Labyrinth is a movie for girls with hardly any female characters. That’s not the part that doesn’t make any dang sense; actually, the film uses this setup fairly effectively. The part that doesn’t make sense is the central conflict: Sarah Williams endures dangers untold and hardships unnumbered to rescue her baby brother Toby, whom she hates. Exactly how much sense this doesn’t make will be made clear at great length in this essay. First, let’s examine my claim that Labyrinth is a movie for girls:
Category Archives: prose
Roman License Plates
The Best License Plate?
The singularity of this license plate was almost lost on me. I noticed it as I was pulling out of my parking space, and I thought: “Hey, ‘Civ 104’, like the 104th entry in the Civilization series! Boy, it’ll be a long time before they get to that one. Kind of like that other hypothetical Civ game, the one they’ll call ‘Civ CIV’, because it’ll be the one where the number of the game is ‘CIV’ in Roman numerals…” Continue reading
The Tree Shaped Like A Monster
CHAPTER ONE
Heather and Nicole were in love. They sat under the tree shaped like a monster and spoke about the things of love. They got out a knife. They tried to cut their initials into the bark of the tree, but blood came out of the wood.
CHAPTER TWO
Then in Fall when they raked up the leaves that fell off the tree they found Heather and Nancy’s skeletons under the leaves.
The End
The Dark vs. Ghost Question: A Rope of Sand
This was a post on Google+, but it ended up being so long that I’ve convinced myself it belongs here too. It is an analysis of Pokémon types.
I was wondering what the philosophical distinction between Ghost and Dark Pokémon was, and my friend Zach said that Dark is evil, while Ghosts are dead. This sounded good at first, but as we thought about it it seemed overly simplistic. For one thing, it’s not totally clear that Ghost Pokémon are straight-up dead Pokémon. Maybe the better word for Ghost Pokémon is “spooky”?
An Interesting Choice in EarthBound
NOTE: I played a little further in EarthBound and I realized that this post only makes like 45% sense. Maybe I should revise it? Hmm.
I’ve been replaying EarthBound on the Wii U Virtual Console and thinking a lot about the decisions involved in constructing its narrative. A particular choice caught my attention, and I am going to analyze it here, but since it involves spoilers from the tail end of the game, and because I have a feeling you might not care about EarthBound at all, I will place my analysis on the other side of a break thingy.
Adze
INTERIOR – ALASKA NATIVE HERITAGE CENTER
A replica Unangax longhouse: a single, semi-subterranean, dimly lit room. A GUIDE of about sixteen is showing RYAN around, explaining various artifacts of her traditional culture.
GUIDE
The flap over the hole in the ceiling is made from seal intestine. It lets in the light but keeps out the cold air.
RYAN
All right.
GEOF THE KNIFER
Moons of Gich
A Twitter Novel. By Ryan Veeder. Copyright Ryan Veeder MMXIV.
☽☽☽
Piol of Gich wiped the blood from her pearly sword and sighed.
“I still have so many enemies left,” she wept, “no matter how many I kill.”
Piv, the first moon of Gich, floated overhead. It was yellow-green.
Piol uttered an ancient Gichian curse over the corpses of the Fik-folk she had defeated. Then she looked in their wallets.
“Hmm,” she said.
According to their orbiter tickets, these Fik-folk were en route to Hed, the second moon of Gich.
“You won’t be needing these,” said Piol.
“I’ll use these to fly myself to Hed, where I can kill even more of those Fik-folk,” she said aloud.
“You won’t,” said a voice behind her.
Piol turned around to see Detective Ff.
“I have a warrant for your arrest,” Ff intoned. “You are wanted for 1,213 homicides.”
Piol spat.
“I am authorized to use deadly force should you resist,” warned Ff.
“You can certainly try your best…” Piol smirked, drawing her sword.
Detective Ff, recognizing the weapon, deployed its multimissiles. Piol exploded, her pearly sword shattered to microscopic bits.
“I’m only a police robot,” Ff thought to itself, “so I can never know love. But if I could, what I would love most is blowing up murderers.”
On the horizon, a violet ghost slowly ascended—Fewkalek, the third moon of Gich. Detective Ff collapsed into space and disappeared.
THE END
☾☾☾
Text Adventure “News” AND: The Perfect Horse
Today I revamped the Interactive Fiction section, adding separate pages for each game, because it pleased me to do so. You might go ahead and check out the new format, in a spare moment.
Now, if you never saw the old version of the Interactive Fiction section, you may think that you’ve missed out on something. I assure you that you have not, but I understand your feelings regardless. Let me make it up to you by reproducing a novel I composed on my phone last Friday night:
Thoughts and High Scores on Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder
Captain Verdeterre’s Plunder (working title; also, release title) was not originally intended as an Interactive Fiction Competition entry. In late 2012 and early 2013, as Emily Boegheim and I were trying to pick up steam on Robin & Orchid (working title; also, release title), I thought to myself: I just need to make a tiny game, to stretch my dang legs. After I finish a little game, I can finish this big game.
Verdeterre was not that game, but for a while I thought it was. From the beginning my goal was to make a slight game, unambitious in scope or plot or theme or mechanics, and to a certain extent I think I succeeded.
And yet here I have written many words, a lot of words, about the design of this game. You will have to scroll past them to see the high score table.