Avatar of tanderbolt
  • Last Seen: 12 days ago
  • Joined: 10 yrs ago
  • Posts: 321 (0.09 / day)
  • VMs: 3
  • Username history
    1. tanderbolt 10 yrs ago

Status

Recent Statuses

6 yrs ago
Current Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih
7 yrs ago
Fab, when it comes to portraying a character believably, you might be the best this site has.
3 likes
7 yrs ago
There's no need to build a labyrinth when the entire universe is one.
1 like

Bio

Well, this was my account. Had my fair share of memories of the guild, both good and bad. I hope you all have a great time here and keep getting better at RPing and writing. Myself, I've fallen out of love with roleplaying in general, and this site in particular. There's still good people here, but I've learned enough and seen enough that I'm not confident this site is going good places. Tanderbolt's moving on. Where am I going after this? I don't know, but to quote Raymond Carver, "I'm always learning something. Learning never ends.". Good night, ladies, good night

Most Recent Posts


Application for Writer on production of {WORKING TITLE} Vacant Worlds


P R O F E S S I O N A L S U M M A R Y


Noor grew up in a middle class household in Windsor, Ontario, the second oldest of five. She read frequently, a habit which her parents encouraged, particularly her father, a paralegal who had at one point aspired to a literary career. She went to University of Michigan where she lived a reclusive life, having only a few loyal friends and devoting herself to her studies. She went on to graduate school where she wrote a few papers she cared about, a lot she didn’t, and taught bored undergraduates who saw English electives as more of an impediment to drinking than an actual opportunity to learn. In between she found the time to read a considerable amount and write a little for pleasure, keeping just to her close circle of friends and penpals.
With careful study and the advice of those more experienced, she refined her eclectic style and started to get her stories published in a few minor journals. They attracted notice for their metafictional elements and philosophical themes, but she remained relatively obscure.

Her first real break came when she wrote her first novel, Psychic Distance, a psychological novel with elements of magic realism that focuses on a man in country in the midst of a revolution. It received good reviews and minor commercial success, enough to increase interest in the rest of her work. She published a few short stories for several years while she worked on the book that would become her best known work. The Folding of Space was somewhere between a collection of related stories and full-fledged novel, but either way it was greatly praised and won awards. Despite being experimental, it was successful enough for Noor to concentrate on her writing career full-time and marked her as one of the newest members of the literary elite. She’s currently planning her next large-scale work and exploring opportunities.


A R E A S O F E X P E R T I S E


  • Literature and Literary Criticism, which is quite a broad category. In the interest of providing some more distinctive details, below are some of her favorite genres:
  • Patristic writings
  • Maqama
  • Medieval Morality Plays
  • Sturm und Drang
  • Speculum Literature
  • Science Fiction, but only in a narrow period roughly congruent with the 1960s
  • 20th century Latin American fiction


W O R K E X P E R I E N C E


Campus Bookstore, Off campus bookstore, Teaching Assistant, Adjunct Professor, during which she found time to author two novels, Psychic Distance and The Folding of Space, the latter of which won the Man Booker Prize, in addition to numerous short story collections, literary essays and research papers.


E D U C A T I O N


PhD from University of Michigan in English Language and Literature, Bachelors double majoring in English and Math also from University of Michigan


P E R S O N A L I N F O R M A T I O N




Name
Noor Jurji Bahadur Al-Madina


Age
42


Gender and Preferred Pronouns
Female, she, her


Why You Want to Work With Emerald Studios
Film is a unique medium. It has the immediacy of like other visual arts, gripping the senses at base level but also offers a totally encompassing experience that more ancient forms cannot provide. The grandeur of the film industry and it’s epic ambitions allow it to explore territory that other visual media struggle with, and the process is inherently collaborative and the sum of many visions to make a whole product. For someone whose own work has acquired a reputation of being unfilmable, a sentiment I agree with at present, joining this project would be a way to experience this world in a way I could not otherwise. It is also true that international tax law is quite complex, and I would like some manner of financial security after I complete the purchase of my new home in Niagara


fav film = Metropolis (the Fritz Lang one)
I realize it's too late join this (and that's probably for the best because I don't have a PhD. in Nasuverse), but I'll have fun reading along and seeing what happens.
Made a post that happens in the bar, because there is a lot of people in the studio at the moment already.
On the way to the Boneyard, James was trying his best to be objective about the Bernard Zephyr album he was listening to over his car speakers. They were never his style of music, but if Mitch was kind enough to offer him a contract, the least James could do was try to appreciate his music. Some of the stuff on the third album resonated with him (though he couldn’t get into the singer-songwritery vibe of it overall), but after finishing that while working he moved onto their second album and it became more of a slog. There was definitely talent, but it came with layers of production and focus-testing, the kind of stuff that reminded him why he hadn’t paid attention to pop charts in years.

It was said that everyone who knew anything about the Philadelphia scene knew about the Boneyard, and everyone who knew about the Boneyard knew about its money problems. Even though James wasn’t a regular of the place, he was happy to see that Mitch was helping preserve a local institution and keep it operating. Navigating the neighborhood was rough, but once you knew the place you knew it was worth the effort. James found a parking space nearby, noticing that the place was busier than you’d expect at this early of an hour, judging by the cars parked around.

During his brief correspondence with Mitch, James forgot to get the details of exactly what to do when he showed up. He thought while he got his bags out of the trunk of his car, and dragged them along as he walked up to the main door to the bar, not knowing how to get to the recording studio. A sign hung on the door, saying “Be back soon.” The door was unlocked, so James went in and found a seat among the empty tables. The place was quiet, but he thought he heard the faint sounds of a piano coming from somewhere, possibly in the basement underneath.

James liked to work at odd hours and for little periods of time throughout the day, creativity did not operate on a fixed schedule. He pulled out his laptop from his bag and wired up the audio interface, getting his rack mounted Modal and a Korg MS-20 set up to work with it. With everything set up he got to work on an old problem, trying to write a part that used all eight voices of the Modal to create a complex melodic line. It was slow going, but he chipped away at it, headphone on one ear listening to his work while hands frantically moved between the keyboard, the trackpad, and the nobs to tweak the endless parameters in pursuit of perfection. He was lost in his work, almost forgetting the fact that other people were coming here too.
Here's my guy, here to bring the weird music.
I'm up for this.
I see why GMs opt for detailed character sheets, but I think that there are possibilities for refinement. An elaborate CS will cut down the amount of really rough roleplayers (and maybe curtail powergaming if that’s a big concern for the RP), yet I think most of the details that are provided aren’t really useful in the context of the RP. Appearance descriptions have always been something I have difficulty with, especially because the level of detail usually expected in them isn’t something you’d see in the literary world outside of 19th century novels (and those are great but pretty far removed from what’s popular today). The personality sections are even more troublesome. I respect Lady A, but I think that simply listing positive and negative traits is one of the worst ways to describe who a character is, and outside of RPing the only place you’ll find it is when someone is interviewing with a particularly uncreative hiring manager. It doesn’t get into the real interesting parts, the way a character thinks and decides, what drives their emotions and goals in life.

EM Forster has some good insights in his book, “The Art of the Novel”, and I was surprised at how it made me think about roleplaying when I was reading it. There’s a part where he talks about flat characters “In their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality: when there is more than one factor in them, we get the beginning of the curve towards the round. The real flat character can be expressed in a single sentence” Now, in roleplaying most people would like their characters to be round, when the whole point is playing your character we view it as a failure if we don’t have all the details on hand and ready to flow. Yet, Forster offers us insight into why flat character exist “One great advantage of flat characters is that they are easily recognized whenever they come in – recognized by the reader’s emotional eye” When you can tell what a character should be, when you can tell where a writer is going or what they will do when confronted with a new scenario, it makes it easier to react to them, easier to think up an interesting turn of events because the players involved are so simple.

I’m not saying that we should aim to make flat characters, that is not good roleplaying. What I like is interesting characters, and a flat character can be more interesting than a rounded one. Personally, I prefer to start with a flat, simple idea and then build off of it, rather than starting from a complex whole. I’ve tried it the other way and I end with an amalgamation of quirks and personality but no direction, no clear psychology for me to roleplay. Maybe other people know some tricks I don’t when it comes to this method. Going back to character sheets, I wish I saw more character sheets that gave me an idea of what Forster called their “inner life”, what he talked about when he said “ We know each other approximately, by external signs, and these serve well enough as a basis for society and even for intimacy. But people in a novel can be understood completely by the reader, if the novelist wishes.”

This has gotten off topic, and I’m afraid I can’t offer any clear solutions. I’ve seen some CSes include something like “Character Concept”, or maybe a field like Worldview would help, but I am always in search of something that will show me not just what a character is but why they are that way, their thoughts and the creative vision behind them. I fully recognize that some people want to keep those private. Perhaps it’s the mark of a true roleplayer to make a good story without any of this, in life we make do without insight into any of this. I just wonder if there’s a way we can start working more like coauthors of a story instead of passing strangers.
Eh, why not?
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