Author: Pab

Helpful Hints for the Aspiring Galactic Dictator

Published by Pab on May 13, 2014

This article originally appeared on the late, lamented Science Fantasy Universe blog in 2010.

Congratulations! Your ships are fueled and armed, your minions are prepared, and your course has been laid in. You’re now ready to complete your conquest of the galaxy and establish yourself as Galactic Dictator. However, before you set out to lay waste to that insignificant blue planet that always seems to be pivotal to building your space empire, there are a few things you should know. That’s why we’ve compiled this pamphlet, to make your journey of pillage, destruction, and conquest as pleasurable as possible.

Tip #1: Stop shaving.

Galactic regulation #ZX-765-1/P specifically requires the Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy to wear facial hair. Since the destruction of Earth is expected to take no time at all, it is best to start work on your facial grooming now. While recent changes in the law mean that a full “beard-of-evil” is no longer required, at the very least a mustache is de rigueur. If your facial hair is complete before you arrive at Earth, then there is less of a chance that red tape and paperwork will delay your coronation. (See also galactic regulation #ZA-847-5/E, “The Supreme Ruler of the Galaxy must wear a funny hat at all times.”)

Tip #2: Watch your language.

No matter what your native tongue may be, or whether or not your species is capable of verbal communication, the common language of the galaxy (as of this writing) is English. All communications, even between yourself and your home planet, are required to be conducted in English. Failure to comply with this regulation may delay your coronation. True, your native language and the structure of your vocal chords may lead you to have a ridiculous sounding accent, but don’t be self conscious about it. (Please note that there is an exception allowed if you plan to locate your base of operations on one of the islands of Japan, but only under those circumstances.)

Tip #3: Hire locally

Your henchmen may be the people that you trust the most, and have served you loyally for hundreds of space years, but they’re no replacement for having boots on the ground. Earthlings are greedy by nature, but paradoxically work cheap. Recruit a few in the early, covert, stages of your operation to help lay the groundwork. If you promise an Earthling dominion over his fellow humans, he will prove to be more loyal than your pet hovark, a harder worker than any of the slaves running your Ice Caves on Uranus, and can double as your eyes and ears as you gather intelligence. When your plans are sufficiently advanced, feel free to dispose of them as you see fit since you will have dominion over the entire race shortly, and need not be bothered with piddling little things like the lives of the people you’ve exploited. (See also Chapter 4, “Mwa-ha-ha!”)

Tip #4: Surround yourself with the babes.

There are many perks to being a galactic despot, but by far the best has to be the fact that chicks are drawn to you like a space magnet. Take advantage of this fact and make sure you always have plenty of feminine pulchritude at your disposal. Sure, they may prove to be an obstacle if some meddling hero seduces one into betraying you, but there’s always plenty more fish in the sea. (However, be aware of galactic regulation #ZX-555-9/W, the “too dangerous for a girl” clause.)

Tip #5: Full disclosure.

Regulations require that planets about to be conquered be fully informed of their fate in advance. This is to give them fair opportunity to prepare themselves for their upcoming enslavement or destruction, whichever your plans require. It may seem like gloating when you tell them that they are all about to die, but don’t look at it that way. Think of it as helping them. Likewise, if one of them should infiltrate your ship, make sure that you tell them all of the details of your plan down to the minutiae. Then make sure that they have plenty of time to come fully to terms with what you are about to do by selecting a slow and convoluted method of execution. An Earthling who dies with full understanding is a happy Earthling. Well, a happy dead Earthling, but happy nonetheless. Do not worry that their knowledge might hinder your plans. Nothing can stop you now.

Tip #6: Have fun!

This is a joyous moment. You are about to become the undisputed Galactic Dictator, and consolidate a rule that spans the cosmos. Smile as you go about your conquest. Laugh. Enjoy yourself, because after the conquest is done, it’s nothing but work.

You will find these six tips invaluable to you as you begin this final stage of your great plan. Take them to heart as you fire your atomic piles and engage your hypersonic engines, and we’re certain that you’ll find a lot to enjoy as you subjugate Earth. Good luck.

“Grumpy Cat” for the Atari 2600

Published by Pab on March 14, 2014

I’m in one of those lacunae that pop up in the middle of an author’s life from time to time. My editor gave me a heads up that the first round of edits for Brothers in Arms will be arriving in my mailbox imminently. Once it does, I will need to drop everything to review the changes and notes, and start out on the rewrites stage.

Of course, being hip-deep in Crush Story could have been an obstruction. To prepare myself to go back into the universe of Bobby, Sarah, and Gabriel, I needed to get Jason and Sam (from Crush Story) out of my head. So I put the novel aside to clear my mental palate and be ready to work.

Of course, my brain doesn’t like being inactive. It wants challenges. It wants to create. So I wrote a video game. To be specific, I wrote a game for the Atari 2600.

For those of you under 30 (which honestly is most of my fanbase) the Atari 2600 was the first widely available reprogrammable video game system. It pioneered the ability to change games by plugging in a different cartridge. It popularized the joystick as a control medium. And it led the way for every system that has come since. The games were simple, but addictive and compelling. And while today people might sneer at the bad graphics and simple sounds, from 1978 through 1982 it was state of the art.

The main challenge in writing a game for the 2600 is to make it as small as possible. The average game for the 2600 is 4K. That is one ten-thousandth the size of “Angry Birds” on your phone. And you only had 128 bytes of memory for your variables. We don’t even talk in bytes any more, only in millions (Gb) and trillions (Tb) of bytes.

So I sat down to write a game. All of the best 2600 games made up for their simplicity with great theming, backstories, and creativity in imagery. So I decided to make my game about Grumpy Cat.

For the action, I recycled a concept I’d used three decades before when I taught myself game programming for the Atari 800 by writing a game called “Herple” which I never released. Your character moved around the screen while being chased by a number of different enemies, trying to collect items that popped up in random places. Easy mechanic, but one that can become challenging when your opponents start to move really quickly.

The theming for the game fell into place naturally. Tardar Sauce wants to eat in peace. But the universe is out to annoy her, which it always seems to do. The player needs to move Tardar Sauce around the screen eating the “noms” (the yellow dot in the screen above). Simple goal, easy to grasp.

Of course, a game needs obstacles, so I created a bunch of “monsters” that would chase through the screen in different ways that the player would have to maneuver Tardar Sauce around.

I came up with five obstacles based on things that Grumpy Cat hates. I drew a smiley face, which would represent happy people. I drew a rough representation of a camera to represent a photographer out to get the meme picture of the year. I drew a Valentine’s heart to represent the concept of love. I drew a “Bluebird of Happiness,” which would flitter up from the bottom of the screen, and I drew a Shiba Inu Doge.

One of the tricks in creating the game was for each of the five “monsters” to move differently, essentially having different artificial intelligence code for each. I made the Happy Person the simplest, moving from the top of the screen to the bottom while chasing after the player as it does so. It moves the slowest of all the monsters.

The photographer moves down the screen twice as quickly as the happy person, but is the same speed as the happy person in going from left to right.

The Doge is the toughest enemy. Like the photographer and happy person it will chase you down, but while it moves from top to bottom at the same speed as the happy person, it’s twice as fast in moving from left to right. At higher speeds, you have to try and get above the Doge as quickly as possible, or it will chase you down.

For the hearts I needed something different. They also move from the top of the screen to the bottom, but I didn’t want them to chase Tardar Sauce down. Instead, they will pick a direction (left or right) and move in a diagonal as they move down until they hit the side of the screen, at which point they just move straight down.

The Bluebird of Happiness was tricky. I decided that it was way too easy to just hang out at the bottom of the screen to dodge enemies before moving up above them, so I had the bird move up the screen, flittering back and forth randomly as it did so. You can’t hang out near the bottom all the time without running the risk of running into the bird.

I have some folks out there play-testing the game (as I call it, poking it with a sharp stick) right now, and will be fixing bugs and making improvements with an eye toward releasing it. Of course, since Grumpy Cat is trademarked and licensed all to heck, I won’t be able to sell the game. However, I will make the binaries available for anyone who wants to play it. And I’ll probably have two cartridges manufactured of the game: one for myself and one for Tardar Sauce’s owners as a thank you for not suing me.

If you know a thing or two about 2600 emulation and homebrew games, or want to learn, you can check out the thread about the game at AtariAge.

Senseless Sensibility

Published by Pab on February 13, 2014

There was a great hashtag going on Twitter yesterday.

Granted, my reply was brief and a little snarky (“Then we would have no plots”) as were most of the direct replies to the tweet, but a lot of other users ran with it and made it hilarious.

Of course, as tends to happen with me, the jokes got me thinking. The truth is that most YA fiction is, in fact, driven by kids who make stupid decisions. In adult fiction, a book that was driven by a protagonist who made one stupid decision after another would send readers screaming and demanding their money back (although there are some notable exceptions) but in YA it’s not only acceptable, it’s almost expected.

Why is this so?

I think the main reason is that kids like protagonists that they can identify with. The heroes and heroines of YA need to “feel real” for kids to connect with them. Young protagonists have to sound, think, and act like actual teenagers if they’re going to click with a teen reader.

Occasionally you can get away with having a protagonist who is forced by circumstance to grow up early (due to a hard life, out on the streets or in a dystopian world) but for the most part YA protagonists have to act like the teenagers we claim they are, and that means they do stupid things.

Some basic facts to consider when plotting a YA book:

Kids are impetuous and reckless

Kids think with their hearts and jump into action. Where an adult might take a second to reason out all (or at least a few) of the consequences of an action, kids jump in head first.

Consider The Hunger Games. The initiating action that starts the whole story is Katniss’ volunteering to be tribute instead of her little sister Prim. If you sit back and think about it, this is a very stupid decision.

Katniss is the provider for her family. She knows how to hunt, she knows how to bargain, and she has essentially been the mother of the family since her father has died and her own mother went into shock. With her gone (which would send her mother into another downward spiral and make her useless again), Prim would have no one to care for her. Plus, Prim would be totally incapable of taking care of her mother and as a result both of them would be doomed. Prim would be doomed anyway. The logical, adult thing to do would be for Katniss to try to pull the pieces together and take care of her mother with her sister gone.

Katniss does not think logically; she thinks with her heart. She can’t stand the thought of Prim dying in the Games (although her demise and suffering without the Games would still be all but certain and much more prolonged) so she steps up.

This is not the logical move. But it is the right one. That is why Katniss is a hero. And why The Hunger Games is a classic.

Kids are inexperienced

The main reason that kids are so impetuous and reckless is simply because they haven’t learned as much as adults. They haven’t experienced enough to make reasoned, logical decisions in all cases.

Consider Paper Towns by John Green. Q is so taken by Margo’s impetuous actions that when she disappears he becomes convinced that she wants him to find her. He assumes that everything he sees is a clue meant to lead him on to find her.

Experience would tell Q that most people who run away don’t want to be found. They mean to leave their previous life behind in its entirety. He might also come to realize that what he loves about Margo is her mystery, not the girl herself.

So much frustration, exhaustion, and really stupid decisions could have been avoided if Q had just been a little more familiar with life. But he isn’t, so he chases after the mystery girl. And as a result, Paper Towns is a compelling story.

Kids learn by doing

Not to demean our educational system, but the way kids’ brains are wired means that they learn much more easily from doing things than from being shown or told things. This is why we give blocks and similar toys to kids: so they can figure out some of the basics of how things work. Things fall down. Check. Wide bases are best for building tall structures. Check. You can’t fit a big thing into a small hole. Check. Different objects have different shapes, check.

As kids get older, the lessons they learn are much more complex than the basic lessons of babies and toddlers, but their brains are still wired to learn through experimentation and action. They don’t know whether something will work until they try it.

Thus it’s easy for a kid to get a harebrained idea into his head and try to see if it will work or not. Of course, if the kid were to do some research into the idea the feasibility could easily be established, but that takes too long and gets too boring. Faster and easier to just try it and see what happens. That also makes for better reading.

Conclusion

The trick to creating realistic YA is to have your protagonists think and act like actual teenagers. Teens are rash, reckless, inexperienced, and often do the wrong thing. But they learn from doing it. You cannot have your protagonists be sensible (although a Voice of Reason supporting character can be handy to have from time to time); not only is it bad drama, it’s not how the world is.