Georgette Tan

Tag: Storium

The October 2023 Review
Report is late because my time is entirely consumed by Nanowrimo.

Site News & Updates

A number of my pages or blog entries now have a new addition on top of the page:

Clicking it will open up a hidden section describing the changes to that page. The reason for this is because I’ll be updating any relevant posts with new information from now on. It seems redundant to create a whole new page for something that might be more fitting for a social media post (and if you’re reading this, you know I don’t really do social media anymore). It’s something called a digital garden, where something is planted and then tended to as necessary. Updated pages will be listed on my main page.

Work

This month sees us wrapping up ‘Inside SSPCA‘, a magazine released during Asia for Animals 2023. You can read more of my thoughts at the links, and download the digital version here.

The other thing at AfA was my first ever gig as a conference rapporteur. The job scope for a rapporteur is to sit in on papers being presented and capture the main points. To an extent, it was similar to a reporter’s job except you record more things, not just the parts that will make it into your article. The points are then compiled into daily reports.

For AfA 2023, we have a stagger total of 80 papers across three streams. There were three rapporteurs and three reports across three days of the conference. For most part, I was typing down notes and squinting at the projector far in front of the Grand Hall at BCCK. These don’t get immediately resolved into points that I would send in, which meant we spend a good hour at the end of the conference day getting our notes into some semblence of order.

These notes are meant to go to the organiser, and subsequently to any stakeholders up the pipeline. In our case, we were asked to compile points from Day One and Two for a minister to catch up on before he arrived to close the conference.

It was a gruelling introduction to rapporteur work because it was a huge conference. I was invited back to rapporteur for another conference with only one stream and two days, and the workload looked manageable by one person. However, I knew I would be exhausted from coming out of one market and needing enough rest for the next.

Markets & Bazaars

Some of the new owners of my preloved books.

I participated in two markets this month. The first was the second edition of Trunkie Junkie, which took place at Cafe Cafe early in the month. Once again, I teamed up with my pal Ronnie. The crowd was awesome. We sold a lot more than we did in the first Trunkie Junkie, and saw a lot of friends and other book lovers. Happy to have let go a good number of excellent titles.

The Pay Day Bazaar at La Promenade Mall was a marathon (6 days) where Trunkie Junkie was a sprint (6 hours). I was eyeing it but didn’t want to go out alone – I only had so many books. Once I learned that a friend has secured a table, I asked if I could have a corner.

The bazaar was a relatively tiny one (3-4 tables), but there were several other events happening at the mall on the first weekend. We did pretty well, and I sold nearly half of what I had in my stock, which leaves me with the interesting problem of not having many books left to bring to the next market. These titles didn’t move through three markets, and I don’t expect them to do too well in any upcoming ones. I’ll probably do a last ditch, either at another upcoming market as a supplementary product, or put them online.

The bazaar was comfortable. The mall’s social media people took photos and updated every day. Eve and Irene were cold all the time, and my running joke was, “I’m not cold, I’m fat”. Overall, it was 6 days across two weekends of catching up with all the news because I didn’t spend a lot of time with either of them since I left The Borneo Post.

But it was a full time job, and I needed 2-3 business days to recover after each weekend.

Our table at the mall. Photos courtesy of La Promenade.

Gaming

This month on Palia, I’m focused on building my home. This involves grinding for gold through hunting and farming, and collecting enough resources to build pieces of furniture. Above is what you see when you enter my house. It’s still a work-in-progress and I’ve tweaked it since. And everyone here is a zookeeper – the starred (high quality) fishes and bugs can be used for display, and if we’re not desperate for gold, it goes on display. I’ve seen far larger collections than mine forming a labyrinth over the player’s plot, least you think this is a lot of tanks.

At the same time, I’m bidding a “goodbye for now” to Storium. The momentum ended when I had to step away in July, which I felt little guilt for doing because it was hitting summer when the whole site just seems to go into hibernation.

Truth is I’m tired of trying to get things going, and I’m tired of waiting around for other people. This is an acceptable past time when I don’t have anything better to do, but I’m back to working on my own creative writing and I cannot multitask the same set of muscles on different projects. Plus, the likelihood of completing my own projects is 100% on me and not divided between a few players who has other priorities.

Coming Next
- NaNoWriMo 2023: I didn’t think that I would want to dive headlong into another month of writing so soon after Stories on Fire, but here I am. I’m updating this 18th Nov and have plenty to say but it’ll have to wait until December. Meanwhile, feel free to add me as a buddy.
Links Roundup

A no-commentary list of articles and media I found interesting enough to share on my Discord server.
November 18, 2023
The January 2023 Review

My January was a contrast between fairly social and somewhat reclusive.

Work

It was quiet on the work front. If the week between Christmas and New Year is a “lost” week, meet the weeks between New Year and a Chinese New Year celebration that fell in January.

Much of 2022 was pre-production for a TV show, in which I am a producer. We are currently in post-production, and I’m not needed full-time, leaving me with a lot of time to myself. You’d think this is the time I’d get started on other things (*cough* novel), but no – it was essential time for resting and getting bored.

CNY

My family are not big on celebrating the festive seasons, and both the dog and I are not big on fireworks. We had our usual reunion dinner with my brother and sister-in-law. I received an angpow from them because in our culture, pocket money is an adequate consolation prize to not having a spouse. I visited two close friends, spending the entire afternoon at the home of the second because all her visitors were also my mutual friends. Great time catching up. Quality over quantity. The dog spent most nights hunkered down under my bed in her new firework bunker. I have an upcoming post about this.

Digital Migration

I’m in the midst of migrating my passwords from LastPass to BitWarden, and my notes from Evernote to Obsidian.

I’ve been subscribing to LastPass for maybe 2 years and their recent security issue meant that people on Mastodon were sharing alternatives. BitWarden caught my eye, not only because it’s open source, but because on a free account, I’m able to use it across all my devices.

I didn’t realise Evernote was going through some issues as well since I barely use it anymore, but I did have notes that I want to transfer out to another app that supports syncing across devices for little to no money. Obsidian has a clean layout and a workaround that allows me to use it on several devices.

Storium

I kicked off a series of intro games for writers from Nanowrimo Malaysia, with some help from a local Storium friend. The new players did wonderfully, and I hope they’ll stay. We also started the new Nevermore (yes, the Netflix Wednesday one) game, which takes place in 1998 and featured the staff rather than the students. This one didn’t even require an open submission. We recruited a full cast on Slack.

Tarot

I’ve been reading tarot for a few years but I’ve not spoken about it here. I’ll make a proper post about it one of these days, but true to my nature, I’ve gathered several tarot readers I could find in Kuching and had a get-together. It’s a small niche community, which is my speciality. We had one meet-up in December and another one in January, simply because Andrea was back for the festive season. We added a couple of new faces and reconnected with some old friends, and it was a good time!

February 17, 2023
The Storium Review 2023
Every year, I like to do a review of what my current Storium games are. If you don’t know what Storium is because you’re not on any of my social media where I talk incessantly about it:
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Storium is a play-by-post collaborative writing platform that includes game mechanics to support the direction of the story or the character's decision-making process. Kinda like a Play-by-Post RPG.
```
I’m obsessed with it because it’s the most fun a writer can have while not committing to an entire novel while engaging in some back-and-forth with other writers.

This marks my third year and these are my current games:

Weird Fruit: Earthquake Season is a premade Kickstarter world set in the universe created by Ursula Vernon. With premade worlds, everything is already done for you except the actual posts. I have never used a premade world before so this was an experiment for both myself and my players. There were unexpected hitches, but also ingenious improvisation, especially when you can’t design your own character. I’m not sure if I’ll run a premade world again, though.

Life & Spirit is the name of my novel series. This is a spinoff of my first book, set in the same universe but following a new character. I am co-writing this with another friend who beta-read my manuscript and has a pretty good grasp of the universe.

Dreamers Often Lie is turning out to be more of a novel than a game. Co-written with a Storium friend, it is on the verge of concluding and has been for a year. Eventually, I hope to go over it with rewrites and edits, and start shopping for a publisher. It’s about people who can go into dreams and manipulate them, a little like Inception.

Each chapter of RESET runs for only one month, whether the story wraps up or not. This began because most Storium games tend to ground prematurely to a halt after a good start that lasts several weeks. It ended up being a nice way of experimenting with game concepts that can be potentially developed into a proper game. I hope to get RESET started again in February.

Nevermore takes place in – you guessed it! – Nevermore Academy from Netflix’s Wednesday. After the series aired, a few of us expressed interest in playing in this universe but as faculty and staff. Our game is set in 1998, years before the events in the TV series. At the time of writing, it hasn’t started yet, but it’s scheduled for 19 January 2023. My character is the Head Groundskeeper and Landscape Designer Anthea Galanis, and a gorgon.

Home.Where? is an experiment on several levels. The characters are dogs. Actual dogs with a cognition level closer to the animal than the human projection of the pet parent behind your favourite Instagram canine star. I asked players to refer to Stella, Bunny and Mila for communication style. Because I don’t expect dogs to poetically describe their surroundings or feelings, players get only 50 words per post. The objective is to steer your lost canine character through a South Asian landscape to find help and, hopefully, a home.

There are about 3-4 other games that are currently on hiatus and I don’t know if they’ll come back. But this is what I have on my playlist to kick off the year.

If you’d like to try Storium, feel free to inbox me on the site or email me. I’ll be happy to show you around.

(Post #3 for Bring Back Blogging – January 2023)
January 7, 2023