One of the things I discovered by relentlessly playing outer-space D & D is the unique setting for fiction presented by the basic interstellar starship. Here you have a cookie-cutter setting with a basic set of requirements that can’t really change. It takes the crew as the primary cast from one possible site of adventure to the next, offering a complete barrier to carry-over conflicts and interactions, and also providing a setting for forced internal conflicts that can have profound story consequences.
Starships are an enclosed environment where you cannot simply run away from your troubles. Especially when you are alone aboard with a hungry flesh-eating alien and surrounded by empty, airless, interstellar space. You have to confront both inner and outer demons face to face. There is no mileage available to put between you.
It has a certain set of requirements for who is on board and available to be hero friends or friends turned adversary. There must be a pilot. Somebody has to know how to drive the thing. There must be an engineer. Somebody needs to be able to fix things and keep things running. Somebody needs to know how to manage food and drinking water and the general odor of this enclosed place. That last is a position that is too often overlooked in movies and science fiction novels. Scotty cannot be expected to clean the toilets on the Enterprise. And somebody needs to be in charge.
Express boats in Traveller are one-man-crew affairs, basically in the service of carrying information between the stars, an interstellar postal truck of sorts. These can be the setting of man-versus-himself sorts of conflicts. If starships are in our future, and it is obvious with global warming we don’t have a future without them, then we are going to have to confront the concept of living with boredom. Boredom can become mindless or it can become raving insanity. This is why, in my Traveller games the X-boats all carried the current favorites among episodes of I Love Lucy reruns. Aliens have been watching that stuff for years now in real life. It will one day be a galaxy favorite.
Starships are also filled with a fascinating complexity. There will be times when there is no gravity so up and down can become irrelevant. If the heat goes out, deep space can freeze you solid. If you go outside, you need a space suit so you don’t blow up from your own internal pressure suddenly released in a pressure-free environment. And you have no air outside the spaceship. James Holden’s favorite coffee maker could malfunction and foul the air with poisons from burned plastic, causing a serious problem-solving situation that could result in you needing to get really, really, a thousand times really good at holding your breath.
And, of course, there is the obvious conflict of meeting another starship with lasers and meson cannons and nuclear missiles all controlled by a captain who is a homicidal maniac and knows your sister and really, really wants to get revenge on her whole family for what she said about his zilfinbarger back on Metebelius III.
So, as a role-playing gamer, and as a creator of science fiction, I really, really love starships. I will probably talk about them a time or too more until it gets really, really annoying… almost as annoying as the whole “really, really” thing.
Catch a Falling Star 
What to Write About Today…
I have to admit it. I am pretty goofy.
Probably not Harpo Marx levels of goofy.
But close.
So, I have gone back and looked at what I have been writing about during the course of my relentless three-year write-a-thon. I am artist enough to recognize patterns. At least, I can recognize the big and obvious ones. Okay, I admit it, sometimes, while thinking, I am really only pretending to think. That makes me kinda like Harpo, doesn’t it?
I reread one of what I think are my best works just now because somebody viewed it online for some reason I will never know. The essay is Toccata and Fugue in D Minor written on March 23rd of 2017. In that essay, I compare a super-condensed version of my life story to Johan Sebastian Bach’s masterwork, one that is represented in Disney’s masterwork Fantasia. My thesis was basically, “Living life is like a piece of classical music.” Yep, total nonsense.
But that is not nearly as nonsensical as the nonsense I wrote in The Dancing Poultry Conspiracy Theory. That one should make me ashamed of myself. Not to mention the danger inherent in revealing a thing that governments of the world have worked so hard to suppress the knowledge of. There is something seriously wrong with any government who would let wackos use the mysterious martial art of Ententanz Fu on anybody.
I also fairly recently wrote a poem about writing poetry. It was called The Secret Behind Poetry and in the course of the poem I carefully reason out that I have no idea at all what the secret behind poetry is.
I am epically good at writing bad poetry. That is why I was chosen to host the Interstellar Bad Poetry Challenge which I did badly, getting no entries at all from Planet Earth, and being forced to settle on the submissions I posted in The Ixcanixian Bad Poetry Challenge
As I have not yet been vaporized by Ixcanixian skortch rays, then I guess I did the challenge badly enough to satisfy the intergalactic poetry lords of Ixcanix. I offer that here as proof that I am really pretty bad at writing poetry.
I am also pretty good at taking an idea and turning it upside down to get a good look at its bottom and to flatten its top a bit. I did that in an essay called Pessimism as a Super Power.
I suppose it is really about losing a writing contest, but the thesis is valid. One can save themselves a lot of grief by always expecting the worst outcome to happen. You are never disappointed according to what you expected unless it is turned into a pleasant surprise. I also admit that is really a Benjamin Franklin idea, but if you turn Ben upside down, he’s already a bit flat on the top of his bald head and he has an interesting pantalooned bottom. (That is supposed to be a joke, so try not to be too disgusted with me.)
So, what will I actually write about today? What is the pattern I am supposed to follow? Well, it seems pretty obvious, I am basically unpredictable. So maybe today I will just recycle some old posts and pretend I have been thinking.
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Filed under commentary, conspiracy theory, goofiness, goofy thoughts, humor, poetry
Tagged as Metacognition