Bloggin'

Ralph Richardson playing Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest Probably one of the first and biggest things that most folks remember about settings like Star Wars or Harry Potter's Wizarding World is the special powers inherent to those settings. Oh, fine, let's call a spade a spade: they both use magic. Same with Naruto, if we're being honest, except they call them "jutsus," and with the Avatar: the Last Airbender universe, where the powers are called "bending." The exampl

The final colorized slide by Pierre "Astanael" Joubert showing Sunflower City from one of its small, surrounding islets All right, before anything else, I think it's only fair that I address why I chose a sissy name like Sunflower City for a place that is supposed to be, by functional symbology, a stand-in for the City of God, or perhaps more as the Celestial City which is the ultimate goal of John Bunyan's pilgrim-character, Christian. In the hero cycle (it's a different li

Once again the work of Astanael brings the page to life Third of the four city-states, or states of being expressed through the metaphor of place, is Dis. First, let's address the elephant: yes, the name of the city of Dis comes from the city described in the Inferno of Dante Alighieri, the great City of Hell, which stands in opposition to the (I think flawed) idea of the City of Heaven as proposed by Augustine of Hippo (who was still a genius, though, in my opinion; he just

The Sanctuary, done in cool, calming blue by Astanael Ecology is kind of a Big Deal. Well, it is now, anyway. For most of history, it really wasn't, and for reasons that should be pretty obvious: when you're starving to death, you don't tend to worry about the lives of anything else, as was typically the case during our semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer origins. Then, when we made the jump over to agrarian lifestyles, as Sir John Keegan noted in several of his works on the hist

The Wasted Lands of Earth (and I'll explain the mice eventually), as envisioned by Pierre Joubert, aka Astanael Because Astanael was so very kind enough to produce four pieces of promotional art, as well as "filter coloring" for them, to provide the intended mood for the works, I think it would be highly remiss of me not to explain them. Especially since I tend to think in a highly viceral manner, visualization and kinaesthetics and the sense of touch being vitally important

This quote, I think, encapsulates why I think we need to strive toward a post-scarcity society One aspect of worldbuilding that regularly gets overlooked is the money. No, that's not quite accurate: there's a *lot* of aspects of worldbuilding that get overlooked all the time, but we allow it as readers and watchers and listeners because we suspend our disbelief and want to just get on with the plot without having to fret about stuff like, for some examples, where does the po

Author's Note: Please see last week's blog posting for more on the universe of New Rat City, if you'd like to understand some context before reading further. But if you'd rather just leap ahead, heedless of consequences, far be it from me to deter you. Oh! But before you do, I want to mention: I've provided links to all the songs mentioned in the story, so you can listen along with the same background music I had going while I was writing. Again, if you'd like. Since I su

By Leona - A cover for a short story collection that might or might not ever exist; ah, sweet melancholy Next week, I intend to share a shortish story based in the setting of the upcoming novel Angel @ the End of the World, listed on the Books sub-page of this website. Before I do that, though, I thought that some explanation of the setting might be in order. The front cover shown above is for a hypothetical collection of short stories set in New Rat City, my version of the

Fleeing for his life again - just another Thursday - Art by Astanael - https://www.deviantart.com/astanael Before anything else, because I always forget to do this otherwise, here's a link to my book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1954094493 - I'm sorry about sharing that, but we do sadly live in a capitalist-centric society, and that means I have to spend money for the essentials of life, which means I need to somehow make money for said essentials. That bit of unpleasantness ou