Ideas from the Road

 Some people have deep, profound shower thoughts.  I come up with stuff like this while driving to and from work:

Driving Stress: The Game

 I love my commute…

…but on the way in tonight it occurred to me it’d make a pretty excellent driving game.  Maybe.  The views I get are beautiful and never the same from day to day, but there’s a lot going on down on the ground that it’s a little more important to pay attention to most of the time :’D

I can’t think of much more to add to this right now, but I had to type it up as soon as I sat down in the office, so..

Combination of rural back roads, highways and small town/metro area surface streets, night driving one way, morning the other.  This is SW Virginia, so mountainous plus switchbacks, hairpins, blind curves and many no-passing zones and speed traps.  Also small-town traffic cops and state troopers who are quite serious about speeding and often very good at being sneaky.  Add a statewide nigh-religious aversion to using turn signals to really make it pop.

Hazards include:

(rural) wildlife, domestic animals, pedestrians, bicycles, farm equipment, local drivers, oncoming headlights stuck on high, fog banks, potholes, loose gravel/debris, and a truly astounding and rich variety of insect life (all of which is magnetically attracted to your windshield at all times).

(highway) wildlife, semi drivers with grievances, log trucks, other drivers terrified of anything larger than a minivan, DOT work zones, plainclothes traffic cops, state troopers, high wind speeds, and just about any other hazard the weather can produce (more on this later).

(town/city) wildlife, pedestrians, other drivers, DOT work zones, traffic lights with grievances, school buses, athletic events, traffic cops of all kinds, oncoming traffic with headlights stuck on high, precious cinnamon rolls too good to obey traffic signals, and people who generally assume you’re psychic and drive accordingly.

Nightmare Mode involves winter weather – snow/ice/precipitation – and your vehicle (which lacks 4-wheel drive) in desperate need of new tires.

The one constant hazard that never changes and is always present is the car-chasing St Bernard who seems to absolutely despise your car in particular.

You get a very basic GPS (a map, and sound, but no time predictions or traffic hazard warnings) until you know the route, which you can use again if you need to find a new one.  New routes are ‘unlocked’ along the way – for example, all-town/highway when it snows.

Plug in an mp3 player or thumb drive to play your own music if you want.

Of course, as you go along you eventually get used to the things that don’t change, like the traffic signs/signals, intersections, speed change zones, and areas where some of the animal/human hazards are more likely to show up, and at that point you get to take in the sights a little.

Easter egg type goodies:

the four horsemen of the apocalypse also commuting, driving cars named after various horses.

Jesus as a homeless guy.

one of the road crews are actually ghosts – all you see of the workers is the reflective stripes on their coveralls, and the lights of their headlamps if you really look at them.

a plethora of amusing vanity plates, because let’s face it, VA is vanity plate heaven.

various vintage and otherwise weirdly modded vehicles, including a super-compact packed to the gills with Shriners and/or an actual clown car.

every now and then some of the weird crap going on in the cars around you really is what you think it is – mini-pinscher in the passenger seat really is mummified grandma, ugly kid in the backseat really is el chupacabra, that Great Dane hanging out the back window really is a camel, and so on…

clouds shaped like various things, and other stuff you would or might not expect to see overhead.

meteor showers and/or actual UFOs.

AND PROBABLY SO MUCH MORE.

AC on too high? Your windshield slowly fogs up on you.

Bugs and junk obscuring your view?  Well, you have wiper fluid, but if that runs out you can’t clean the windshield until you stop for gas (which happens about once a week).

Once in a while one of the idiot lights comes on, and at the end of the drive you get to guess what it means.  Guess right and it gets fixed – guess wrong and it stays on and makes you nervous.

Your car making odd noises, such as gravel in the wheelwell etc.  Same as above – identify it and it’s fixed.

Tired? The view gets blurry at random.

Extra challenge: drive one-handed as you finish breakfast/chug coffee.

Headache? Oncoming headlights are literally blinding.

Have fun constantly adjusting the visor every clear morning as the sun refuses to conveniently rise half a centimeter higher or stay politely behind your a-pillar!

Bonuses/Achievement type stuff:

Friend to All Nature – manage not to hit any animals – for extra awesome bonus points, on harder modes this includes roadkill and the frogs and toads that carpet the road when it rains.  Congratulations, now you get to pull over and take snapshots of some of the amazing scenery!

Good Neighbor – wave back to everyone who waves at you on the backroads – extra bonus includes getting the guy who people-watches in front of the hobby shop up the highway six days a week to recognize and wave back at you.

Time Shenanigans – get to work amazingly early.

Instant Karma – every time you complete the drive and manage to adhere to the posted speed limits/don’t get pulled over, a cop will tag someone else you just had to watch breaking the law. Yyyesssss.

AGAIN, PROBABLY SO MUCH MOAR.

After a while the game will ask you at the end of the drive if you noticed certain things – IDing what that roadkill was in its last life, for example.  Correctly IDing a specific kind of car might get you the option to upgrade to it, and wouldn’t a Jeep be handy???

Rate the vanity plates.  If the game agrees with you on awesomeness level, you get one of your very own.

IDK I’M OUT OF STEAM, MAKE SUGGESTIONS, Y’ALL.  Or at least just giggle a little.  I want to share my amusement.

Tomorrow is on the Other Side of Sleep

 This is how I used to describe today vs tomorrow while I worked nights.  It’s also what gave me the idea for this plot…ish thing, and it’ll be kind of a pain to implement if I do do this.  I sat all day today and thought on this idea some more.  I did want it to be supernatural; not necessarily horror per se, but more of a quest thing.  There are no romance aspects, actually, but there are items you’d have to collect and put together.  The thing for me was rounding up folktales/legends and supernatural critters local(ish) to my area and cross-referencing them with their roots or counterparts in Europe – specifically Scotland, Ireland and England, where most Appalachian settlers came from – without treading too deeply into the indigenous mythology of the region.  I have one reference to that, actually, and even that’s sort of an aside.  I’m not comfortable trying to tackle…prickly topics.  Plus that’s not my bloodline as far as I know.

The end result is I have two characters specific to the area, another of a more general nature, one original to myself, and four derived from the mythology of the British Isles (mostly Scotland).  I’m one of those people who actually liked American Gods and how that presented the concept of spirits migrating with their cultures, so…there’s some of that as well.

The passage-of-time aspect would be hairy, I think, since you have a one-week time limit on your storyline, but you can cheat it by not sleeping.  Staying awake prevents ‘tomorrow’ from coming, but the longer you stay awake, the more things can go wrong for you or the weaker you get.  I can’t say much about the plot or the characters aside from this without super spoilage, but…

The last thing you remember is closing your eyes.  Now you find yourself back in your hometown, and some really strange things are going on..not the least of which is the unchangeable fact that you’re dead.  You have one week to figure out what’s happening and fix your problems, or you’re going to be stuck with one hell of a job…forever.

Your guide is a strangely familiar little girl named One-and-a-Half (and her Taily-Po). You rediscover Hobble, the imaginary friend of your childhood..who’s not just imaginary after all.  It turns out local legends Ben Bogart and Dovey the Washerwoman aren’t just legends, and there are more things lurking within (and without) the town limits than you ever really wanted to think possible.

Adventures in Mahou Shoujo

 It started in 2008, with the old-ass lineart.  There was some kind of character-generation challenge either on DA or at the Tower (can’t remember which, now) involving Sailor Senshi based on art supplies. I wound up with Sailor Tempera.

That really didn’t go much of anywhere, so I got to rethinking the concept and eventually she became Chroma…and got teammates.  The designs have changed a lot, as has just about everything else, and two of the girls are gone now, but at the top is the final product.

I have a whole story concept to go with them; it’d probably count as YA, but since it’ll never get serialized or written, I’ll just lay it out spoilers and all.

The Seed of a World

 Scattered scenes from a world entire.

When I say I’ve been marinating this world idea for over a decade, I mean it.  The earliest explorations took place through the medium of Bryce 3D, which my computer couldn’t handle too well (obviously).  A later processor upgrade helped somewhat, but the images still don’t compare with what I see in my mind’s eye.