Big things are happening. The last two months post-graduation I’ve been in a state of limbo, waiting for July to arrive so I can start the rest of my life. Now it’s finally here, and I don’t think two months was enough time to prepare. Here’s to the future, and to the beautiful present!
Soon I will be moving into my fifth apartment of the last four years. Montréal apartments in the city vary wildly, mostly constructed before standardization became so strict. I’ve come to notice a lot of things about how the space you live in influences the way you live in it, large and small.
My second apartment had a wide “window” connecting the living room and kitchen, which meant that making food felt more social, as you could always easily socialize with whoever was hanging out there. In that apartment, the couch faced the hallway that ran down the length of the building, so you couldn’t pass through it without being seen. In others, where the couches faced away from or parallel to the hallway, there was a clearer distinction between “being in the space” and “hanging out in the space”.
In my third apartment, a bunch of the bedrooms (including mine) were on a 2nd floor, which made my bedroom feel like much less of a social space and more of a retreat than in the second, where my room opened into the kitchen.
In this apartment, the fifth, three bedrooms (including mine) are in the basement, down a flight of stairs from the hallway. Will the direction of the stairs influence how going back to my room feels? All three bedrooms connect into a common area, as opposed to my third, where they opened into a shared hallway. Will this lead to the bedrooms feeling like extensions of a shared space, and make it easier to casually wander in to each other’s? Basements tend to have more moderate temperatures in winters and summers. Will the basement common area become a sort of refuge when upstairs becomes too inhospitable?
Our kitchen features a table made of a wood slab sectioning off the kitchen area from the living room area. Only one side of the table can have proper seating, facing in towards the kitchen. Will this make cooking a more social activity, since the table makes it so easy to sit in a place where you can chat with someone cooking?
The upstairs living room area is quite large, and divided into two parts. Combined with the downstairs common area and the backyard, there is a wealth of communal space. This might lead to specialization of working areas, since there will be so many different spaces available, as opposed to my last apartments, where the singular common area needed to be able to fit as many different needs as possible.
And of course the most important question: where is Penny going to spend her time? The back wall has beautiful windows, but not much direct sunlight. Will the cute little basement windows recessed into the walls be appealing to her? This staircase is less sprint-uppable as the one in my third apartment, but will she still try? Maybe make the rounds every morning visiting us as we each wake up? These are the questions. I will be happy to provide updates.
Now this is strange—where did the rest of the city go? Three days into the move, I’m across the city (down the mountain!) in a very different neighbourhood (on the same metro line!). I’ve been so focused on the apartment and its geography and the dimensions of its rooms and practical organization and cleaning and focusing on our collective vision for the final household that the rest of the city and the rest of my life has faded out, been washed away by an intense focus.
Nothing else really matters when weighed against getting the household in order, getting the kitchen into working shape, repairing years of neglect by past tenants. The rest of my entire life has taken a back seat. My dear friends who I’ve known for years feel out of place as roommates. When I wake up to find them clustered in the kitchen it feels vividly like something out a dream. Silly you, this isn’t your place! (Oh, but what a dream this is!)
It doesn’t help that I’ve almost exclusively been leaving the apartment by car or rental van; I have no mental map of the area, and absolutely zero connections between home and my map of the rest of the city. My bedroom is small, and has strange corners. Penny is acting strangely, adjusting in her own way. The kitchen countertop is made of metal. My bedroom is down a flight of stairs instead of up. Outside the living room window is out yard, much more closely resembling my childhood friends’ homes instead of a big city apartment.
For now I live in a pocket dimension, separated from the real world, where the rules are different and time is on pause and the space is unfamiliar and we have no bread because we’ve been waiting to make a big Costco trip to buy everything at once. And it’s beautiful.
You can probably tell from the design of my site that I’m obsessed with the sky. It looms over every moment of my waking life, day or night, cloudy or clear. Gigantic clouds and towering weather systems, the brilliant sun and beautiful moon, the planets and moons and other bodies of our solar system, and behind them all a near-infinite sea of other stars, stretching off in all directions. The scale is oppressive. I love that this gives a frame of reference for the universe external to our own earth. I love how the distance to the moon and the size of the sun just barely feel comprehensible if I really try. I love the light in the dark like the brief blips of matter in the void. I don’t need to see the stars to feel their presence, which is good, because living in the city makes clear and dark nights are few and far between.
This majestic sky envelops me. I’m cursed to live at the bottom of a well, to perceive three dimensions with access to only two. Sometimes I’m pitied a glimpse of the whole scene, from the top of mountains, down in valleys, brought on by good architecture with scale, but never an invitation. Alas, no machine by our design can grant the freedom of a sparrow. The laws of nature don’t act equally across coordinates; r̂ has extra strings attached. I yearn for spaces as truly three-dimensional objects. The clouds above cannot be truly real until I can wander their halls.
The valley used to be wider during my grandmother’s time. On the rare occasion she leaves her home she averts her gaze downwards. Sometimes she glances up and mumbles that there aught to be more sky. Everyone still calls 7pm ‘sundown’ even though the light is gone beyond the western peaks before 6:30. Nobody misses a chance to comment that it’s gotten dark early.
You can see it in old photographs: the town used to be more spacious. There used to be more space between the houses. It’s hard to tell where the parks of my childhood are. Aging changes your perception of space, they all say. Uncle will joke about how the fields felt so much wider when he was a kid, and then something would flash across his face, and everyone would get quiet and change the subject. Everyone spends more time looking down these days. I never sit in the yard anymore, it feels claustrophobic. Like quicksand at the bottom of a well.
But the millstone keeps churning, and people keep living, and the roofs get a little bit steeper. Our village has always had a ‘face down and focus on the day’s work’ attitude, but the same thoughts are on everyone’s mind. I narrowly squeeze down my back alleyway on the way to the grocer, the same way I used to stroll with my mother. What are we to do? This is our home, our dearest home, that none of us could ever leave. And each year the mountains move closer, and it gets just a bit harder to breathe.
Would you say you feel constrained when you’re out in the city in the pouring rain? Some water can’t stop you, you’re still free to wander as you wish. There’ll be consequences, though. Pouring rain forces you to think about what exactly you’re doing. Is your goal to go somewhere? To stay comfortable? To have fun? Now it’s exciting, it’s a game. It’s excuse to mix it up a little. I guess we’ll have no choice but to dance around puddles and dash between cover. I guess we’ll have no choice but to hold each other close under the umbrella.
Problem with Lancer: The game is balanced around players being able to print their mech from scratch at any industrial printer/assembler. Lancers are front-line heavy cavalry, and their mechs are designed to be flexible, easily deployable, and most importantly: secretive. The problem is how do you justify scarcity of complex machinery in a setting where almost every major settlement across the galaxy has the means to print a top-of-the-line mech from scratch in just a few hours? Module blueprint scarsity is a major part of Lancer’s progression, and required by many aspects of the lore. If any printer could make these mechs, what’s stopping a printer used by a lancer from re-printing the mech, or otherwise gaining useful information from its instructions?
There’s the material cost, of course, which presumably Union, the wealthy benefactor commanding the players, can cover with ease, but the average government might struggle with. It’s something to consider, but doesn’t offer a strong barrier. The in-game explanation, which I find lacking, is some sort of DRM that prevents printers from understanding the models they are printing. You can’t hand-wave this by conjuring some magical unbreakable future encryption: a printer would need to understand and fully comprehend the printing instructions in order to build the mech itself, and I’m not sure how you, as a manufacturer, could prevent that data from being unrecordable while still deployable on any model of printer in the orion arm.
The solution to this is already implied by Lancer’s other systems: the mechs print themselves. Industrial printers are used to jump-start the process, constructing the trappings of a frame, which then works in tandem with the industrial printer to construct the core of the frame, itself a printer, which then hijacks the printer’s resources to construct the rest of the mech around it.
The only data held by the industrial printer at any time are blueprints for the first step of a multi-step printing process, which increases its precision with each iteration until the frame itself the capabilities to fully construct one of the most dangerous weapons of war in the Orion arm. The rest of the blueprints are kept fully within the player’s control, protected by whatever kind of futuristic encryption the lore demands.
This change feels more in-line with Lancers as mobile strike forces, able to bolster Union’s armies on any world at any time. It also helps explain why Lancer mech frames are limited in number (compared to the scope of the setting): all of their frames must have this self-assembly built in in order to act autonomously and be deployed anywhere. Mechs are already capable of repairing themselves fully in the field with a 10-hour full repair (conjuring raw materials out of thin air? don’t worry about it), so there is precedent for built-in manufacturing capabilities.
There’s a very important woman in the crowd, but I wouldn’t know. She’s glowing, brilliantly, in a colour that I can’t see. I find faint hints to her nature in reflections in sidewalk puddles, in glare from the setting sun in corner store windows, in the trajectory of the pigeon flocks above. For a moment this street, this block, this city, turns unknowingly around her. When she exits the scene through the metro station doors her status will end, but briefly she walks through an invisible hurricane of being, every atom tied to the next, with her at the eye.
Lying awake in bed, my awareness creeps upstairs into my new apartment. I can trace the halls and doorways, hold it in my palm like a miniature, flatten it out like a blueprint. Furniture shifts around, space rearranged, nooks and open floors given new contexts. I can feel the grain of the dining table on my fingertips, and the cold sheen of the metal countertop, covered with thousands of tiny dents and abrasions. My neck tenses as I duck down through the doorway back into my room. Finally, now, this is home, to me as a shell to a snail.
written by my friend snow !!
the planetary god turned against her children. at least, that's what the army says when they start recruiting in schools. the cafeteria lunches are lab grown upstairs in converted classrooms— for the ground itself could not be trusted. errand landslides crush people like millstones once crushed grain. and so years down the line, you are assigned a brutalist megastructure to pilot. you become a puzzling self-rearranging form, you house people and shelter them from the treacherous god. all concrete corners and thick windows, you cut a damn fine silhouette. you take up sleek steel arms and butch the divine.
You’re in a colossal, ever-shifting labyrinth, and the paths are well-defined. There is a pattern to the labyrinth, one acting on a scale far beyond what you could perceive. Trying to predict the hallways’ twists and turns is a maddening task, requiring greater vision than what you possess, and will always be futile. You have to try anyways, because you’re being chased by something. Zombies, constructs, raptors, a pack of hunters matching your speed so you can never outrun; you must avoid indefinitely. At every intersection there will be a correct turn and a wrong turn. Picking the right path grants a few moments of relief. Picking the wrong turn means painful death—unless! With great mental strain, you reach back and rewrite your past so you always chose the correct path. And the chase continues. Each time you save yourself from certain death this way, rewriting your poor choices becomes harder. Eventually you’ll make a wrong turn and find your willpower too drained to continue—and you’ll have no choice but to fall painfully to your pursuers.
I don't like to erase writing, so I have dozens of unfinished or barely-started entries scattered in my writing folder. Here are a few that I would like to live on. Some of these might even be revisited one day!
April 20thFive storeys of bone and three storeys of steeple.May 22nd
There’s a slow trickle of water through a crack in the balcony.It’s so difficult to create words from nothing. I’m looking back at my previous entries for inspiration, and the issue is that allMay 22ndThe process of harnessing an emergent mindJune 1st
The development of
There was incredible amounts of hubris in playThe grapevines, as it came to be known, is an alternate plane inhabited by a single, interwoven, seemingly endless amalgamation of man-made structures.June 8th
The grapevines themselves are bafflingly tall twisting structures of cement and stone and rebar and cast ironBetween my second and third left ribs there is a small metal cylinder. Use the knife in my right boot: I keep it sharp. There’s no need to be gentle. Inside is a copy of my encryption keys, which I’m sure you’ll be happy to get your hands on. I have nothing to hide anymore.June 9thA common problem in scifi narratives centred around humans is why humans need to be there at all.June 10th
How do you account for faster-than-light travel breaking causality? Answer: You don’t! Have fun!Listen, I have a lot of feelings in my heart but not a lot of words in my head, so you’re going to need to bear with me here.July 14watch your step/[] when you catch a ride from a train station in decay.July 29th
Sometimes, throughOut in the hallway penny states her demands through song, lovingly and insistently.