Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

I’m currently in a play and involved in a lot of improvised theatre, so this blog has recently fallen by the way-side. Updates will resume at the end of November, with a new project – “The Sexy Project”. Stay tuned!

(First Take has been discontinued, and the All-That-Is project has dropped right to the bottom of the priority list, unfortunately. Both will most likely start again some day. In the meantime, sporadic Peter updates can be found at his Livejournal and on his Twitter account. He is also live-blogging the TV show Lost on another Twitter account, and the archives of that will be uploaded here some day. Some day.)

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

I’ve installed a new comment-filtering program, because I was getting upwards of 100 spam comments/day. This one doesn’t let me go in and check for false positives, so if you try to post a comment and it doesn’t show up, email me on peter@thechainsawblokes.com or leave a comment on the livejournal mirror.

There will be new updates, hopefully in the next day or two – I’ve been moving house, which is much more exhausting than I predicted, and has left me little time for writing. Stay tuned!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

The last five races of All-That-Is.

Humans, Elves, Orcs, Gnomes, Dwarves:

Humans, Elves, Orcs, Gnomes and Dwarves have remained largely unchanged. You could almost play these races straight from the D&D PHB (except for the difference in character creation numbers, which I’ll be detailing in a post of its own.)

Humans
My friend Damon, who was the person I worked closest on All-That-Is with in the first few months of its existence (before it had a name, and was simply (and a little egotistically) referred to as “The Peterverse”) hates the fact that Humans are the “base” of every other RPG system. The more I worked on All-That-Is, the more the other races intrigued me, and Humans were given a smaller and smaller role in the world.

In All-That-Is, instead of being the “dominant race”, they’re actually one of the least dominant – the only reason the other races ever notice them is because they fight all the damned time. Angels, as the large, self-proclaimed protectors of the world, are the most prominent, however Dwarves (for reasons I’ll go into later) are the most common.

Humans are notorious for their aggressive tendencies. The Human home-land (”Humania”) is in a state of constant civil war – it’s the only homeland that doesn’t have a capital city, simply because they couldn’t agree on one. In the in-universe year that the Traveller’s Guide is published, two of Humania’s states are at war, and the other two are just a number of tiny provinces (they refer to themselves as “kingdoms”) who are all constantly bickering over petty matters of land, kidnapping each other’s princesses, and setting dragons on one another.

Humans look pretty much like they do in our world – they’re slightly tougher and stronger, for the sake of adventuring, but otherwise there aren’t a lot of changes. Humanian Humans (Humans from the Human home-land) are of an Anglo-Saxon appearance, however Human skin has a unique feature – when someone spends more than a decade in another land, their skin slowly changes colour, and some of their facial features rearrange.

For example when a Human lives for more than ten years in the Angel home-land, their hair and face start to pale – within a generation, they have an entirely Albino appearance. (for the Fairy home-land, it’s a South-West Asian appearance, for the Gnome homeland it’s more of a Mediterranean look, etc etc.) Babies are born looking like their parents, however if they live for more than a decade in another land, the same thing happens. It’s not uncommon for a Human family reunion to be made up of two Albino adults, an Asian grandfather, a black grandchild, and a white cousin or two.

Elves
Elves, honestly, are the race that I’ve done the least work on. At this point, they’re essentially just stereotypical fantasy Elves, simply because I haven’t had much of a chance to mess around with the tropes yet – their civilisation live in cities in the Tree-tops, they’re a very formal society, warrior-based sort of thing – they’re by far the most racist of all the races, and the Elven homeland is the most “racially pure”, but I don’t really know enough about Fantasy to tell you whether that’s typically Elven or not.

As you can see from the picture at the top of the post, I had an idea early on about all Elves wearing glasses, but that was, fortunately, abandoned rather quickly.

I’ve written bits and pieces of fiction set in all the other countries, about all the other races, I just haven’t sat down and fiddled around with Elves yet, so they’re not at all fleshed-out. My cousin Gavin had an idea about their society being split into distinctly different social classes, but I haven’t decided whether or not to go with that. As I said, I simply haven’t worked on them at all.

Orcs
Orcs are a playable race – I never liked the Dungeons and Dragons race being “Half-Orcs”, especially since (at least in any of the campaigns I played) you never really came across many orcs, let alone felt compelled to start having sex with them. Essentially, Half-Orcs were their own race, and so when I brought them over to All-That-Is, I removed the “half” element, and just made the race Orcs. (Orcs are one “size” away from Humans – Medium to Large – and thus the two races are able to breed, but they’re not called Half-Orcs. A Half-Orc could be half-Human, half-Elf, half-Angel…)

Orcs have tough, scaly skin that comes in a variety of dark colours. (green, black, blue, red…) They stand at the same size as Angels, about a human-and-a-half, or two Dwarves stacked on top of each other. They’re dumb and strong, but not as dumb and strong as ogres. (one could describe them as Ogre-light, and the two races are often lumped together in-universe, simply referred to as “Trolls”. This can either be an insult, a term of endearment, or simply a description, depending on the tone of voice used.)

The race has an extremely strong sense of family, loyalty, and race-pride; Orcs don’t hate other races, but they’re unlikely to make close friends with anyone who’s not an Orc. They’re also strongly connected with nature and the world around them, with the vast majority of Orcs in the Orcish homeland living off the land. I haven’t decided whether or not to give them tusks yet, or just huge teeth.

Orcs are the second-most common types of slaves that can be found. Non-Troll slaves are extremely rare, except in the Land of Ogres, where pretty much anything goes.

Unlike Ogres, intelligent Orcs aren’t outcast, they’re revered, and given important positions in the tribe.

Gnomes

If Ogres are known for being big and dumb, Gnomes are known for being smart and smart. By far the most intelligent race in All-That-Is, Gnomes treasure above all else knowledge, intelligence, organisation, and smarts. Gnome, to many people, is synonymous with “Genius”.

Gnomes exist much as described in Dungeons and Dragons, except without the playfulness and creativity. Gnome society is a hairs breadth away from eliminating names altogether, and simply giving each Gnome born a number.

Any Gnomes born with even a hint of playfulness or creativity are likely to shun Gnomish society and become adventurers, though they might be regarded as stuck-up and stiff by their fellow adventurers. (especially Peedlings. Peedlings and Gnomes go together about as well as Orcs and Demons, or Angels and Dwarves. Ogres and Fairies, despite their differences, get along quite well.)

Dwarves

Of all the “kept” races, Dwarves are the ones that I’ve changed the most, though I didn’t even realise I’d changed them until someone pointed it out to me.

To begin with, all Dwarves have beards, even the female ones. Yes, I’m aware that Terry Pratchett did it first.* **

*so did Tolkien and early versions of D&D.
**I hadn’t actually read any Pratchett when I came up with this – it wasn’t until I was telling my cousin about it that he revealed the unoriginality of my idea. I’ve already written it into a couple of pieces, so I’m unlikely to get rid of it, even if it does cause unfavourable comparisons to Discworld. I’m not using it to make points about feminism, or metaphors for fitting in or coming out, I just think it’s an interesting idea that I want to play with.

Secondly, and this is the one that I had assumed automatically came with Dwarves, most Dwarves are Pirates.

I thought this was self-evident. They have beards, they speak in gruff voices, they drink alcohol by the barrelful – of course Dwarves were Pirates. It wasn’t until I was showing a friend the map, showing which Dwarven Clans controlled which parts of the sea that I was informed that no, Dwarves aren’t typically sea-faring creatures.

There are five Dwarven Clans. Three are primarily Pirate Clans, two are primarily Miner Clans, but they both have extensive navies and mining operations. The three Pirate Clans control roughly one-third of the ocean each, and range from “Good-natured” to “Evil”. Depending on which part of the ocean you’re planning on crossing, you’ll need to either hitch a ride with a heavily-armed ship, ready to fight for your life, or set sail prepared to stand to the side while the pirates rummage through your good cutlery. (in exchange for compliance, good-natured pirates won’t kill you, do any lasting damage to your ship, or take your food and water – if you don’t make it to your destination, they won’t be able to rob you again on the way back, and killing people tends to inspire missions of revenge. Who needs the hassle?)

Dwarves are fiercely loyal to their clan or to their friends, heavy drinkers, and great sailors. Dwarves are the only race with a majority not living in their homeland – most Dwarves are either sailing the eleven seas*, happily mining in another land, or simply adventuring.

*technically four seas and seven oceans.

All-That-Is is a world of islands (writers create their ideal world – I have always loved islands) and so Dwarves, controlling the oceans as they do, are ubiquitous. Angels might be the most powerful race, but Dwarves are the most wide-spread, making up about one-quarter of the world’s population. If an adventure takes places entirely within an Elven forest, or a Gnomish city, then you might not run into any, but if the story takes you anywhere near the ocean, you’re going to come into contact with Dwarves, and probably a lot of them.

I don’t even particularly like Dwarves, it just makes sense to me.

So those are the ten playable races of All-That-Is.

Character creation numbers and other stuff that needs to be known to actually play them will come in another post, this was just to introduce them, give an idea of the kind of world that All-That-Is is.

In the next few posts I’ll be covering some of the miscellaneous bits of information you need when you’re creating a world (e.g. what sort of Calendar is used, life-spans, religious beliefs), what Earth has that’s “missing” in All-That-Is, a bit about the countries and lands of All-That-Is…once all that pesky “world-building” stuff is out of the way, we’ll start getting into the meat of this project – The Numbers.

If there’s anything in this post that you think doesn’t work for whatever reason, feel free to leave a comment – at this point, I’ve done so much work with these races the way they are that I’m unlikely to change much, but this project is all about getting input, so let me know. If you think that Dwarves shouldn’t be pirates, or that Fairies are too small to be a playable race, or that Gnomes are just stupid and ugly and you hate them, please, leave a comment, and I’ll address it in a later post.

Up next: Miscellaneous World-Building Stuff!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

More on the Races of All-That-Is.

Angels and Fairies:

I’ve always wanted to play a character in Dungeons and Dragons who could fly. None of the base races that come with the Rulebooks have the ability to fly – if you want a flying character, you have to get supplementary material, and adjust your levels, and it becomes such an inconvenient mess that you might as well just play a character who can jump really high.

I wanted to make flying characters accessible but not overpowered, and it wasn’t hard to decide on “Angels” and “Fairies” as two flying races to include.

Angels
Angels came from a simple idea – an all-Good race. In Dungeons and Dragons, you choose an “alignment” to describe your character.

There are two scales – Good to Evil, and Chaotic to Lawful, and you choose where your character sits on both. A Chaotic-Good character, for instance, would steal from the rich to give to the poor, while a Lawful Evil creature might be true and loyal to his evil overlord, and gleefully carry out his orders to torture you to death. (there’s also a “neutral” option on both scales)

Throughout fantasy history, there have been examples of “All evil” races. (the Orcs in Lord of the Rings, the Dark Elves in a lot of fantasy.) I wanted to play with the idea of an all-Good race, and since I’d already decided to include Angels in All-That-Is, the choice was obvious.

Originally, they were going to simply be a race of Good people, then I changed them to overly-religious zealots, then a race of fastitidious rule-keepers, and finally I combined various elements of the three – the Angelic people are ruled by a strictly organised Lawful-Good Church, which can be a bit over-zealous at times, but the average Angel citizen is just trying to get on with their life and do the right thing.

It’s a right of passage for every young Angel who wishes to join the Church to go out and see the world as an adventurer for a while. Others are sent by the church to do good around the world, and others (particularly Chaotic-Good Angels) don’t like to live by the church’s strict rules and leave the Angel homeland to seek their fortune elsewhere.

Angels are large and strong, but the entire race suffers a weakness to water. Submersion in water will kill an Angel, and even having a bucket thrown on them can be fatal. They are unaffected by ice or steam however, so most Angels carry an enchanted amulet with them that will either boil or freeze the first batch of water that comes too close to their body. (I feel that this nicely counters the advantage of being able to fly – it’s a huge but manageable weakness, and any player will have to weigh up the advantages of flight against having to be constantly on their guard from water.)

Fairies
I was raised on Enid Blyton books, so fairies were another pretty obvious choice for a flying race.

The Dungeons and Dragons races are all an extremely similar size – half-orcs are slightly larger, halflings (and gnomes and dwarves) are slightly shorter, but if you line all the races up and swing an axe, you’re still going to either behead or miss all of them.

As you can see from the diagram above, I decided to switch things up a bit with the All-That-Is races. Enter: Fairies. They’re one-quarter the size of Humans (one-sixth the size of Angels) and while they can fly, they don’t flit around like the fairies in Fern Gully, they travel at a speed which makes sense for their size. (as do Angels – flying speed, in an attempt to keep it balanced, is the same as walking (not running, walking) speed. The obvious exception is when they’re travelling downwards, and gravity is on their side.)

Their strength is correspondingly reduced as well, but what they lose in size, speed and strength, they more than make up for in intelligence and magical ability. (the magic system is something that I’m completely redoing – there’ll be a post with more detail coming up in the next couple of weeks, but basically your percentage chance of succeeding at a spell is determined by your race. Fairies, straight off the bat, have a 90% chance of succeeding at an average spell.)

Fairy skin comes in various different colours, depending on the colour of the food that they’ve eaten all their life. The colour of the food in the Fairy Homeland, in turn, depends on where it was grown, so a Fairy’s skin colour largely depends on the region that they were raised in. (except for big cities, which has food brought in from all over the country. This can create either Fairies with patchy rainbow skin, or a rather dull brown, depending on the quality of the food.)

Angel wings are big and feathery, pretty much how you’re imagining them right now, while Fairies come in a variety of different flavours – huge butterfly wings, small dragonfly wings, aeroplane wings, a couple of other non-typical designs.

I’ve tried to write a compelling reason for a typical member of each race to go adventuring, but Fairies don’t really have one. Sometimes Fairies just feel like going off and having adventures.

Demons and Ogres:

Demons
I wanted a race to counter the all-Good Angels, but all-Evil races are

a) Overdone,
b) Extremely constraining. Few players want to play an evil character, and even less people want to DM them,
c) Tricky to justify in-universe. Their society would just collapse, or every other race would try to wipe them out, and
d) Not really much fun.

I really liked the idea of a demon race though. When I think “demon”, I don’t think tall and domineering with the red muscly chest, and the glowing black eyes. I think small and mischevious – more like the Gremlin from that Looney Tunes cartoon. More Satan from Bedazzled than Satan from Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey.

Demons in All-That-Is are an all-Chaotic race. They’re small and gnobbly (I’m imagining they look somewhat like Dobby from the second Harry Potter movie) and have a reddish-brown, crinkled skin. I haven’t decided whether they should have tiny horns & a tail yet, but I don’t think it will dramatically affect gameplay either way. Demons stand at about half the height of a Human, and have disproportionately large heads, and smaller, pointed teeth. They have huge eyes, long noses, pointed ears, and long, thin fingers.

Demons probably suffer from the most racial prejudice of all the races on All-That-Is. They’re not outlawed from entering other countries, but they’re pretty widely disliked. They don’t like the term “Demon”, preferring to be referred to as “Underlings”. (this came out of a system where every letter of the alphabet described something different about a Player Character, so that a phrase like “AHBN” could sum up your character’s status at any given point. This system has long sice been abandoned (early 2007) but I liked the name “Underlings” and the idea of Demons having a different name for their race.)

Possibly as a consequence of being so widely disliked, Demons are extremely personable, good at making people trust them (another reason that people are so often warned not to) and just generally quite likeable. They’re your best friend, right until they stab you in the back. (this is, of course, a racial stereotype – a number of Demons work particularly hard to be trustworthy, just to prove that they’re not all like that.)

Ogres
The last “invented” race on All-That-Is (the other five are almost directly out of the handbook.) Ogres stand twice as tall as a human (like Fairies, Ogres came from a desire for more varied sizes in All-That-Is), are almost twice as strong, and about one-tenth as intelligent. Big and stupid are the two most commonly used words to describe these creatures. Tough, but…well, stupid.

“Min-maxing” is a technique used by players to create the strongest, most focussed possible character. If you were playing a game where you knew ahead of time that the aim was to break into a tower without being caught, for example, then when creating your character you might sacrifice all combat abilities and social skills in order to focus on wall-climbing, sneaking around, picking locks, etc.

Since the vast majority of pen-and-paper role-playing games focus on combat, players will often take hits anywhere else that they can in order to get more combat advantage. Systems like Dungeons and Dragons (possibly as a result of this) have their character creation process almost entirely based around combat, so that you can’t drop anything else (except maybe your Charisma stat) to get better at combat; you’re just trading off skill in one combat area for skill in a different combat area.

Ogres weren’t deliberately built for min-maxers, but I can see how they could appeal – I’ll be going into specific numbers in a later post, but if you choose to be an Ogre, you gain significant combat benefits in exchange for non-combat losses. Of course, in any combat situation with an Ogre, the enemy is almost exclusively going to focus on them, and their sheer size constrains them from entering normal-sized buildings, so picking an Ogre is a significant trade-off.

As I said, they stand twice the size of Humans, are about one-third larger than Angels, and approximately eight times larger than Fairies. They have soft skin and tend to either grow their hair quite long, or shave it off and keep it shaved. Ogres come in four main flavours – those with two eyes, like all the other races, those with two eyes one on top of the other, those with three eyes, arranged in a pyramid formation, and those with one single eye in the middle of their forehead.

(I’ve actually written different “factions” for all of the races – different states, regions, tribes, city-states etc etc. (Angels, for instance, are split into Chaotic, Neutral and Lawful. They’re not at war with each other or anything, but these are still three distinct groups within the Angel homeland.) Ogres are the only ones who show it in such an obvious physical manner.)

These four different Ogre-clans are constantly warring with each other – outside the Land of Ogres, they don’t leap straight into battle, but they’re more uneasy around Ogres of a different clan than they are around any other race. Ogres are the only race that are legally sold as slaves in all the countries of All-That-Is, even their own home-land. An intelligent Ogre (roughly the equivalent of a slightly stupid Human) is a rare thing, and generally outcast from Ogre society. Intelligent Ogres make up the vast majority of Ogre adventurers.

Tomorrow: The last five races – the ones from the books!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

According to Kevin Smith, a writer “creates his ideal world”. In the world of Kevin Smith films, people talk in lengthy monologues about pop culture and sex. In the world of Charlie Kaufman films, reality is a bit vague and everyone seems to be miserable all of the time. That’s why the good guys win most of the time, nice guys get the girl, and everyone in movies is so attractive. People create the world that they wish they lived in, and hope that others enjoy it as much as they do.

All my work on All-That-Is has been written with myself as the target audience. If I thought something was cool, would be interesting, would solve a problem I have with the Dungeons and Dragons universe (or fictional universes in general), would be fun to play…if I liked an idea, I’d throw it in.

Bits and pieces are also based on various public domain works (The Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan) and others are (much less directly) inspired by works that aren’t public domain. I’ve only included information about the parts of All-That-Is that are vastly different to your typical fantasy universe (Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons) and I’m focussing on the parts that are relevant to the Traveller’s Guide.

One of the most interesting series of articles I’ve ever read was by Rich Burlew, the man behind Order of the Stick. (a webcomic set in a world that obeys Dungeons and Dragons rules, but is not necessarily a game of Dungeons and Dragons.) The series of articles was called “The New World“; it’s an (unfinished) account of him creating a new campaign setting, writing stream-of-consciousness, explaining his decisions as he makes them, and giving general universe-building advice.

I’ve been working on All-That-Is for literally years now, so I don’t even know why some of the decisions were made, but I’ll share the thinking behind the parts that I remember. Over the years I’ve bounced more than a few ideas off people – most notably my cousin Gavin, my friend Damon, and my sister Elizabeth. Without their input, All-That-Is, would be quite a different world.

Races

There are exactly 10 sentient races in All-That-Is.

In Dungeons and Dragons, not only are there the base races that come with the rulebooks, but you can buy dozens of supplementary books, full of more playable races. What’s more, a huge number of the enemies you fight are sentient as well. Reading through the monster manual (or, honestly, playing a standard adventure) it feels like you’re living in a world where you can’t go ten metres without running into a new sentient race.

It also brings up…I suppose it’s not really a “moral issue”, but I’ve always felt a bit strange, playing a character of “Good” alignment who has no problem murdering an entire town full of kobolds or goblins, casually killing children and unarmed men and women alike. The alternative, of course, is to let them live, which doesn’t really make sense either.

In All-That-Is, I decided to simplify it – there are exactly 10 sentient races, and 20 cross-breeds that can be made from those races. (I’ll be using the word “people” a lot in this article – a “person”, in All-That-Is, simply means “a member of a sentient race”, with people being the plural.)

There aren’t more races on other planes, there aren’t more races coming out in later handbooks, and any group of creatures terrorising a village is either going to be one of these ten races (making killing them a legitimate moral choice) or a non-sentient race that you can slaughter without feeling guilty. (if you’re the sort of person who feels guilty killing fictional people.)

I’ll be making a lot of comparisons to “humans” – this could be confusing, because Humans on All-That-Is are different to humans on earth. To make comprehension easier, whenever I say “humans” with a lowercase H, I’m referring to regular-brand Earth humans, and whenever I use a capital H, I’m referring to All-That-Is Humans. (this is in keeping with my habit of capitalising All-That-Is race names anyway.)

Similarly, if I’m comparing All-That-Is Dwarves to regular-style D&D dwarves, or halflings, or gnomes, I’ll use capitals for All-That-Is races, and lower-case for all others.

Halflings and Peedlings:

Halflings
I have never liked halflings – I don’t like the name, and I don’t like the race. Halflings are a D&D Race who are…well, they’re Hobbit rip-offs at best, but the way they’re described in the handbooks, they’re basically just short humans. They have almost nothing that makes them individual or unique, they’re just short humans with slight personality changes and hairier feet. If you want to play a human but shorter, you play a halfling.

In All-That-Is,”Halfling” is a name for any cross-breed. “Half-elves” aren’t listed as a separate race, they’re simply a Human/Elf halfling. The races are split into 6 different sizes (Big, Large, Medium, Small, Tiny, Xpedious) and any race can cross-breed with races of the same size, or the size one smaller or one larger.

There are a total of 20 different Halfling races – these won’t be covered in the Traveller’s Guide in any kind of detail. Halflings, to keep it simple, were originally going to be born sterile (like mules) but then I worked out a simple system that allows them to breed without a degree in mathematics required to calculate their children’s stats. (more on that in a later post)

While any individual Halfling’s culture is dependent on their parents, where they were raised, etc, they also tend to have an affinity for other Halflings. Most towns have a Halfling bar or club, where they can meet and associate with other Halflings without the prejudice that they regularly face from “normal” people. Halflings commonly become travellers, because they don’t really feel that they fit in anywhere.

Peedlings
To replace Halflings, I included a race called “Peedlings” (the name was chosen at random from about 50 different x-ling names I wrote down) – Peedlings are slightly taller than Dwarves, and covered entirely in hair. They have disproportionately large heads, hands, and feet, and skinny arms and legs. Peedling hair comes in all the colours that human hair comes in – brown and black are the most common, there’s an occasional blonde, and the much rarer redhead. Clothes are optional, but Peedlings in situations where loose hair could be a risk (such as, say, adventuring) tend to wear protective garments and tie their hair back wherever it’s longest. (or cut it off, but that’s not a common habit.)

Peedlings are the entertainers of the world – the vast majority of the great writings, paintings, songs, dances and plays of the world have come from Peedlings, and their culture is based around culture. A stereotypical Peedling is like a personified D&D Bard – great at chit-chat, terrible at combat. (give them the right class, of course, and they’re as tough as any other character.)

Peedlings suffer from an artistic temperament. This invariably makes them restless – a Peedling rarely stays in one city for their whole life, preferring to see the world, draw inspiration from life, and have adventures that they can work into creative pieces.

Tomorrow: Angels, Fairies, Demons, Ogres

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Generally when I’m writing about All-That-Is, (expanding the universe, starting a novel, exploring characters or ideas etc) I like to write in-universe, pretend that someone who actually lives there is describing whatever I’m describing, as if my piece of writing exists in All-That-Is itself.

It’s a really useful technique for a couple of reasons, but it’s not something that I came up with by myself. I stole it directly from the video game The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which has been my single largest influence while creating All-That-Is.

The Elder Scrolls is a series of games that started in 1994 with a game called Arena. I’ve never played Arena, or the sequel, Daggerfall, but from what I’ve read about Daggerfall, one of its main draws the huge world in which it was set – the in-game area was around the size of Great Britain – and one of its main drawbacks was that the huge world suffered from complete blandness.

Creating a game area the size of Great Britain requires either ten thousand monkeys programming for ten thousand years, or a program that will auto-generate locations. You tell it that a room has four walls, two doors, and a window, and the program can randomly generate an unlimited number of extremely boring rooms.

Apparently that’s what they did with Daggerfall. There were thousands of towns, which were essentially made up of the exact same buildings, slightly rearranged every time. There were 20 real quests, and an infinite number of “go here and get this for me” quests.There were over 750 000 named characters you could talk to, all with the same six topics to talk about.

So when the company started work on their next game, Morrowind, they focussed on fixing these flaws. Instead of making the game as large as they could (Morrowind covers about 0.01% of the area that Daggerfall covered) their aim was to create a world where almost every city looked completely different to the next, a world of strong visual flavour.

They succeeded spectacularly.

Compare those six buildings. Each of them is not only unique and gorgeous, but their design makes complete sense, culturally and structurally. The second you step into a city containing any one of those buildings, you’re instantly aware of where you are. This is not only useful when playing a game, but it shows how effectively they created a rich, beautiful world. (it didn’t stop at building design – there are dozens of creatures that you can fight, almost none of which you’ll have ever seen before, and some of which have their own food chains and life cycles. They invented architecture, animals, plants, geography…Morrowind is my single favourite game, largely because it’s so visually striking.)

Throughout Morrowind, you can find, buy, sell, and (most importantly) read books. There are around 6 full novels worth of books to be read in the game, and none of them is entirely reliable.

Because they’ve been written from the point of view of characters within the world, they contain the same inaccuracies and biases that real books written in and about the real world by real people contain: a book titled “The 36 Lessons of Vivec”, by Vivec, detailing his own adventures throughout the land is to be taken with a grain of salt. As a writer, you can safely put anything you like into that book, and not worry about it contradicting canon – like the film 300, it’s deliberately subjective.

But it’s more than the safety of unreliable narrators, it lends a sense of character to the world. By writing a book that exists within the world, you’re not only adding depth through the content of the book, you’re adding more information simply through the fact that it exists within the world. Someone who exists in All-That-Is must have had cause to write the book – they had motivation, they had a purpose, they have a target audience. And there’s no better way to flesh out a character than by writing as them, so we learn about the kind of people who inhabit the world as well.

The aim of this project (the All-That-Is RPG blog project) is to create the equivalent of a Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook – a book that the players can have next to them as they play, with everything that they need to create and play a character. I want this book to be written half in-universe and half out-of-universe: it’s going to be called The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is, with the idea being that it’s roughly (and I only just realised the similarity) the equivalent of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is is a book that Travellers (the name used for “Adventurers” in All-That-Is) can take with them anywhere, with a rough overview of all that they need to know. A bit about each of the different races in the world, a bit about each of the different countries, other travellers that they can expect to meet and band with, handy spells to learn, weapons to buy, different deities and their worshipper’s customs, etc etc.

Anything that is simply description (”A Barbarian is someone who survives on their wits” “Gnomes are the smartest of all the races” “The problem with casting magic while fighting a man with a big sword is that you’ll probably die” etc) is going to be written in-universe. Anything that involves numbers that the player needs to crunch, or dice that the player needs to roll (”To see if you succesfully cast a spell while fighting a man with a big sword, roll a six-sided die and hope that it comes up 7″) is going to be written out-of-universe.

For clarity’s sake, I’m going to use a number of different background colours. Without committing to anything, I’ll probably use an off-whitey/yellowy/parchment-coloured background for anything written in-universe (like this) and a grey/”stone” background for anything written out-of-universe (like this).

I’ll also need a third colour, (probably a dull blue like this) because I want to use content from the Open Gaming License:

In late 2000, the company that publishes Dungeons and Dragons decided to take the basic rules and principles of the d20 system (rolling a twenty-sided dice to determine failure or success, the idea of characters gaining more skills and feats as they level up…heck, the concept of leveling up) and release them under the “Open Gaming License”, allowing anyone to publish a game using those rules, provided they included a copy of the license somewhere.

The reasons for doing so are interesting and complicated, and Ryan Dancey, the man behind the Open Gaming License explains them really well in this interview. Basically sales of Pen-and-Paper Role-Playing Games were beginning to drop, and Dancey came up with the Open Gaming License to try to boost sales. The idea is that the more role-playing books being published, the more people who are going to be getting into the hobby, and since Dungeons and Dragons is the cornerstone of pen-and-paper role-playing, more people getting into the hobby means more D&D books sold.

I can’t tell you whether or not it worked, but they wrote the Open Gaming License in such a way that they can never take it back – the second it was published, everything was irrevokably released for other game-designers to meddle with, alter, and release as their own.

I really like the d20 system, and I love the idea of the Open Gaming License, so I’ve decided to do the All-That-Is RPG using the Open Gaming License content as my base.

One of the conditions of using Open Gaming License content is that you clearly mark what is original content, compared to what’s being used under license. There’s no one correct way to do this – some people use footnotes, underlining, have open content on specially marked pages – I’m planning on fairly drastically altering a large portion, so that last one definitely isn’t an option for me.

Since I’m already using a couple of different background colours, using one more to mark Open Gaming License content seems logical. (all of this is assuming that I end up with a nicely put-together pdf file or (best-case scenario) actual physical book. If my final product is a word document, I’ll probably just use underline or something basic like that.)

If you want to have a look at the Standard Reference Document, the base Open Gaming License content, it can be found here. (I’ll be using the 3.5 edition because that’s what I started working from in 2006, and so a lot of my notes so far are based around it and also because they drastically changed the License for 4th Edition content. I intensely dislike the 4th Edition license, but that’s a post for another time.)

Despite my taste for writing information in-universe, I won’t (tempting though it is) be using that style for these blog posts. It’s great if you want to set a mood, or build character, or create depth and flavour, but it’s not ideal for concisely sharing information. Another problem I’ve found with it is that you can’t explain concepts that don’t exist – for example, in All-That-Is, the wheel was never invented. Try explaining that while writing as an in-universe character.

Another problem about writing in-universe is that you sometimes get distracted by writing about the author who is writing whatever piece you’re trying to write. (say that ten times fast.) The original plan for my 2007 NaNoWriMo novel was to rewrite The Wizard of Oz (the original has fallen into the public domain) as a novel that existed in All-That-Is, called The Vizard of Az.

The original Wizard of Oz was written by Frank L. Baum, and was so popular that he wrote a number of Oz books – The Marvellous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz, etc etc. In the later ones, the true ruler of Oz appears, a girl called Ozma. She has complete power over Oz, and is completely beloved by all. One of the first things that she does is ban magic: no one can use any kind of magic unless they have her express permission. Naturally, as she’s beloved by all, this suggestion is celebrated and they all come out and kiss her feet, etc etc etc.

The Vizard of Az books were going to be written as thinly veiled political analogies, for an idiotic dictator who really tried to ban magic. In the months leading up to November (the month of Nanowrimo, when I was going to write the first Az book) I started to write a backstory for the writer. You can find Frankel’s backstory here, and the backstory of the idiotic dictator here.

November came around, and I realised that having written Frankel’s story, I didn’t actually feel motivated to write The Vizard of Az at all. There was no need for it; the story of Frankel was done, and actually writing the novel was suddenly unnecessary. I still have all my notes for it, a couple of paragraphs of prose (including the opening) but the story didn’t need to be told. (instead, for my 2007 Nano novel, I attempted Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, a Harry Potter parody set in All-That-Is.)

I have a couple of notes around about who is actually going to be writing The Traveller’s Guide to All-That-Is in-universe, but I’m not allowing myself to do anything with them, for fear that it will render the actual Guide superfluous.

For more information about All-That-Is, check out The All-That-Is Wiki, my (unfinished) novels. or the All-That-Is-themed entries from my livejournal.

Next time: All-That-Is Races: Halflings and Peedlings

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

I thoroughly enjoy an occasional game of Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve never completely understood the negativity that surrounds pen-and-paper roleplaying games - I have friends who have met their spouses over the internet, who own every episode of Star Trek ever made, who will argue for hours over whether Han or Greedo shot first, who own and have finished a hundred and ten computer games, who have been blogging since before it was cool…I have friends who seem to be involved in every “geeky” activity known to man laugh at me and call be a nerd because I like Dungeons and Dragons.

The logic escapes me.

Dungeons and Dragons, for those not in the know, is a game in which you sit around a table and pretend to be someone else. There are a group of players and a “GM”, the “Game Master” (or DM/Dungeon Master) who controls the world around the players - all of the non-player characters, any natural events (”Rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.”) and everything that is needed to keep the story going. I like the idea of calling the DM the “StoryTeller”, but it’s never really caught on.

I have a friend who doesn’t enjoy any of the standard “nerdy” activities, but he loves Dungeons and Dragons. “It’s a game about building a character and using your imagination. It’s like writing a book with friends,” he has said to me before. “I don’t understand why that’s so nerdy?”

If I had to guess, I’d say the nerdy part comes in when you start dealing with specific situations - if two players (or a player and a non-player character, etc) want to have a fight, you can just sit there and describe it (”I aim for your neck with my sword.”) but you’re unlikely to come up with any kind of mutually satisfying resolution. Enter the rulebooks and the dice - when you create your character, you roll a number of dice, and assign the resulting numbers to attributes - Strength, Dexterity, Charisma etc etc. You could choose to put all of your higher rolls into the attributes that will help you in combat, and create a great fighter who is lacking in social charm and smarts, or you could decide to have a well-spoken, intelligent character who is as weak as a kitten.

Then when you decide that you want to fight, rather than just sitting there and talking about it, you consult the rulebook. Wait for your turn, roll the dice, and see if your sword successfully hits your opponent’s neck.

There are various roleplaying systems that use only 6-sided dice (those are the ones that you think of when you hear the word “dice”) but Dungeons and Dragons, the daddy of all the pen-and-paper RPGs, and the most famous one, uses a number of different-sided dice, most notably “d20″s:

Dungeons and Dragons, popular and fun though it is, is a flawed system. As the pen-and-paper RPG system that’s been around the longest (there are now literally hundreds, and more springing up every day) the rule-system has grown larger and more bloated - if you want to attack someone in D&D with your sword, it’s a simple roll. But if you want to move from one square to another, there are dozens of factors you have to take into account - How many enemies are in the squares around you? What sort of terrain are you running on? What have each of those enemies done in the previous round? Whate are they planning to do in the next round? Are you trying to cast a spell? How tall are you? Does your uncle live in this village, or the next one over?

Each one of those factors (except maybe your uncle’s whereabouts) can factor into whether or not you successfully run one square over. It started simple, but then people started wondering “Hang on, why can I just run past a guy holding a sword while he stands there and looks at me?”, and added rules in to deal with it. The rules upon rules upon rules…it can be a bit overwhelming.

And don’t even think about trying to physically grab another character (grappling) - you’ll be there for months, just trying to work out whose arm is where.

As well as the bloated combat rules, there are other bits and pieces of the Dungeons and Dragons rules that a number of players just find impossible to deal with. A lot of people write their own little patches to fix these up, others have house-rules like “No one is allowed to grapple anyone else” (when I first started playing D&D, we just ignored the more complicated rules completely), and some work around them however they can. (”just as you are about to grapple them, rocks fall from the sky. Everybody dies.)

On top of the bloated rules and inconveniences, there are a lot of other little bits and pieces about Dungeons and Dragons that have always just annoyed me - they’re not badly made or overly complicated, they just bug me. In combat, for example, everyone’s rounds are supposed to occur simultaneously, but you can see what everyone else has done before deciding upon your move. The magic system has always frustrated and annoyed me. Dice randomly determining how good your character is - that can go well, but more often than not it goes horribly wrong. The god that you choose to worship has almost no bearing on your character at all. Little things like that.

Rather than work out dozens of increasingly complex house-rules (which would, of course, layer on top of each other and end up being horribly bloated) I decided, like so many have decided before me, to create my own set of RPG rules.

This was in 2006. Around the same time, I was doing a lot of writing - I was in that stage that every young writer goes through where they want to write short stories about vampires. (mine was called Jhusmet. He was a gentleman thief. The stories were about as bad as you’d expect them to be.)

These vampire stories were set in their own distinct universe - it started out as a modern fantasy version of this world, but the more I played with the idea, the less like earth it became. I started toying with various “what-if”s - What if no one in the world had pets? What if wheels had simply never been invented? What if magic, instead of being a mystical, mythical thing, was an ordinary everyday part of life?

Working simultaneously on my RPG and my own world, they slowly got mixed together, and my new RPG system became specifically tied to this universe that I was creating. It stopped being modern fantasy, and just became regular fantasy. I don’t actually read much, and I’ve never found a fantasy book that I enjoyed (other than The Hobbit when I was a child) so it doesn’t really have much in common with most of the fantasty you’ll see on bookshelves, I’ve been told.

(the closest series that I’ve seen is probably Discworld, simply because they’re both comedic fantasy. I hadn’t actually read any Discworld until 2008, when I got into it at the recommendation of my cousin Gavin - he suggested it would be a good study of world-building. It took me a while to get into the series, but it does pay off. I personally recommend Going Postal or The Truth (but not both, because they’re essentially the same book with different characters) as a one-off, or the series of Guards books. And the world-building side of it is fascinating. Once you’ve found a few Discworld books that you’ve enjoyed, go back and read the first few - they’re written in a completely different style.)

The RPG system got shelved after a few months, and instead I simply worked on expanding the universe. It eventually became known as All-That-Is, and I created a wiki to put all of my notes on. Each year for NaNoWriMo I’ve tried (and failed) to complete a different novel set in All-That-Is (in 2008 it was Life on the Wall, in 2007 it was Basil Turret and the Prisoner of Algebra, and in 2006 it was a novel called Writing a Novel.)

In 2007, I started working in a map shop, which inspired me to start drawing maps of the world I was creating.

I’ve invented hundreds of characters, dozens of locations, and designed more than a handful of games for All-That-Is. I’m yet to actually finish anything, but I consider myself more of a geofictionist anyway - I do it for the fun of creating the world. It’s a hobby, it doesn’t necessarily have to lead anywhere.

Recently, at a pen-and-paper roleplaying convention, I met a number of people who had created their own RPG systems, and (in some cases) published them. In the several years since I’d last worked on my own RPG system, Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition came out, and fixed most of the major issues I’d had with the system.

But All-That-Is had grown from its humble roots of “let’s fix a few problems”, and become its own universe, and I feel that it’s time to pull out the very first notes that I’d ever written - the class list, the weapons, the combat system - and revisit them, see if I could put together an All-That-Is RPG System.

I find it extremely interesting when other people share what they’re working on. I like to see something created from nothing, watch as the creator makes decisions - I especially like it when people do it in blog form, and allow input from the comments, so I thought that I’d share my notes, share the creative process, and garner audience participation and suggestions.

This blog will primarily be focussed on the mechanics of the world, not the flavour. (except, of course, when they cross-over.) If you want to know more about All-That-Is as a world, I recommend visiting The All-That-Is Wiki, or checking out my (unfinished) novels. In 2007, I did a series of All-That-Is-themed entries on my livejournal, they’re worth a read as well.

Whenever I use a term that may not have the same definition in All-That-Is as it does elsewhere, I’ll explain it (Demons, Hands, Halflings…) and for the sake of people who have never played a pen-and-paper roleplaying game in their life, I’ll be explaining all of that terminology as we go as well. (d20, classes, skills…)

At the end of this project (which I predict will be around the end of the year, included play-testing) I hope to have a completely playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is. I haven’t decided if I’m going to have any kind of art in it (the map above is about the extent of my artistic abilities, so I’d have to get someone else in for that) or if I’m going to print it, or just have it as a downloadable set of rules. I’m not going to be working full-time on it, but there should be a new post about about once a week.

At the end of this project, I hope to have a completely balanced, playable RPG set in the land of All-That-Is, and probably an adventure or two to go with it. The entire process will be documented right here, on Pictures and Words, and audience input will more than likely  be taken into account.

Should be an exciting ride!

Next time: Writing in-universe, a bit about the book, and Open Gaming License.

I'm now using peterchayward for my personal livejournal, so this LJ mirror has been renamed picturesnwords.

Hopefully this will not majorly disrupt your day-to-day life!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

I saw Synecdoche, New York yesterday. Here’s a short review, for people who don’t want to wade through my copious wordage to find out what I thought: I’d give it 7/10, 3/5, 73%. Two word review: “Beautifully dissatisfying.” Ten word review: “I don’t want to see it again, but probably will.” 

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Synecdoche, New York is a beautiful film.

That sentence doesn’t make any sense.

“Beautiful”, by its very definition, is a subjective term. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure and all that. Something that makes you weep with beauty might leave me cold. Something that makes me reconsider my life and purpose might make you angry at the sheer pointlessness of its creation.

And no, Synecdoche, New York didn’t make me weep with beauty, leave me cold, make me reconsider my life or make me angry at its sheer pointlessness.

The closest we can get to “proving” that something’s beautiful is to have lots of people agree with us. Millions of people watch Big Brother, but I don’t think that makes it beautiful. Millions of people think that Keira Knightley is absolutely gorgeous, but I know people who can’t see the appeal.

The next step is to point to a certain class of people who agree with us. “Every art critic in New York agree, Donovan Steissel is a brilliant artist.” But I can guarantee that there are movies that are critically acclaimed that you think are absolute garbage, and movies that were panned that you love - I think that Spanglish is one of the most beautiful films of the 21st century, but RottenTomatoes tells me that I’m the only one who thinks so.

Fact is, beautiful means something that pleases you. If it don’t please you, it ain’t beautiful.

(some people try to get around the subjectivity of beauty by adding an objective word to it: “Say what you like about Synecdoche, New York, you can’t deny that technically speaking, it’s quite beautiful.” Nope. Makes even less sense.)

When reviewing something, you’re allowed to state your opinions as fact - “It’s a beautiful film. It’s a terrible novel. She is a fantastic actor. The set design is wonderful.” All of these words are subjective, so we know that every time you’re stating one of these “facts”, you’re really just telling us your opinion. It only annoys me when people make generalisations, and tell you that by straying from these generalisations, you are somehow “wrong” - “Anyone who enjoys this book doesn’t know what art is,” “This painting will change your mind about what it means to live, and if it doesn’t, you’re an idiot.”

“Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Synecdoche, New York is a beautiful film.”

The other problem with the that sentence is the word “film”. What is a film?

Technically, a film is “a sequence of images strung together to create the impression of motion”, but I hope we can all agree that there’s a bit more to it than that. The next definition down tells us that a film is a “connected cinematic narrative.”

One more definition and then I promise I’ll start talking about the film:

A million people have had a million arguments about what constitutes a narrative, so I won’t define it too strictly, but I think you need a beginning, middle, end, and a buncha characters to care about.  My personal favourite definition of narrative comes from Tom Salinsky, a British writer/improviser:

A story is a linked series of questions and their answers. When all questions are answered, the story is over.

Obviously it’s no fun when every question is answered, but it’s infinitely more irritating when significant questions go un-answered. It can work when done well - the end of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels springs to mind - but when it’s done badly, it can ruin a film. I loved No Country For Old Men until we reached the end, and I realised that they’d cut out the final third, and all the answers that should have accompanied it. That’s another movie where I disagreed with the critics - Rotten Tomatoes tells me that 94% of critics loved it, it won four Oscars including “Best Film” but I think that ultimately, it was a beautifully shot complete waste of time. 

Synedoche, New York is also beautifully shot and has zero closure, but there’s no way I could call it a complete waste of time. I think that it was beautiful, and I think it failed as a “film”. It’s full of great moments, and it creates at least one character that you care about and one character that you despise, but ultimately it raises far too many questions, and refuses to answer 90% of them.

It’s worth seeing, and as I said in my 10-word review above, I’ll probably go and see it again, just because it’s got me thinking, but it’s also a miserable film to sit through. Bleak, depressing, full of unhappiness - there were devices in the film that really worked for me, snippets that I loved, but this film (”film”) manages to be beautiful without being even remotely uplifting.

After seeing the movie, I went and had a meal. Thinking about what I’d just seen, I suddenly realised the significance of a couple of earlier events, themes leapt out at me that I hadn’t noticed at the time, and I almost cried, thinking about a relationship in the film. At the time, it hadn’t affected me at all, it had bored and disappointed me, but looking back, realising exactly what had happened, I was almost brought to tears.

As far as I’m concerned, that makes it a beautiful piece of cinema.

But the complete lack of closure, the lack of explanation as to what’s happening 90% of the time, the last, bewildering twenty minutes of the film…

As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t count as a “film”.

Spoilers follow. If you haven’t seen the film and intend to, don’t read on.

It’s possible that I would have enjoyed this film a lot more had if I hadn’t spent a few minutes chatting to the man who sold me the tickets. I was trying to work out how to pronounce the title (Sin-a-dock? Sine-eh-dock? Sin-eh-dock-ee? Turns out it’s Sin-EC-dock-ee, with the emphasis on the second syllable. Like “Connecticut”, but with “sin” instead of “con”, and “docky” instead of “ticut”. And, uh, “ect” instead of “et”.) and he told me what it means - “When you go from talking about something generally to something specific.”

“Like going from ‘boat’ to ‘yacht’?”

“Exactly.”

That’s not precisely what the word means, but for the sake of explaining it to me, it was close enough. He went on to tell me that the film was about a man who builds a smaller New York inside New York.

Again, not precisely correct, but it meant that I spent the whole first half of the film waiting for Philip Seymour Hoffman to build a tiny New York. When he did get around to it, it wasn’t at all what I expected.

The film opens with bits and pieces from the life of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character (Caden). He’s directing a play, he’s flirting with the box-office girl, his daughter is sitting on the toilet and worried that her poo is alive (it’s green), he’s shaving and his sink explodes, causing a cut on his head.

At the time, I was annoyed that Kaufman was introducing far too many elements, and that almost none of them would come back, that they were “mood-setting”, plot-irrelevant elements. At the time, I also thought that the film was going to be about a tiny New York inside a bigger New York.

I picked those four events out at random, and it’s only when I typed them out that I realised that all four of them not only come back, but they’re vitally important setups. The new New York is a result of a ridiculously extensive “rehearsal” process for a play, the flirtation with the box-office girl takes over second half of the film, Caden’s forehead cut is what causes him to seek medical attention in the first place, and Olive (the daughter)’s poo being green…well, that one’s the least directly important, but I interpreted it as a foreshadowing of the fact that she would get sick and die young, or perhaps it ties into the flowers that would later control her life.

I’m going to attempt to explain the plot, but it gets confusing quickly. Caden’s wife moves to Berlin, and takes his daughter with her. He continues to flirt with the redheaded box-office girl (Hazel) and eventually they go back to her place, where he’s unable to perform. Hazel buys a house that’s always on fire, and marries the man who lives in the basement. Caden’s marriagae counsellor continues to counsel him, selling him a copy of her book, which he slowly reads over the next 12 years.

Was it 12 years? Time is impossible to track in this film; one of my favourite lines was delivered quite early in the film: (paraphrased from memory)

Caden: I’m still married.
Hazel: She’s in Berlin, Caden. 
Caden: She’s vacationing. She’s only been there a week.
Hazel: It’s been a year. Jesus, we’ve got to buy you a calendar.

That’s the first hint we get that time is vague in this film - another one comes later in the film when Caden flies to Berlin to find his daughter. Hysterical, he yells “She’s only 4!!”, to be told that no, she’s “almost over 12″.

Caden wins a “Fellowship”, a magical plot device that gives him unlimited funding to make a piece of amazing art. He starts rehearsals immediately; one hundred people crammed into a tiny room, watching him have no idea what he’s doing.  He tells them that he wants to create something true, something real, and they all stare at him blankly, except for Michelle William’s character (Claire) who nods enthusiastically and within ten minutes (or perhaps several years?) is married to him.

It’s not a happy marriage. They have a child, but Caden realises that he wants to go find his “real” daughter, Olive. (”first”, he corrects himself. “My first daughter.”) The marriage breaks up, he moves into a cupboard next door, and listens to her have sex through the wall*.

*he listens through the wall. She doesn’t have sex through the wall.

He realises that the play has to be made of people playing themselves. Every actor is going to play themselves, and he builds (here we go) a set for them to play themselves on, a replica of New York where each actor will play a replica of themselves.

He tells them of the idea, and is again met with blank faces. “Caden,” one actor says, “when are we going to get an audience in? We’ve been rehearsing for 17 years.”

Caden ignores him and continues - because everyone is going to be playing themselves, and a number of them regularly interact with him, he needs to hire an actor to play himself. Cue Sammy, a man who has been inexplicably following Caden around for 20 years now. We’ve seen this guy a number of times throughout the film, just hanging around, watching.

I expected Sammy to be nothing more than a cipher, a reflection of Caden that he can direct, but he quickly turned into his own character. He doesn’t play Caden like Caden plays himself, he’s much more “fun”. He’s meant to fall in love with the actor playing Hazel (who has returned to the scene as Caden’s assistant) but instead falls in love with the real Hazel - she goes on a few dates with him to attract the real Caden’s interest, but Caden, feeling rejected, sleeps with the actor playing Hazel instead. (beautifully played by Emily Watson)

Tammy, the actor playing Hazel (Tammy is the fake Hazel, Sammy is the fake Caden. I only just realised that they rhyme.) starts a fight, and drives the real Hazel and the real Caden together. Sammy kills himself, and the day after Hazel and Caden get together, Hazel dies as well.

Meanwhile (there really is a lot going on in this film) Caden’s first wife has moved back to New York. Caden never comes face-to-face with her, but moves into a small room in her house, and spends his evenings cleaning her house, pretending to be a lady called Ellen.

Caden’s first wife is a hugely successful painter - she paints portraits no more than 5×5cm, and Caden sees that she’s painted the real Ellen. He decides that someone needs to play Ellen in the play, and so he casts a lady who looks exactly like the portrait. (we discover later that she is the lady from the portrait, in the part of the film that got a little bit too weird for my liking.)

Character-Ellen’s life reflects Caden’s real life, cleaning his ex-wife’s house at night, when he’s not directing the play. After Hazel dies of smoke inhalation (the ever-burning house was another part of the film that I thought was a bit of self-indulgent flippery, but came back later in a big way) he decides to cast the lady playing Ellen as himself. After Hazel dies, he needs a break, and she takes over as him, while he starts playing Ellen.

So that he knows what to do, character-Ellen-playing-Caden…I realise that this is ridiculously confusing. It’s hard to explain, the actors playing actors playing actors playing actors, but while watching the film, you accept it without question, and keep track without even trying.

So that he knows what to do, character-Ellen-playing-Caden sets him up with an ear-bud, and gives him instructions twenty-four hours a day. “Pull off a bit of toilet-paper. Wrap it around your hand. Wipe yourself. Stand up.”

She also tells him personal anecdotes, bits and pieces from her life, to inspire him. (we only see one, but I assume there were more.) When she was young, she went on a picnic with her mother. “What are you doing, honey?” “I’m remembering this moment, so that in twenty years time I can go here with my daughter, and have the exact same picnic.”

One day, he goes into the warehouse where mini-New York is built to discover that everyone has died. He wanders around, discovering that mini-New York has a warehouse, inside which he finds mini-mini-New York, and so on and so forth. Nothing is done with this, and I suspect that it was thrown in just because people (such as myself) were wondering how recursive this world was.

Inside one of these warehouses, he finds a woman.

“You look awfully familiar,” he says.
“Yes. I was the mother, in the memory about the picnic.”

The voice in his ear continues - “Apologise. Ask if you can lay your head on her shoulder.”

“I’ve got an idea,” Caden says, “for the end of the play,” but before he can say what it is, the last line of the film is delivered by the voice in his ear - “Die.”

It’s an ending that I found deeply dissatisfying. That’s my largest complaint about the film - it’s deeply dissatisfying, almost from start to finish. A lot of this is because nothing good happens to Caden, in the entire film. “Bleak” is an understatement - his life goes from bad to worse to worse again, and every time something resembling positive change comes along, it’s destroyed within seconds.

That doesn’t always kill a film - I’ve long found Little Miss Sunshine fascinating because not a single character in that film ends up in a better place than when they started, but it’s still a positive, uplifting movie.

The other piece of advice that Tom Salinsky offers in the article I linked to above is “establish a hero, then make him suffer.”

Well, Caden suffers in this film, in every conceivable way. Physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, sexually. It’s a misery to watch. It’s Little Miss Sunshine without the inspiring music and flashes of humour. It’s a movie without hope.

I didn’t enjoy watching this film, but I’m definitely glad I watched it. It’s like having surgery - no one likes having needles jabbed into them and bits of you cut open, but you emerge from the theatre better for having done it.

There’s a lot to this film, and it would be madness to try to tell you what I thought of it as a whole. I’ve been reading a number of other reviews and critiques, and one of them, Film Brain over at Like Anna Karina’s Sweater, wrote about reading reviews and critiques of the film:

Synecdoche, New York is about nothing but subjectivity, so it seems only natural for that to be reflected in a critical response. This is why I so admire Manohla Dargis’ and Roger Ebert’s takes on the film. Both are unabashedly subjective, yet still function as wonderful pieces of film criticism. As I said in my first part of the review, the film questions what it means to be a person, and the way in which we experience ourselves in relation to the world around us. How can this be ignored when creating an honest response to it? One can certainly approach the film with a feigned objectivity, but it smacks of disingenuousness.

I think it’s beautiful, and I don’t think it’s a film proper. I also think that a lot of people will hate it, and a number of people will think it defines what a film is. It’s an amazingly complex work, there’s a lot going on, and ultimately, I think you should go see it, because no one else will be able to tell you what you will think of it.

Seeing Synedoche, New York inspired me to write over 3000 words, and update this site for the first time in over a month. Perhaps my actions say more about my feelings about the film than words will be able to.

I’m going to go and see it again in the next week or two, and I’ll more than likely write a second, and maybe even third post about it - there are a number of specifics that I wanted to discuss, but the more I think about them, the more I want to see the movie again before I do.

Love it or hate it, you have to admit that Synecdoche, New York is a beautiful film.

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and I thoroughly enjoy poking around my incoming search queries.

I get a lot of strange searches leading to this website. This does not entirely take me by surprise: in the three months the site’s been up, I’ve conducted experiments about rotting meat and maggots, unhealthy diets and budgetting and giving up sex, but no post returns more results than the comparison of Ted Bundy and Ed Gein.

Normally they’re fairly standard weird results: “did ted bundy get his butt stuffed”, “who all did ted bundy rape”, “how you know your pregnant show me pictures” (my advice: a pregnancy test is probably your best bet, or seeing a doctor. I do not have pictures of either of those things.)

The other day, I got a particularly intriguing one:

brain teasers: one costs $1, 12 is $2,and it costs you $3 to get 400. What are they?

Honestly? I have no idea. I’ve googled around myself, and I can’t find the answers anywhere. So here’s a challenge to my readers:

One costs one dollar, twelve is two dollars, and it costs you three dollars to get four-hundred. What are they?

First person to post with the correct answer (and the logic backing up your answer) gets to request a post. I’ll write about any topic of your choosing, for at least four-hundred words (and it won’t even cost you three dollars!)

Get cracking, puzzle enthusiasts!

EDIT: The answer is in the comments! Congratulations, Kristen, not only do you get to request a post about any topic, you also got the added bonus of making me feel like an idiot. Try to work it out before checking the comments, if you’re a real man (or woman.)

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and when I’m not rotting meat, not eating, or watching other people not have sex I’m a film-maker!

Earlier this year, I filmed a Twilight parody with my cousin, my sister, and my housemate Cannibal Kate. The parody’s still in editing, but in the process of filming, we made a number of Behind the Scenes videos. Every few days until the parody itself comes out, I’ll be sharing another behind the scenes video. Some of them make references to jokes and gags in the parody film - I don’t think any of them “spoil” the final product, but watch at your own discretion.

The Twilight Parody: Behind the Scenes 2 - Hair-Dying

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more behind-the-scenes videos! (I’ll also be posting them all up here.)

Enjoy!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan, and I’m single.

On the 27th of this month, I asked my boyfriend “Andy” to come with me to my friend Chris’s 40th. Chris wouldn’t be there, as he had died two years previously - I asked Andy to come because I was nervous about going. It was going to be like revisiting the wake. I knew the feeling of despair that would erupt upon seeing everyone there, gathered in his honour. I miss Chris every day, but seeing all of his loved ones in the same place was likely to overwhelm me.

Andy told me that he wasn’t interested in coming, because he didn’t know anyone and wouldn’t have any fun. He said that he didn’t want to accompany me to an emotionally-charged situation that I was nervous about going to, because he wouldn’t have any “fun”.

I was, as you can imagine, a bit annoyed. I thought he would be there to support me emotionally, but apparently not. I let it slide - he’d had a huge week at work, so I excused his cunty attitude as simply him being tired.

On the 28th of this month, I rang Andy, upset. My cousin’s cousin had committed suicide. I’ve lost a family-member each year for five years now - three suicides and two illnesses. I’d known my cousin’s cousin when I was a teenager, and was fairly close to his mother and older sister. As you can imagine, I was pretty torn up - on top of Chris’s party the previous day, I was pretty emotionally raw.

Andy didn’t give a shit. He said “Yeah, that’s a bit rough hey?” and then started talking about going out that night.

“No,” I thought to myself, “it’s okay. He’s never lost anyone close to him, he doesn’t understand grief. He doesn’t know how to support me emotionally, I’m going to have to work through this by myself.”

That night I went out with Andy and his mates. He got drunk and treated my like a whore, sticking his hand up my skirt, and asking if he could squeeze other girl’s arses.

At one point, he started squeezing my pinky, I don’t know why. I asked him to stop. I told him it was hurting, but he wouldn’t stop. He just kept squeezing it harder - the more I asked him to stop, the harder he squeezed.

Eventually, I just ripped my hand away, and burst into tears. Andy kissed me and told me he was sorry, and I thought to myself “It’s okay, he’s just drunk.”

On the 29th of this month, we went up to Eumundi and had Thai for lunch. Over lunch, we talked about how we were past the “awkward getting-back-together-after-breaking-up stage”, and how well it was going. We went to his parent’s for dinner, which was lovely. I started feeling really good about everything. 

That night, back at his place, we threw on a movie, and less than ten minutes in, started having sex. At one point, I said “I love you,” which usually gets an “I love you” in response, regardless of who says it first. He didn’t say anything in reply, which was a bit weird. I didn’t whisper it or anything, but he just ignored it while still driving himself in and out of me. Afterwards, I asked him why he didn’t say “I love you” back.

“I don’t know,” he responded, “I just don’t really feel it.”

I asked him what this meant for “us”, and told him that I wasn’t going to go around just so that he could have sex. He suggested another break. I agreed, and left.

The movie still had twenty minutes to go.

On the drive home, I didn’t feel sad. I felt angry, pissed of as all hell, but I didn’t feel the pangs of sorrow I had felt the last time we were on a break. Even then, I wasn’t thinking about it as a break, I was thinking about it as over. It was really dawning on me how much of an arsehole he was. No matter how much I may have loved him, the feelings of dissatisfaction I felt while with him weren’t going away. I started wondering if the only reason we had so much sex was because orgasm was the only time I felt satisfied around him.

He’s uncreative, he can’t free-think to save his life, he never offers opinions - he just sits there all day, having no thoughts of his own. It pisses me off no end, but who wants to be alone? I was suffering an arsehole who obviously didn’t care about me or my emotions, and why? Because I thought that being alone would be worse.

Well, it’s been one day since it ended, and I feel free. I feel like I deserve more than him - I want a partner I can fight passionately with over whether dark or milk chocolate is better. I want someone to challenge me, to excite me, to motivate me, and to love me the way I love them.

I want someone I feel satisfied with, even when I’m not having an orgasm.

On the 30th of this month, I thought long and hard all day about whether or not to contact Andy. Should I wait until he rings me with his verdict, or do I ring him and tell him that I want out?

I considered messaging him, but I reasoned that our relationship was worth more than a text message. So I bit the bullet, and gave him a call.

Three minutes and forty seconds later, I realised that Andy hadn’t valued our relationship as much as I had. Three minutes and forty seconds is all it took to cut all ties with Andy - I told him that it wasn’t working, that I did love him but I just couldn’t handle the way he treated me. I told him that I didn’t think we should be friends either, because we’d just end up in bed again, because we really had nothing else.

He said “Yeah, that’s what I think.” Five words. I asked him if he had any other thoughts, and he said “No”. I waited, to see if anything else was coming out, but after a while it was obvious that he’d said all he wanted to say, so I said goodbye. He said “bye”.

Three minutes, forty seconds, seven words, and it was all over. 

Seven words. I was never so sure that I was making the right decision as when I heard him say “No.” After the phone-call, all I could think was “Fuck.”

Fuck this. Fuck this relationship. It feels like a pathetic failed orgasm. You know the one where you feel it’s going to be big, but when it finally arrives it’s nothing but a pathetic pulse or two?

So, there you have it. I suppose Celibate Sarah was an experiment, because it answered once and for all, “Should Andy and I be together, or is it just sex?”

I feel very strong and very “I am woman hear me roar” right now - as much as I was desperately insisting that our relationship was about more than just sex, it became painfully apparent after I gave in that it was a lie. The sweet, caring Andy I was falling in love with this month disappeared as soon as I opened my legs again, leaving me with emotionally selfish Andy the Arsehole.

It looks like I’m going to be Celibate Sarah for quite a while to come. Still, on those long and lonely nights, at least I’ll have masturbation to keep me warm.

Final results:

Celibacy: FAIL

Relationship: FAIL

Andy: FAIL

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and when I’m not rotting meat, not eating, or watching other people not have sex (I watch a lot of people not have sex) I’m a film-maker!

Earlier this year, I filmed a Twilight parody with my cousin, my sister, and my housemate Cannibal Kate. The parody’s still in editing, but in the process of filming, we made a number of Behind the Scenes videos which I thought I’d share here.

So every few days until the parody itself comes out, I’ll be sharing another behind the scenes video. Some of them make references to jokes and gags in the parody film - I don’t think any of them “spoil” the final product, but watch at your own discretion.

The Twilight Parody: Behind the Scenes 1 - Trolley-Cam

Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more behind-the-scenes videos! (I’ll also be posting them all up here.) My thoughts on the Twilight film can be found over on The In-Joke Podcast.

Enjoy!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan, and it turns out I suck at not having sex.

So, I had sex.

I failed. 22 days into the Celibate Sarah project, I became non-Celibate Sarah. 

At the time, I didn’t think of it as “failing”, I thought of it as “being able to have sex again”, and I can’t lie, it was worth. It was amazing, awesome sex. It was all like He Tarzan, Me Jane.

I don’t even have any remorse, which makes me feel a little bad. (so I suppose I feel remorse about not feeling remorse. Did I mention that it was really good sex?)

I haven’t had sex since, and I don’t know when we will again, but now that the floodgates have been opened, I suspect we’ll be going at it like rabbits. If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from this experiment, it’s that I like sex. A lot. I suppose I’ve also learned that I have little to no self-control.

Honestly, it wasn’t a matter of self-control at the time. “Andy” wasn’t even trying to have sex, I was the one who made all the moves. I don’t really know why I did - at the time, I justified it by deciding that my relationship was more important than “the project”, and somehow concluded from that that having sex would prove how important the relationship was to me. It doesn’t make a lot of sense now, but at the time it seemed like a great reason.

I’m really sorry if I’ve disappointed everyone. I really did think I could make it - I wouldn’t have started if I didn’t think I could, because it would have been embarrassing to start each blog with “Hi, I’m Sarah Morgan, and I can’t even go 31 days without sex.”

I think one of the problems is that I was deliberately trying to go without sex - I can easily have sex if I don’t think about it, but because I was writing about it, and thinking about what I was going to write, and discussing it with everyone, I ended up thinking about sex 24/7. That stopped being fun around day 7.

Last week, I had a low point, and was planning on riding the wave of low libido until the end.  That, obviously, didn’t happen. On Sunday night, I reopened the gates of my libido, let it flow over me, and did what felt natural - ground my way to sexual liberty and orgasm after orgasm. We had sex quite a few times, and I felt almost virginal. It had been more than 22 days since we last had sex, which was longer than the time between when we first met and when we first had sex.

The fact that I knew I wasn’t meant to be doing it made the encounter feel secret, naughty, and exhilerating, three ingredients that guarantee good sex. The only thing that could have made it better was if I’d had a cigar afterwards, and if there’d been a midget juggling in the corner.

I don’t think I’ll attempt this experiment again. It’s sort of redundant - all that it did was make me think about sex and my relationship day and night, which made my relationship about sex more than it was before. I will be posting a few more updates before the month is over, answering some questions about sex that were left in the comments.

Relationship status: I feel like my relationship can handle anything now. This month made the relationship revolve around sex, which in itself made me realise how it hadn’t beforehand. The project has shown me how sweet Andy is, and how much I take his feelings for granted. Thinking this project wouldn’t really affect him was pretty stupid.

It’s also taught me to accept failure, which is a tricky thing to do. But I’ll admit it - I failed, and I’m okay with that. I failed, but it was fun, and I learned a lot about my relationship. And really, doesn’t that mean that the experiment succeeeded? (editor: No. No, it doesn’t.)

I love andy, and I finally feel secure in his love for me.

Day 22

Celibacy: FAIL

Relationship: WIN

Next: The End

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan and it’s only 14 days until I can have sex…but who’s counting?

The last few days have been pretty slow, sexually speaking. There have been no more slip-ups. I haven’t even felt the need to masturbate.

Studying for university, for reasons I don’t fully understand, makes me horny: I’ve been doing so much studying lately that I think my sex drive has burnt out. The loss of libido has actually been a blessing…I’ve been able to concentrate properly for the first time all month.

My relationship with “Andy” continues to strengthen. The start of this week was a bit rocky, my sexometer was ramped up, and I was having all sorts of strange thoughts, but the last few days have been very loving and affectionate without being sexual. I haven’t even humped any inanimate objects yet!

Since we’re not having sex, the other day I talked to Andy for the first time ever (our relationship before now has been entirely based on sex, you see.)  Turns out that he finished his uni degree at the start of last year (who knew?) and so he’s been helping me out with my uni work - at the top of this post is a photo of me casting his face, for one of my assignments. I’m going to make a number of sculptures from it; the first will be a chastity belt, originally going to be a memento of this month, the Celibate Sarah project, but the more I research chastity belts, the more I’m thinking of making it a symbol for monogamy.

It will be a bit of an atypical chastity belt; it won’t actually prevent access, and the lock will be Andy’s face. This can be interpreted in a few different ways, either “I’ll screw around regardless of locks”, or that I’m locked into him. (the intent is “I’m locked into him”, but I’m still researching, and trying to work out how to best present it.)

My lecturer is getting a kick out of this blog - I think he wants to see how far I will actually push my boyfriend. Hopefully I won’t get a taste for it, maknig this the first of a number of Andy-tormenting projects. Tune in next month, for “How many insects can I make Andy swallow before he notices”, followed by “Andy’s limbs: how much pressure before they break?”

Celibacy has been affecting everything I do. All of my uni work comes back to relationships, celibacy or sex, and I can’t stop talking about it. I work at Coles, and while I’m scanning groceries, I talk to the customers about my project. They either laugh it off, or get really interested and ask me questions. The most common opinion is that I’m being cruel to my boyfriend, not myself. Since they are customers, I can’t really get into the argument, so I just laugh along about what a bitch I am, with-holding sex. Ha ha ha. Because everyone knows that only boys enjoy sex. Ha ha ha. Let’s face it, all girls hate sex.

Ha ha, ha.

I’ve been visiting at Andy at work - he does the graveyard shifts, so I can hang out with him for a few hours at a time, at a nice, neutral place. There’s no risk of having sex (they frown upon him getting laid at work) and because he’s the only one there, we get some time to ourselves.

Last night we went out and sat on the roof overlooking the city lights. We sat there talking, admiring the view, Andy held me close, and we discussed how the project was going so far.

He told me that he was feeling a bit rejected by it, which was hard to hear. That wasn’t my intention at all - it almost makes me want to stop the experiment, because I know how much rejection sucks. I reaffirmed him as much as I could - it’s pretty obvious that I do want to have sex with him. I told him that if I could do anything in the world at that moment, I would writhe against him naked. That seemed to cheer him up a bit.

I think that all fasting is good for cleansing. Perhaps not for a month - people say that a month isn’t that long, that it’s hard but not impossible. I’m starting to feel cleansed: I think this project is helping us move past our bad period. There’s less doubt in my mind about us as a couple. I don’t see Andy as someone I’m sexually dependent on, I see him as someone I genuinely love. I enjoy his company, I miss him when he’s not around, just talking to him and seeing his face. While I’m definitely missing sex, I’m not just missing the act, I’m missing sex with him. 

This week, I watched The Unborn with Andy. Part of the plot involves the main character’s boyfriend being part of an exorcism circle with her. I asked Andy if he’d be in an exorcism with me: he said yes, if I had to be exorcised, but no if I was just looking for a random exorcism to be part of.

From that, I have concluded that he loves me, but isn’t keen on my constant search for random and exciting things to partake in. Especially to do with the occult.

I’ve been thinking a lot more about our relationship, and appreciating different parts of it. Our relationship is laughter. It’s having fun. It’s him holding me when I have a sad moment, and…well, Andy doesn’t really have sad moments, but I would hold him if he did. We spend a lot of our time just talking about every little moment we had while apart. We’ll tell each other what we said, what we meant, what we were thinking while we were saying that, and what we would have said if we’d thought of it in time. I suppose to anyone else, that would be kind of boring, but to us it’s the most interesting thing in the world.

I’m realising that relationships aren’t easily definable. As handy as that would be, it’s unrealistic. I’ve also come to realise that the only feelings I have to worry about in the relationship are my own. If I love Andy, then I can’t do anything to hurt him. I know that I’m not interested in leaving Andy. I guess that’s the only thing I can be dependent on. Obsessing over his feelings will drive him away. I’m already too much crazy; going crazy over that would push me over the edge.

From the comments:

Dan Beeston asks:

I have a request from you, Sarah. Pretty much every partner I’ve had is 100% adamant that no sex is to occur during ‘the week’ in ‘the month’ despite my insistance that all bodily fluid is pretty much as gross as each other (ie. not much). I’d be interested in whether you had a stand point on this issue.

I used to at a brothel, on the desk, back when I was still a virgin. I remember asking the same question at the time, whether or not the girls would be able to work at that time of the month. The answer, surprisingly enough, was yes - they had these things called a “spunge”. It was quite literally a sponge that they would wet and then insert. It was mandatory that the guys wear condoms, obviously, and apparently the men couldn’t tell.

I never got to interview any of the men afterwards, they always left fairly quickly.

As for me - honestly, I enjoy sex on my period. (but not this month, obviously.) I don’t think that sex on the period is gross or yuck or fowl. I think it feels exactly the same, and gives you extra incentive for a joint shower afterwards. I don’t think that blood is dirty. I don’t think any of the bodily fluids are dirty, really.

I suppose that anal sex could be considered “dirty” sex, because of feces, but I don’t find anal sex dirty. The idea of it, anyway: I’ve never successfully had anal sex. We’ve tried it a few times, but Andy’s too big: I’ll think that he’s all the way in, but he doesn’t even have the head in, so I make him stop. Anyone have any tips?

Next: Celibacy: Fail

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan, and for the month of March I’m not going to have sex. This is more challenging than it sounds.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, I’ve been incredibly busy with university. I have started a Twitter account - “celibatesarah” - and I’m going to be trying to update that regularly - add me for updates “as-they-happen”, instead of “as-I-get-the-time-to-write-a-full-blog-and-then-email-it-to-Peter-and-wait-for-him-to-update-the-site-with-it”.

Breaking me:

Last weekend, my boyfriend “Andy” went camping. I thought this was a great idea, because it meant that I wouldn’t  be tempted. Without Andy around, there’d be no chance of me having sex with him. (not masturbating continues to be a struggle.)

So I invited my best friend James (pictured, above) to come around, to gossip and giggle and watch vampire movies. James is gay, so we spend most of our time together talking about our mutual love of penises.

James came around, we put Underworld on, started to spoon (totally allowed, because he’s gay) and started to talk about sex. I didn’t have much news; I’m celibate at the moment, and my boyfriend was away camping. I asked James for a backrub (my biggest weakness!) and he happily obliged.

My friend James is extremely affectionate, and very talented with his hands, so I was in heaven. I turned to face him, while still kind of spooning him, and started to give him a head massage. My boyfriend doesn’t like my head massages, and I wanted to see what James thought (he was a fan.)

There was a strange sort of moment, and James started giggling. “For a second there, I was thinking about what would happen if I kissed you,” he said, in reply to my querying look. We both laughed, and he continued - “Then I wondered what our boyfriends would think!”

I laughed so much that I needed to go to the toilet. When I returned, I found my friend James completely naked on my bed, my sheet strategically placed over his…”area”.

I did what any self-respecting girl would do, I jumped straight into bed with him, and we both burst out into a fit of giggles.

When I got a bit annoyed about his penis touching my bed linen, he ripped the sheets off, and revealed that he had just rolled his pants up.

Who knows what would have happened if he’d taken them off?

The first slip-up:

On Day 9, I slipped up.

Andy came over. He had been camping, and I hadn’t seen him for almost a week. He brought with him dinner, dessert and a wine - lamb korma, mango sorbet, and a nice red merlot.

My flatmate answered the door, and saw the bottle of wine. Within a minute of Andy arriving, my room was full of my flatmate, her two kids and her boyfriend, singing “Oh Andy, don’t seduce poor Sarah” over and over, in their best operatic voices. It was slightly surreal, and my cheeks were a bit red by the end of it.

Andy had a glass of wine, I had about three mouthfuls. I like the taste of wine, I just don’t like the warmth that travels through your body when you’re drinking it.

I think that the dessert was more than a little to blame for what happened next - it was so delicious that we had to see what a mango sorbet kiss tasted like. (it was fantastic.)

We made out; it was rough and sexy, and I was seconds from tossing in the whole project the whole time.

I didn’t. I didn’t take my clothes off, I didn’t have an orgasm, I didn’t have sex…I did, however, give Andy head.

(editor’s note: I thought I’d share the conversation where she first told me about this:

My take on what’s happened here is that the relationship has failed not having sex in the 31 days, but I personally haven’t. It’s day 11 as I write this - 11 days orgasm free, and I even kept all of my clothes on.

My logic at the time, I remember, was “Andy’s made it clear that this is my project only, nothing to do with him. I do want to give him head, and it’s not like I’ll be getting any real sexual pleasure from it.” The next thing I remember was immediately after the act, thinking “What the fuck? That logic didn’t make any sense at all. What was I thinking!?”

I firmly believe that I am still sex-free, it’s just my relationship that isn’t.

(Editor’s note: I think it’s a bit of a grey area. Feel free to weigh in, leave a comment.)

Celibacy:1
Andy: 1
Relationship: 0

Afterwards, I was talking to Andy, and I told him that maybe my worst fears had been right, that maybe we really don’t have a relationship past sex. He thinks that’s a stupid way of looking at it - Andy thinks that we like sex, and we like each other, and that’s all that matters.

Last post:

In the last post, I made some comments about masturbation - I feel like I’ve come across like a bit of an idiot, suggesting that everyone has the sexual desire of a bonobo. Thanks to Janet (over at Facebook) for drawing attention to the fact that I was presuming everyone’s experiences were like mine. It was just as stupid for me to suggest that everyone would naturally discover masturbation as it was for the girl to suggest that everyone wouldn’t.

I have a habit of only drawing from my own experiences, and disregarding everyone else’s. I don’t think it’s an attractive trait, and it’s one that I’m going to work on combatting.

From the comments:

I’ve been receiving a few emails with questions, so I’ve taken the names off of them. If you want your name to be attached to your question, you have to leave it in the comments.

Which do you think is more natural, monogamy or polygamy?

My first reaction was to say that of course polygamy was more natural. Then I remembered that no, not everyone is sexual as I am. I’m a highly sexual girl, and polygamy makes sense to me from that angle, but I’m starting to learn that people aren’t as highly sexual as I’d always assumed they were.

How would marriage have come to be if everyone thought like me? I feel the same way about marriage as that girl I met last week did about masturbation - yes, I want to get married, but if no one had suggested it to me, it’s not an idea I ever would have come up with. If I hadn’t had people telling me my whole life that marriage was the best path, it wouldn’t really be one that I’d have considered.

I’d point to my friends (most of them think the same way about it as I do) but that’s anecdotal evidence, and not really enough to build a case around. People often hang around those with similar thoughts and ideals, so it makes sense that I’d have like-minded friends.

I think it would be much more socially productive for asexual people to get married. The main point of life is to reproduce, and once you’re married, you can just schedule children. Sexual drive doesn’t need to factor in at all, really.

Until recently, I’d assumed that all babies were accidental. This is definitely not the case; many of my friends were planned. With this in mind, there’s no reason that asexual people can’t have children. (not to say that asexual people don’t have spurts of high sexual energies, and accidentally have children, just like highly sexual people can plan pregnancies, and have low sex drives at times.)

Having said that, even for highly sexual couples, I can see a number of advantages to monogamy:

• Safety - no STDs to worry about.
• Comfort - you get to learn each other’s kinks, learn what turns each other on.
• Company - when you’re not having sex, you get a best friend and a confidant.
• Convenience - sex on tap.

I really think that marriage/monogamy works best in a family scenario though, binding two people who love each other together to support their offspring, regardless of whether or not they have sex. (you don’t need marriage for this, I just think it’s a nice idea. Also, it makes the person you’re having kids with your legal next-of-kin. Fingers crossed that they bring these rights to gay and lesbian couples, with and without children.)

On a similar note:

Does being in a relationship freak you out?

Yes and No.

I fall in love with people all the time. In an ideal world, I’d like to follow up each of these encounters, and see where they lead. My relationship means that I can’t do that, because I need to protect the feelings of my partner. I hate the term cheating - it’s not fair that I can’t love multiple people.

That being said, I can’t stand the idea of not being my partner’s everything, and I feel that he should be my everything in return. That’s the main reason I like being in a relationship - I like the intimacy you can achieve with one another. This takes time, and until then, I always want to bail - it seems so messy and emotional. There are so many questions - do they want me long term? Are they just having fun until someone better comes along?

After that part, you settle into a rhythm of seeing each other and being comfortable with their feelings for you, and yours for them. It’s nice.

That’s the stage where I start mentally wandering - I feel loved and secure, and they’re secure with my love…it’s almost like I’ve just learned to throw and catch, and now I want to see if I can add another ball in, and juggle two with one hand. 

As this project rolls on, I’m sure I’m going to keep on looking at relationships in different ways - my thoughts on what constitutes a relationship are being challenged already. I used to think that a relationship meant that you were having sex, but now I think that people could have long, loving, full-engaged relationships, sans sex. 

“Peter B” asks:

Sarah, would you like to have children some day? Frequency of sex goes way down after kids. Also, are you worried at all that things about your sex life would change if you and “Andy” moved in together?

Well, I would like to have kids one day. I’ve heard that your sex drive decreases after having kids, but it wouldn’t worry me. If I had no sex drive, I just wouldn’t have sex. I wouldn’t force myself to, just because I once liked it a lot. My flatmate has two kids though, and she probably does it more than Andy and I do. It’s pretty impressive. Maybe I’ll be like her.

If Andy and I moved in together, I wouldn’t worry when our sex life inevitably changed. Because we don’t live together, when we’re in each other’s company, we have sex, and when we’re apart, we do all the mundane stuff that needs to be done. If we lived together, I’m sure that dishes would become a higher priority than sex.

Following the condom discussion:

I just hate condoms. They wreak spontaneity, and they smell weird.

My philosophy is that if there’s a crappy thing you have to do, make it work for you. I too once thought that condoms sucked, so I made an effort to associate them with sex. Now I find the thought of a condom quite sexy!

The advantages of condoms:

1. They provide a barrier against sperm, which is nifty for not having children before you want to.
2. They allow sex to be far less messy.
3. You can have a guy go down on you straight after sex, without them being scared of having to eat/taste themselves. (always quite handy if they arrive before you do, if you know what I mean.)
4. They allow for an intense, sexy pause that I love. You and your partner are making out, trying to force your bodies to get as close as solid forms can. The only way to be any closer is for him to literally enter you.Your partner (or you) then need to stop this in order to retrieve and apply a condom. It’s hot. It intensifies the moment. Your body is literally begging for more, and after the condom is applied, the act happens. It’s bliss. It’s like cleaning your ears with a cotton tip, when they’ve been bugging you all day.
5. They come in all kinds of flavors, scents, sizes and textures.
6. When you buy them, you get to give the attendant that knowing look of “Yup. I’m getting some.”

I’ll be back in a couple of days with another update. In the meantime, feel free to leave any questions in the comments below. I’m also happy to act as a sex advice columnist - if you have any questions or problems with sex, let me know, and I’ll see what advice I can offer!

Next: Chastity Belt

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hello! My name is Peter C. Hayward, and I love food.

28 Days, 28 Dollars:

You may have noticed that the follow-up 28 Days, 28 Dollars posts haven’t gone up yet. The first week of this month has been quite busy for me - I’m catching up on projects that I couldn’t work on while I was food-deprived, editing the Celibate Sarah posts, and above all eating. God I love eating.

The last few 28 Days, 28 Dollars posts will go up in the next week or two, when I get some time to sit down and nut them out. Don’t worry, they have not been forgotten.

Impro:

In other news, I’ve been performing in some short-form improvised theatre lately, in shows run by Edge Improv and Impro Mafia. Here are two scenes from this past week - one starring myself and my cousin Gavin Core, the other starring Gavin, myself, and a local Brisbane improvisor called Joel Gilmore. Enjoy!

Two Line Vocabulary - Cairo, Egypt

Should’ve Said - Up a Tree

Celibate Sarah:

From the comments I’ve received so far, everyone is enjoying the Celibate Sarah posts. (please don’t be shy - leave questions! She is looking forward to answering all of your sex-related enquiries.)

I’ve even had a few people comment that they wish she updated more than twice a week. I was having a chat to her today, and due to uni commitments, it doesn’t look like the comic she was intending on making will be happening as soon as she hoped - as such, we have decided to increase the number of updates.

I can’t say exactly how often there will be updates, but they’ll be slightly shorter and appear more often. If enough comments are left with interesting and relevant questions, we might even be able to increase the frequency to once a day! Go, ask her everything you’ve ever wanted to know about celibacy! She’s not shy!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

Hi! I’m Sarah Morgan, and for the month of March I’m not going to have sex.

I find it quite amusing that I’m now known as “Celibate Sarah”. For this month it’s the best way to describe me, but if this nickname lives on, it’ll confuse the hell out of anyone who knows me and my highly sexual ways.

The good:

It’s Day 5, and the project is going really well - I’m feeling much more secure in my relationship with “Andy”. I’ve stopped bugging him for approval every five minutes: I’m starting to wonder if constant sex was making me a little insecure. It’s good to have such strong sexual desires, but you’re always wondering if you only have a partner because you put out.

Now that we’ve stopped having sex, our relationship has shifted. We’re putting the emphasis back on having fun with each other and hanging out, and I’m realising things that I’ve always (subconsciously) known about us. This project has been really good for us so far - our relationship feels much more positive than it has for a while.

I want to have sex with him more than ever, but I’m loving spending time just joking around, and being our normal weird selves. It’s fun and it’s free, and I know that in 26 days (not that I’m counting…) when I do have sex with him, it will be wonderful.

In order to be honest on here, I’ve asked Andy not to read it for the month. So you know that it’s not for his benefit when I say that I really do love him. I love that I can just suddenly decide to have a month of celibacy, and not only does he not get mad, but he says that it’s one of the things he loves about me, that I decide to do random things, then do them full hilt. He’s taking this month like a trooper.

So that’s the good. 

The bad:

The bad is that I miss masturbation. I really, really miss masturbation.

I’ve found that it’s actually started to affect my sleep. I think I use masturbation more as a sleeping aid than anything - the orgasm is incidental. I’m used to going to bed, and dropping right off, but now I don’t have my “quick-sleep tool”. 

For three nights now, I’ve laid awake for hours, willing myself to go to sleep. I’ve actually considered breaking the project, masturbating and not telling anyone…but I’m too honest. If I broke, I’d tell everyone.  (I disclose way too much. If I were a superhero, I would be “Disclosure Girl”. I’d be killed off pretty quickly - to discover my secret weakness, you’d just have to ask.)

I’ve been sleeping in, just because I can’t get to sleep at night. I’m going to have to start going to bed earlier, give myself more time to drop off.

Monday:

Andy decided on Monday that his aim for this month is to make me break. I’m pretty stubborn though, so I think I’ll be okay - if anything, his resolve has strengthened mine. 

On Monday night, Andy and I went out. This new - normally we just hang around at either his place or mine, and the evening is one long build-up to sex. Most of our conversations consist of “Want to do it?” “Sure.”

Going out was really nice - I even enjoyed the train ride, getting to chat to Andy about what I’d been up to, people I’d met recently. I told him about an idea I’d had to end the project - at the end of my month without sex, I could celebrate by having sex with Peter. Sort of like how Peter celebrated by having a big “do” at the Pancake Manor, I could celebrate by “doing” Peter.

He found the idea pretty amusing. Later that night Peter brought it up, which made me glad that I’d mentioned it to Andy earlier in the evening. Peter’s thoughts on the matter were “I wish I could object, but I can’t deny it - it’s an awesome idea.”

(editor’s note: I don’t think it’s going to happen. Sorry for getting your hopes up, readers.)

After we got home that night, we spooned in bed for a while. I think he tried to feel me up a little bit, but I stood fast, and told him it wasn’t going to happen. For the rest of the night, he was lovely and affectionate without being sexual. I feel I’m definitely in the lead.

Celibacy: 1
Andy: 0 

As you know, I love sex, but spending a night together without every move, every conversation, everything we did leading towards sex was really lovely.

The fiend:

A few people recognised me that night: a hilarious physicist, Peter’s housemate Cannibal Kate, a couple of others. I met a Viking called “The fiend”. The fiend hadn’t heard of the project, but he seemed interested - he thinks I’ll go crazy without masturbation. At one point, everyone was trying to wind me up, and the fiend said to Andy ”I want to do bad things to your girlfriend.”

Andy grabbed my shoulders territorially, and said “Well so do I.” It surprised the hell out of me - Andy has never been possessive before. I suppose he’s never been confronted with the sexual can of worms that I’ve opened with this project. He made it quite clear that I was his - I enjoyed having my man fight for me, it was quite flattering. 

We went on to discuss the rules of the project - I mentioned that I was allowed to make-out and dry hump (the “no nudity” rule. At one point, we considered calling this the “Never-nude project”, but Peter insisted that if that were the name, I would also have to give up showers for the month.)

The fiend replied with a simple statement that made my heart sink: “Dry-humping is masturbation.”

It’s true. It’s totally irrefutable. I hadn’t thought about it before, but I can’t argue the point: gyrating against my boyfriend for sexual pleasure is masturbation. 

I’ve thought about it a lot, and decided to add a new rule to the experiment:

• No orgasms.

If I accidentally have an orgasm on the bus, I’m not going to count it, but I am going to do everything that I can to avoid orgasm this month. If I’m doing anything that is sexually pleasing, I am going to stop - I will do everything in my power to avoid orgasming this month.

(this may mean I’ll have to try to avoid buses. God, I’ve been loving buses these last few days. They really make those buses vibrate with a vengence, don’t they? I have never before enjoyed public transport too much. I’m going to have to avoid leaning up against the washing machine as well; I’ve heard good things about the spin cycle.)

Tuesday:

Tuesday morning I slept in (because I couldn’t get to sleep Monday night. Did I mention that I miss masturbation?) and so Andy dropped me off at the bus stop with a kiss. I felt free of relationship tangles, I felt like the night before had been a pure night of affection that I hadn’t had until our first date. I felt like not having sex was the best thing that anyone could do for a relationship.

I also felt bad because I was running really late. (for a time management course…oh, the irony!)

That night, Andy and I went out again - this month is doing wonders for my social life! At some point in the night, the conversation inevitably turned to sex (I’m spending all day and all night thinking about it…) and we started discussing female masturbation. One girl had a theory that I just had to mention - she didn’t believe that females would never naturally discover masturbation, that girls only masturbated when they were told about the idea.

Me: Say what?? Are you serious?
Her: Yes, I only knew about it because I read a magazine that my sister had. Sex with another person is awkward and humiliating enough, let alone having to do it with yourself.

I had to leave at that point, so I never got a chance to finish the conversation. There might be people reading this who agree with her. Let me set one thing straight: you are wrong.

Masturbation is inevitable. Girls, at one point, will eventually feel randy. Your vagina feels…I guess the best way to describe it is “throbby”. So you try to ease the throb by rubbing it. Done for long enough, you get quite good at easing the throbbing, and before you know it, something strange and exciting happens. Your body tenses up, and it feels like tension is being released, spreading out from your vagina, all over your body.

At first you’re a little scared that you may have peed yourself, because you’re not used to that kind of tension release. But over time, you get to know that feeling quite well. You learn certain techniques and styles, and get better at it.

This happens whether or not you have been taught about masturbation. You might not know what to call it, and maybe you wouldn’t really understand what was going on, but you’d do it anyway. If no one could masturbate without someone telling them about it, how would it has been invented/discovered in the first place?

I wanted to address the other thing she said: “sex with another person is awkward and humiliating enough, let alone having to do it with yourself.” 

I was absolutely blown away by this, but I was literally walking out the door as she said it - it couldn’t have been worse timing.

Awkward: Yes, at times sex can be awkward. These are the best times. Awkward sex is awesome! It’s my favourite type of sex! The person you’re with is in the exact same position, so embrace it! Giggle and laugh, you’re in this awkward situation together! It’s a bonding experience!

I can’t see how can masturbation can be awkward though! Sure, sometimes the place you’re doing it can be awkward, sometimes you’re at risk of being caught…but the actual act? That isn’t awkward, that shouldn’t be awkward. It’s your body. You’re the one who knows it best. If you somehow manage to make an awkward mistake, there’s no-one to judge you but you.

Ladies and gentlemen, I implore you - don’t judge yourself during masturbation! You have the power! Masturbation is wonderful, and most importantly, it’s yours! You own it, embrace it! You have the power!

Humiliating: Sex should never be humiliating, unless you’re doing it with people you don’t feel safe with, or in front of your parents. If you’re having sex with someone you don’t feel safe with, stop immediately. Yes, you. People who are reading this while having sex and feeling humiliated, stop now! Get off him/her, or if they’re on top, push them off!

Also, stop going online halfway through sex. That’s just rude.

Masturbation is only ever humiliating if you get caught, and even then it’s only humiliating if you let it be. Personally, I would have a huge laugh about it. Again, you have the choice!

I think the key to enjoying sex is to dispel all the fucked-up feelings that people have about it. It’s not dirty, it’s not humiliating, it’s not wrong, and you won’t go to hell for it. People who want you to feel bad for having sex are either repressed, or trying to control you.

Sex is beautiful: done with two people who respect each other (it doesn’t even have to have love involved - I’ve had sex where love’s involved and I’ve had sex without, and I enjoy it both ways) it’s the most satisfying thing you can do.

When you take off your clothes, leave your insecurities and inhibitions on the floor as well. Two people feeling guilty about doing a dirty, sinful act is boring. Two unrestrained people fucking each other with abandoment is brilliant!

Oh god, just writing this post is making my sexual frustrations meter sky-rocket. I’m going to have trouble getting to sleep tonight!

Tuesday night:

On Tuesday night, Andy wasn’t at all well-behaved. He gave me an over-the-clothes body massage: I had to swat him away from the erogenous zones (which at the moment seems to be everywhere except my nostrils, and I give it two more days until they’re erogenous as well) a couple of times, but for the most part he was quite the gentlemen.

He knew that the massage was getting me hot, however, and started making out with me. He worked his way on top of me, and I almost lost control. The only thing stopping me was “Day 3! It’s Day 3! I can’t break…oh man, I want do it, but no! It’s DAY 3!!”

Keeping my legs firmly closed, I continued to make out with him until it got too much. At this point, my dear readers, you’ll be proud to know that I pushed him away. It was horrible having to do that when you want it as much as they do, but this month is about more than sex. It’s about self-control, proving to myself that I can do this, and trying to improve our relationship.

We chatted for a bit about how stupid this project is, but I still didn’t give in. As pointless as the experiment seems during an intense make-out session, I’m actually looking forward to completing the month, having proof that I’m in control of my own body.

Wednesday:

On Wednesday, I had university all day. I was planning on going out on Wednesday night, but I accidentally drifted off and paid off the sleep debt I’d built up over the past few days.

This weekend, Andy is going out camping with some of his mates. (they’re all guys, before you ask, and I’m pretty sure he’s not gay.) It’s Thursday night at the moment; I’m typing this on my laptop in bed. (it’s my new masturbation)

Peter keeps telling me that it’s not real science until you have a graph, so I’ve made one showing my sexual frustration by day:

Dreams:

I’ve had two sex-related dreams. I wouldn’t call either of them “sex dreams”, but they both had “strong sexual themes”.

In the first, I was raped. The rape wasn’t part of the dream, the dream was me talking to Peter about whether or not being raped counted as losing the project. We were arguing about whether it was technically counted as sex. He said that scientifically speaking, it did.

I told Peter about this dream, and he was quite taken aback - he wanted me to mention that he definitely doesn’t condone rape.

I think that rape counts as sex, but Peter (unlike in the dream) insists that it doesn’t. We made an official ruling - if I get raped, it doesn’t count as losing the project, but we will definitely be stopping the project.

My second ream was about “Andy” masturbating while we made out, only his penis was a hard rock lolly. You know how toffee warps when you suck on it? Well, his penis was warping from the masturbation. I remember seeing the differently coloured stripes that rock candy has. 

Does anyone know what these dreams could mean?

From the comments:

“Oz”, re: condoms

I find the Four Seasons - Larger Size ones work a treat, haven’t had one break on me yet

Thanks for the suggestion! I’ll definitely try these out, once the month is over. (I’ll definitely need the larger ones for Andy.

I’ve had a lot of people sarcastically say how hard this month is going to be for me. Yes, it really will be - if you’re in a sexual relationship, try giving it up for the month, see how easy you find it. If you’re single, stop masturbating for a month. It’s harder than you’d think.

Conversely, I’ve had some people think that I’m a nymphomaniac, and that sex is an actual addiction of mine. You don’t have to be an addict to enjoy doing something every day. My grandfather used to read the paper every day, and I don’t remember anyone suggesting he go to newspaper rehab. I enjoy sex, I enjoy masturbation, and I don’t like giving it up. Doesn’t make it an addiction!

At the moment, I think that Peter is the only one who thinks that it’ll be a struggle, but believe that I’ll make it throughout the month. Most people think that it’ll either be really easy, or really hard.

If anyone has any questions, please leave them in a comment, and I’ll answer next time. If you’re having any problems with your own sex lives, comment, and I’ll offer advice- I can’t have sex myself at the moment, so I’m going to have to live gregariously! I have advice on any sex-topic under the sun!

Next time: Failure, sort of.

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

New “Celibate Sarah” post will be up in the next few hours; in the meantime, here’s a video that was taken at the Pancake Manor, at around 12:05am on March 1st. (full 28 Days, 28 Dollars epilogue will be up tomorrow)

At the pub today, Sarah and I were explaining the project to a friend.

Sarah: So I can’t even be naked in the same room as my boyfriend.
Him: A month without sex? That’s not even a challenge.
Me: She can’t masturbate, either.
Him: What, are you insane!? You’ll never make it!

Next: Day 5 post!

Originally published at Pictures and Words. You can comment here or there.

All posts are temporarily delayed - I just got home from taking my housemate Cannibal Kate to hospital. Nothing serious; she stepped on some broken glass and cut her foot. She got four stitches, and has to take a few days off, but she gets to keep the foot.

I panicked slightly on the phone to the emergency services:

Them: How much blood came out? Did it gush, or squirt?
Me: Only a little bit…not enough to drown a rat.

Posts will resume as planned tomorrow.