s the thing, though: if you want your community to be a good space, sometimes you need to stand up to the bullies.

It’s okay to ask questions and look for more information. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.

Note: Any comments containing abuse apologism, denialism, threats, rationalization, whataboutism, sealioning, or victim-blaming will be deleted.

Setting Math in Adobe Illustrator: The Impossible Dream

Posted on May 13, 2024 by tacit

A while back, I posted on social media:

I did not suspect, Gentle Reader, just how many people would have questions about this, nor how many of them there would be. Especially over on Quora, where it raised quite an interesting discussion.

So, in the interests of elaborating, so that I can refer people to this entry:

The equation is real. It’s the Higgs field Lagrangian, the equation that describes how the Higgs gives mass to massive particles. (On a side note, the Higgs field is only a small part of the inertial mass of everyday objects; more than 90% of the mass of things in our normal world comes not from the Higgs, but from the binding energy in the particles that make up those things).

I needed the Higgs Lagrangian for a porn novel Eunice and I are planning but haven’t yet started working on. Specifically, I’m noodling about with an image for that novel, and I needed the Higgs Lagrangian in Adobe Illustrator.

This is the image I’m noodling about with. Everything here, including the face, is vector, built entirely in Illustrator, not raster.

If you look at the largest gold band, that’s the Higgs Lagrangian.

I realize that Illustrator is not in fact an appropriate tool for typesetting math. The proper tool for this is LaTeX; indeed, it’s what LaTeX was created for. And I did in fact originally create the equation in LaTeX, and exported it to SVG to place in Illustrator.

Thereupon I found a problem.

I want to set the equation on a curve. And it is indeed possible to set an image like a PDF or SVG placed into Illustrator on a curve.

But Illustrator treats placed images as, well images, which means if you set them along a curve, it will distort them.

Here’s what I mean. On the top, the Higgs Lagrangian set as type in Illustrator, which did in fact take me about two hours to do; below that, exported from LaTeX; and below that, exported from LaTeX and placed on a curve.

And honestly that would simply not do.

So I set it as type in Illustrator. That required, among other things, installing a typesetting font on my computer to use in Illustrator (New Computer Modern, available here, just in case any other Illustrator users should run into a problem typesetting math equations in Illustrator and stumble across this post in the future), and frequent trips to the Wikipedia list of mathematical symbols here to copy-paste characters into Illustrator in New Computer Modern Math Regular).

I did all this because getting the equation set as type in Illustrator meant I could use Illustrator’s type on a path tool to curve the type while perfectly preserving the shape of each letter.

This also meant it would print smoothly as vectors. I could bend the type in a different graphics program, but any raster (pixel) program would break the letters up into pixels, meaning they look slightly fuzzy on press.

Illustrator’s math typesetting is, bluntly, nonexistent. Which honestly surprises me. I’ve used Illustrator since 1988 and the fact it doesn’t have any typesetting library for math still surprises me. They could, for instance, easily license, oh, I don’t know, something like LaTeX…but I digress.

You can do superscripts and subscripts, but it treats them as text in a line, like X2adoesn’t work correctly on superscripts and subscripts that have to be aligned one right under the other. For that, I had to type the superscript, type the subscript, and set the superscript’s tracking to -1000 to scoot it over the subscript. Big pain in the ass.

The whole equation took a ton of ugly hackery like that (and if you’re reading this because it’s six years after I wrote it and you’re searching for a way to set math in Illustrator, you’re welcome, and also, cry havoc, you mad bastard).

Anyway, I got it done, if not perfectly than at least acceptably, but my god, those are hours of my life I’ll never have back.

There and Around and Back Again

Posted on April 28, 2024 by tacit

I am not, it must be said, the sort of person who gets to the airport early.

I am the sort of person who rolls up to the gate just as they start boarding, then says “hmm, I’m in Boarding Group 8, that means I have time to dash down the hallway to grab a bite to eat.” (I’m serious. I’ve done this. My wife hates it.)

And so it came to pass that I woke on the morning of my recent trip to Springfield, started packing, and then saw a message from the airline: they’d canceled my flight and put me on another, scheduled to depart an hour and a half earlier.

Folks, if you ever see the distant gray not-a-moon shape of the Death Star in a clear blue sky over your home town, panic will not do to you what it did to me when I saw that text.

I grabbed whatever was close to hand and shoved it frantically into the suitcase: a couple pairs of pants, some shirts, maybe some socks I think? (I’d already packed the important stuff, the sex toy prototypes, the night before; I’m not a complete barbarian.)

I will spare you the harrowing and wildly improbable roller-coaster tale of what happened next—arriving just in time to discover that flight had also been canceled, flying standby on yet another—and skip ahead to the part where I arrive, exhausted but grateful, a couple hours earlier than I would have had things gone to plan. Suffice to say I eventually arrived in Springfield, through the magic of flight turned into something tawdry and uncomfortable.

I flew Airbus, so the flight was uneventful—nothing fell off, split open, or went “Sproing!”

My Talespinner and another of her lovers I hadn’t met yet greeted me at the airport. He turned out to be a lovely chap, and we immediately got on like two people who have a lover in common and are both dedicated to making her life as fun and interesting as possible. We got back to her place, yadda yadda yadda, a few days later we were off to the future city of Kanzit to do some sanity checking for a novel.

We are, you see, my Talespinner and I, spinning a tale. It’s a far-future, post-Collapse, magical realism novel about a young spinner named Aiyah and a brilliant but eccentric master tinker named Lazlo who specializes in making windup toys, who live not far apart from each other in the future Dominionate, a neo-Calvinist theocratic empire erected upon a horrifying slave society that has built their entire social foundation atop a legal and moral edifice of systemic subjugation of women.

In the novel, Aiyah takes a journey from her small snug cottage in the tiny village Half-Circle Cothold to the big, bustling city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate. Along the way, she has many adventures, she meets all kinds of people, she makes new friends, she flees cross-country from the Inquisition without food or supplies, and she is forced to confront some uncomfortable moral truths about the horror that sits at the base of her society. Whee!

There’s a particular part of her flight that has some complicated timing and a lot of moving pieces, and even with Google Maps we weren’t certain about how the timing would work, so when my Talespinner was just like “fukkit, I’m gonna trace Aiyah’s path and see” I was like “you son of a bitch, I’m in” and that, rather than kinky group sex, was actually the purpose of the trip.

We rose and bundled into the car, my Talespinner, her lover, and I, to follow a path that does not yet exist through towns that aren’t there in the path of a woman who isn’t real, fleeing from an inquisitor who is both a proxy for the society we’re holding up as a mirror to our own and also far more complex than he lets on at first, to the complaints of her cats, who seemed to know something was up.

I’d say we traveled over hill and through vale, but that would be a lie. Much of that part of Missouri is as flat as workers’ real earnings since Ronald Reagan and as interesting as soggy gerbil bedding, so I will jump ahead once more to our arrival in Half-Circle Cothold, from which our protagonist set forth.

It’s not much now, but in two thousand years, it will still be…not much.

Fortified by convenience-store pizza and candy bars after a drive that would’ve been rather boring if not for the conversation and the company, we set out on foot across what will, in two thousand years and the deaths of billions of people, become a sleepy village on the water’s edge. (Neither geologic upheaval nor global change in temperature are likely to erase the spot; it’s safe against even six meters of sea level rise, which is beyond the most pessimistic projections.)

Onward we went, traveling not through the realm of the real but the realm of what Terry Pratchett calls ‘L-space,’ that place where untold stories await the person who will write them, discussing as we did everything from glassblowing to the economics of guild systems, observing how even today towns in rural America tend to be spaced about the distance a person on horseback can ride in a day.

Accommodations that night were to be in an America’s Best [sic] Value Inn. That failed to work out as planned, because it seems that while America’s Best [sic] Value Inns are fairly solid on the concept of taking a reservation, they are a bit less clear on what it means to keep a reservation.

Considerably frustrated with no room at the end, we at last located another hotel thirty minutes away, which turned out to be, Gentle Reader, the third worst hotel I’ve ever stayed in, and given that rodents and bullet holes figure prominently in the story of the first and second, believe me when I say that’s saying something.

After dinner, we settled in for more kinky group sex. Yadda yadda yadda, the next day found us at the seat of the Dominionate, or what will be in thousands of years. Right now, it’s home to a genuine Caravaggio, which truly was extraordinary, though I didn’t realize St. John the Baptist was quite so…buff.

All good things must end, and so we tore ourselves from the contemplative glower of Buff John the Baptist to follow the path of a different character, our villain rather than our protagonist, back to Springfield.

More group sex, followed by testing of xenomorph facehugger sex toys…

…somewhat interrupted by certain cats who insisted on photobombing the shenanigans…

…and yadda yadda, yadda, the next thing you know, we’re at a FedEx Office printing out pics from the trip for our very first Murder Wall™. (At least my very first Murder Wall™, I don’t actually know that my Talespinner has never made one).

I thought there would be more cackling involved in making a Murder Wall. I didn’t realize it’s so…prosaic. Hollywood never shows the obsessive conspiracy nutter dropping pins, or cutting the yarn too short.

Eventually, as time must do, the moment to leave came. It came inconveniently, at 3:30AM, since this entire adventure had been predicated on the cheapest airline tickets possible and that meant flying out at 5AM, but we do what we must because we can.

When my Talespinner’s cat figured out I was leaving, he became inconsolable in that way kittens who have taken a shine to you sometimes do.

So I hardened my heart, said my goodbyes, and disappeared into the night, leaving, or so I am told, rather a lot of my clothes scattered about her bedroom, because who can really pack at that hour of the morning?

Now, days later, we are still girding our loins for The Rewritening.

A Trip to the Dominionate

Posted on April 14, 2024 by tacit

I’m typing this in Springfield, Missouri, where I’ve just returned from visiting several places that do not yet exist, and won’t exist for nearly two thousand years.

Lemme back up a bit.

My Talespinner and I are writing a novel. Specifically, we’re writing a rather chonky (~160,000 word) far-future, post-Collapse magical realism literary novel called Spin, set in the Dominionate, a sort of quasi-Catholic/Calvinist theocracy that extends through much of the center of what is now the United States.

We are, as I write this, about 90,000 words in, and we were having difficulty nailing down a crucial bit of timing, when our protagonist is forced by an encounter with the Inquisition to head off-road through what is now rural Missouri, trying to reach the city of Kanzit, the capital of the Dominionate and home to a character she hopes can save her.

We’ve looked at maps and Google Earth, measured distances, made calculations, and finally my Talespinner was like “You know what? Fuggit. Ima follow her path and see how long it would take.”

About this time, I received a letter from Oregon Revenue, informing me I’d made an error in my 2022 state income tax (cue heart attack)…and that I’d overpaid by $208 (whew!). So I found a plane ticket for $206, and said “You know what, Ima go with you.”

We started following the footsteps of our protagonist from modern-day Stockton State Park, a park on a small peninsula jutting into Stockton Lake.

In two thousand years, after the Great Collapse, sea level rise, and two smaller collapses, this will become the small village of Half-Circle Cothold, where our protagonist Aiyah Spinner was born and raised.

On this spot, right here, will be a church and Mother’s Cloister two millennia from now. From this very spot, Aiyah will begin her journey toward Kanzit, built on what was once Kansas City, a journey that will absolutely not go as she expects.

From here, her plan will be to cross the bridge into Bridgegate, heading toward Brightchurch and from there, Kanzit itself, following the ancient roads still maintained and used after all these years.

Ah, Brightchurch.

If Kanzit is the head of the Dominionate, Brightchurch is its heart, a walled city that hosts Brightchurch Cathedral, the Temple of a Thousand Lights, one of the wonders of the future world, destination of an endless river of pilgrims. Brightchurch Cathedral, its windows shining like God’s grace itself every moment of every day and night, thanks to thousands of oil lamps fed from a cunning engineering marvel that distributes oil through a vast system of tubes and pipes, driven by pumps powered by human and animal muscle, tended by an army of novices, awe-inspiring beyond imagination. (The idea for Brightchurch Cathedral came from a pen and paper role-playing game I ran for a time a few years back, expanded and incorporated into the world of the Dominionate.)

Brightchurch Cathedral will one day stand on this spot, right here, in present-day Nevada, Missouri.

(Honestly, I would never for a moment want to live in the Dominionate, but I nevertheless wish I could see Brightchurch Cathedral. It’s truly a magnificent, incomprehensibly beautiful place.)

Aiyah, for various reasons, never reaches Brightchurch, but instead is forced to flee overland, through what is now farmland but will be, in the age of the Dominionate, forest. We followed her path, and I’m so glad we did, because we found all kinds of treasures along the way.

Like this tiny graveyard, which isn’t on any map or on Google Maps, but lies directly in her path and some remnant of which may still exist in the time the novel is set.

As for Kanzit, while it’s much reduced and sees countless changes, some of its buildings still exist, lovingly maintained over countless years.

The administrative center of the Church and, by extension of all the Dominionate lives in what is now the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art, suited by both design and location to be repurposed to the head of the theocratic government. All the various aspects of the Church except the Inquisition are administered from here.

So let’s talk about the Dominionate.

When this novel publishes, I think people will compare it to The Handmaid’s Tale. The two stories have some superficial resemblances: social collapse, a theocracy carved out of what was once the United States, falling fertility that leads to sexual subjugation of women.

But that’s where the similarities end.

Margaret Atwood has said she explicitly modeled the government and culture of Gilead on the Islamic Revolution, a cautionary tale about what might happen in a society where reactionary religious zealotry comes to power.

But when I read The Handmaid’s Tale, I came away from the story with a sense that Gilead is fundamentally unstable. On a very deep level, the society doesn’t really work for anyone. Everyone is miserable—even the people on the top of the hierarchy. Offred, certainly, and all the other Handmaids…but even the Commander comes across as fundamentally unhappy. You really can’t point to anyone in Atwood’s story and say “yeah, those folks have a pretty good life, they seem happy and self-actualized.”

Which is, I think, part of the point she’s making.

The thing that makes Spin so horrifying, so deeply disturbing, is that the Dominionate works. The society of the Dominionate has long-term stability, peace, and prosperity. Many people—most people, really—are happy. Or if not happy, at least content. There’s little violence or crime. That sets Spin in sharp contrast to The Handmaid’s Tale (well, that and the fact Spin incorporates elements of magic, and a vastly different story).

Technology in the Dominionate is limited—the thing about the modern world is that we’ve largely stripped the earth of natural resources available to anyone without a post-industrial level of technology (there are no more surface deposits of iron, copper, tin, or coal, no oil available without modern drilling techniques, and without vast and available fuel, you might be able to “mine” landfills or junkyards for metals but you will have a very difficult time indeed smelting modern steels into things you can use)—but our knowledge remains. Even without modern levels of technology, most people still have a reasonably high standard of living.

But all of it—their standard of living, their society, their peace and prosperity—rests on a foundation of subjugation of (some) women. There’s no escaping it. They hide it away, in Mother’s Cloisters administered by the Church, and it’s been normalized for so long that everyone, even the people most oppressed, accept it as natural and necessary.

That is, I believe, way more horrifying than the society of Gilead, a society that does not have peace and prosperity, a society that seems unlikely to endure for two hundred years, or honestly even for twenty.

And more horrifying still, you can make a strong argument that the oppression and subjugation of the Dominionate is necessary. Without it, humanity will likely cease to be. Squaring that circle—trying to reconcile the idea that humanity has value with the horrific bedrock strata of sexual slavery on which not just this particular society but humanity’s future rests—is the core of the novel.

Spin is by far the most challenging, most ambitious writing project I’ve ever been part of. My Talespinner and I didn’t set out to write it this way. We’d originally imagined an 80,000-word young adult novel, something far more lighthearted. About 25,000 words in, we realized that story didn’t actually worked, tore it up, sat down, re-thought the story we wanted to tell, and came up with a detailed 27-page outline for something much, much different…and much, much darker.

I am absolutely thrilled my Talespinner and I took the opportunity to make this trip, following a character’s journey two thousand years from now. Everything we saw along the way will inform the novel. We have quite a lot of rewriting to do, particularly in the first third of the book, which will be far richer and more vibrant because we did this crazy thing.

I’m also profoundly grateful that one of my Talespinner’s other lovers was able to accompany us. His presence made the trip better, but even more, as we took copious notes—I still haven’t transcribed them into the outline yet—he offered ideas and suggestions that will make the novel so much better.

On Being a Writer in the Age of AI

Posted on April 12, 2024 by tacit

AI generated image of an author sitting in front of a computer writing. Can you count the flaws in this image? And who the hell puts a glass of what I assume is whiskey behind the monitor?

People—by which I mean, the great teeming mass of human beings who make their livings by any means other than writing—are deeply weird about writers.

I make my living as a novelist. It’s not a particularly good living—I make less than an average fast-food worker in Oregon—but it’s a living. Like everyone who makes a living crafting words of whimsey, I have, on more than a few occasions, encountered folks with Great Ideas.

These encounters follow a predictable path, like water flowing down a riverbed. “Oh, you’re a writer?” says the person who’s just discovered that I’m a writer. “I have a great idea for a story! Why don’t you write it for me, and we’ll split the profits?”

There’s a strange, topsy-turvy logic in this proposal, a weird notion of how writing works that’s a bit like one of those maddening M. C. Escher paintings where the more you examine it, the less sense it makes.

On the one hand, the people with the Great Ideas seem to understand they lack the ability to turn the idea into a book, else they wouldn’t be making this (in their estimation, rather generous) offer. On the other, they trivialize the act of writing; it’s the idea that’s hard, see. The writing of it is a mere formality.

Inevitably, attempts to explain that ideas are really rather common and ordinary, and the difficulty lies in the turning of an idea into a book, fall on deaf ears. I have about half a dozen ideas for novels a day, no exaggeration. Ideas are everywhere. You can’t walk down the street without encountering ideas.

And I really mean it when I say ideas are everywhere. Eunice and I are just putting the finishing touches on a novel called London Under Veil, a contemporary urban fantasy that’s sort of Harry Potter meets The Matrix by way of Tom Clancy, but with sex.

That PHP is taken from a live, in-the-wild bit of WordPress malware.

Where did we get the idea to write a novel about a young British-born-Chinese infosec worker at a London webhosting company who gets sucked into a centuries-long underground war between a group of spellcasting sex workers and a society of rage mages that has infiltrated and captured the Tories?

From a social media question.

That. That sparked a conversation betwixt Eunice and me that led to a book.

Ideas are everywhere.

The folks with the Grand Ideas generally seem to believe that 75% of a book is coming up with the idea, and 25% is the writing (or, if they’re especially generous, that the idea is 50% and the writing is 50%). In reality, it’s more like the idea is 0.25%, and the writing is 99.75%, though if you’ve never written a book that might not seem credible.

I’ve talked before about the process of writing a book, and man, there’s nothing like the Writer’s Roller Coaster…largely because if there were, it would contravene the Geneva Convention.

So let’s talk about AI.

The advent of ChatGPT has led to a ton of folks who think that since the idea is the hardest part of writing a novel, and the writing is the trivial bit—a mere incidental—that in a world of ChatGPT, anyone can publish a novel. It’s so easy! Type your idea into ChatGPT and Bob’s your uncle! Fame and riches await!

Of course, it doesn’t work like that.

There’s a peculiar thing that happens with human beings where, when you lack the ability to do something, you also lack the ability to evaluate whether or not someone else who does that thing is good at the task. People who aren’t writers may sincerely be unable to tell that ChatGPT output is bland, dreary, inconsistent garbage—not really information so much as an information-shaped space, a suggestion of what information might vaguely look like.

I’ve been asked if I’m afraid ChatGPT will make me obsolete.

No. The answer is no.

Folks who think that ChatGPT can turn their amazing idea into a best-selling book…well, let’s just say I see disappointment in their future.

Will AI get better? Sure. Will AI ever replace technical writers? Mmmmmaybe, though I think it’s more likely it will enhance technical writers by creating a tool in their toolkit for certain formulaic parts of technical writing. A good technical writer needs to be able to imagine herself in the position of someone unskilled in the art being guided through an unfamiliar task, and I don’t see AI doing that untill it actually becomes, well, real artificial intelligence, which ChatGPT and its like most definitely are not.

Will AI replace creative fiction writers? I think that’s an AI-Complete problem—a problem unlikely to be solved until we have true self-aware general AI, at which point AI people are people, and like human people, may r may not be good at writing.

But I digress.

The point I’m making here is the fascination with ChatGPT producing a novel comes, I think, from a profound ignorance of how common ideas are and how difficult it is to turn an idea into something someone else wants to read.

I’m writing this from the home of one of my co-authors in Springfield. Tomorrow, we are driving out to rural Missouri to trace the path of the protagonist in our upcoming far-future, post-Collapse literary novel, Spin, because we need to get a sense of what it’s like to make that journey…and that’s exactly the sort of thing ChatGPT cannot bring to the table.

Some Thoughts on Bad Sex

Posted on April 10, 2024 by tacit

Last weekend, while I was working with Joreth and Eunice on an upcoming episode of the Skeptical Pervert podcast, the conversation veered off in a direction I’ve been chewing on ever since: male expectations around sex.

Image: charlesdeluvio

Men and women have, by and large, grossly unequal experiences of sex: socially (men who have lots of lovers are “studs,” women with many lovers are “sluts”), physically (women bear a disproportionate amount of physical risk from sex: pregnancy, sexual violence, and so on), and even in their expectation of outcome (men are more likely to report a random encounter as physically satisfying, and often have an easier time reaching orgasm).

A lot of this imbalance is rooted in sexism, and we often talk about how sexism disproportionately harms women, but I think sexist ideas about getting it on hurt men, too. One of the ways that can happen is social pressure around sex: men are supposed to want it, supposed to take advantage of any opportunities to have it, and, I think, supposed to enjoy it even if it’s bad sex. Men are supposed to be opportunistic about sex.

In fact, I’ve often heard men say “there’s no such thing as bad sex.” I have literally never heard a single woman say this, but men? Oh yeah. All the damn time.

There is bad sex. Even for men. (As an old friend of mine was fond of saying, “if you think there’s no such thing as bad sex, you probably are bad sex.”)

The thing that got me to thinking along these lines was an event that happened in my sex life many years ago, back when I still lived in Florida, and had only recently started dating my ex-wife.

I came home from work one night to find all the lights low. Curious, I wandered into the bedroom, to find her in bed in a negligee, snuggled in with a female friend of hers. I was barely through the door before my wife dragged me down into the bed and started pulling off my clothes. Yadda yadda yadda, we had an unexpected threesome, me, my wife, and her friend.

Sounds like a Penthouse Letters, right? (Is Penthouse Letters even still a thing? I legit have no idea.)

But here’s the thing:

Her friend wasn’t someone I would have chosen as a lover. I tend, by and large, to decline offers of casual sex because casual sex doesn’t really work for me. And it was quite clear from the beginning that’s all this was: casual sex, no kissing, nothing beyond the grunt-n-thrust of two more or less emotionally uninvolved bodies.

It wasn’t good sex. I mean, yeah, I had an orgasm, she had an orgasm…but the thing that’s lingered, the overall psychic impression it left in me, was that it just…wasn’t fun.

I didn’t feel, back then, like I had any call to say no. And it wasn’t just because this woman I was dating had clearly gone through a lot of effort to set this up. No, it was more than that:

What kind of man turns down sex with a willing partner? What kind of man says no to a threesome?

Answer: Me, now. I’m way more likely to say no than I was when I was 22, and way more likely to decide that sex with someone I don’t feel connected to just isn’t worth it. But back then? It happened fast, I was in for the ride the instant I walked through the door, nobody at any point asked me if I was on board with this or not, and I genuinely didn’t feel I should—or could—say no.

And here’s another thing:

When I tell this story to other men, invariably, in-fucking-variably, the response I get is “What do you mean it wasn’t good sex? Are you mental? Your girlfriend arranged for you to have a threesome with another woman and you’re complaining about it? What’s wrong with you??!” (That is, when they don’t simply accuse me of making it up out of whole cloth—I get that a lot too, even about things I consider fairly mundane.)

Which leads me to think that for a lot of men, “good sex” is somehow…I don’t know if “performative” is the right word exactly, but good sex is in the context, not in how enjoyable it was or how you felt about it after.

Was she hot? Then it was good sex. Was it kinky? Then it was good sex. Did you get off? Then it was good sex. A threesome? Dude, that’s the brass ring, the sine qua non of awesome sex. You had a threesome with your girlfriend and another woman, arranged by her? You can’t get any better sex than that!

Whether it was satisfying, whether it met the needs of the people involved, whether it gave you what you want…irrelevant. Your girlfriend set you up with another woman! How jaded do you have to be not to think that’s good sex? Do you know how many men would kill for that experience?

The social construction of male sex is that men want sex, men should be grateful to have sex, and certain forms of sex—including the Holy Grail, sex with two women at once—is the pinnacle of the male sexual expression. The experience of that sex isn’t particularly important, or indeed even particularly relevant.

And I think that’s unfortunate. It means there are likely a lot of men out there having sex that…really isn’t that great, but that they’ve been told to believe is great, because what makes sex great is the display, the spectacle of it, not the experience of it.

But I rarely hear people talk about that, and that’s a damn shame.

I’m way more selective about sex now, and decline opportunities more often than I accept them (something else that often causes people to roll their eyes and say “yeah, sure, whatever, you’re clearly lying,” or in the case of one bloke I encountered on Quora who declared with absolute conviction, “no man anywhere would ever turn down sex”).

I wonder, sometimes, what the world might look like if we lived in a society that recognized men aren’t all cast from the same mold, and encouraged everyone to learn what works for them, and then have, you know, that kind of sex.

Franklin Veaux's Journal

Working toward the heat death of the Universe, one joule at a time!

Author Archives: tacit

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