Pedro's Point

[pedromvilar]

Shoal, Sadde is eventually going to explain what exactly has gone on when it appears necessary to other characters on screen, so if you want to wait until that happens you can do that. More detailed context can be found in these four threads. Summary in the spoiler box:

Spoilers

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Sparkles finds Milliways and there finds the triplets, a Kato, and another Sadde. Mates on the five of them. They have a lot of fun together and then decide to go talk to their respective worlds about the world collision. The triplets and Katur's world has a form of magic called sorcery which comes form a world called Elsewhere that periodically collides with and creates portals to other worlds. It is possible to create artificial portals to these other worlds with sorcery, and if you do that before Elsewhere moves on then the worlds are connected for good, stably and such.

They make portals to Galatea and Aurum, but since those worlds were not in fact found by Elsewhere they were "too far" and the connection was unstable. The sorcery portals collapse, and Sparkles is stuck in Aurum without their mates. Cue a bit over a decade of depression and then finding the key. Cue several years of wandering the multiverse looking for their mates. Cue finding a magic thing that strips them of emotions so they don't need to care about anything other than their mates. Cue them finding magic that outranks that and lets them use their emotions to find their mates - as long as they don't neglect their other emotions, and help worlds they find on the way.

Relatedly: why did you find it hard to read Lighthouse?

[Shoal]

Thank you for the summary, I think that'll help. I'll try to look at the threads too. Sorry it took a while to respond; my cat was neutered on Monday and he's doing great but it took more language than expected.

I'd have to try reading Lighthouse again to see where the problem happened, but it was just the usual thing where you look at the words and move your eyes over them from left to right like usual, but the words don't enter your brain at all. It tends to happen more if there's lots of words I don't understand or if there's a lot of background assumptions about common knowledge that I'm missing -- for example I have a lot of trouble reading Jane Austen's stuff because she doesn't explain the stuff that everybody in her time and society knew about what life is like in her society. Everyone's obeying social rules that are never spelled out and that I can't begin to guess at. It's like watching people play what you think is chess but then they start rolling dice the top face of the die displays a 3 of clubs and that means the knight can teleport. I also tend to have a lot of trouble making sense of acronyms and other words that have multiple/ambiguous meanings, which is unfortunate because most of english nouns can also be verbs. It's not really something that can be accomodated though; somedays my language parser is up to the challenge and sometimes it isn't. It's a lot easier and more enjoyable to read stuff if I've been spoiled because then i have a bit of a roadmap.

But if I'm having trouble with one text I can sometimes switch to another and half the time I'll still be able to read the other thing (the other half the time, I just have to do something not languagey for awhile instead and wait for it to come back.)

I think with lighthouse specifically that it was probably like reading a high context fanfiction of a world/set of characters that I'd never heard of: I was missing some critical background information to understand what was going on / needed a different introduction to one of the characters / didn't get a pop culture reference that turned out to be important.

how is lighthouse organised? how are the subsections related to each other? maybe i was trying to read them in the wrong order.

I tried again with lighthouse just now and got stuck on page 2 of the magic field has a kind of inertia because i can't figure out what exciting means when it doesn't mean fun-surprise-thrill. (I will probably look it up in a dictionary but I think it really just means that today isn't a good day for receptive language, maybe tomorrow.)

[pedromvilar]

About "exciting" in particular, I was using it to mean the magic equivalent of something like generating a magnetic field using an electric current or like the thing where you take a quantum field from its ground state to a higher-energy state. It... had not occurred to me that this would be difficult to parse to someone without a background in electrical engineering or physics but in hindsight it is obvious :P

Anyway, the current order Lighthouse is set up in is the suggested reading order but "Steps of a Journey" is the only section that strictly requires having read the previous ones so far (specifically the two previous ones). The other sections are independent of each other.

[pedromvilar]

So, I really really really enjoy writing in Lighthouse, but I think lots of people don't read it, and I was wondering why, and if there's anything I can do to make it more enjoyable to them. So if you're one of those people, I'm very interested in hearing your opinions! You can just PM me if you'd rather not post here, but yeah, very curious.

[pedromvilar]

I have added Genesis and Faery to the list of settings.

[DanielH]

For your Potter worlds, is there a reason adults seem to say “Ms. Potter” instead of “Miss Potter” for Sarah and Dorea? The Wizarding world is a bit old fashioned and in particular, even as late as 1998 nobody did that. Is it a deliberate change?

Also, I just realized there isn’t enough evidence to be clear in any of the threads: what is your interpretation of Dumbledore? So far the threads support everything from the worst of the Evil!Dumbledore interpretations to the most forgiving of his various faults.

[pedromvilar]

It's because I sorta straightforwardly replaced Mr. with Ms. without thinking. I'll look up the offending passages and fix them.

My interpretation of Dumbledore is well-intentioned crazy hypocrite who thinks he's very very wise. He buys everything he says.

[Anya]

....tbh I've been putting off reading Lighthouse because I'm lazy and its sorta long but I'm literally stuck in bed for the next couple of days so now I know what I'm going to do!

[Moriwen]

I enjoy Lighthouse but there are a Bunch Of Threads in it, and a lot of them are in unfamiliar settings, and there tend to be a fair number of ongoing threads at a time, which makes it tricky to keep track of where I am in what thread and what's happening and who's pealed yet and wait is this character not pealed yet or been separated from the peal and so forth. I've ended up mostly just following a couple of the settings, in the vague hope of coming back at some point to read the others when they're finished.

[pedromvilar]

Well for what it's worth technically no one is pealed yet, there was a brief almost-peal and then Horrible Things Happened, but yeah that's reasonable we keep adding new threads :P

Also for my own future reference, this, for Faery worldbuilding.