User:Barbs/SI30

[] Unbordering

Thoughts & ideas

• The Dispossessed - Ursula Le Guin & Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer are very unbordering-coded
• Make a wiki for me & my friends
• 1 page TTRPG / character designing / worldbuilding

Log

Week 1

The Art Department

This was my fourth time attending TAD, a yearly conference/festival celebrating the art behind film, animation and games. I was feeling a little weird about it before the event, as this was the first time I would attend having started a different journey compared to what I expected to be doing with my career right now when I first started attending TAD. I felt nervous about interacting with the entertainment art industry again Unexpectedly, I had nothing to worry about. Multiple talks I attended stressed the importance of focusing on doing your own thing

May break

Thinking a lot about the more-than-human TTRPG idea.. Lots of (TT)RPG's come with a promise that "you can be anybody!" inside of the worldbuilding of the game. I relistened to a podcast interview with Gareth Damian Martin in which they argued for RPG's as vehicles for roleplaying a specific experience, putting ourselves in someone else's shoes, not having complete free choice.

When players create and play a non-human character in a TTRPG like Dungeons & Dragons, they are usually anthropomorphized, like cats that talk or trees that walk. From an anthropocentric lens, they are ascended to being-human, so we can relate to them and speak through them without effort or difficulty.

The challenge of speaking-for/speaking-with the non-human that we discussed during last weeks class really stuck with me. Can we use the act of roleplaying as border-crossing / border-breaking?

Possible sources of inspirations:

• The Author of the Acacia Seeds and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics - Ursula K. Le Guin
• Annihilation - Jeff Vandermeer