I’ve been sick as a dog lately- (not Covid, I popped negative on a rather unpleasant swab test, and due to hospital wait times and not wanting to contract Covid while loitering in the wait rooms, I’ve just kind of been operating under the assumption it’s a stomach flu of some sort, given the hours long stints of projectile vomiting and waves of nausea- I fell asleep slumped over the bathtub edge!) and that apparently means my feverish little pea brain, still insistent on writing, grappled around for like fifteen minutes on trying to figure out how to spell marina in absolute bewilderment at why a bunch of women were showing up for the search results.
It’s a pretty decent poem I think- I want to polish it up a bit before crafting a Bitsy around it, but it was really funny reviewing my search history now that my brain isn’t being gently poached like a feverish egg and seeing endless permutations of “What is a marina.”
Pretty much all of the writers I know wind up with suspicious or hilarious search histories (it doesn’t help my friends skew towards horror as well!) and I thought it’d be funny to see some of y’all’s.
What was the best selling game? Were you around to play it? It’s always interesting to hear about what games were like before I was a kid- the whole idea of having to type stuff out from magazines to play(?) is so delightfully foreign.
Apparently it was Space Invaders! I was born in 1984. The earliest games I remember playing are Altered Beast, Mario Brothers (the original one: Mario Bros. - Wikipedia, with mario and luigi together, I think my dad’s company was porting it to Atari), and QBert, and the first Zelda game. I didn’t do type-in stuff until 4th grade in 1993.
“name of the wooden part of an archery bow” (the word I was looking for was “limb”)
“tunnel of love” (aka Old Mill rides. Strongly recommend Defunctland’s recent, profoundly NSFW video about the Garfield-themed Old Mill ride at Kennywood and the acts that people committed in front of Garfield and friends)
Plus a couple of searches where I checked if a puzzle’s solution made sense after writing the puzzle, and then had to rewrite the puzzle.
Also, a lot of searches for David Fisher’s IF Gems collection of writing advice, which I keep forgetting to bookmark. Bits of it are out of date (it predates Twine), but it’s still pretty good to browse.
Oh man, I keep forgetting about that page but mid-20s me is all over it. Now that I’ve actually written some games I shudder at the idea that anyone could just go over my host of too-confident pronouncements and catalogue the ways I didn’t take my own advice.
On topic: my next game is pretty much a fan-game of a book, so I’ve been primarily just reading that to get inspiration and general structure ideas at this point, though I did need to go online to look up more information on the Excise Crisis of 1733.
Searching my brain for influences and associations I actually use/will use/ want to use in my writing (as opposed to things I read and will inevitably wind up in anything I write anyway):
Mother Nature by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
(Really, must-read!)
Impressionism and the beginning of this art form in my public library.
Rope making on Wikipedia and the deep crevace of interesting websites it leads to.
Horowitz by Glenn Plaskin.
And how to grow Basilicum, That remains a big question in my gardening and writing life.
While writing today’s Gold Machine piece about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I thought: “there has to be a name for that green planet guy on the American book covers.” I googled “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy green planet guy,” and it was a fruitful search.
Turns out he is called the “Cosmic Cutie” in the States while a handful of British people called him “Jeremy Pacman.”
I have to admit, I saw your headline and thought it was setting up some sort of elaborate Love Song of J. Alfred Pacman joke, and was sorely - through no fault of yours - disappointed.
Well, it was, in truth, a Prufrock reference (which I’m glad you got!), but I think that it would take a Graham Nelson to get away with more overtly Eliotian riffery in such a piece.
I grow old… I grow old…
My skin has faded to pale gold.
Shall I pop a Power Pill? Do I dare to eat a cherry?
I shall wander the darkling maze, my hopes there to bury.
I have heard the ghosts singing, every to every.
I do not think they will come kill me.
Seriously, that poem has one of the saddest lines in all of English literature: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.” Weird that he was so young when he wrote it.
The last thing I looked up while writing was a plant. I know what we call it out here in the Texas Boonies, but I wanted to know if that was in any way botanically correct, or just a texasism. We’re not known for our scientific accuracy these days.
And, per his own assessment (albeit of much later date), he was at that point “very immature for my age, very timid, very inexperienced”!
That’s from the hilariously defensive statement he wrote when he found out the woman he’d loved in his younger years, Emily Hale, had donated the love letters he’d written to her for eventual publication - as far as I can make out, he had the opportunity to marry her (a writer and teacher roughly his age) after his miserable first marriage ended, but instead chickened out and married his forty-years younger secretary.
To pre-emptively respond to criticism, he said that this was because Hale “was not a lover of poetry, certainly… was not much interested in my poetry; I had already been worried by what seemed to me evidence of insensitiveness and bad taste.” Not to worry, though, all this bad taste was just because she was unduly under the sway of her uncle’s opinions! Plus she wasn’t especially impressed by fusty High Church Anglicanism
(You probably know more about this than I given how deep you seem to roll when it comes to poetry, but this story amuses me so much I can’t help but trot it out at the slightest provocation. Eliot’s I’m-not-mad-I’m-sorry-for-her-that-she-didn’t-like-my-poem statement is here; Hale’s much more even-tempered assessment is here).
(Er, apologies to all for the thread jack - I’ll stop now)
I do a lot of research when writing a game. I’m toying with three different games at the moment. The last two things I looked up were an upper class sounding surname (for the name of a school) and arrow mazes (for a puzzle).
