The Newest (and Best Ever) Podcast

[LordLeopold]

And here it is. (http://www.box.net/shared/static/ag8q2sjhi9.mp3)

Feel free to give us your input.

Also, Sighter and I briefly discussed something on our own that I'd like to hear people's opinions about. I think it'd be interesting for someone to record some "Writer's Commentary" podcasts about notable quests or battles that have happened on the forums. Does anyone think that would be worthwhile or interesting?

EDIT: Alright I have no idea what that thumping noise in the background is, but it's annoying as hell. I think we need to stop recording these podcasts in that room because it must be haunted.

[Reiko]

I think you're really over thinking the climate and geography of Althanas. It's a fantasy and part of fantasy's charm is people don't ask why when it comes to that kind of thing.

Writer's commentary is interesting but I dread,as with all events based on celebrating the notable threads, that it might just end up praising the same people over and over again. I just get this sinking feeling it'll end up like the teasers and just give the JC winners another reason to pat themselves on the back.

[Synful_Blood]

I'd like to see player commentary, but I think that it should be done on threads people think are worth having a podcast for -- so threads would have to be nominated, and not by mods and admin, but by fellow players.

[Cyrus the virus]

I think you're really over thinking the climate and geography of Althanas. It's a fantasy and part of fantasy's charm is people don't ask why when it comes to that kind of thing.

I disagree. Especially with the Geography. Having a world and regions is completely silly if we don't know for sure where the regions are in relation to one another. The latitude and such is too deep for me, but simple stuff makes sense. But I think we're paying too much attention to what makes 'sense' in our world.


I just get this sinking feeling it'll end up like the teasers and just give the JC winners another reason to pat themselves on the back.

Good. They deserve it. The overly sensitive ones can ignore it or work on writing a really engaging story.

Listening to the podcast now, though I doubt I'll have any commentary.

[Artifex Felicis]

The overly sensitive ones can ignore it or work on writing a really engaging story.

In this particular case, I would rather not have teasers by Letho or someone. I would much rather have teasers by people who haven't gotten JCs, but are still good writers, and who I might not notice at first. It's not so much that they weren't good writers, the JC forum proves rather easily otherwise, it's just I know, you know, he knows, and that furry thing that calls itself a frumple knows that Witchblade or Letho is a good writer. I don't need to be reminded of it when other people, such as Saxon, Fia, or Solomon, deserve to have more mention.

Also, I think more basic weather patterns would be more sutible then most other things. Things like "corone has temperate weather, with snowfall in winter and hot summer." And "Raiaera is warm all year round, coming to nearly blistering heat at times during the summer." Weather isn't that easy to guess I would think, and having more open descriptions would I think make it better for the players in a region.

[Karuka]

I'd also like more detailed historical and geographical details. For the first major quest that I started planning (still going on, albeit slowly), I scoured the Scara Brae history et cetera, and still only had about half the details I needed. So I asked Atzar, and he was like "feel free to make it up."

Oh no...potentially non-canonical stuff is going to be treated like canon in an RP that might very well figure in with the history of Scara Brae. Oh no, what if there's information clash?

*Cringe* *Close eyes* *Write*

That's a very scary thought for someone like me, I like knowing the exact context everything is happening in, instead of making up 50-75% of it.

And it isn't for Karu's knowledge that I want this info. Karu's still like "Althanas? WTH?" However, I'm responsible for the entire backdrop of a very complex little tale, and when running such a thread, it's nice to have those little details.

[SnootchyBootchykins]

I like the ghostie! He sounds like he's purring! You guys should leave out bread and milk in the room so he can eat the shadows.

You guys give me a headache. I think you're overanalyzing the way the world should be mapped out. It's a fantasy world. The plates of the world, the way they move, the building of mountains and such by time is dependent on teh inner currents of the core, the type of rock found in certain places, etc. The makeup of Althanas' geology could be anything, make anything, so it doesn't need to match up to earth standards, I think.

As far as the comments thingy goes, I think it could be really cool, but it will most likely go under, roll over and die, blackened and withered like Syneare's soul.

[Synful_Blood]

That will make it all the more vicious and virulent when it does decide to strike.

[Cyrus the virus]

When we had teasers, they weren't often of Letho's or Witchblade's posts. We'd read random new threads and post a teaser highlighting somebody who did not get much 'fame'. So I don't see where the worry is coming from.

[Lucien]

Yeah. To be fair, I only remember on such teaser that had Judge's Choice. In fact, I remember having one of my battles as a teaser when it was not a JC yet or even done.

[Reiko]

When we had teasers, they weren't often of Letho's or Witchblade's posts. We'd read random new threads and post a teaser highlighting somebody who did not get much 'fame'. So I don't see where the worry is coming from.
more often than not it'd be their other accounts or a thread that had to do with them. I probably seen one that didn't have to do with a player that wasn't already hailed as great and super popular.

[Saxon]

Geography:

I usually poke around the territory I'm writing in and page through it a bit. Take Fallien for instance, its supposed to be a desert-type place, and thats usually all a writer needs besides city locations, specific traits the land has, that sort of thing. But other then that, there is such a thing as TOO MUCH detail. I'll pull a random writer out of my hat: Robert E. Howard, the guy who practically wrote the book (pun intended) on action adventure novels with Conan the Barbarian. From what I've read from the people who continued and read through his notes, Howard managed to get that gritty, in-your-face detail of the land by creating notes and piecing the world before hand.

The reason why this is important, was that Howard managed to put in enough detail of the land in the story to keep you aware of what is going on, but didn't make you choke on it. I'd suggest writing the geography for certain locations that deserve the attention: Such as Salvar or Fallien. As you tend to get into realms where it is populated mostly by cities, the detail needs to be scaled back a bit so you can keep the reader focused on what your actually trying to do and not be bored to tears with almanac-type details. Remember, the people who read your work are usually relatively intelligent, you need to give them enough to let them form the picture and fill in the gaps for themselves. Its a walking-on-the-razor type concept that takes a while to craft.

Commentary:

I agree that this should be used for the people who need the boost to continue shaping their craft. What I don't want to see are people who are already cult favorites around the site getting that pat on the back, when they obviously don't need it. I suppose it depends on how you look at what matters more to Althanas: Recognizing the accomplished writers, or bringing to light the more unknown, over-looked ones. I'm rooting for the underdog on this one.


Food for thought, hm?

[Cyrus the virus]

more often than not it'd be their other accounts or a thread that had to do with them. I probably seen one that didn't have to do with a player that wasn't already hailed as great and super popular.

Then you need to learn to read better :) Because you're completely, totally off, and it is once again making my head hurt.

[Max Dirks]

Cyrus, you should make being a dick funny.

That, or apologize to Reiko.

[Cyrus the virus]

Go make a friend, you twat.

[Karuka]

Both of you need to get off your high horses and chill out. Actually, all three of you do.

[Elrundir]

Karuka's right. This is silly.

[Cyrus the virus]

Save for what I said toward Max (which maybe should have been accompanied with a smilie, because people don't realize we're playing around), I'm not in the wrong here.

Reiko, Jon, whatever, if people get JC's they deserve praise. That means they've taken the advice given to them and improved their writing. The staff doesn't deserve this, and people who write well enough to score high on threads certainly don't deserve it. You've been acting like we're in elementary school and you're the one kid not getting your milk, alright? So stop it, please. Having a real complaint is one thing, but making up stories is completely different -- I read EVERY teaser we ever put up, and put up a bunch myself.

[Slayer of the Rot]

We've had JC's for years and I see no reason to remove that feature of Althanas. It's a way of rewarding distinguished, excellent writing. Usually, the one's bitching about JC's are the one's who have never gotten them. I personally don't have a single one under my belt, but have you seen me rampaging around the FST, crying about how it's not fair? No.

On the topic of teasers, I've had one of my battles featured as such. It was nice to have the recognition, but it's no big deal. As far as the same people being featured...well, you have to consider how many active writers we have at one time, and how active they are. If Letho is in more than one teaser, it's because the man does about a dozen threads at once.

Not everyone is recognized immediately. Not everyone that comes here is immediately an excellent writer, I know that first hand. I think the teasers and the JC's show newer, less experienced members examples of writing that should be followed, and perhaps they may even notice techniques and begin using them to improve themselves.

[Letho]

There is actually truth in both what Cyrus and Reiko are saying. Now I'll try to filter that truth out of all the bullshit.

It is true that teasers weren't necessarily reserved for the "Big Guns". I do remember a number of different characters getting them and not all of them were just alternate accounts of veteran writers. Hell, in all my time on Althanas, I probably got no more then one or two. However, it is also truth that more of them were given to the aforementioned "Big Guns" and that is also understandable. Most of the established people here have already ironed out their writing style and they are more apt to write something that would be noticed. And while a teaser wasn't necessarily a JC announcement (in fact, very few threads from teasers actually got a JC), we couldn't put up just about anything on Althanas home page as a display of what Althanas is all about.

The funniest thing of it all, this isn't even the actual issue here. LordLeopold just mentioned that there could be commentary about notable threads. Not what exactly the commentary would be about, not that it would give praise to the uber gods of Althanas, not that it would showcase JCs or some of mine or Witchy's or Dissinger's threads every time. It was put up for discussion and everybody suddenly started to cling to the worst possible scenario.

I personally think that if this "Writing Commentary" ever really hits off, it should only deal with threads in progress (because the finished ones already got their commentary in the rubric). The authors of this could choose threads with both bad and good aspects and point them out not only to the writer of the thread, but also to teach the rest of Althanas. This way, not only the "Big Guns" will get the commentary (even though in all our work there is still a lot of bad things that needs to be weeded out, regardless of how much numbers we have stacked beneath our usernames), but everybody who has an interesting thread in which he or she had both good moments and bad ones. And I think that covers just about all of us.

[Sid]

The commentaries should be relating to the podcast focus. For instance, this one would have had a commentary on a thread or writer that demonstrating particularly good world building, or perhaps multiple writers that use different forms of world building.

[Sighter Tnailog]

Let me just say that while Letho got his share of teasers with a wide variety of his characters, the vast majority of those came before he was established, indeed, before he was a moderator. In fact, I distinctly remember when he was on Althanas at first and I was judging one of his threads. I thought he was a particularly notable newcomer, and I posted his threads.

Althanas is elitist in the sense that we reward good writing. We don't consider how hard someone worked on something or how long it took them or how cool they thought their epic storyline was. We judge the finished product -- and often, making a good finished product may require something we call editing. I know that when I read back through a post, even after I've posted it, I notice all manner of errors and awkward phrasings, repetitive words, etc. It takes five seconds to run something through a word processor -- and believe it or not, spell checks are now getting so advanced they can catch your sentence fragments, passive voice sentences, and other phrasing mistakes. Just reading through this thread, a number of us could use help -- including the "elitists" among us.

As to the geography, a lot of you have said that it's not all that important that we be precise, but I think it is. The great criticism of fantasy is that it is "escapist." This has been charged within literary criticism since at least the 19th century, but it's probably been around as long as parents have been alive to tell their children to get their heads out of the clouds and think of real things for a change.

One of the ways to get away from escapism is to make things that mirror reality. We should find ways to explore themes that operate from deep within our shared and splintered understandings of culture, life, and experience, and one of the ways to give ourselves that experience is to build consistency into the world. It provides a common template from which everyone can work, while still leaving room for exploration beyond and within its edges. And even better, it provides us with a world that has a sense of rules. There are boundaries and limits, like in the real world. And having this sense of working within the established rules of our fantasy land -- as opposed to some nebulous construction of "anything goes," -- is the key to writing literature that is not escapist, but realist under the parameters of a new reality.

But I'm wandering. Post-modern psychobabble is most delicious.

[Serilliant]

Part of this discussion not pertaining to the Podcast has been moved to this thread: http://www.althanas.com/world/showthread.php?t=5399. Discussion about the podcast may commence here.

[Andrew]

I found that the podcast was highly entertaining, and moderately constructive. I think your various points about gods, history, and geography were worth thinking about. Unfortunately for you, though, I am a raging ass-hole; as such, I shall begin by pointing out my problems with your format.

You three are too similar. You've been friends for a long time. You come from the same region of the world. You think very similarly. Yes, you are still distinct people, but a big chunk of the podcast involves you all saying that you have pretty much the same ideas about most things. I think you would get some immensely cooler podcasts if you were to set up conference call style podcasts with people who's styles and opinions are more widely divergent. How about a recorded debate between Sighter and Dirks? How about a podcast of Santh talking to a few of the (relatively) newer players about the evolution of Althanas into what it is now? How cool would it be to find one of the retired originals like Iris (the only one whose name springs to mind just now) and include him/her in a discussion just like the one we just listened to?

Geography: I like the idea of having the locations of continents being internally consistent. Having their climates make sense would also be cool. I think you should be less concerned about maiming old posts through your meddling. The quality of the stories themselves won't be harmed by the sudden presence of a river.

As for the specific problem of that one preplanned city in the middle of a plain with no river access: it's a planned city made by elves. Having the elves create some sort of magical wellspring at the heart of the city in order to provide clean drinking water may technically be "explaining things away by magic," but it is magic done by people, which is not the same thing as "well, the gods stuck some mountains here because they thought it would look cool."

History taking too long? Difficult. I have a quick and dirty solution for most unreasonably long history time lines, which is exactly the same as my solution for ridiculously high numbers in Yu-Gi-Oh: shave off that last zero. It won't exactly work with everything you all talked about, but the general idea could be used to great effect. If something seems like it took way too long to happen, or if there is a huge stretch of time where nothing happens, just shorten it. I know that anytime I am reading a bit of fantasy writing in which something took "thousands of years," I am instantly turned off. Think about just how far back we have reliable histories in the real world. (The answer is, we don't have reliable histories for even the modern era.)