001 : FIGURING

Welcome, old and new!

Turns out I didn't have to break my promise of "only two emails per month."

Overthinking. Silly me.

Here's what happened since the last update:

• Finished up the "36 manifestations" for Project Ebon.

• Acquired inspiration for the journal(s).

• Drafted an Index for the core resource.

• Ported Desire, Maxim, Aforma, and Metaforma to the new site.

What have we learned?

How will we move forward?

Let's see.

Idea Generation

Are you someone that finds it difficult to come up with a bunch of distinctly different ideas? I am. Trying to come up with two that don't merge into one is hard enough. Developing 36 of them is worse. 108 is an atrocity. But it all, eventually, gets done. And most importantly, it all remains unified under a central theme.

How could you go about doing the same? And how do you avoid getting trapped in needing to produce far too many things? Structure for the first. Awareness for the second. And structure is almost enough to account for a lack of awareness. Almost.

Make two sets of categories.

One is for overarching themes.

The other is for the most important ways those themes can be used.

To get 36 manifestations, I had four states of matter as the overarching themes (not getting into what each of the states mean in this fictional world) and, naturally, the nine fragments. From this, each state had 9 distinct ways they could appear in the world.

And since all of these will be used in a number of games, I added one more set of categories (three key ways the player may act in the world) and came up with 27 moves for each state of matter, for a total of 108 different moves.

Very adequate. Very cool.

What may not be cool is needing to code all of that.

But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Novelty in Unfamiliar Territory

While speaking with a friend, she showed me her copy of the "1% Percent Diary" by Steven Bartlett.

I don't intend on using it for myself.

But did I see that journals are an interesting medium to convey a wide array of ideas and allow people to work with them in a constructive way.

Problem is, I have no idea how to go about making one, especially not for the intricate web that are fragments. Fortunately for me, problems are also opportunities.

I got hung up on how to do something "new" with journals. The spare you the trouble of reading through my labyrinthine thought process about it, the long and short of it is that journals (as far as I can currently tell) seem to be a very structured and simple medium. And the way you can make them feel fresh and new is to apply a theme or set of themes that very few people have done before.

And, what do you know, that's something just about everyone does all the time, especially when suited to either their own current needs, or the needs of themselves or someone they've met before in the past.

Who needs to engineer novelty when problems are their own, unique, novel shapes that will accept a myriad of solutions?

Theory vs. Praxis

The quarterly goals laid out in the previous post were to make "all of the Praxis content for the Nine Fragments" and "at least three worksheets based on that content."

Although I made a decent bit of headway in writing all of that content up, it ballooning into, well, large walls of written material.

This made me realize something.

There's a fine line between "writing about pragmatic uses" and writing "straight up theory." And unfortunately, this is a line I cross very, very often.

So, I thought "why not start with something people can use right now and develop the theory in the background?"

This is where the worksheets come in.

And this is also where the idea of "making an introductory quiz" resurfaced.

People I've spoken to about the fragments have always been interested.

But my disdain of quizzes outweighed the need.

Why make something serious? And why try to make something imperishable?

The best things are refined over time.

And if there's anything I know how to do, it's definitely refinement.

The Path Forward

After seeing that all of the old pages I made for my site couldn't be easily transferred over to the new one, I took a few days to manually port everything over.

Painstaking. But long overdue.

Here's the site.

All of my time and attention will now be going on the quiz, worksheets, and other hands-on stuff. Expect fun and interesting tools in the coming weeks.

Until then, feel free to peruse the old stuff.

And tell your friends.

I'll be hosting the sheets, booklets, and a whole bunch of other purchasable digital downloads on Patreon. Simple, secure, and easy to update.

Check it out.

There are already some goodies there.

More to come soon.

(Yes, I used that much ad space on a simple message.)

(Yes, I will do it again.)

That's all I have for you today.

Thank you for your time and attention.

Next update on the 21st, barring emergencies.

Until then,

👋