Category Archives: Organizational

Ahern says the Editing Gang is crazy, Ahern Would Say I'm Whining, Brain droppings, Emo shitfaced crying, FanFic Maintenance, Hot Updates, just write dumbass, Organizational

So…Patreon.

5 Comments

After discussion with the Editing Gang and the poll, I have decided to open up a Patreon to defray costs for artwork, music, and other goals.

The Patreon Page is here : http://patreon.com/LogicalPremise

There are more details listed there, including reward levels and what not. Please keep in mind : You are not required to give anything.

You don’t have to be a Patron to access the forums.

You don’t have to be a Patron to be in the Editing Gang.

This is strictly voluntary. For those of you who would like to donate but don’t have the cash or ability to do so, comments on this post about things you could to do help would be appreciated.

If you know good artists, musicians, animators or the like, references to them would also be helpful.

The Next Chapter is being outlined.

FanFic Maintenance, Organizational

Updates, maintenance, stuff.

3 Comments

I’ve suspended user registrations temporarily, as I’ve had 48 new signups with  .ru and .tu domains in the past day and all of them are spamlinks.

If you wish to sign up just shoot me an email at viley@att.net and I’ll hook you up.

I’ve made a bit of progress on the next chapter of TWCD, although not a ton of it. No good release dates so far, as my back is intermittent and I’ve been distracted by work and personal bullshit no one cares about.

I’d like to get my shit together to at least try for a chapter this month.

Ahern says shut the fuck up and be merry., Brain droppings, FanFic Maintenance, just write dumbass, Oh, Organizational

Working on my other project

6 Comments

If you’ve put a watch on my stories you know I’ve been updating the Naruto stuff instead of the Mass Effect stuff.

Two reasons for that. I’m still in the process of doing the research on the Drell, and a book I ordered is held up due to utter fucking bullshit so I’m forced to wait.

The other reason is that the next chapter of TWCD is important, and I’m not willing to put together a bunch of filler scenes and wonky dialogue when I’m not sure how I want it to feel. I want to get it right, and until I can I’m not just happy with a token effort to advance the story. I’ve done that a couple of places in both OSABC and ATTWN and while it got the job done it weakened the overall result.

I’m aware many of you aren’t fans of Naruto, and even if you were most people gave up when the series creator fucked it up waaaay worse than the ending of ME3.  So don’t think you have to read or review my stuff if it isn’t your cup of tea.

That being said, all interest in the work is appreciated. The DLP Gang have a particularly dim view of most Naruto fics and I am going to get a positive reaction out of them to show them the fandom isn’t dead yet as long as people with a brain write it instead of yaoi-obsessed  idiots with a fixation on mPreg and foxy accessories.

In other news, my back is doing better, my mom’s hair is finally coming back in, work is still crazy but is doing better and nothing horrible has happened to me (yet) (knock on wood). It’s a very crappy time of the year for me, but I’ll be okay.

 

Ahern Would Say I'm Whining, just write dumbass, Organizational

Updates and the lack thereof.

2 Comments

You probably noticed my writing spree this time around for this part of the year has been Naruto focused,  rather than on ME.

I’m having some writer’s block on how exactly to proceed in a meaningful way, but still need to distract myself a bit.

TWCD and the rest of the ME Stuff will continue, do not worry.

Brain droppings, Fundamental Questions, Important Philosophies, ME Ramblings, Organizational

On forerunner concepts and the Premiseverse

13 Comments

The curious thing about all the old ancestral myths is how dickish all the gods were. The Greeks were the Clash of the Douches, with rapists and what not. The Egyptians were flat out creepy, tearing apart the gods bodies. Even old Indian trickster deities like Coyote were often deeply disturbing.

I can’t help but wonder what aliens far older than our entire race must be like.

 

Very few Mass Effect fan fictions take up the trouble to ‘scribble in the blank spots’, as it were, outside of the framework of the games. This is hardly surprising — most fan fiction is about working with what is established, either in new ways or new views or what have you.

Outright world building is rare, and doing so on a time scale of millions of years seems pointless to most. Yet there are so many hinted at but ultimately unanswered questions even in canon ME that I can’t help but want to find answers.

The Inusannon play such a role. They are perhaps the most striking of the races I have tampered with, even though the big reveals will only happen in ME3 and ME4 pieces of my books.

They had technology and abilities we couldn’t match, colonies in other galaxies, and could create machines like Vigil — and they still lost. What chance, then, does modern society, with its squabbling and stupid acts, have?

The key to understanding that question is to realize you are asking the wrong question. As it was said in Wargames, the only way to ‘win’ is not to play at all, a concept they quickly identified.

The Inusannon understood that the Reapers had been at this for millions of years, and were not going to fall for dumb shit like fleeing to another galaxy (never mind Reapers already infested every nearby galaxy). They weren’t stupid. Neither were the Tho’ian. So they made choices and actions that fit what they knew the Reapers expected, and took a Third Path out.

Why is this important?

Because, despite all the foreshadowing I will try to do, it is likely to come out of left field much like the Starkid did at the end of three. The Inusannon are not a simple Deus Ex Machina — they cannot stop the Reapers now any more than they could back then. But they are capable of understanding more and seeing more than today’s races do, and making sense of what they saw.

The Inusannon tampered with many races. So did Leviathans (all three groups). So did Protheans, and so did the races before Inusannon. But the Inusannon did not tamper with races trying to make a weapon.

They instead wanted to make sure that when the threat was passed, nothing else would simply rise up and cause them problems again. And some of the steps they took they hid in the plainest possible sight.

Forerunner races are often given a group of traits — ancient technology, mysterious vanishing, can pull shit out of their hat, a single, ancient survivor by way of X, blah blah blah.

The Inusannon defy that. Almost none of their tech is even known, much less released — a lot of it, like Tho’ian tech, was biological in framework and literally rotted away a long time ago. Moreover, the Inusannon, taking cues from the Reapers, set up their own method of monitoring the situation as it developed, even if the method used wasn’t aware of it’s purpose.

AKA Vigil.

So when people ask me things like “Why can’t you just have Vigil give Shepard kick ass weapons”, it is for two big reasons.

The first is the mystique factor. The more I reveal about the Inusannon, the easier it is to eventually figure out how this mess ends up. So it has to come at the appropriate time in the story.

The second is more story based. The Inusannon made a decision that the Reaper situation should not be altered, be that for good or ill. They did not, once they understood WHY the Reapers did what they did, try to stop them. They simply … got out of the way.

But if they come back, they won’t be a threat if everyone has the tech they did.

Most importantly, making the Inusannon living ass-pulls flies in the face of what I see them as — horrible, horrible trolls.

They knew full well the Reaper threat, and decided it was the better part of self-survival to simply shield themselves from the outcomes rather than actually warn anyone of the coming danger.  With their technology they could have easily destroyed the Citadel in the thousands of years after Reapers retreated to dark space.

So why didn’t they? Because they saw the concept of the snare that catches the hunter and not the hunted as hilarious. This is also why they didn’t fill Vigil in all the way, or let their creation know their real plans.

Ultimately, the Inusannon should be seen as a vaguely defined threat, not heroic and willing to co-exist for long periods of time.

Brain droppings, FanFic Maintenance, Fundamental Questions, ME Ramblings, Organizational

Some interestingly heavy textual analysis going on at DLP and next steps

16 Comments

There has been a perpetual thread that pulls no punches about my series going on at the Dark Lord Potter forums for some time now. Unlike Spacebattles, where if your fic is not about Shepard killing Reapers with his dick while doing his best Kirk impression, the DLP folks are actually GOOD at textual analysis and reviews.

They raked OSABC over the coals quite a bit, but every last criticism was very fair (and are things I’ve tried very hard to address in the next two books). And lo and behold, as I’ve gotten better they have continued to go over things.

More recently they had several text-walls discussing the nature vs nurture argument of Premiseverse Badasses, which tend to run in familial lines. One poster put forth the idea that perhaps outside forces augmented such things to create ‘heroes’.

It is a curious viewpoint, one that I had certainly not considered. I would say that genetics plays a role. So do connections and who you know. There is often a  subtle chain of events.

The ancient dalatrass of salarians, Shego, would have never amounted to anything if she’d not been somewhat rebellious in her youth and made lots of friends outside her clan. While I’m not ready to drop the big reveal on the Thirty and what Trellani found out, the only reason Trellani was accepted into the ranks of the normally Thirty-only Church of the Sun’s senior clergy was her relationship with Benezia.

If not for Anderson growing up near Kahlee Sanders and being friends with Pel’s father, Pel and Leng would have never joined, and Anderson would never have met Michael Shepard. And without that meeting, Shepard herself would have just ended up on the streets, dead, or in a Commissariat labor camp, and the entire focus of the series would be lost.

Fate, or destiny, may be something the Leviathans can control with their subtle manipulations. It may well be that they can’t see specifics but altered the timelines to ensure the most powerful ‘heroes’ were all available at the time when the Reapers would arrive.

Or maybe it’s sheer dumb luck.

Anyway, you should head on over to the massive megathread on DLP if you’re interested in that kind of thing. They have a HUGE range of other stories they review, and some of the reviews of the more sizable Harry Potter fics — and the depth of analysis — is as good as any New York Times review.

As for the story itself…

I’m in the process of the following:

  • Getting back to work on several pieces that I mentioned last month, like the Encyclopedia BIotic and Lions. I’ve made progress on both, just not enough to republish.
  • The next chapter of TWCD is at about a thousand words. Memes are hard to create without simply reusing existing ones that don’t really fit.
  • About a third of the way through the hanar military section. The drell and vorcha are outlined, although the vorcha file will be … short indeed.
  • Halfway through the next Engineering Guide file, but still figuring out where to go with the story. The math and science (and bullshit asspulls) on FTL sensor and FTL communications is fun indeed, and I just know one of my readers with a good background in physics is going to call me out as a hack 😀

I’m interested (as always) in what you think should be worked on next, although I’m pretty much tasked to capacity in terms of starting NEW projects. The only one I haven’t started is SevenSeven’s guide to the Citadel forces.