I will say, I enjoy the kind of noir feel I’m giving this. Between the character and the serial format, things are clicking a bit.

***

The Lifestyle section. I was writing for the fucking Lifestyle section. The part of the paper that scrolled by in hair salons and doctor’s waiting rooms, and was read by a few culturally effete wannabes and a lot more people with time to kill. God love you if it showed up in your feed queue, because it sure as hell didn’t show up in mine.

There was some point in the past where journalists would kill for this gig. I was writing for the Chicago Tribune, a paper so backward that they still hung on to the administrative name of the city, despite the fact that no one ever used it. I vaguely remember hearing the “Chicago version2.0″ campaign when I was in middle school, but most people didn’t know or care about that. All they knew was that we lived in Version City, where the updates keep coming but nothing ever changes.

I took the El out to McCormick Place to cover my first assignment: the Version City Auto Show. The batch of car manufacturers thought to appeal to the “edgy”, “hip” side of the city, without even thinking that none of this demographic drove, and even if they wanted to, less than half of them could afford the cars being marketed. I suppose it was a sad state of affairs, but someone was making money doing this.

Closer to the lake, the city thinned out, maintaining the parks network that was finished in the early 21st century. It was a bit strange coming from Nova Angeles, where space was precious and even coastal erosion didn’t prevent the further construction of high-rises. I think it was a good compromise…I got to maintain my sanity, and could still order yakitori from a boat if I went down to the river.

The convention center continued this “openness” trend with high glass ceilings, and a completely open floor plan. Auto shows were typically like this, or so I was told, because a booth layout made it difficult to bring in the main attractions of the show, the cars themselves. The funny thing was, this was the first auto show in North America in nearly 50 years, thanks to our little nuclear indiscretions. But for me and for most, that was merely what you learned in history class now. Still, I knew some old hat journalists who were deeply pained that there were no more American auto manufacturers left. Putting the horse before the cart, I thought, due to how slowly our rebuilding process had gone.

There were three large Japanese manufacturers, two Chinese manufacturers, and one Korean manufacturer. We had all heard the rumors about when the Mercedes plant was going to open back up in Germany, but the Europeans were having their own problems. Even if the plant opened up at the end of the year like they said, I sincerely doubted they’d export to us within five. The Japanese were dominating the industry, though they still built most of their cars here in America. Space had always been dear in Japan, but now it was starting to get a little ridiculous.

I first went over the Fuji area, looking at their wares. Fuji Heavy Industries owned a relatively niche car brand in the 20th and 21st centuries, but had really come into their own as a maker of performance and specialty vehicles. Toyota and Honda were the commuter makers, but Fuji made the out-there stuff. The first car I looked at was a concept model called the Optimus. There was a smiley model standing there in what looked like a vinyl bikini, telling the other convention goers about the car.

“The Optimus employs 15 different geometrically variable control surfaces to optimize the car’s handling at a whole range of speeds. The four hundred horsepower gas turbine engine can run on any of ten approved fuels, and ensures that you will be in full control on today’s min-speed interstates.” The car was a funky-looking thing, with several different appendages that, for the show at least, were flexing back and forth, shifting the car from a very aggressive box to an almost impossibly squat wedge. The rear was taken up by the turbine’s exhaust ports, as well as the usual traffic information display. The display was cycling through speeds and colors, big numbers showing the car’s intended action on a large matrix of lights mounted on the rear. Though I always found them tacky, TIDs were a necessity for any cars operating in mixed autonomous and personal traffic. Nowadays, that meant pretty much every street.

Fuji had their normal range of vehicles, ranging from powerful min-speed cruisers like the Optimus, down to Western cruisers like their XV. I actually found the dearth of commuter cars somewhat odd, this being a city, but I had no idea who the clientele was. Cruisers were likely to be the most popular, as more and more people were commuting between cities, or from suburbs more than 30 miles out. As fucked up as the thought was, it was nuclear war that brought us the minimum speed limit interstate, and that was ultimately a good thing for those who drove. Long, straight, grade-separated highways with maximum speed limits around 125 mph, and minimum limits starting at 80. They were utterly useless to city bums like me who took trains everywhere, but for those well-heeled enough to own a car, they were a godsend. Apparently, prior to their inception, there was traffic even on grade separated highways. I shuddered at the thought of such a speed differential…it probably killed a lot of people way back when.

Toyota was the next stop on the show floor. They and Honda had become largely commoditized, and were getting taken down by the lower-buck Koreans and Chinese. Toyota’s method of solving this was an innovative manufacturing solution that let everyone make their car to order, down to an incredible level of detail. Toyota’s cars were largely autonomous, though there were a few self-control models with added power and handling features. The display showed the components of the car, and how they could be customized. Around the central display were a group of six Toyotas, with a wide range of customizations, paintjobs and feature sets. These were once again being hawked by scantily clad Asian models.

It was at some point around here that I lost the plot. I had been taking notes about the Fujis, the Toyotas, the Hondas, the Doosans…but it didn’t seem to matter so much. Cars were cars at a certain point, right? No matter how much technology you packed into them, cars in this day and age had two characteristics: they got you from place to place, and they were ridiculously expensive. I thought about my closest friends, and couldn’t picture a car buyer among any of them. I guess that’s what I needed to do, then: I needed to talk to some customers.

As it turns out, no one wants to stop and talk to a journalist. After the fifth or sixth time being brushed off, I stopped trying to talk, and decided to listen. First I heard a father and his fourteen year old daughter, talking about buying her a car. When he had to pick up his phone, it became clear he was a real estate trader. Next, I saw a young couple milling about the Toyotas. The man was the owner of a high-touch design firm in the city. I saw a group of middle-aged men looking at the Fuji Optimus. Briefly listening to their conversation revealed that they were investment bankers. As a journalist, I could have been the poorest person in the whole damn convention center.

I knew exactly what I wanted to write, and quickly sent a brief outline to my editor. The message that came back was terse: “Just talk about the cars.” Of course. It was the fucking Lifestyle section. No one wanted a class shift editorial there, all the thinking would make their brains hurt. I continued doing my rounds, gathering the bullshit up for the Lifestyle version. Power, fuel economy, number of doors, type of fuel, all those nice numbers that people pretend to understand when they compare their purchases. Editor would eat it up. In line at one of the concessions stands for lunch, I shot my other outline over to a friend. He ran a blog that was apparently well-read on ShadowNet. ShadowNet was popular among Informals, that is, people who didn’t participate in the regulated economy. Those in said regulated economy tended to call it the black market, but that’s an ugly term, oversimplifying something much more complicated than black and white. I knew the way my piece would be presented, but it had to be better than being relegated to the Lifestyle section. Besides, I never really interacted with Informals…even if my politics didn’t get messed with, I bet it could stretch my paycheck. The message came back.

“Like the idea, like the content. Let’s meet tonight, discuss payment. You’ll need a ShadowNet username.”

I bought my hot dog, sent my clean article to the Tribune, and sat down. Unsurprisingly, the article was accepted with my byline after only about 20 minutes. I mean, it is the Lifestyle section, why waste more time? I knew I’d probably get fired after my shadow article ran, but I wasn’t so worried about that. Somehow, I hadn’t been thinking about money or my career direction with this move. It was impulsive, but I kind of liked it. I did one more run around the Korean and Chinese displays, and sent a draft to my ShadowNet contact. As I was leaving the building, I got another message.

“Looks good. We’ll discuss and polish tonight. BTW, your login: Bendy, password: ChangeMe”

I downloaded an onion router and fired up ShadowNet. My login worked, and a bunch of content had already been forwarded to me. It was overwhelming, most everything being organized in a combination of nested forums and subcategories. I made a mental note to explore it on the train ride home. In the station, I got another message from my Tribune editor.

“Nice work, Bendy. We’ll make sure this arrangement can continue to be beneficial for all parties.”

I froze. That account name had existed for less than an hour now. Apparently, journalism in Version City was more complicated than I had anticipated…even in the Lifestyle section.

Admittedly, my efforts to find a local group in Boston have been half-hearted at best, but I’m discouraged at least in part by the fact that I don’t want to play D&D. Everyone knows how to play D&D, and it seems that 95% of the people out there are doing just that. Well, I’m not interested. Second, I seem to have very high expectations of what I want out of a gaming group. My gaming group in college was a strong part of my social circle, and I’d like to continue that. So that means finding gamers who are chill too, and have more things to talk about than NPCs and THAC0 (I’m generalizing, I know, put down the pitchforks). And besides, part of me is still very uncertain about meeting random people from the internet, especially in such a diverse group as those in this hobby. You may balk, but we all know at least one guy…

More than just the fear of meeting geeks over the internet, there’s the very real fact that beyond my system demands and out-of-game social demands, my play style doesn’t seem that common. I like to play fast and loose with rules, but still like crunch. At the same time, however, I’m all about story, and don’t care enough about the intermediate details to endure or even tolerate the sort of combat sessions that most 4e enthusiasts and even a lot of GURPS players enjoy. Even a more generic effort to find gamers interested in modern/sci-fi settings has borne no fruit so far.

I may sound like I’m being picky. However, at this juncture, I have yet to actually meet any players to be picky about. My efforts have admittedly been feeble, but I would like to know if there is some sort of special sauce for meeting gamers who play like you do, and then are cool enough to have a beer with after. If there is, tell me, because I’m dying to know. In the meanwhile, though I’m sure my college buddies would love to hear how irreplaceable they are, we’re still limited to Skype.

The only thing that makes this really sad is that I have been more successful finding women to date than I have been finding local gamers to play with. What gives?

So I have this new story, which is actually somewhat woven in to this “Street Level” setting to some degree. Though I doubt any of the more blatantly Cyberpunk themes will come out in the story (or that it’ll be game canon at all), it does help establish what social issues are interesting to look at and poke at a little. I had a little back and forth this morning with my father about an article he sent me having to do with retail automation. My primary issue was that it had a lack of relevance, and not only because the author thought it would be cool to namedrop brand names for “street cred”. Ultimately, being able to try on clothes with your Kinect is not a social issue. Augmented Reality is not a social issue, barring privacy, and is not a science fiction issue, because at this stage in implementation it is neither science, nor fiction. It is engineering, and some company’s “near-term product adjacency”, consulting speak for being up on deck development-wise.

So what are issues I want to address? How about automation and employment? This was the conceit of an earlier writing project of mine, and it’s coming up again in my current one as well. I do believe that the nature of “jobs” is going to change fully and completely within the next 20 years or so, and this may be the speculative frontier that the internet was to the likes of William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Even if we solve the ominous economic issues with systematic (what we’d call today) underemployment, what about the social ones? Also, though a little more far out, what’s the next frontier in self-sustainability? And what’s going to happen as our government becomes more and more disconnected with how people actually live? These aren’t questions that can be answered so much as issues to explore.

These issues get addressed very differently in a game context and in a written one, mainly because of mechanical constraints of the genre. Unless your group is the philosophical type, getting into debates on the nature of “work” won’t translate well into a game system. On the other hand, sneaking into a government building and planting a bomb is probably a relatively ham-fisted plot device in all but the most pulpy of technothrillers. That’s not to say there aren’t exceptions on both sides, but where I operate, there are fewer overlaps.

So in the story, the conflict is around “work”, and around what the characters do instead of society-mandated work. I am making a thesis that humans tend toward creativity and productivity, but that’s mainly because I do. In the game, I see the primary conflicts being around wealth and lack thereof, and the interesting mechanisms of wealth transfer that come up in a society with ineffective rule of law. It may be logical to introduce an earlier discussed topic into the game, that of the “mercenary as effective agent”. Mercenaries are effective agents in particular circumstances, and designing a setting that conforms to those circumstances enables games that center around small groups of self-motivated agents (i.e. the vast majority of roleplaying games ever written) to flourish. So really, the restrictiveness is on the game side, because it needs to be designed in such a way as to make running around and doing things in the world fun.

So Street Level is predicated by an absence, scaling back, or severe corruption of the rule of law. The former United States is an example of scaling back, and the first game had the conflict between a re-emerging government and the entrenched elements of a lawless society as its backdrop. I definitely want to keep that in. Europe is a mix between absence of rule of law and not…the most cogent way to bring this about is to focus on the lawless areas, and their effect on the rest of the region. In my original setting, I had imagined two major lawless areas: the black market port of Tel Aviv, and a fictional city existent around the strait of Gibraltar. Those two can continue to be focal points, but instead of having Europe being a nuclear ruin, let’s instead have the EU pockmarked by both the physical and social scars of a ground war, along with the Czech mobsters pushing their wares throughout. This way, the Czechs can be disfranchised, caught between East and West when everything went down. And indeed, while they may not be the center of the legal world, a combination of factors could still see the renaissance of Prague as a major city.

Other geographic areas I wasn’t as clear on, but maybe it’d be better to leave them like that for now. Focus will serve the setting well in a quest for consistency and vision. Also, my admittedly Euro- and Ameri-centric historical context will need serious updates before I can make any even vaguely interesting intellectual leaps in Africa and Asia. South America could be easier, but I think I’d lean on one turn of phrase: Cyber-Brazil.

So at least the game setting has a platform. However, it may not be clear exactly where it’s going until I start writing a game. As for the story, I have no lack of material. I just need to get it written down.

Street Level is your archetypical day-after-tomorrow Cyberpunk setting, with an apocalyptic twist. I wrote my first notes on paper in 2005, and it became a game in 2006, my college GMing debut. It expanded from there, and included another game as well as a play-by-post that has gone down in history as simultaneously one of the best and worst gaming experiences I have ever run. The main problem is that all of these games took place in different, somewhat non-interacting parts of the world. The result is that tying them together has resulted in a mess.

So I want to pare it back. We can start with the things that are consistent, and that work. The design for the United States came first, and additions to it have come in a way that actually begins to build into something of a consistent vision. The West Coast is dominated by a strip of dense build-up along the coast, that continues out along several of the east-west interstates. The middle of the country is mostly corporate land being used for farming, with the desert Southwest mostly occupied by post-apocalyptic nomads who live along the remaining interstates. In the middle of the Southwest is Astropolis, a massive arcology and political black hole. In the midwest is Version City, a corruption of an old Clash song and a deluded Daley’s vision for Chicago Version 2. The East Coast was nuked and is highly unstable, though Pittsburgh acts as both a border outpost from the “deadland” as well as a microcosm of political instability for its own internal reasons.

Outside of the US, things were less well-designed. I had an idea for organized crime being run by a crazed Czech mafia, which is still possible. What seems less likely is that Europe would get so effectively leveled that the Czech Republic becomes the seat of power. Nova Praha may still be the capital city, but there would need to be a more nuanced story. Similarly, the one bit of history getting in the way of my Czech mobster story is the existence of Russian Oligarchs and the Russian Mob, so that needs to be explained somehow. The useful and dangerous device here is that nuclear war is a very easy way to explain upheaval.

In rebooting the setting, I have two goals: construct a more internally consistent plot base for the world, and a history into which the existing campaigns can be plugged in. For my idea of Version City that came just now, I’ve realized I can recycle my Chicago 2020 materials, as well as use some of that campaign to more firmly base the campaign’s tech level. Then, I can move onto the more plot-centric hubs, like the smuggling city of Tel Aviv. Suddenly, a reboot of Street Level seems within my grasp. I wonder if I can get some help from my players…

In real life, you need some sort of construct to help you meet potential partners, and that’s where this concept of “dating” comes in. Once you do start dating broadly, there are once again three stages: the platonic “get to know you better” stage at one end, the “time to define the relationship because you totally left your toothbrush at my place last time” stage at the other, and the “oh fuck, wait, what the hell am I supposed to do?” middle.

As a brief departure, now’s an admission that, despite seeming so damn sure of myself in many settings, I was quite the awkward kid pretty much until after high school. College was a serious fast-track for social skills, though as I’m now discovering out in the real world, key tidbits may have been left behind. Dating is definitely one of them. The process is intended so that you are comfortable enough with someone to make some sort of advance on them, and transition into a more committed stage where the two of you begin sharing more time and other things together. This does all mean that at some point, someone needs to make a move.

To a degree, I’m ranting. It doesn’t really matter, and though I could complain about the gender discrepancy about who’s taking the initiative, I won’t. It comes down to the fact that, I’ve found something I absolutely suck at. And like most things that are important in life (sadly, yes, this is important in life), getting better is hard.

In short, I am once again trapped at the “oh fuck, wait, what the hell am I supposed to do?” stage. I have occasionally moved into the “oh wait, that’s what I was supposed to do…dammit” stage as well. I will come back and give an update once I’ve learned some more social skills.

Politically, I fall more on the spectrum of those protesting than those dismissing it. That being said, the movement (like all political movements) is drastically simplifying what is at its heart a complicated problem. I feel that my understanding of the situation makes it disadvantageous for me to throw my weight into one corner or the other. Both sides are throwing around some extreme simplifications to support their views.

First: I support the use of protest as a form of speech. I think protest bureaucracy is a paper tiger, and that if local state or federal governments actually wanted to follow the First Amendment, it would require no more paperwork to have a protest than it would for a college fraternity to have a party. I believe that the behavior of the police in these protests has been mixed, but use of violence in this case is appalling. I’m also of the opinion (and witnessed this firsthand at the G20 demonstrations) that the police are the only cause of violence in protests. The entire black bloc strategy exists because police react predictably and awfully to demonstrations of this sort.

Second: I am undecided as to the efficacy of protests as a form of speech. These protests have dramatically shifted the timbre of political conversation in the country, which would lend to the argument that they are effective. On the other hand, they tend to be polarizing. The only thing that has lent this group its efficacy is its broad political message, which will be weak when it comes to implementing anything.

Third: The reaction of those against the protesters from what I’ve seen has been incredibly narrow-minded. It pains me to say this, but people in upper income brackets (which at this point includes myself, in the spirit of full disclosure) really have no idea how the majority of people in this country live. 10% unemployment is understandable as a concept, but even I have to admit I strain to fully envision its impact, as I’m surrounded with Ivy League grads and holders of advanced degrees. People from what is arguably my world don’t understand that the concept of just working hard and pulling yourself up by your bootstraps only works if you either already have the cachet of your parents, or if you are incredibly, unbelievably lucky. Upward mobility in this country is an absolute joke at our current point in history.

Fourth: There are some really dumb people on the protest side, too. I’ve been exposed to a lot of this on Facebook, and it especially pains me when I see socialist rhetoric bandied about. You know what Marx would have wanted? He would have wanted everyone to have a personal computer, because for the vast majority of us, that’s the only “means of production” we’ll need. Marx lived in a world where capital was a big, hefty, inaccessible thing, the owners were not the operators, and vice versa. Guess what? It’s becoming less and less true. Socialism in the theoretical/philosophical sense is an outdated construct, because the definitions in which the construct was created don’t hold true. So when I see students talking about general strikes and worker’s groups, I cringe. It’s outmoded, and it will not fix our problems.

So I basically just lambasted everyone, and indeed I do hold most political conversations in this country in very low esteem, because politics seems to give people who don’t know what they’re talking about to act like they do. And the sooner everyone stops acting like they know what will work, the sooner we might be able to get something done.

Of course, this is all a useless exercise if I don’t have any thoughts on the broader issue, right? Possibly, but I’ll take the opportunity regardless.

There are a few external factors making our current recession worse. One is volatility in oil, and another is a permanent sea change in worker productivity. The first is being dealt with by market forces on the whole, as alternative fuels and forms of energy are being found and exploited. I do not believe changing US drilling regulation will help significantly, as we’re so far over the Hubbert peak that no amount of ANWR drilling will cause a big enough bump. The second is not something that our economy is equipped to deal with, for reasons that tie back to the first. People complain about jobs being shifted overseas, but this is a macroeconomic inevitability. As the standard of living goes up in a region, labor becomes more expensive. Eventually the increased labor costs make offshoring the work to a cheaper region more attractive. Then, their economy grows, and their standard of living goes up. Eventually, the global income disparity will level off as unskilled labor is shifted further to the frontiers of cheap. This sounds like an upward price spiral, but the thing is, we have robots and the internet. More and more jobs are becoming automated in manufacturing and services. It’s a bad time to be a car welder when we have 7-DOF robot arms, but it’s a great time to be a mechanical engineer who designs said robot arms. It’s a bad time to be an accountant when there’s TurboTax, but it’s a great time to be a programmer. Of course these are simplifications, but I digress.

As more becomes automated, lower-skilled jobs disappear. I repeat, disappear. They are not coming back. While I’m not saying that our current unemployment level is structurally endemic to an automated economy, I do believe it will be eventually. The only way to provide higher employment then is to grow the economy enough so that everyone can have a job that’s higher-skilled on average. This is where the internal problem comes in.

The US education system is utter shit. Even if we had the energy intensity necessary to make an economy with twice as many programmers and engineers and half as many welders, baristas and accountants,  we couldn’t fill those high-skilled jobs because the majority of our citizens couldn’t do them. The reason the we’re going to have structural unemployment is that in the areas of our economy that may actually grow, no one will be able to do the work. Our primary education system is a joke, with kids reaching college unable to do basic math. Our secondary system is almost as bad, so humanities degrees that already weren’t skill-oriented now mean even less because the few critical thinking skills we thought they could stand for aren’t taught effectively. That leaves the small chunk of kids getting engineering, business, and other professional degrees as the only ones who have purchased an education that will make them employable. And engineering is really the only Bachelor’s degree in the lot, save for a small number of very prestigious schools, who make their students more employable on brand alone.

Right now, there are a lot of issues with the financial system that need to be fixed. Regulation is a mess in many areas of the economy, but thanks to “Structurally Important Financial Institution” regulations, it’s clear where things are most convoluted. I have my own opinions on what needs to be done, but my understanding of financial regulations is fairly introductory, so going into them won’t help. What I do know is that within the current conversations, people with my level of understanding of the situation (or less even) will jump behind demagogue 1 or demagogue 2 depending on what fits their fairly narrow worldview. It’s counterproductive, and it means that as far as I see it, the conversation that will begin to hash out how to shift our economy towards a more certain future will not happen.

So that’s my opinion. The intricacies of the situation are complicated, people are saying a lot of dumb shit, and I spend more time shaking my head at the dialogue than worrying about which side I’d fall on.

And I have plenty of ideas where to go. I’m reading up on all sorts of agricultural methods, and pondering how long the food supply of a moderately large city would last, faced with a population of around 1/50th its original capacity…really depends on how hurriedly everyone left, and what sort of apocalypse it was. Did I mention this is a post-apocalyptic story? Yeah. I’m thinking around it, and I think there’s some plausibility, though I am looking for exceptionally hardy crops to use. Barley fits that, though more will need to be considered. It is a potential conflict if the leader is particularly forward thinking, and there’s plenty of supplies at the moment. Of course, what I’m going to have to hit on relatively early is the trauma aspect, which means I need to go ahead and decide what this apocalypse is. All I know is that the story takes place in Pittsburgh, the region is isolated due to underground coal fires, and a lot of people are either gone or dead. And nukes are boring, so it’s not nukes. Hmmm.

I had a random idea for a short story, entitled “Hipsters with Guns”. I don’t know anything about Hipster fashion, or guns for that matter, but the idea of twentysomethings in ironic clothing armed to the teeth was amusing. I pushed a bit with the visuals, and ended up concluding that a world with armed hipsters was probably post-apocalyptic. A few more weird mental turns, and all of a sudden, I’m about to start writing the story of a brewer in post-apocalyptic Pittsburgh. No, I don’t get it either. But I think it’s a cool idea. Let’s see where it goes.

The ultimate problem is that the desire to write fiction comes from the same set of motivations that lead us to read it. We know what’s good, and what we like. However, we not only can’t produce that, we won’t produce it until we’ve produced a volume of rough work (read: utter shit) to mine through and refine. It’s a lot more work than reading a good book…it’s even more work than reading a bad one.

I need to remember what it was like the first time I did this. I had an idea for a first scene, which sprang forward fully formed onto the page without much advance thought. The second one was awkward, and didn’t really fit so well. But ultimately, I pressed on beyond, and stringing together a narrative became easier the more and more scenes I had to build off. Somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 words it went from being a slog to being a creative process…one that was addictive, even if it took energy.

I hate not being there. Establishing a story takes so much work, and I’m not sitting unemployed in a frat house anymore. Getting the energy together to actually pull this together has been immensely difficult.

Life is mirroring this…I know I’m impatient, but being in a holding pattern sucks. And unlike my writing stall, I’m not entirely sure what I need to do to get out of it…or even if I need to get out of it. This always happens…there’s a depressive wave, and then it goes away after a few days, and I’m happy again. And in the past, solving whatever I was sure was the cause of my funk never helped…either it did nothing, or something else entirely ended up being the solution.

And I have total control over my writing situation…as for everything else, I guess I’m new at this. No surprises there.