Last night I showed this forum to a friend and exclaimed, “Look! I’m getting the band back together!!”
Beyond simply writing again, are there any other things you guys would want to try and do? We’re a bunch of smart, creative, crazy people–I’m sure someone has an idea or two.
Obviously, I’ve thought on this some. Sometimes I’ve wondered what became of the Esper Union, Hannibal de’Zama, and all the rest. I wouldn’t mind revisiting that.
I’ve missed the old days and writing with y’all, so I would be happy to take a swing at doing it again; I could even go for the persistent world, constant collaboration style of the old days of Kupop, if people are interested. The days of huge volumes of writing every weekend are gone, but things are usually steadier than they were for awhile. I dunno if I told y’all about the crazy shit that was my life from 2008-2011, and it’s not relevant here, but that was a bad time for reliable story writing. I could do more now.
I can also go smaller in scale. What do other people think?
I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get onboard for a kupop revival, mainly because I write all day for my job and don’t get enough personal writing done as it is. But if we do get something going, I’m sure I’ll stick my nose in somewhere.
Dude, you were one of the most prolific writers too Jerry. A revival without you just wouldn’t be the same!
Having said that, I’m kind of in the same boat and pretty overcommitted. I could probably churn out a page post per month or something.
Having said that though, I want to do something.
I think if we do something, we may need to prepare for a slower pace and fewer overall plot threads than the good ol’ days, because this sounds true for a few of us. I know I can’t do a rapid-fire rate, much less a cast of dozens across multiple countries and such.
A smaller scale, adventure style story might be better suited to dip our toes back into the water, so to speak. Maybe pick a single world, maybe a single continent/country, and branch from there?
My writing nowadays is primarily relegated to creating quests for a LARP I help run, which is a monster in itself, but I’ve got enough time to commit to whatever we end up doing. As Mike said, I want to do something
I think we could leave it a little open, too – I admit I wanna hit some of the stuff I’m nostalgic about, but certainly don’t wanna ask everyone to do the same – but yeah, I think it’d benefit us to not immediately jump to a huge scale. Maybe do something where characters can be in the same location at the start, and plots can branch out from there?
Hylian Adventures style.
Just a really super random idea to go with that–maybe we can make a little map that procedurally generates as people post. Everyone starts off in a single location, but as people write, it generates sections to the map that are seeded by the word content of the last posts. So no one knows what the story world will look like until we write the posts before. We could also maybe add keywords for like “cave”, “forest”, “mountain” so as places are mentioned, they magically appear on the map!
That could be cool!
I’d like to have it open to visit and use the existing locations from Kupop, too; a lot of what I wrote was about building the setting, so not touching it at all wouldn’t really feel the same. I think maybe kinda (amazingly enough) like the original, back in the day. Start with a hub world (hell, use the Kupopolis city and surroundings, which weren’t that well defined as I remember) and branch out from there with both old and new stuff?
Yeah, we could add a list of old locations into the map generator, and as we reach certain benchmarks as a group, new major locations will appear on the map. Personally I’d kind of like to keep it a single world and treat every place as city states, and they can pop into existence like a game of Civilization.
Benchmarks could be like everyone has posted one story post, a % of the writers have mentioned a certain location or a character, things to foster collaboration.
Or we could just toss them into the world generator and have them be dynamically generated with the rest of the map. I do like the idea of starting in the middle with Kupopolis and letting the map build outwards.
My leaning would be to try to keep the Web and dimensions and stuff there, just because a lot of what I (and I think others, but I won’t speak for them) did was stories about the craziness of those worlds connected by portals? Even if I’m not going fullbore, writing for a bunch of countries, et cetera, I’d like it to be there.
But we could have gates show up on the map as characters reach them, maybe? Like, when they appear in the story, they pop up on the map.
These are just woke up ideas so they might not make sense. (Hooray for Fridays off!)
We could do that! Would they appear procedurally generated or would the map scrape the last story to get its location? Like if you wrote “We just discovered a new portal! Its by the Sleepy Hollow.” Would the map then look for ‘Sleepy Hollow’ and then drop a portal next to it? Would we want the map to update pre-existing map locations then?
Hmm. Can we do both? I feel like it might be neat if there was the option for–well, let’s give two scenarios.
Scenario 1: Matt is writing about a Guardian knight who is helping with whatever situation is occurring in Kupopolis, when he gets a dire missive from home! Our brave hero needs to return to the Gate Dimension posthaste. The Gate Gate (…why did I pick an example with the SILLIEST POSSIBLE example…) appears on the map!
Scenario 2: Byron is writing about a plucky street rat who delves into the city’s sewers system with a pair of characters written by us. The map automatically mentions after Byron’s post goes up that a Gate to the Mana Dimension can be found there!
Scenario 1 is when the writers just need something to happen because they have a story to tell. Scenario 2 is what (I think, please tell me if I’m wrong!) you envsioned, where the map could actually kinda provide context to write about?
Also, if anyone else has comments, please share 'em! I don’t wanna overplan and cut some of y’all out by mistake here.
Might be exploring this idea too far without much input, but how about this:
When we discover new portals, new districts are added to the Kupopolis city as immigrants start to arrive. These districts get added to the map, and as people write about these districts the map changes to accommodate the popularity: shops, roads, parks, hotels, embassys, etc. As the map grows outward, the city develops as well. Similar to marking a portal, we can have the map scrape for such location keywords to add them to the district.
This would allow for stories themed around the city as well as stories themed around exploration for new portals. As we can add portals to new places, this will also inject possible conflict as new elements will literally also be neighbors with the old.
Did you also want the portal locations to be writable locations as well? Maybe we can seed the old ones with pregen maps that also grow as people write about them too. I still would like to keep the focus on one world as much as possible to avoid everyone staying in their own sandboxes.
edit: wrote this on the subway and just saw your last post.
Yes! Why not both! And yeah I agree what do the rest of you guys think??
Hey gang!
As I mentioned over in Show 'n Tell, I’ve actually spent a great deal of time thinking and writing Kupopolis even if the site’s not up anymore. Here are my comments:
1b) Mikey and I have been talking about revamping the old boards for years, but it was always just pie-in-the-sky talk about stuff we wanted to do. The live-time-updating map would be neat, and sounds sorta like stuff on the wishlist we had back in the day.
Don’t get me wrong, those were heady days of ambition, intrigue and fun. We delighted and surprised each other with the magnum opuses (opi?) that we cranked out on the weekly, if not daily. But, we realized as we contemplated moving forward that we had to start blank slate. So we itemized all our Big Ideas to each other, made a list of things that Probably Happened during the Kupop Hiatus, and picked a starting point with that bit of history behind it.
So, we should probably do something like that before we begin. Decide what year in the timeline we’re starting at (Travis can help with this, when he gets around to posting), decide on the current status of our assets (e.g. who’s still in power, what’s gone on in the intervening time, what’s playing on Kupop radio these days), then maybe pick a place as a central hub of activity and go from there.
It should go without saying that the Wiki would require a heavy amount of editing and revising once we decide on the where, when, how and what of our new endeavor, but one thing I found in the latter years of Kupop.com’s lifespan was that it was an indispensible resource. And can be once again!
I like this idea! And the rest of your post. I think I may have an idea for how to keep the focus on one world, without it being an exclusive focus – basically, so people can leave their favored locations, but come back if they want (and maybe pull others along!). We could say there’s some kind of recent dimensional instability in Kupopolis… and it’s pulling pieces of other dimensions to it. So, say, one district suddenly has a part of an Esperian city yanked over. Another has a wilderness area from Merge. Et cetera?
It might also give us a thing to work with early on.
Hey! I agree with this; I’d like to have it back, even if it’s password locked to us or with posts of those who don’t want them available taken down. (Hilariously, a large part of my current job is working with wishes like this when people donate to an archive, and preventing people from seeing stuff the donors didn’t want them to.)
But, I’ve started thinking: “What do we do if we can’t get the old site back?” It sounds like a realistic chance and early outlooks on getting a webcrawler to save it is… uh, not good. The experts told me the software is notoriously hard to install – something about a dedicated Linux OS with server software, and it’s considered hard for command line Linux installs. Also, needing a dedicated machine (or maybe a Virtual Box but that gets complicated because of system resources).
I think we should look at something like our archive boards here. I discovered my external drive does have a lot! I have all my megaposts from Neo and a bunch from Proper, a lot of notes and profiles, and then some. I’m gonna start trying to get some of this up. But, we should also expand it – let’s make a go-to place to get feedback, ask people things, and try to tease out as much as possible. Prepare for the worst, but hope for the best, basically.
[quote=“Scen”]2) It’s worth noting that I’ve actually also been chatting with Travis extensively over the last few years about collaborating on a Kupopolis “sequel” story, that would basically have just been me and him and Nick swapping story posts. One of the things that I kept telling Travis and Nick is that the main thing that clogged Kupop’s arteries and lead to the drop-off in participation is that we all had SO MUCH on our plates toward the end. Any new ideas we had, or new potential for collaboration, was quashed with this knowledge hanging over each and every one of our heads that in order to work on New Idea X, we had to first deal with Plots A, B, C, D, E and F. And you couldn’t collaborate with Writer X, because you already had a queue of collaborations in the pipe that needed to happen first.
Don’t get me wrong, those were heady days of ambition, intrigue and fun. We delighted and surprised each other with the magnum opuses (opi?) that we cranked out on the weekly, if not daily. But, we realized as we contemplated moving forward that we had to start blank slate. So we itemized all our Big Ideas to each other, made a list of things that Probably Happened during the Kupop Hiatus, and picked a starting point with that bit of history behind it.
So, we should probably do something like that before we begin. Decide what year in the timeline we’re starting at (Travis can help with this, when he gets around to posting), decide on the current status of our assets (e.g. who’s still in power, what’s gone on in the intervening time, what’s playing on Kupop radio these days), then maybe pick a place as a central hub of activity and go from there.[/quote]
Agreed completely! I think that really held us back, and I think we need that fresh start. What we’ve done in the past, I feel, works great as backstory… but it should be a boost for the projects we write in our 30’s, not a chain from our 20’s. Or something. That metaphor got mixed up something fierce.
But to do more than agree: we could look at the in between Proper and Neo period. Have some people from Proper alive, and maybe hints of things that came in Neo, but with an understanding that it’s a new story – and we may change details of the past (and deviate hard from Neo in the future). It’s a relatively untouched area, and I think it’s familiar but new enough to be fun?
Also: I’m really glad Travis is interested in general. I haven’t talked to him in years.
[quote=“Scen”]3) VITALLY IMPORTANT: we need the Wiki back. If only because, as writers, we relied on it as a resource when we forgot a name, or a place, or whatever. Even if we were to get the old board content back up as an archive, the Wiki is invaluable to any effort at a Kupopolis reboot because it can serve as a quick repository for “this stuff happened” when we’re writing on the fly.
It should go without saying that the Wiki would require a heavy amount of editing and revising once we decide on the where, when, how and what of our new endeavor, but one thing I found in the latter years of Kupop.com’s lifespan was that it was an indispensible resource. And can be once again![/quote]
Yes totally. Mike, how easy is that to put here? Wikia is spyware infested devilry.
So that map thing sounds like Asgardian magic to me, so I’ll trust that you aren’t some wizard selling blue colored water in a bottle. Aka. Love it, let’s do that!
As one of the…umm…less prolific writers back in the day, I’m certainly all for starting small/fresh and building out. Maybe taking on a few characters to start, and letting our characters abilities expand with their awareness (be they magic, science, etc).
On the other hand! I adored the massive wars and intricate plots, and would love to see all that happen again. Scen is right though, it made for a tricky writing landscape (and honestly was one reason I had trouble contributing as much as I wanted to).
working on it