Adventures du jour!
Yoga: the knot at the end of my spine and most of the soreness in my spine joints (?) was gone this morning, so I rolled out my lower spine out with the foam roller. Sometimes I feel like I should buy one of those endless cookie cutter things and give myself a temporary tattoo that way. Letting go of the tension along the fronts of my hips and thighs was difficult, but today I felt lighter. I put on some dancing music on the speaker in the kitchen and danced for a while, and it didn’t feel like my feet were nailed to the floor for once. (Although I can’t say it was graceful.)
Walkies: went a different direction today, ended up at a park I wasn’t familiar with. It was very swampy. The entire time I was there, I was thinking, “I’m going to regret this later.” A lot of mosquitoes. I’m also fairly certain that someone’s going to ask me on one or two of the pics if I got eaten by alligators. Do y’all ask people if they got bitten by a rattlesnake every time they go to the Great Plains states? Or coyotes in Colorado? No? If you’re gonna make fun of Florida, make fun of DeSantis, not the poor little alligator babies.
Midjourney/AI: I’m working on a cute project for someone, but either the AI is being recalcitrant, I’m fighting hundreds of years of bias, or both. I’m going to beat my head against the problem for a while before I talk about it further.
I’m still pissed off about the AI text engines I’ve been messing around with. I *know* the AIs are more sophisticated than the ones I get to play with. Example: I asked a bunch of them for a “fairy tale about family.” Then I added different countries to it, so “French fairy tale about family” or “Japanese fairy tale about family.” Each of those three cases, I would get nearly identical versions (like, one or two words different) of the same story, which was almost verbatim across the different tools I tried. I probably should have saved the results but didn’t; I was too annoyed at the time. Even when messing with the settings that should have prevented me from getting repeat results–I got the same results. GRAH.
Today I ate lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant, Ximena’s, that had lengue tacos. BLISS. I had lengue, al pastor, and beef with nopales/cacti. There are tacos that taste good and tacos that feed your soul the same way chicken noodle soup does; there’s a bone-deep “yes” to them. These were the latter. No horchata, but I did get a passionfruit Jarritos, so all was forgiven. (I haven’t had that flavor before!)
Story stuff. I went through the dream scene again. It’s a ticklish scene, because not everyone has experience with tabletop games, so I needed to color in enough details to make it make sense, without getting annoying. Plus there are surreal elements, and they’re fighting about shit nobody should have to fight over, and I need to weave in that newer character, plus raise some ideas out of Mr. Assassin’s subconscious so he has to cope with them in the waking world. He needs to question his past decisions in a way that lets him move forward, not stay stuck; I also need him to start figuring out that big plot twist that’s coming up, but not too soon.
Fortunately I’m not in charge of all that; I just work here. My subconscious has its work cut out for it. I’m just reading and going, Yes, wait what please expand, no you said that already–stuff like that.
One paragraph just particularly pleases me, so I’ll paste it here:
They were eating pizza in one of the booths at a New-York style pizza joint, Lorenzo’s. It was a place with red checked tablecloths, wood-paneled walls, and chili-pepper flakes and powdered parmesan in fat glass shakers at every table. Even in dreams Dan could remember what the room smelled like.
–I wrote another short scene after the dream scene that’s meant to get readers caught up again on the general gist of the story. If the dream scene is about the past, this next mini-scene is about making sure the reader knows what to expect for the next bit by having the characters discuss what’s about to happen. Here’s one line that’s an example:
“Costas tells me that you’re coming to supper with us tomorrow? At the park?”
–I need to brainstorm something for the next scene, so I’m gonna run through it once here in my “I know things” voice so I can flow it more easily into the story.
Subtext!
No matter how complex subtext looks in practice, it has very basic main elements: distance, safety, and identity.
In any given social situation, whether that’s in person or online, the subtext is about very simple things: “come closer,” “go further away,” “I feel safe,” “I don’t feel safe,” “this is me,” and “this is not me.” If you’re conscious about using subtext, there can be other elements, too, like “stop” and “pause/wait.”
For example, you might see two people get into an argument about a movie online and not know what the big deal is: either like the movie or don’t and stop arguing already!
If you look at everything that’s being overtly communicated, however, what you’ll see are words that, if they were taken out of context, would communicate “this is me, this is my area of expertise, I am the authority” or “this is not me, I disagree with your opinion and it makes me feel unsafe.”
Most of the time, most people aren’t aware that they’re communicating subtext, either picking it up or putting it out. In person, subtext comes out as really simple stuff that might have nothing to do with words: facing someone, looking at them, mirroring their gestures (“come closer, I feel safe”), or turning away, lowering their voice in a loud room, making an X across their body with their hands (“go further away, I feel unsafe”).
People (like me!) who talk with their hands are defining their space, the space in which they are allowed to be as well as the space in which they feel competent to communicate (“this is me”). We’ll also use gesture to symbolize concepts (I’ll make a repeating circular motion to mean, “et cetera, it goes on in the same way,” for example). That stuff may not be subtext as such (it’s too complex!), but using or not using it is; on some level, I have to “feel safe” around someone to do it, even if I don’t want them to “come closer.”
Maybe the easiest way to explain “Come closer/go further away” subtext is to think in terms of pushing or pulling. Mammals understand “come closer/go further away” very well. Growling, snarling, barking, ears back, hackles up, actions that don’t mirror the other person’s, etc., all mean “go further away.” A hand held up in a *stop* gesture means “go further away” most of the time. Misalignment in volume, tone, pitch, and rhythms of words are also “go further away” signals. Alignment in movement, tone, pitch, language, repetitive nodding that’s not attached to specific questions, and particularly “come here” gestures, are all good “come here” cues.
When you see people arguing about some dumbass thing online, they’re trying to find out whether they align or not–and discovering that they don’t. So there could be some hurt feelings there, when “come here?” cues are responded to with “go further away” cues.
I know I’ve gotten in arguments online that were other people going, “If you don’t align with me, you’re worthless to me, but I don’t think you’re not worthless, so that means you think I’m worthless.” I have responded to their over-familiar “come here” cues with “go further away” cues, for sure.
Similarly, “Safe/not safe” cues are about relaxation vs. tension, expansion vs. contraction, movement/looseness vs. stillness/frozen. Safe/not safe is made more complex by the fact that some people move toward unsafe things, but universally. A little bit of danger is good for some people; it’s why go new places on vacation, among other things.
A person might raise their voice because they feel safe/expansive, or they might raise their voice because they want someone to go further away. In the case of conflicting signals, I’d check for patterns of tension or relaxation. If someone is behaving childishly, that’s usually a “safe” indicator–in an extreme situation, it means, “please help me feel safe again.” If someone tries to out-adult you, it means, “unsafe” and often “you make me feel like I’m not the me I thought I was–unsafe unsafe unsafe.”
“Me/not me” signals are primal yet difficult to interpret. We are all constantly putting those signals out without thinking, and it’s really hard to talk about them, because we are sooooo not aware of them. They are about the way someone does something, and not about the thing itself. I go by a rule of three here. If someone mentions something about themselves three times, I mentally file it in the “this is me” column for that person. If I see them wear the same style of clothing three times in quick succession, same thing. If they refuse something three times, “this is not me.” If I heard someone code-switch or change tone depending on the group of people they’re with, I’ll listen for which set of people evoke the most relaxed, expansive language and behavior.
…
I’ll have to think about all that. It seems pretty accurate, as far as it goes. The characters in the WIP need to have an easy, clear communication system so they can lie to each other in public without warning and not freak each other out.
I’m thinking:
–“come closer” – scratch on your own leg, like when you’re asking a cat if it wants pets.
–“go further away” – hand pushing on something, with leaning away for emphasis.
–“pause/wait” – flat palm or thumb, exposed and not pushing on anything.
–“resume” – closed hand, relaxed, knocking (sign language “yes”) for emphasis.
–“safe” – tapping fingers.
–“unsafe” – pinch own fingers together (sign language “no”)
I don’t think I need a sign for “I’m lying/I’m telling the truth,” and the lies they might need to tell are going to be a mix, anyway. So one person can go “tap tap tap?” on a table during an argument that looks like it’s about to get physically violent and the other can go “tap tap tap” and it’s fine, no hurt feelings no matter what other signals they’re giving off.
I might simplify it even further. I’ll probably just write it all into the scene and just remove anything they don’t end up using.