#jade e lomax

[ink-splotch]

More a Haunting than a History - Version 2.0!!

an (updated!) interactive fiction game from E. Jade Lomax (ink-splotch / dirgewithoutmusic), the writer who brought you Beanstalk, Second Star to the Left podcast, and Stay?. "Return to your sleepy, strange little hometown after years away. Explore your old haunts, reconnect with old friends and new, and dig into the mysteries that rise up in the town like mist. It's a story about leaving home and coming home; about life after death-- in more ways than one. This choose-your-own-adventure game lets you explore who you used to be so that you can decide who you want to be."

More a Haunting than a History is my second IF (interactive fiction) game, a story about returning to your childhood small town and finding both it and yourself different than you left them.

Version 2.0 is cleaner, stronger, with new content and a trophy system! If you've already explored MAHTAH, dive back in to see what's new to find, experience, or break-- if you haven't given MAHTAH a chance yet, I'd love it if you gave the new & improved version a try!

PLAY IT HERE:

In version 2.0, I made three main changes, as well as various bug fixes (thanks everyone who wrote me about bugs!):

Updated the dialogue system to make for smoother, less awkward conversations-- dialogue being the main gameplay mechanism!

Streamlined the dreams & climax/river scene systems to improve the narrative experience (ensure certain backstory content got seen/emphasized/excluded as relevant)

Introduced a trophy system (more details on the why of this under the cut)

MAHTAH was both a blast and a slog to write, just like Stay? was a rush -- I'd love to hear your thoughts, feelings, and experiences as I start chipping away at my next IF project.

Why trophies? I've added in "trophies" at the end of the game because a) it seemed fun and b) I'm hoping this will help shore up one of what I see as the weaknesses of MAHTAH-- a single playthrough feels "complete."

In some ways, this was a goal of mine; I wanted non-repeat players (players who get to an ending and never pick up the game again) to have a satisfactory and full experience & to not feel like they were "missing out" on anything. 

But this also leads to there being no clear motivation to replay the game, and no hint of the different secrets you can find, relationships you can build through the game, and endings you can have open up to you. It makes the "exploration space" feel more shallow than Stay?'s-- and it is certainly different than Stay?'s-- but they are both stories about exploration & discovery.

In MAHTAH, the discoveries are your friends, your feelings, your relationships, your past-- yourself, even. You can get a pretty full picture in a single playthrough if you max enough things out, in just the right way, but generally I think it takes a few playthroughs of MAHTAH to get the full experience and story.

Even if a single playthrough can be "satisfying,"  it's not the end of the story or the experience, but my focus on trying to make single playthroughs "stand on their own" undercut the visibility to the gaps and holes still remaining that required repeat playthroughs to access. 

So: trophies. They're fun! And they both inform the player at the end of the story that there is content they didn't access -- and ideally make some of that content interesting and desirable. It gives the player a goal as they launch into the next playthrough, and hopefully having that goal lets them play the game in new ways and meet new experiences. 

[queer-book-character-tournament]

Characters, book, and author names under the cut

Viv/Tandri - Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

Jean Moreau/Jeremy Knox - The Sunshine Court by Nora Sakavic 

Sally-Anne/Sez - Beanstalk by E Jade Lomax

Christine Braxton/Stephanie - Fire Season by KD Casey

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Preliminary Round

Book summaries and submitted endorsements below:

Dionysus in Wisconsin by E.H. Lupton (Wisconsin Gothic #1)

Endorsement from submitter: "Gay urban fantasy in Madison, WI"

A graduate student and an archivist work together to fight a god.

Fall, 1969. Ulysses Lenkov should be working on his dissertation. Instead, he's developing an unlucrative sideline in helping ghosts and hapless magic users. But when his clients start leaving town suddenly—or turning up dead—he starts to worry there's something afoot that’s worse than an unavenged death or incipient insanity. His investigation begins with the last word on everyone's lips before they vanish: the mysterious Dionysus.

Sam Sterling is an archivist who recently moved back to Madison to be closer to the family he's not too sure he likes. But his peaceful days of teaching library students, creating finding aids, and community theater come to an end when the magnetic, mistrustful Ulysses turns up with a warning. There's a god coming, and it looks like it's coming for Sam.

Soon the two are helping each other through demon attacks, discovering the unsavory history of Sam's family, and falling in love as they race to find a solution. But as the year draws to a close, they'll face a deadly showdown as they try to save Sam—and the city itself.

Fantasy, urban fantasy, mythology, romance, academia, historical fiction, alternate history, 1960s, adult

Leagues and Legends series (Beanstalk: The Adventures of a Jack of All Tales, Echoes of a Giantkiller, Remember the Dust) by E. Jade Lomax

Jack Farris doesn’t want to save the world, just every person he knows, encounters, or hears of.

It’s a bit of an issue.

S. Grey doesn’t want to save anyone but himself. He wants to know everything and majoring in sagework at the Academy is the best way to do that.

Laney Jones left her home to avoid the constraints there, only to find different barriers holding her back at the Academy. Eager to learn, to excel, to escape, she has far from given up.

Rupert Willington Jons Hammerfeld the Seventh would just like everything to be orderly, thank you very much, but it seems the only way to make monsters and myths (and malicious but mundane men) to stop rampaging through his world is to go out and do some hero-ing himself.

They are put together as an unwilling study group, but they become something more.

Fantasy, epic fantasy, adventure, secondary world, series, young adult

[my-writing-on-the-wall]

I've been sick so I haven't really got the headspace at the moment to dive into my current book which is about data science.

But I thought I could yell into the void about one of my all time favorite book series.

Leagues and Legends by E.Jade Lomax aka @ink-splotch

I adore the story and well rounded, loveable characters and the books are so remarkably well written. I struggle to put it into words.

I am not usually one to reread books all that often, there are simply to many I want to read, but I have read all three of them several times.

[thoughtsformtheuniverse]

tagged by @booksandchainmail to shuffle my general listening music and post the first 10 songs. I chose my 'music' playlist rather just my full library to avoid the two (2) podcast episodes and random audiobook chapters in there.

1. Songs for Lonely Giants by The Mountain Goats ⁃ I mean. it’s The Mountain Goats. it’s slow, it’s sad, it’s pretty weird. I found this one on a character playlist for Jack from E. Jade Lomax’s Beanstalk series (read it for free here!) it’s very good!

2. Moving On by Oysterband ⁃ not blue oyster cult, but a much weirder band that mostly sings songs about working man’s politics in England in during the last century. this song has both the lines "we asked the man for justice, well he handed us a stone" and "the way to hell is straight and sure/the way to heaven is long/the way to your heart is never-ending/so I just keep moving on" and I adore it

3. Four Hours by The Longest Johns ⁃ I found The Longest Johns late in college (and felt deeply smug when their Wellerman was a hit a year later. I found them first), but I do just listen to a lot of sea shanties. This one is a big ass mood for getting off a ship again and trying to adjust to Land and Not a Watch Schedule. Also, like most sea shanties, great to do chores and lab work too

4. Theseus by The Oh Hellos ⁃ god but I always love The Oh Hellos; this is a song about the importance of maintenance and I treasure it. all of the Zephyrus album is good

5. Loves Me Like a Rock by The Wailin’ Jennys ⁃ turns out The Wailin’ Jennys, usually a folk band, did a cover of Paul Simon’s Love Me a Rock. it’s pretty good. (I actually downloaded this earlier today; I have no sophisticated thoughts yet)

6. I Don’t Want You Now by KT Tunstall ⁃ If Only is probably my actual favorite song off this album, but KT Tunstall is always a good time

7. Angels of the River by Oysterband ⁃ aaand the other stuff Oysterband does is odd, folky, kinda wifty stuff like this. Genuinely no idea what this one is about, any more than I know what Milford Haven is about. I like it though

8. Now I am an Arsonist by Jonathon Colton (ft Suzanne Vega) ⁃ to me, this is a very unlikely combination of artists; Colton usually does deeply nerdy fare, while Suzanne Vega soft and strange. this song is on my thieves playlist, and I could not really describe why

9. Heavy Horses by Jethro Tull ⁃ most of the Jethro Tull songs I like best are songs about industrialization with some of the weirdest flute solos I have ever heard, and Heavy Horses is no exception. This song is nearly 9 minutes long and about the arrival of tractors. it’s great. (Stormwatch is actually my favorite Jethro Tull album, and Weathercock or Acres Wild are more favorite songs from this one, but do I really like Heavy Horses)

10. Falling For The First Time by The Barenaked Ladies ⁃ This is the kind of overlapping wordplay I’m here for, the whole chorus delights me; "Anyone perfect must be lying, anything easy has its cost/Anyone plain can be lovely, anyone loved can be lost/What if I lost my direction? What if I lost sense of time?". And the way it comes back in the final chorus, but tweaked a little. it’s just a good time.

I’m deeply surprised that there’s no They Might Be Giants, Great Big Sea, or songs from my highschool acapella group, but other than that, this is pretty representative.

@epsilon-delta do you play tag games?

[isolatedphenomenon]

“For Rupert,” said Laney.  “Do you have another boyfriend that might be lurking in the Graves’s dungeon?” said Spider. 

...

“You and your girlfriend having little secret conferences without us?” said Grey. 

...

The sound made Rupert shiver. “Your girlfriend’s the one who nabbed me,” she said. “Didn’t invite Farris for some reason.”

...

“I need to get to work, and so does Doc,” said Susie, as Doc nodded gruffly. “Jack, you got your people?” “Yes’m,” Jack told the woman.

...

“They’d left Dadlus alive. Your people."

...

“I’m hurt, Jack. Don’t you think, if I stole one of yours, that I would have the decency to make sure you knew all about it?"

...

“But also, yes, Jack, you’re special. You’re Rupert’s,” she explained. “That matters to me.” “Me, too,” he said

...

“Marian understands sticking with your own; she and I just both didn’t know that you lot were mine.”

...

“I’m a stranger.” “You’re Uncle Jack’s,” she said. “You’re not.”

...

“I don’t want it to be like this,” said Rupert. “I don’t want to leave holes in people, good people, my people.”

...

Laney lifted her head and told Jack on the upper bunk, “He’s bright, this adopted kid of yours.”

...

“I have a feeling,” Laney croaked into the darkness, “that was our boys.”

...

The sentry Jack was relieving glanced at Jack as he climbed up onto the platform and said, “This yours?” Grey looked up at Jack. 

...

“They’re not strange, they’re mine,” said Jack.

- Leagues and Legends by E. Jade Lomax

[echoesofagiantkiller]

But at the base of Jack’s ladder, the closest anyone would come to the scattered magic still hissing and dripping down, there was a girl with short gold curls and Jack knew every one of her names.

- Remember the Dust, by E. Jade Lomax 

[ursae-minoris-world]

TAG GAME 🌟

Tag 9 people you'd like to know more.

Tagged by @starlightvld thank you!!! 😊

Last song: in all honesty... I was just watching this amv so that's the last song I heard lol https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPaysUywNZg

Currently watching: I'm in the middle of the last Candela Obscura episode (The Collectors) by Critical Role

Currently reading: Currently reading again the Leagues and Legends Trilogy by E. Jade Lomax ( https://ejadelomax.com/leaguesandlegends/beanstalk/ ), I just started the 3rd book (Remember the Dust).

Current obsession: Still very focused on VLD!

Tagging: @cruelisblue @hazeleks @jacqulinetan @dylexa @eaion @tomatocages @cinnamondjinn @kissingkeith @goldentruth813

(if you feel like it!)

[grifff17]

I relate to this so much. I deeply believe that there is so much niche media that would be so widely loved if it was just better known.

This is what I try to do when recommending obscure audio fiction. I try to bring more attention to these stories which are mostly unknown even within a medium that a good amount of people don’t even realize exist.

There is so much deeply niche media which has changed me as a person, and I feel obliged to try and share these little-known stories with the world.

Another reason I love niche media is that it can afford to be experimental. Nothing with a 6-figure budget or higher will ever try something weird, due to the risk it does not work. Weird experimental stuff can be incredible and unique.

Anyways if you’re reading this and inspired but not sure where to start, check out my website (link below and in my bio). Most of the audiodramas on there are very niche.

For some more specific recommendations, I want to give a shoutout to Stories From Ylelmore, a cozy urban fantasy podcast about 3 kids getting up to magical shenanigans in a small town, made entirely by one person. Also check out The Alliance Books by E Jade Lomax, a low fantasy political intrigue trilogy that humanizes both sides of a conflict, and are free as ebooks on the author’s website.

That’s enough rambling for now. Please message me if you have thoughts on this, I’m always happy to talk about it.

somewhere on a long dead forum there's a link that no longer works to a mod to a game nobody plays that would be a valuable contribution to the way people see level design if it got a chance to be seen. somewhere on a website that gets 15 monthly visitors there's a webcomic that woulkd inspire and resonate with you and change your life even in a small way if you could just find it. somewhere theres a music artist that would inspire you for years to come but their work just can't manage to be seen online or off. theres so many things that would change your life that just can't seem to rise to the surface and remain undiscovered and forgotten. or maybe never shared

[oswaldide]

Hello! List 5 things that make you happy, then put this in the askbox of the last ten people that reblogged something from you! Get to know your mutuals and followers :D

I finished reading Remember the Dust by Jade E. Lomax yesterday and I still think about the charaters and their found family a lot

2. I can hear children laughing and shouting from the open window at work (the weather is shit but kids will be kids) (yes i'm at work sue me)

3. During lunch break I found a bumblebee on the street and picked it up so it wouldnt be driven over. It was so very cute and let me carry it for a few hundred meters

4. I found some kind of book collection nearby that the owners are trying to get rid of cheap so i'll check that out soon and get some nice copies of classics

5. I just stumbled upon the phrase love is stored in the peanut from last year again, which is about my dad peeling lots of nuts for me as a child because I loved eating them but hated the peeling

phew I think I really needed this today! :)

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Preliminary Round

Book summaries below:

Little God by R. Cooper

Melis, the fledgling God of Desire in All Its Forms, is of course aware of the famously beautiful and famously unwed King Antero. Though the human king has been approached by many suitors, all have been intimidated by the strength of his remarkable heart. The lonely Antero has been praying for a companion, a friend who will stay by his side if he is not meant to find the other half of his soul. For years, he has been making those prayers to Melis.

Known by many names including Melis the Prankster and Melis the Cruel, Melis is blamed by humans and gods alike if he answers their wishes—and if he doesn’t—and almost never thanked for the stories that turn out well. He has listened to Antero’s yearning without responding, secretly pleased to have the noble king’s devotion for himself, but mostly convinced there is no one on earth who could ever be Antero’s equal.

But when some of the elder gods insist Melis would serve the world better if he knew anything of desires for himself, the little God of Desire decides to visit the private chambers of the king and finally respond to his most faithful servant—only to find himself wanting to answer the king’s wish in a more personal way than he’d anticipated. Melis might be divine, but one clever human king is more than a match for him, especially once Antero decides it’s time for Desire to learn something of Love.

Romance, fantasy, novella, adult

One Stormy Day in New Providence by E. Jade Lomax and K. Sundberg

An heiress, a diplomat’s daughter, an undercover auditor, a corporate spy, an ex-detective, and a fraud walk into the small field office of a major insulation corporation. Half are there under their proper names. Only one is there to do the job they were hired for. The punchline is friendship.

The selfsame cast could also be described as five liars and one truth-teller; four on-the-clock employees and two interlopers; or a thief, three people trying to solve the same conspiracy from different angles, an ex-boyfriend, and a woman who desperately deserves a nap.

They are a single mom (and grandma!), a PhD candidate, the victim of a coercion campaign, a veritable genius with debilitating attention and anxiety disorders, a man trying very hard not to be in love, and a young woman who packs her girlfriend PB&J’s every day because it’s the only thing she can reliably make edible.

When a magical storm falls over the city– a storm that freezes not the flesh from your bones, but fries the circuits in your brain– our crew of technicians and tricksters must set out to fix all that’s gone wrong.

Fantasy, urban fantasy, mystery

[booksandchainmail]

a bunch of my most unusual ones are small fandom-specific (character or author names):

amandine and mcguire from seanan mcguire's toby daye series

(maya) deane

malinda (lo)

seeress and beanstalk from e jade lomax's beanstalk series

snowdrop, verona, and kenned (mispelling of kennet) from pale

naismith and aral from vorkosigan

revue (starlight)

mede from queen's thief

but the others:

zamboni, lateen, muleteer, sacristan, nightwalker, ecru, wavelike, peerage, overcoat, wolsey, tyg

no idea where any of those are coming from! I guess most of these are just words unusual enough that having them at all makes them overused, but apparently zamboni is used in 24 posts on my blog... searched it and turns out that's mostly from posts where there was an addition from a someone I follow with zamboni in their username

on the used less side of things, mostly I don't blog about politics I guess

So you know those dumb little wordcloud things?

You know, where like, they go through your blog and find the words you use most often, and then spit out stylized text with the most often used words as the biggest ones so you can embed or screenshot them or whatever?

I FUCKING HATE THOSE.

Like, the idea is really cool in theory. A standardized analysis generating an artifact characteristic of you, easily digestible at a glance.

Except in practice everyone's word cloud ends up being "like, people, think, want, make, get..." -- i.e. basically just a bag of the most common words in the english language (presuming they speak mostly english).

But what I actually want is a collection of words I use more than the average person does. And while we're at it, also a collection of words I use less than the average person does.

So anyway I made that:

It's on Siikr now. New blogs don't get it yet, only blogs that were indexed as of a few days ago (still working on optimizations to allow for real time generation).

The words in green are the words you use weirdly often.

The words in red are the words you suspiciously seem to avoid.

In both cases, the bigger the word, the more weird your usage of it is relative to all of the other blogs in Siikr's index. This is limited to the most extreme 100 words in both directions.

Hovering over a word gives you some statistics about how much it should appear in your blog vs how much it actually appears in your blog.

So that's fun and everything -- but it can and very well might get even more fun.

Because generating this meant creating a list of all of the words used by every blog, and storing a bunch of numbers per word per blog. Currently, that's ~9 million associations over ~57k words.

Every blog->word relation stores frequency statistics, and every word itself keeps a running average of its frequency across all blogs.

Which means we could in theory (and almost certainly will in practice), treat each word as a dimension in a 57 thousand dimensional space.

Then treat each user as a point in that 57 thousand dimensional space, where their coordinates in the space are (user_word_freq - avg_word_freq).

From there, we can measure the distance (as cosine similarity, or euclidean distance, or even just raw inner product) between users, and return for your blog, an ordered list of:

Dopplegangers - blogs most like yours (closest to your blog in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Foils- blogs least like yours (furthest from yours in 57k dimensional word frequency space).

Manic Pixy Dream Friends - blogs that overuse the same words you overuse (closest to your blog in 57k freq-space with respect to only positive vector components)

Least Like Un-You - blogs that avoid the same word you avoid (closest to your blog in 57k freq space with respect to just the negative vector components)

[isolatedphenomenon]

on love:

He laughed, the deep boom a ten-year-old Jack had always hopped his own high chortle would grow up to be. “It’s not about being a husband, Jack, or raising a family. It’s not that. That woman and this family is what I fell in love with, but that’s me, not you. It’s the falling in love, Jack. That’s what gives you meaning and makes you stand tall. It’s finding something worth building.” Light filtered down through the bush’s tangled branches. “What are you in love with, Jack?”

Beanstalk by E. Jade Lomax

“Jack’s a romantic,” said George. “Less so, after Liam, but still more than he claims. He thinks if you love hard enough, things will be okay. There’s a poem or something somewhere—love cures a multitude of sins.”

Echoes of a Giantkiller by E. Jade Lomax

“Is there always evidence when things happen?” said Jill. “Someone goes brain-dead and they could just be sleeping, except they don’t wake up. You fall in love—what evidence?”  “Pupils dilating,” George told the ceiling.  “Not the kind of love I mean,” said Jill.

...

“Let them take care of you,” she said. “They love you, Rupert, and they want to be there for you. Let them.” “Couldn’t stop them if I tried,” he said. His cheeks had pinked, but he was keeping a straight face. “Don’t try,” said Miz Eliza

Remember the Dust by E. Jade Lomax

[mirrorstone]

More Beanstalk daemon AU

It was rare for a daemon to settle as anything other than a normal, non-magical creature, but that didn’t stop the ones who hadn’t settled yet from trying it anyway. Not everyone's daemon could manage it, could take the shape of an animal that was magic mixed with flesh. It took a certain amount of flexibility, of imagination, particularly if you’d never seen the real thing and were trying based on descriptions from stories.  

George was not the sort of child who anyone would have suspected would be good at such a thing. She was quiet, thoughtful, grounded. She listened to the fanciful stories told by someone’s uncle or grandmother, but she also read books, and then quietly sat down and considered what she’d read, thinking about the ways the words could be turned into something real.

But George's daemon had never had any trouble changing shape as easily as he breathed, as though imagining himself in a different body was no different than imagining himself opening his mouth to speak. He listened to the fanciful stories told by someone’s uncle or grandmother, and then he said “so, like this?” and turned them into something real.

He made himself a griffin, half mountain lion and half eagle, or a unicorn like the blacksmith's horse with single curving mountain goat's horn. He didn't like taking the shape of birds, and when he flew it was more often than not in the form of a sinuous reptilian beast he fondly imagined a dragon, with long slender wings like a hawk, shining golden scales like a carp, a tail like a snake, and claws like a cat. Saint could make any shape he dreamed of comfortably his own, could combine whatever he saw into something fantastic and whole. While George steadfastly read a book about potatoes again, from cover to cover, he danced through the air above her.

When the dragon came, it did not look at all like the dainty creature with gilded sclales Saint had played at. Its scales were like embers. Its eyes were like ice.

When Saint settled, he did not look at all like the bright gold illustration of a lion they had seen on the faded circus poster carried by a trader. He was not the proud, barrel-chested creature, surrounded by a golden mane like the rays of the sun. He was a gangly creature with legs too long for him, his mane all in tufts, his coat still marked by dappled shadows.

They only realized, after it was finally all over, that he had settled, and that neither of them were exactly sure when. Had it been the moment they'd thrown the net over him and fastened it to the ground, and he’d realized that none of the shapes he had flickered through as easily as breathing could help? The moment the blacksmith had slipped a knife into her hand and turned his back without a word? The moment she'd seen the ash and rubble her village had been reduced to? Those times, and a long time following them, had been a waking nightmare, still full of blank spaces in her memory where her mind had been too full of sorrow and horror to do anything but lock it away. Deep in her heart, she didn’t want to acknowledge the feeling that he had settled in the end, when she had stained her hands red with blood and earned the title “dragonslayer.” Perhaps it didn't matter exactly when it had happened. But she'd held him in her arms then, when they finally realized, streaking his fur with ash while he’d wailed and screamed, and tried again and again to leap into a new form the way that had always come so easily to him before.

“I could have fixed it!” he'd sobbed into her chest. “I know what they look like now, there wouldn't have to be one less in the world, I could have… I could… I...”

“Shh.” She held him, while he screamed out their grief from a single throat, feeling guilty to be grateful that she didn't have to be the one to cry, that the raw stinging in her throat was only from breathing in ash. “We'll find another way to make up for it.”

[ink-splotch]

Patreon Post: MAHTAH Version 2.0!

The latest patron reward for patrons $1 + is live!

I've been working on a new version of More a Haunting than a History, my latest IF game. I've cleaned up some content and bugs (thank you for everyone who's sent in bug reports!), as well as worked to improve some of the gameplay "flow" especially around chatting with the major NPCs. I've also added in trophies!

The most current version of 2.0, still under test, is now available to patrons at the link below (as well as some further commentary on my goals for v2.0!):