The Factory Floor — Episode 1: No Pressure
Well we finally did it. World Building has a podcast. Dubbed The Factory Floor, the first episode has been posted to YouTube!
In this episode, brought to you by Celebrity Jeopardy and Soylent Green, we discuss the concept of world building, the alignment of historical and fictional characters, why we love building worlds, and in case that wasn’t enough we discuss some interesting and provocative questions from the Worldbuilding site at Stack Exchange.
Take a moment…catch your breath; that was a long sentence. Ok. Moving right along.
Joining me for the episode were Nex, Green and Whoosh.
We started off the conversation defining world building and each of us had a slightly different take on what exactly that meant. It really came as no big surprise though as world building can be anything from creating a universe to discussing building materials at a specific location and all the stuff that exists…so you know…everything.
As Whoosh put it,
There is a place that exists that also doesn’t exist and world building is going there and exploring it
which is probably the most poetic thing anyone said the entire evening.
To get the creative juices flowing we debated the alignment of various historical and fictional characters based on the Dungeons and Dragons alignment chart.
We looked at Sun Tzu, famed for the Art of War, Sacagawea, guide to Louis and Clarke and both Boromir and Smeagol/Gollum of Lord of the Rings Fame.
Ironically, though perhaps not surprisingly, we knew the fictional characters better than people who actually lived. It should be mentioned that a pretty amazing GIF (warning…it includes strong language, just a heads up) came up in conversation.
Catapults would definitely have made getting the ring to Mordor much more entertaining …doo dee doo.
From there we launched (get it…we like bad puns) into why the group likes to participate in the insanity that is world building, who the best world builder is, what each of us is currently working on, and then went into a few good questions from the site.
Green led us off and like the rest of us appreciates the challenge of creating worlds that work within themselves. We also found that the rabbit hole effect draws all of us in…it’s amazing where a simple “What if” can take you…well that and ADD…speaking of which we really must revisit what exactly Magical Programming is, I assume it has something to do with Perl.
So, who is the best world builder? Pretty sure its not Stalin…
The group suggested a pretty broad range of candidates:
- Whoosh offered the team behind the Halo Series, because who doesn’t like World War II in space?
- Green chose Frank Herbert for Dune and its depth and breadth with all the complexity and weaving that implies; then cheated and extolled the virtues of Dan Simmons as his other first choice.
- James (me) gave Christopher Paolini the nod for the world of Alagaesia. People on dragons, in depth research and backstory, and an amazing magic system.
- Nex asked to go last and dropped the power of Michael Bay (note the unanimous face-palm) for Transformers 2…ok not really, we don’t believe in book burning but we would probably be ok with a Blu-Ray/DVD bonfire in this case. His actual answer was Robert Jordan for the Wheel of Time. He mentioned in particular how the world is created and shared throughout the course of the story as layer after layer unfold.
We followed the conversation on the best world builders we could think of with a discussion of what we are working on ourselves. We may as well have put the Rolling Stones on stage to open for a high school glee club.
Nex led us off on this conversation and made it apparent just how easy it can be to wander off when you world build…we only discussed three of his thousand worlds.
Whoosh took us down his own rabbit hole; he is working on a universe where pretty much any story can be told. A combination of far future settings, post-apocalyptic and anything else you can think of in history.
Green doesn’t really work on his own worlds, at least not right now. He does love working on the problems other people come up with when building theirs. Ever hear a serious conversation about a dirty sock monster? Listen and you will. You can also check out the original question.
We dove into a few more questions that the team picked from the site:
Green: How do you establish identity when people can change their appearance at will?
Please don’t tell Brad Pitt about this conversation…he has other things to focus on right now.
Nex: Related to Crimson Skies, we essentially were asking how would you manage a society that existed on large floating zeppelins almost exclusively.
Nex had to be difficult and discuss a question that is not on the site…he also forced us to do a little fact checking…he was almost right.
James: Would ritual cannibalism of the dead lead to issues with disease?
Strange we know…but it happens on Earth. True Story
James (again): How would multi-race humanoid evolution happen?
It always comes back to Tolkien…and divergent evolution of bi-pedal mammals.
After a brief conversational detour we closed out the conversation with how to hide from a super nova in our solar system…we didn’t really do the math, but it probably doesn’t turn out well for our space faring descendants. Green did some math before the show and the energy delivered by super nova to Jupiter would be about 50 megatons on each square kilometer which is equivalent to the largest bomb ever detonated by mankind. That’s crazy
Thanks everyone for watching and reading. Please feel free to comment and complain; we will answer your questions and nerd rage complaints as soon as possible…or when we feel like it…
We are looking forward to putting another episode together and hope you enjoyed reading and watching as much as we did making.
A final thanks to all those who made the podcast possible (you know who you are).
