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More Flags from an Alternative Future

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I had so much fun sharing the flags from the “playable” fictional nations in our Olympics game, that I took some time and finished the designs for the NPC (Not Permitting Chrono-migration) nations. There are two categories, nations that will compete in the events and those that are banned. Countries that compete had a simulation performing the actions that fans could do to influence the Games.

While the playable nations have fixed ethics, these nations have ethics that are more malleable and can be influenced by other players

NPC Nations

Nation: Armstrong Habitat

National Anthem: Home On Lagrange

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Collectivism 

Nation: Fertile Crescent

National Anthem: Wax and Wane

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Angevin Empire

National Anthem: No Gods. No Kings. Normans.

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Divine Right

 

Nation: Gibraltar Pillars

National Epic: Over or Through

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Militarism

 

 

Nation: Gran Columbia

National Anthem: ¿Quiubo parce?

Continent: South America

Ethics: Pacifism

 

Nation: Hunan

National Opera: Bu Guo

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Intermarium

National Anthem: Do Not Call the Wolf from the Forest

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Nation:  Kandy Kingdom

National Anthem: Ah, Red Rock!

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Cultural Influencers

 

Nation: Lands of Cyrus

National Anthem: I Would Not Kneel

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Militarism

 

Nation: Luxembourg Hive

National Anthem: Assimilate!

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Hive Mind

 

Nation: Mount Bali

National Anthem: Gede

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Nation: Nunavut

National Anthem: All or Nothing

Continent: North America

Ethics: Prosperity 

 

Nation: Republic of Greenland

National Anthem: Time Is an Illusion

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mechanist

 

Nation: Sikkim

National Anthem: Where Teesta and Rangeet Flow

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Divine Right

 

Nation: The Holy Sea

National Hymn: Ave Mare

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Spiritualism

 

Nation: The Neverlands

National Anthem: Can’t Say That Again

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mechanist

 

Nation: Tornado Alley

National Anthem: It’s Raining Men

Continent: North America

Ethics: Individualism

 

Nation: Tsang

National Mantra: Guru Rinpoche

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Discovery

 

Banned Nations:

Nation: Corsicas

National Anthem: God Save You

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Prosperity

 

Nation: Costaguana

National Anthem: No Peace & No Rest in Material Interests

Continent: North America

Ethics: Environmentalism

 

Nation: Dyson Sphere

National Anthem: Drain the Sun

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Piracy

 

Nation: Kansas

National Anthem:  From the Stars, Through Difficulties

Continent: North America

Ethics: Authoritarianism

 

Nation: Sea of Tranquility

National Anthem: Leaps and Bounds

Continent: Outer Space

Ethics: Prosperity

 

Nation: Siberian Rails

National Anthem: Ride! Ride!

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Nomadic

 

Nation: The Hansa

National Anthem: Ordnung und Disziplin

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

 

Flags from an alternative future

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One of my “pandemic projects” was a python-based web-browser game that was loosely inspired by Blaseball. The premise was that we could see a different version of the “Olympics” in a post-scarcity future where humans are augmented. The goal was to highlight and delight in the excesses and absurdities in modern Olympics, but the project eventually died as I got busy with real commissions and real projects. What ultimately killed it was a bug in the code that was discovered when a hockey fight created infinite clones of all athletes and had them wail on each other for all eternity. As metal as a universe-shattering hockey fight sounds, it revealed that I was out of my depth as an amateur coder, and I haven’t had the time or skill to rewrite the game from scratch.

Below, I want to take a moment to share some of the “playable” countries from our alternate future. It was a lot of fun imagining how a different history would shake out and how that would be represented by the political lines, names, and flags of our futuristic nations and city-states. I tried to strike a balance between historical projections, fantastical, silly, and aspirational potential nations. While the list below doesn’t include the non-playable nations or the nations that are banned from the futuristic Olympics (yet), I hope you can enjoy a glimpse into a project that will probably stay on the drawing board.

Nation: Antarctica

National Anthem: On Top of the World

Continent: Antarctica

Ethics: Cultural Influencers

 

Nation: Aurora Commonwealth

National Anthem: The Heavens Weep

Continent: North America

Ethics: Collectivism

Nation: Chesapeake

National Anthem: We Do Not Inherit the Earth

Continent: North America

Ethics: Environmentalism

Nation: Estados Unidos

National Anthem: Himno Nacional de Norte America

Continent: North America

Ethics: Meritocracy

Nation: Gulf of Havana

National Anthem: ¡Chao pescao!

Continent: North America

Ethics: Egalitarianism

Nation: Manhattan

National Anthem: Success is Critical

Continent: North America

Ethics: Individualism

Nation: Silicon Coast

National Anthem: Compile and Execute

Continent: North America

Ethics: Materialism

Nation: Inca

National Anthem: Bring It On

Continent: South America

Ethics: Artistic Patrons

Nation: Tropicália

National Song: Coração Materno

Continent: South America

Ethics: Anarchism

Nation: Libertatia

National Shanty: Raise the Black Flag

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Piracy

Nation: Sahara

National Anthem: Face the Mind Killer

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Expansionism 

Nation: Salted Carthage

National Dirge: Dido’s Tears

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Hegemony

Nation: The Coffee Bean Thalassocracy

National Jingle: We’ll Grind You Wholesale

Continent: Africa

Ethics: Dominance

Nation: Hellas Megalopolis

National Anthem: Smite Thee

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Mysticism

Nation: Kalamar Vikings

National Anthem: Eagle, Show Your Claws

Continent: Europe

Ethics: Prosperity

Nation: Scythian Empire

National Anthem: Less Talk, More Rock

Continent: Near East

Ethics: Centralism

Nation: Oceania Flotilla

National Anthem: Aboveboard and Inboard

Continent: Australia*

Ethics: Discovery

Nation: Mauryan Techno-Republic

National Anthem: Embrace Change

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Pacifism

Nation: Neon Tokyo

National Anthem: Jack the Sound Barrier, Bring the Noise

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Mechanist

Nation: Yuan

National Anthem: Hear Their Lamentations

Continent: Asia

Ethics: Nomadic

Plotting and ‘Pantsing’

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The expression “No Plan Survives First Contact with the Enemy” is pretty common. However, it is worth noting the whole context of the quote where this idiom (probably) came from:

In 1871, Prussian Field Marshal Helmuth Von Moltke wrote an essay with the line (boldness added by me), “No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces. Only the layman believes that in the course of a campaign he sees the consistent implementation of an original thought that has been considered in advance in every detail and retained to the end.”

The highlighted bit made me reflect a lot about my growth from an amateur writer to a more professional creator.  Recently, I had a discussion with some other writers about how much time we spend “plotting, writing, and pantsing.” For the purposes of this discussion, we’ll define plotting as “planning out the steps and progression of your story’s plot (A happens, therefore B happens but C occurs to disrupt B).” Writing is the physical act of writing or drawing your story. And “pantsing” is literally flying by the seat of your pants.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve really grown to embrace the pantsing portion of the writing process. As a young writer- for example, when Fortuna Saga was being written- I would agonize for weeks on trying to plot out every single turn and counterpoint of the plot. It was only near the end of Act 4 in the Fortuna Saga that I really felt that the story took a life of its own. The characters began driving the plot instead of me trying to corral it to a conclusion.

The plotting portion is important. It’s valuable to think about the world as a whole and how the various timelines and perspectives should reasonably intermesh. It’s also really easy to get lost in Planning Paralysis where no writing actually gets done, the story loses momentum, and things might ultimately get stuck. Plotting is necessary because you need something to throw away and rewrite as the story takes a life of it own. It’s painful to admit, but that first plan is never, ever going to work. That’s why the pantsing portion of the process is important. It gives the story life. It helps snap the story into something more alive and emergent. Forcing a plot to conform to the original plan is amateurish and breaks the story.

My method is a constant cycle of plotting, writing, and pantsing over and over again. I’m sure there are writers that can plot out every detail of a story and then make the story work within that original plan, but I suspect they are the exceptions to the rule. For me, big aspects of the story stay the same. It’s the paths that we take to explore these big aspects that will diverge and take exciting new journeys. Sometimes these paths will undermine the original plot. Sometimes it will breathe an uncomfortable wrinkle in what was once an easy choice. It can be really painful but it’s never destructive.

Out of curiosity, I dug up some of my old paper notes from (*cough*) 2007 when I was finishing up Fortuna Saga and plotting out the greater details of how I wanted the then forming Hymns of the Apostate and the distant Lost Noise to tie into each other. This particular page caught my eye because it was a more detailed breakdown of the ‘Lens’ from Fortuna Saga. I had assumed that much of it would be obsolete at this point, but most of it is still valid (and has been redacted due to potential spoilers). We’ll see how much of this stands once Lost Noise is said and done. It proves that good plotting can be a north star to keep a story on track, but I’m more than prepared to throw most of this away if I need to.

Twitter No More.

Twitter No More. published on No Comments on Twitter No More.

Many of you used twitter as a way to get updated on when new Lost Noise episodes were online. I am no longer going to use twitter (“X”) for this.


You can find my social media profiles on:

Mastodon at @jcutting@vivaldi.net

Bluesky at johncutting.bsky.social

I will also look into if I can get an RSS feed or a Mastodon bot purely for updates to this site.


Visual Shorthands in Movies

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Movies use a lot of visual shorthands to quickly communicate a point, but these shorthands don’t exist in the real world. This causes a lot of subtle problems in the real world because movies- for better or for worse- are how most of us inform our lives outside of our actual experiences. For example, if I ask you to imagine Moscow right now, you are probably going to think about an onion-domed cathedral covered in snow. Moscow is snowy, but it isn’t THAT snowy. In fact, it can get quite hot. The average annual temperature in Moscow in 2015 was 47 degrees which was slightly higher than the average annual temperature of Paris.

The point is, movies fill in the gaps a lot of us have about the world, and this can lead to a lot of misunderstandings that it is hard for people to put out of our minds because we aren’t aware that these cognitive shortcuts exist in the first place. Some of these shorthands can lead to real problems while others are simply funny to think about. Here are a few examples:

  1. “Go to Aisle 28 in Michaels for Conspiracy Crafts”

Scene: The main character is trying to unravel a web of lies, corruption and conspiracy that involves petty criminals, politicians, and mafia dons. To figure out all of the connections, pictures are placed on the wall with red strings showing the connections between the various parties. People that are killed have giant red X’s marked over their faces. Reality: This may be the most inefficient way to track these web of relationships possible. The cork board with photos only serves to inform the audience and provides no practical detail for the character. It does raise some questions that I would like to see…

I want to see Frank Castle in the middle of his investigation montage actually doing the physical arts and crafts- show him standing in an aisle at Joann’s Fabrics deciding which string is most appropriate for his revenge map, comparing prices, printing and carefully cutting out photos, and getting frustrated when he makes a mistake and has to unspool a bunch of thread so that the map makes sense again.

I did some consulting work for a California agency that was doing a deep dive into white collar crime involving fake pensions, tax evasion, worker intimidation (perhaps worse), etc. We had a team of forensic accountants and investigators unraveling the net, and everything was tracked on an Excel spreadsheet. This makes sense because you can easily do regression analysis to find connections and correlations from gigabytes of data. The investigation leads actually went out of their way to restrict access to photos, names, and identifying features of the people being investigated because they didn’t want any subconscious biases to affect the decisions being made.

Regression analysis isn’t sexy to show on the screen, but the corkboard is also silly. I suggest we replace this shorthand by cutting to the executive summary that the team of investigators presents to summarize the results of a difficult data analysis.

  1. “Help, my child has been abducted… yes, I can hold.”

Scene: The main character’s loved one has gone missing. Despondent, they call the police, and the 911 operator says that they can’t file a missing person’s report unless the person has been missing for 24 hours. The protagonist can’t wait that long and is forced to strike out on their own to find justice.

Reality: This is pure fabrication by movie writers in order to create a sense of drama. It’s not true. In fact, police will release PSA’s begging the public to report a missing person right away because it’s HARDER for them to find the person after 24 hours. It makes sense in an odd kind of way for this to be ‘true’ in movie logic because it creates drama and crisis that the protagonist has to resolve instead of handing over the search to a (supposedly) trained, fully staffed police force. Movies would be boring if the police believed John McCain and surrounded Nakatomi Plaza right away or if the Chicago PD actually searched for Kevin McCallister instead of just ringing the doorbell and then giving up.

  1. “Bombs should audibly tick (and also have a glowing light). It’s unfair otherwise.”

Scene: Our hero kills all the bad guys and dashes to an easily accessible time bomb. He agonizes over whether or not to cut one of the conveniently color coded wires (or, for a Shyamalanian twist, they all might be the same color). The timer approaches zero and he is forced to choose. A quick snip, a pause, and the timer stops at 1 second. The bomb lays inert.

Reality: This is a common trope complaint, so I’m not going to talk about the logistics of bomb defusing (the correct answer is to destroy it with a smaller bomb or a shotgun), but I want to talk about the fact that time bombs (or, more specifically, “timer activated explosives”) are really impractical and are rarely used. 

Most bombers want some sort of control of the bomb because (1) making a bomb is difficult and dangerous and (2) a timer almost guarantees that you’ll end up exploding nothing of value. That’s why most bomb makers use some sort of active trigger- a cell phone call, a pressure plate, and button- because it offers control, reduces the risk that the bomb will be discovered, ensures that the target is actually struck, and reduces the risk that the bomber will blow himself up (time bombs are prone to early detonation). I understand this movie shorthand- a timer adds a sense of dramatic tension to any scene- but I also find this shorthand particularly insidious because politicians will cite a proverbial time bomb to justify torture and all sorts of misdeeds. Any credible threat outside of unsophisticated lone-man lunatics will forgo a simple time bomb for something that they can control.

Even in movie universes, time bombs don’t make a lot of sense. A terrorist in the story usually uses a bomb as a form of leverage to make demands. What if their demands are actually met? It’s going to be an awkward moment when the terrorist will have to explain that they couldn’t defuse the bomb because there was traffic and they couldn’t make it back in time to stop the timer.

Abstraction >> Faux Realistic

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I have been thinking a lot about video games that remain compelling to me over a long period of time, and a common theme is the amount of abstraction that the game itself embraces. Many game studios (or at least their marketing departments) love to talk up how photo-realistic, immersive, or lifelike their games will be, but I really think this material misses the point about why people play games more than once. 

All games are abstractions, and I posit that the industry trend of throwing millions of dollars in an attempt to obscure this abstraction creates a total that is less than the sum of its parts.

A lot of very smart people have written dissertations about the Uncanny Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley) and how humans tend to have a negative emotional reaction to object that approaches a human’s appearance. There is something off, and our brain notices it whether we want it to or not.

I suspect that this reaction holds true for other representations of reality even though the Uncanny Valley reaction is most strongly felt for human faces because a major portion of our brain is dedicated to processing faces and emotions. This might be best explained by example.

I was playing a first person shooter not too long ago that boasted a destructible environment and a few other realistic features. I came to a point where I couldn’t figure out how to get around a chain-link fence. I couldn’t climb over it. I couldn’t knock it down with a rocket launcher. It held impossibly firm when I drove a vehicle into it. Despite the graphical fidelity, this felt ridiculous in the moment. It took me out of the moment, broke flow, and was a strong reminder that I was sitting in front of a monitor playing a game.

Let’s take the same scenario and lower the promise of graphical fidelity. I’ve played dozens of top-down shooters where you can blow apart some buildings but other walls are impervious. I can’t recall a single time this has disrupted the flow of play because my brain is readily able to process the abstraction of reality and frame it in a universe where rules seem consistent or at least understandable. Instead of wondering why a simple fence is impervious to tons of steel barreling into it, my attention snaps to finding the proper path to my next objective instead. Even though the situation might be exactly the same, it is more frustrating and off-putting to be placed in a less abstracted representation.

To test this hypothesis, let’s dial down the graphical fidelity and increase the abstraction as much as possible. The first game that comes to mind is Dwarf Fortress. I play Dwarf Fortress using ASCII characters to represent everything from tree leaves, water, giant pandas, lava, etc. The level of simulation is absurdly detailed and oftentimes beautiful once your eye is trained to understand what is being represented by a few tildes and hashes.

I recently did a Let’s Play thread on twitter (using my Blaseball handle) where I built a wooden fortress completely suspended in the trees of a forest (https://twitter.com/BlobCostas/status/1585040951768416256). This was a hilarious play through because the trees would often drop branches down through the multiple layers of roofs and floors of the fortress… often with funny or tragic results. The game we played had a lot of emotional moments of sacrifice, loss, and fortitude in the face of impending disaster. Also, there were tales of romance, betrayal, and grief from the poor dwarfs of the fortress… and all of it was rendered using characters that one could type into a text editor.

If we were somehow able to render this exact same scenario Unreal Engine 5, it would not have been a fun play through. The thought of a giant, two-headed Ettin climbing a wooden ramp into a massive treehouse would have looked odd. We would wonder why the monster didn’t simply pull itself up by tree branches to get to the fort. Likewise, the falling branches that pile drive their way through the fortress would look ridiculous instead of being a fun sort of environmental hazard to the fort. Even the fort itself would look uncannily stable and resilient because it wouldn’t sway with the breeze or droop under its own massive weight.

The same can be said about the online game Blaseball which uses an even higher level of graphical abstraction. The entire game is represented by text prompts and a few common representations of whether or not a player is on a particular base. That being said, the game has a rich lore of murder, theft, betrayal, redemption, and literally attacking and dethroning gods. None of this would be remotely enjoyable if it were rendered in the latest MLB the Show 22 engine. Dominic Marijuana hitting a home run to cripple the Shelled One’s pods was an epic moment in Blaseball history (https://www.blaseball.wiki/w/Day_X). If we tried to recreate this in The Show 22, it would never pack the same punch because the joy of imagining and losing ourselves in the moment would be replaced by a passive, less-satisfying representation of reality.

Prequels and Pitfalls

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The Three Canticles on this site are intended to be fully standalone stories while also serving as segments of a greater story with some underlying themes that transverse literally millennia in the same universe. Writing these stories has forced me to think a lot of why sequels/prequels work and why they often fail. Failures are particularly interesting to think about because they are more instructive for would-be writers like myself. I can’t guarantee that I won’t fall victim to these failures as the story proceeds, but I believe an awareness of the pitfalls is useful. This most recent episode with Zel and Vitova is an example of the temptations and common pitfalls that I wish to avoid while writing Lost Noise.

 

Pitfall #1: Explaining things that don’t need explaining

Prequels are especially prone to this pitfall because this can be incredibly cool. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade does this particularly well with the opening scene that shows how Indiana got his iconic hat. Was this scene necessary to understand or advance the story of Indiana Jones? Absolutely not. If this question was never answered, fans wouldn’t be clamoring for a source or getting into great debates about the provenience of Indiana’s fedora. The hat is Indiana’s hat. That’s all we need, really. In the case of Indiana’s hat, this scene does a good job because it also introduces a source of narrative tension between Indiana and his father that we will explore later in the film. The story is neat, but what it adds to the story is what makes this scene work.

I feel this is precisely why this pitfall is so dangerous. It can be fun and engaging to add backstory to significant items or motifs in a story, but the scope of this must be narrow. This is easier to do for Indiana Jones partly because Indiana Jones movies are essentially serialized stories that can be watched in whatever order you please without difficulty (this website does not recognize Crystal Skull). Conversely, this exact same thing does not work well in the Star Wars prequels. Explaining that Anakin Skywalker built C3PO- and intertwining this fact with other important plot related events- makes the universe smaller (see pitfall #2 below), isn’t particularly interesting, does not expand on any of the greater themes of the series of this point, and rips open a bunch of plot holes that are big enough to skydive through before they are sloppily patched over two movies later.

“No one likes this.”

Most times, things are better left to the imagination of the audience. This is why horror films know to incorporate a Monster Delay because the persistent dread the audience gets from the idea and threat of the monster is much more meaningful than the monster itself. When the monster itself is finally revealed, the imagined dread collapses into a clearer reality, and the result is almost always less scary than what was in the audience’s head.

The same is true for these “fun facts” and connections that tend to crop up in prequels. If these connections don’t provide an expansion of a theme, a new perspective, or a critique of previous point, then the author should be cautious about adding them to a story because they usually collapse a universe of interesting possibilities into one that is clearer but much more boring.

In the Fortuna Saga, the Guides (magic users typically able to transport people and materiel over distance) are shown using giant glass balls as a way to contain a city that had fallen to the the enemy. These balls were never explained in Fortuna Saga because they didn’t need to be explained. The scene that introduces them adequately shows that they are stationed strategically around the city, the city has been at a stalemate for months, and it shows exactly how the Fortunans use them and what their vulnerabilities are. Going into a metaphysics exposition about it would only have detracted from the story at that point.

So, after saying all of that, why did I choose to include a metaphysics exposition about these glass balls over ten years after I wrote the first page with them? I thought about this a lot, but I ultimately decided that this was a good place to make a connection because the goal isn’t to finally explain what those glass balls actually did or where they came from. This wasn’t a plot hole that has been bothering me for years that I’m hoping to retroactively cover up (to be honest, I have and will continue to do that in other places in the story). More importantly, the connection isn’t a simply a connection to this one scene from Fortuna Saga. It also buttresses some of the larger themes and motifs of the Three Canticles. For example, consider some of the late-story dialogue between Arlia Janet and Jazira El-Vrijer about cycles of violence, escalation, and loss. In this way, I feel this call back/call forward adds some real-world examples of these motifs that we will continue to experience in Lost Noise and have already experienced in Fortuna Saga and Hymns of the Apostate.

Pitfall #2: The Universe Starts to Revolve Around a Lucky Few

Granted, this is a little bit easier to avoid for these Canticles because the timelines are centuries apart from each other, but the risk is always present. Sequels or prequels are fun because characters are already established and we can then move on to putting an interesting cast in a brand new situation to see what will happen. The risk here is that the universe will start to turn around these characters instead of the other way around.

Fans will actively push against the introduction of new characters or previously unrelated parts of the universe because they’ve already done the work of understanding the main character and the thin slice of the universe that they inhabit. It’s easier to frame anything new in terms of how it relates with the old, which is inherently self-limiting. “Who is this? It’s Indiana Jones’ new love interest.” “Him? Oh that’s Biff Tanen’s great grandfather who lived in the Old West and had the exact same personality and is played by the same actor.” “Mr. Bond, the Crown needs you to be the last line of defense in this mission that will decide the fate of the free world… why? Because there wouldn’t be a movie if a massive organization like MI6 had proper internal and external controls and competent people in charge to prevent situations from deteriorating to the point where everything relies on the actions of a single super spy… No, there will not be an internal investigation about the failures after you complete your mission, Mr. Bond. We need to set up the sequel.”

Ironically, a series of stories tend to get more myopic with the more time it spends in the a universe. Really compelling stories expand their universe as they go on. While this is tougher to do, it is magical when it is done well. To explain both good and bad examples, I’m going to pick on Star Wars again.

To oversimplify a cultural juggernaut, the original trilogy was a tale of a young man who was thrust into a much larger conflict that he didn’t quite understand at first. For this discussion, Luke Skywalker’s universe got bigger as he learned more about the truth of the Empire, the Force, the Rebels, and the relationships between his friends and family. The Empire Strikes Back is a masterclass in expanding a universe while also staying connected and expanding established characters. The emperor, Lando, and Yoda all have direct connections with previously established characters, yet they bring in new perspectives and depth to the universe as well.

Conversely, the universe of the prequels and subsequent films and TV shows typically make the universe much smaller because most events are framed around how they directly lead to the events of the original trilogy. In a galaxy of billions or trillions of characters, most characters we spend time with can be summed up in terms of how they are related to Darth Vader or Boba Fett. Even the Knights of the Old Republic games, set 5000 years before the events of a New Hope, can’t help but fall victim to this. You can find armor belonging to Cassus Fett- a famed bounty hunter. In the Star Wars universe, the Fett family have all been famous and feared bounty hunters throughout the galaxy for about as long as Stonehenge has existed on Earth. It’s absurd, and I’m glad that many Star Wars fans recognize this absurdity.

“My name is John Stonehenge, from the same family that has built every monument on Earth since forever. Perhaps you’ve heard of us?”

For the Canticles, I have chosen to side-step this problem. Arlia Janet/Valens didn’t show up until halfway through Hymns of the Apostate and Ms. Blail is still absent from Lost Noise after 100+ pages into the story. This is intentional because I want to explore new aspects of this universe with different characters while also keeping the themes consistent. It’s hard to deconstruct or comment on a motif using characters with perspectives that we’ve already explored. Frankly, it’s not going to be interesting seeing what happens to Nyle, Balen, and Karen because we already know what happens to them. We don’t know what is going to happen to Zel, the Chieftess, Marie De Ralse, and the Xin Yun’s extended family, and I can’t wait to see where their decisions take them.

Nyle, Balen, and Karen will play a role in this story, of course, and we will see how they change throughout the events of Lost Noise. I am looking forward to sharing some aspects of their lives and personalities that we didn’t get in Fortuna Saga, and we’ve already seen some of this. However, I don’t expect to build a lot of narrative tension from their particular slices of the universe.

Many prequels try to tackle this issue by showing how a character became the character we already know. How did Anakin Skywalker become Darth Vader? These types of questions are usually dissatisfying because Anakin is simply less interesting than Darth Vader. Anakin follows a linear flight path from Chosen One to Fallen Hero. It was never a question of if he would choose the path he chose, and he is constrained by this poorly-structured narrative necessity for him to fall.

We never see any new side of Anakin. After dozens of additional hours from movies, TV shows, and cartoons expanding on the saga of Darth Vader, the throwaway line that Obi-wan said in Episode IV is sufficient. He was a good Jedi who succumbed to the temptation of the dark side and was lost.

It’s less interesting on the screen than Obi-wan made it sound.

Instead, I hope to expand on the world of Lost Noise and provide new context for why Nyle and his friends went the way that they did while hopefully building more tension about how those decisions impact and are impacted by the actions of the rest of the world. The world of Lost Noise does not exist to stuff Nyle into a hole. The world will hopefully feel much, much bigger than that.

Delay between VIII-4 and VIII-5

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CW: Depression, Suicidal Ideation

I didn’t intend there to be a many, many month gap between these episodes. I never do. Canto VII was one of the most fun story bits that I have worked on in my decade of making sprite comics. That battle was something that would have been out of my reach during most of the run of Fortuna Saga and Hymns of the Apostate, but it came together in a really fun way. I think Ysane’s story arc (though brief) is perfect.

I came into this episode with a lot of enthusiasm but something unexpected happened… I got sad.

I’ve written about my youth on this site or on Twitter. But I don’t think I ever have talked about how I had suicidal ideation from about age 12 through most of my twenties. During this time, I would always have a few ready-to-go plans for how to kill myself. If I traveled, I would look for tall parking garages that I could jump off of or something nearby that I could use to kill myself “just in case.” I never tried to kill myself, but it was something I felt that I could do. It was something that I learned to either ignore or suppress.

After I got into a serious relationship with Jessica Mora, a contributor to Fortuna Saga, got married and had a kid, those thoughts became distant memories that I associated with the stress of my childhood and then the stress of serving in the military. I genuinely feel lucky to enjoy the type of life that I have now. It’s beyond what I could have imagined what was in stock when I daydreamed as a child.

Shortly after I updated the VIII-4, I noticed that I was starting to eyeball tall parking garages and other “good” locations to kill myself. I noticed I was getting frustrated easily when I normally laugh at frustrations. I sat down to work on this comic so many times and just felt an overwhelming sense of ennui before I made a single new brush stroke to a panel background.

I have a therapist for the first time in my life, and it has made an important difference. I haven’t had a suicidal thought for months, but I am not confident that this is something that I can ever be free from; however, it is something that I feel that I am finally getting tools to understand and control rather than suppress and ignore.

I don’t want this to come across as an excuse for a delay. It’s not an excuse. I guarantee there will be more delays. I can’t commit to a twice-a-week update schedule like I had with Fortuna Saga because my life is completely different now. Any future delays will (almost certainly) not be indicative that I’m suicidal again. I’m busy with my kids, my relationships, and my job. Delays will happen. This specific gap in updates was particularly hard for me, but I’m grateful that I was able to use it as an opportunity to address something that has been hounding me for the vast majority of my life.