I recently did my first bit of vocational voice acting on The DeMondego Diamond, a tragedy-romance murder mystery audiodrama- the format is technically referred to as a 'dramatized full-cast audiobook', involving an ensemble cast, narration, music, and sound effects.
I played one of the main characters, Beau DeMondego, a playboy scion of a shattered commercial family. He is part of a tight-knit (perhaps ingrown) group of friends attending law school at a fictional hybrid of Duke and UNC Chapel Hill when chaos and death arise from a tide of pre-graduation debauchery.
The show's been getting great reviews, as you can see on Goodreads and Apple Podcasts. Working with the other voice actors gave me a greater appreciation for the skill of voice actors in general than I'd ever had before; most were either established professionals or pursuing acting as a vocation, and their versatility was astounding. I kept my arms and legs inside the vehicle and just method acted, i.e. played from my own experiences rather than trying to embody a wholly separate character as an artifice. The latter is true skill and seeing voice actors who can really step outside themselves and embody someone unrecognizable from their regular sound and affect is remarkable. When they do 7 or 8 characters in a row as a warm-up, it's like seeing somebody rapidly scroll through a character-select screen.
The show's production values are astonishing, even moreso because the audio engineering, editing, and take selection were a one-woman show, all performed by the writer and director, Greta Craig. The show sounds better and is more aesthetically pleasing than most major audiodramas (or any kind of production) that you'll hear on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That's the power of a creator's interest in a project's outcome, where personal attention to detail can outproduce professional subcontracting. I look forward to sharing another project that I collaborated with Greta Craig on, an upcoming fantasy audiodrama written and directed by myself.
Then came the great bloody desert where smiled the quilted colors of Setroxia’s opium fields, mountains, and beyond a wetter clime still arid to one emerging from the balmy bay of Megakratheon’s power. There in the plain on short grass and starlight was the City of Leagues, a yellowlit sprawl kneeling blackly manifold like a geometric arthropod whose legs were forges and foundries.
Black fighters bearing the long red triangle across their wings escorted the petitioners, their white biplane like an angel, dove, or swan fallen into the World Machine and silently sorted to its final position by unspeaking psychopomp autonoma.
They flew low over the city. It was a place of vents, tunnels, great blocks like obsidian temples, everywhere sheds and hammocks for sleeping; vast hammocks between buildings, families looking up from where they gathered on blankets, fires burning inside sheet metal shelters and foundries which knew no flicker. No towers; a great sprawl, utility upon utility.
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Menu of the 22nd Annual Political Officer's Conference Capstone Dinner
With explanations for esteemed labor delegates and intelligence assets
Apéritif
Cookies and Cream
freeze dried coffee in heavy cream
This is a “get up and go” food; one can heat the cream before adding the freeze dried coffee and then re-chill, but this would reduce the nostalgia many Leaguesmen feel for the texture when semi-mixed.
Appetizers
-choice of-
▢Earthsavor
peanut butter pumpkin purée
Circle preferred additions:
Cinnamon Allspice
Nutmeg
Ginger
Cloves
A Leagues seasonal favorite. The primary ingredients are grown here using rotary trough gardens which are hauled through the sun each day via a chainworks before resting in subarchitectural chambers.
As you can see, the Southern Vice Isles campaign has delivered a bounteous crop of spices to our diligent militia unions and beloved tribal allies, which are now available to grace your table tonight.
▢Interfluvial Purée
whipped salmon and potato
Veterans of the Minervan Cascades pacification developed a taste for these abundant local ingredients, mashing them together in leafy pits to be served communally. Tonight's rendition can be tamed with chive sauce available at your table.
▢Broiler stew
Mains
Free flow begins: Glasses of fuming sorghum moonshine, steins of manioc beer like liquory buttermilk.
-choice of-
▢Savannah Pudding
white rice blended with mayonnaise and soy sauce
“Semi-abandoned” vinegared fish sauce is sometimes used in lieu of soy sauce, in which case the mayo proportion is reduced; this is referred to as Island Pudding.
▢Butter Thighs
chicken thighs fried in butter served with butter
One kilogram of chicken thighs fried without breading in butter until crispy, on the very cusp of being burnt. Served with a fist-size piece of sun-softened sea salt-flaked butter seized in gigantic casks from the Juncaceaen cattle barons. Sometimes served drenched in mashed green chili and vinegar.
Dessert
The Four Corners
durian ice cheese toast
Prepared by those deployed to tropical theaters, with pasteurized processed cheese food on toast being commonly enjoyed in the City of Leagues. Slices of durian and cheese are chilled in a medic’s ice chest and served on hot toast, optionally buttered; those who want to really taste something will leave the sandwich in the sun for a few minutes before getting down to business.
Digestif
Blood Mana
water with sodium chloride, potassium chloride, trisodium hydrate (citrate), and glucose anhydrous
This wonderful mixture is the key to rehydration. It is prepared for those who are recovering from survival and evasion or POW status, and is distributed to communities suffering from diseases like cholera and dysentery.
Humanitarian cargoes are sometimes delivered by our elite soldiers, such as the Committee for Freedom, who have learned to use Blood Mana to recover from their benders and immediately get back into the action.
What you will have tonight is Blood Mana's Hospital Formula. A "Field Formula" can be prepared from water, honey, ashes, and salt, with potato skins and medicinal bark added if available once the water is boiling.
Note that despite rumors seeded by labor spies, the name has nothing to do with the Blood Bank Entity, which was quickly suppressed by the heroic sacrifice of the City of Grandoval.
___
Merlane lay in the safehouse for days, numb, listless. Gradually he regained his hearing underlaid with a constant whine. His balance returned with fits of wooziness. The explosion had blown a small hole in the ceiling of the workshop, the floor of the sleeping area, and this became a tiny volcano of horrific scent after a few days. Merlane grew sick again and left, walking to the freight logistics district, bearded, matted, filthy, bent, and wild-eyed. He lay in a dark corner, ignored, until a truck bound somewhere abroad had been loaded with sacks of macadamia nuts. He clambered into it, ensconced himself, and waited, perfectly still. The truck rattled to life and headed for the city gates.
…
A mailplane approached the City of Leagues by night; missives, records, communiques, pleas of requisition. Sacks of paper hung from the wings; Merlane huddled in the rear seat. The city was like the highest tip of an ecumenopolis rising through the wastes, dark sere streak of metal, a budding x uneven with many protrusions, hooks and sawteeth imperfectly imitating the greater examples of yore. Raised spines budding, conning towers of the sprawl, grain silos and water basins and tenements unyielding concrete scaffolded in dark metal. A thousand amber windows and blood-eyed mills forging the city’s skeleton night after night.
They touched down on a dusty street on the city’s outskirts. Boys in leather trenchcoats watched them from walls and doorways. A donkey laden with steel water drums tied to it by rope nets stood impassively, droverless, sniffing as the plane came to a stop beside it. Thanks, said Merlane, and crawled out of the plane. He went up a staircase shaped from corrugated iron and walked along the featureless, charcoal-colored roof of a building. He found a tarpaulin thrown over a vent to keep the rain out, wrapped himself in it, and lay on his side. Visions of people being disemboweled and pulled apart with jolting splitting rips filled his mind. He blinked and shook his head but there they were. He breathed deep as they sickened him. Screaming echoed over the singing of his ears and the universe was filled with the ripping butchery of tortured people.
The next day he awoke from his vicious fugue. He wandered until he smelled food. A canteen window for file sorters. They gave him a bowl of vegetable broth with a few pieces of semi-molten broccoli in it. They shrugged and apologized; this was what they’d been given. He swallowed it and went back to his tarp.
I would like to invite you to give me 100% anonymous feedback on anything you please related to these projects. You can of course provide me feedback on anything you like, though I would find feedback on Investigating Censor particularly salient.
In other news, I will soon be releasing Moonrhythm Mire, the maximalist artpunk adventure I wrote for In The Hall of the Third Blue Wizard by Noisms Games, as a standalone for $2 on DTRPG and itch.io. Noisms refers to it as "a bizarre and brilliant feast for the senses; OSR DIY D&D turned up to 11."
Characteristic dishes of the mountaintop city-state.
Groundswell: Powdered Parmesan mixed with black coffee to create a porridge. Regular breakfast during the detective agōgē. After graduation, some agents refuse to touch it ever again, others make it whenever they feel nostalgic. Politely called 'Rainy Plain' on bed and breakfast menus.
Snowmelt: A little mound of whipped cream with hot espresso poured over the top. Eaten with a long spoon.
Sour Peon: Sourdough bread soaked in heavy cream. May be served with a dollop of raspberry or blackberry jam.
Ziggurat: A potato chip dusted with jalapeño powder, heaped with sour cream, topped with a slab of pickled herring and a little piece of onion.
Lewdbread: Bread soaked in bacon fat. Generally attained by frying a large amount of bacon and then placing it in a serving canister with bread at the bottom.
Bent Rainbow: A dish imported from Cape Cittacotte. Papaya shrimp salad with creamy yellow curry served on a bed of soft lettuce. Polarizing.
Lanterns: Little slabs of potted meat fried on a camp stove, e.g. while writing reports at midnight. Can by corrupted by the addition of egg, radish, rice, and/or oyster sauce. Also called Pig's Procrastination.
Barrel Mash: Black beans and rice soaked in olive oil and then pan fried with sausage, fennel, garlic, and red wine. Often eaten as a sandwich on wheat or soft black bread.
Archipelago: Cheddar, sour cream, and paprika salami on a soft, sweet cracker. Served dozens to a dish at cocktail parties.
Birthday Swill: Root beer mixed with lemonade.
Crucified Banana: Peanut butter and banana whipped together. Eaten with a spoon or encased in chocolate.
Monsoon: Heavy cream blended with root beer.
Volcano Pudding: Cottage cheese drenched in chili sauce.
General Winter: Bad coffee poured into a metal cup and left out in the snow overnight; much improved by morning.
Aftermath: Strawberry yogurt blended with peanut butter.
Brickwork: Chunks of Parmesan placed in the mouth, followed by a sip of hot coffee to slightly melt the exterior.
Stomion Cocktail: Whisky, cranberry juice, and pear schnapps. Should be nearly black.
___
Indigenous Starling & Shrike foodways evolved from historical conditions of alpine isolation modulated by the arrival of imports-enabling technologies such as refrigeration, rigid-hulled airships, and elongated biplanes. Agents serving contracts in distant lands brought back a taste for tropical goods such as coffee, peanut butter, and chili products.
One means of assessing a piece of art is how you react physiologically to it. You might find your face seizing up slightly before tears come while watching a movie, or find yourself springing to alertness as you suddenly realize that a song is manifesting greatness, or find yourself laughing out loud at a passage in a book, all before you've had a chance to reflect on what you're listening to, reading, or experiencing.
Whether or not you regard this as a valid (or the central) means of judging a work of art will depend on whether you believe your instincts are capable of ascertaining meaningful value before you've applied your train of thought to it. I don't just mean aesthetic value, but underlying value that goes deeper than pure aesthetics (though is perhaps partly demonstrated in aesthetics, but that's outside the scope of what I'm talking about here).
My operating schema is that you are taking in and processing information at all times, and that this information is of a sufficient quality that while you are capable of parsing it with words, and revealing its aspects and its implications for you with words, you don't need to mediate it with words before it enters your comprehension and your operating schema.
Your instincts are surprisingly capable of metabolizing complex information, but your train of thought can still act on and draw complex conclusions from observed phenomena in a way which your instincts are willing to follow if they don't detect a mismatch from what they've observed. In other words, your instincts and your train of thought work in tandem, checking each other, but despite the instincts' reputation for atavism (and their occasionally atavistic goals), both your instincts and your thoughts are fully capable of processing the information of the modern world.
Your instincts are not stupider than your train of thought, but are more focused on managing your responses to the sum total of your observations rather than linguistically parsing elements of your attention (which does help order your knowledge somehow, if it jibes with what your instincts have apprehended).
When you physically react to a work of art, I believe that this is a comprehension that it embodies something of significance, something that you can recognize even before you attempt to investigate it with your train of thought, and that this has some relationship to the truth or the potential of what you're experiencing. 'Potential' here including both implied potential, and 'the expansion of your world's potential.'
I believe this revelatory apprehension to be part of a system similar to the one in which your instincts constantly check your environment, your thoughts, and your behavior for reliability, solidness, and correctness, taking into account more variables than your train of thought alone could assess. It is continually assessing new information and referencing it against all the information that you have retained.
The revelation that you experience in a piece of art can have the properties of information, in that it expands your domain of consciousness, or it may signal towards this expansion without a full revelation, compelling you through implied potential. This revelation could be called the value. It might take the form of informational revelation, or of a subjective expansion of what is possible.
It's tempting to think of this as the work's 'utility.' I am not attempting to justify being moved by art by saying its power is that it merely embodies utility. What I'm reflecting on is that the most powerful art often has a valence of truth (truth with respect to reality and/or truth with respect to the human spirit in its ironbound, narrow, and billion-faceted nature), and the weakest art often has a valence of falsity. Also that powerful works often have great verisimilitude, regardless of the specific content (which may be fantastic or beyond the viewer’s experience), and also that there have always been powerful works depicting the information of victory and of catastrophe; heroism, tragedy, and romance, alongside the subversive and picaresque stories of the true-truth.
(I am not speaking of these as universal qualities of great work, but of tendencies. Obviously there can be significant works built upon the tease of potential, and of the brain-illuminating force of the embodied unknown; I enjoy doing these, in fact I think they are essential phenomena. However, a work that contains only mystery with no revelation is not, to quote Sun Tzu, the acme of excellence; we tend to prefer works that masterfully tie their threads together.)
I believe that one's instincts are capable of detecting veracity in a work of art, just as they are able to detect veracity (or at least possibility) in your own conclusions, and are faster and perhaps more reliable at this with regards to art than your train of thought; that this is why you feel a sensation of revelation and harmony with a powerful work, even one that is very tragic.
What is this sense of harmony? Why can we usually not adequately assess why it emerges in a given work? You can still apprehend it, contain it, embody it, adapt it, and deliver it with the same experiential power, the same catharsis of surprise with harmony, in a new work. The phenomenon replicates.
This deeper intrinsic value is embodied, rather than explicated and didacted, and perhaps it is more true because of that, in the sense that a poem can be true, than a legalistic explication of the same thing. It is more flexible, has more nodes, is more able to fit into the billion contours of a subjective reality than a mandate or flowchart ever could. This is the kind of truth that I believe we are referring to when we assess truth as an aspect of artwork.
This is why it can be enrapturing to read something perfectly true, whatever its characteristics, but it can positively erupt when you encounter truth in a piece of fiction; it is able to comfortably span more surface area across reality's many dimensions than something perfectly contingent.
When you experience this, you experience a sense of harmony with what is indicated, some facet of reality that your deep existence can accept unity with. Your perceptions line up with what is indicated without the jagged edges of reality revealing imperfections in the medium. When these do appear they leave you partly outside it, apprehending that something about it won't quite do, isn't quite sufficient. When it works you see clearly, without contamination, fractures, warping in the glass.
When you experience something and it is simpatico, you apprehend its rightness; not goodness, nor necessarily its universal correctness, it is like a conduit passing between between your perceptions and something of intrinsic value, and you feel at ease with this connection because part of you has already assessed it.
I took this instinct-based approach to assessing which card art I liked most from the first few years of Magic: The Gathering. I don't collect the cards, and never play unless someone harangues me to, but I have always appreciated them as a vehicle for art.
I didn't asses; I looked, and felt. If I felt any hesitation in putting my cursor over a card, opening it, or saving it, I didn't do it. I was worried during the process that I wouldn't have that many cards here by the end of it, but decided that would be okay, if there were five cards then that would probably be a pretty good distillation of my taste in them. It turns out there were almost one hundred. I make no specific claim to the nature of the cards' objective quality, nor that each card embodies objective truth and value beyond whatever power is entrapped in its aesthetics, however I did trust the process, and allowed my instinctual reaction the final word on whether or not I should share the card.
I liked 85% of the card art I saw, but these are the ones that went seamlessly into the Magic Art folder.
