August’s Son of Pictonaut effort ended up being very “stream of consciousness” on my part, as I mashed together bits and pieces as I wiki stumbled down a rabbit hole from Fukushima’s Wikipedia entry. As bizarre as it might sound, I actively encourage you to google snippets of the story as you encounter them and see how everything fits together. Or don’t. I’m not a cop.
This month’s son of pictonaut exists soley because I wanted to write one line of dialogue, but first needed to do all the preamble before I could get to it.
It’s 3 days late becasue deadlines are for cowards and fools.
This month’s “Son of Pictonaut” very nearly didn’t happen, devoid of inspiration I was conent to let it pass me by. At least until I was seized by an idea 3 days after the end of March.
This month’s image was “Person Going Through a Broken Wire Fence” by Zachary DeBottis on Pexels. On some level I felt a bit like I was channelling John Darnielle. Not necessarily in terms of style, but more in terms of “vibes.” I did after all, finish reading “Wolf in the White Van” last month. But what we have is a stream of consciousness piece that heavily references information I scraped from Wikipedia articles on historical events. Which events should hopefully become rapidly apparent once you start reading the story.
At lot of things have happened since the last post I made here, back at the arse end of 2016. I had a small nervous breakdown, my dad died, I bought a house, I got married. But one thing that there hasn’t been a lot of is writing. At least not fiction. I’ve got a short story of about five and a half thousand words that I started in the wake of my father’s death from what I have been quanitly calling “MEGA CANCER,” but it remains unfished. His suddden, but not unexpected beefing of the coil mortal isn’t really to blame for the lack of words, merely one of a myriad of other contributing factors. Other things have been the focus of my attention: my wonderful wife, picking up art again; fiction just hasn’t been a priority. Although I did release an RPG back in 2021 based on a setting I helped write , that was pretty neat. You can find RoadSpire here.
However, at the start of this month my good friend Sam resureccted the Piconaut Challenge (with my permission) under the name “Son of Pictonaut.” It would have been rude not to participate. So here we are, image in hand; the work of Caspar David Friedrich, the iconic The Wanderer above a sea of fog.
The story is a prequel of sorts to both Yogic and Shaman that I have cheerily titled “The Old Ways Must Die.” Enjoy.
Over the last couple of days I’ve been playing a lot of Paradox Interactive’s Stellaris. For those who haven’t heard of it, it’s a galaxy spanning real-time strategy game that is absolutely loaded with random events and AI interactions. These random events and the scenarios it throws up make the game ripe for making self-created narratives in your head.
I started playing it in May, and had some great laughs with a ruler who became addicted to drugs and in doing so accidentally became immortal (I’ve generally been assuming that it’s Melange.) A few weeks back a patch was released that made a lot of my older games incompatible, so I started a new one. I came back to it this weekend to help take my mind off things happening in the real world. (For those following me on twitter you’ll already know that this wasn’t exactly a success.) After two days of almost solid gameplay I stopped for the evening and promptly wrote 2,000 words about the crazy nonsense which had been unfolding. I’ve interspersed the story with some edits of screenshots I took as the game was unfolding. I hope you enjoy it.
The Rogue Verbumancer 