So, I won a gold badge to South by Southwest (SXSW) this year, thanks to some writing about cloud computing. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, SXSW is a giant film/music/technology/now edu/now eco festival that takes place in Austin every year. Being a local, I usually look to the time with some amount of dread, as traffic and crowds become near unbearable. (2) Professionally, I’m quite interested in the technology part of the show- SXSW Interactive- and I did get to attend the keynote and some great panels. But something interesting came up on Saturday…

So first, confession time. I feel a bit bad that I actually did get in to see famed director Danny Boyle. And I left early. I left early because I found out that Joss Whedon’s new movie, Much Ado About Nothing, was going to be playing that day. And to show you just how much I’d been paying attention to the film schedule (3), I didn’t even realize that Whedon and a lot of the cast were going to be there and do a panel afterwards, until the panel actually happened.

So I stood relatively close to the front of a very, very long line for about two hours and got a pretty decent seat (4). I had vaguely heard that Joss Whedon was doing a Shakespeare film- mainly rumors shared by our housemate (5)- that Joss Whedon had taken a bunch of his former actors to his house and make a black and white Shakespeare movie in about a week (which was a bit of an oversimplification (6)). I hadn’t seen a trailer or heard anything else about it, so I went in not knowing what to expect. Was it going to be a period piece? A Baz Luhrmann-esque re-envisioning? Set in space? Was Mal going to be in it? I had no idea.

The movie was, simply put, magical. It did justice to Shakespeare and justice to Whedon and justice to the wonderful actors and actresses and everyone else involved. If all you want is my recommendation, here it is: See it. Buy it. Watch it. Make your family watch it. Watch it again. It’s Shakespeare, with its period vernacular, in a modern setting, and it is gloriously accessible and Whedon-esque, even absent his dialog. Take our money, Joss Whedon.

So, before I get to a slightly deeper review, as it turns out you CAN spoil a 400 year old script. (7) So if you want to see it like I did, and be completely clueless… well, to be as completely surprised you would have had to have not read the last paragraph, but to avoid more spoilers stop reading here. ^_^

Much Ado About Nothing has at times been called Benedick and Beatrice, who happen to be my favorite characters in the play. Their repartee is my favorite Shakespearean dialog and is amazing by itself. And Alexis Denisof (Wesley/Buffy) and Amy Acker (Claire/Dollhouse, Fred/Angel) not only did justice to the roles but very much made them their own. The pair definitely brought incredibly worthwhile interpretations to their characters, and were just amazing. Their line delivery was superb, and their physical acting and physical comedy was terrific. Amy Acker is my favorite Beatrice, ever. (8) I cannot say enough good things about her performance. And I really want to know how many takes they made her do for some scenes, because, ow. ^_^;

Whedon did some interesting things to put his own mark on the story. The film took place at his house. Men wore suits and possessed guns. Benedick and Beatrice had some sort of physical relationship prior to the story. Conrade was female (played by Riki Lindhome of Garunkel and Oates, Cheryl/Buffy). There was definitely a stronger undercurrent of sexuality than is usually portrayed… and in at least one scene, not so much an undercurrent (9). Dogberry (the ever awesome Nathan Fillion) and Verges (Tom Lenk, Andrew/Buffy) were played as comical 80s-style cop buddies, and totally stole scenes.

Everyone was great. Sean Maher (Simon/Firefly) played an intensely villainous Don John. Clark Gregg (Agent Coulson/Avengers) played an impassioned Leonato. Fran Kranz (Marty/Cabin in the Woods, Topher/Dollhouse) acted in ways we hadn’t seen before, as the brash Claudio. Reed Diamond (Laurence/Dollhouse) played a regal Don Pedro. And Jillian Morgese, who played Hero, fit in the cast so well that I was really surprised that I couldn’t place her in a past Whedon role at all… which turned out to be (uncredited Woman in Restaurant/Avengers). I know I’m not mentioning everyone, but everyone definitely brought it.(10)

And lo and behold, as the credits rolled, the SXSW staff brought chairs to the front for a panel. I’m sure that there will be recordings of it made available online at some point, since I saw plenty of people recording it. Here are some of the questions/comments I recall:

*Lots of clapping from both the audience and the panel for an English teacher who thanked them for making the movie before asking her question.
*One lady didn’t ask a question, but who thanked Joss Whedon profusely and completely broke down during her thanks.
*One gentleman who said he stood in line thinking he’d come up with a question, but ended up asking Nathan Filion why he was so awesome. (Paraphrasing the response: First, I commend you on your taste. I ride a lot of coattails. The secret of being awesome is picking the right coattails (points to Whedon).)
*When asked how they felt about doing Shakespeare, Fillion talked about how he almost chickened out until Whedon convinced him to come back. He said that he was scared, and that he peed a little. To which Greg Clark added that he himself peed a lot. Fillion also said that after awhile you got used to the language (which was true when watching the film as well). It was just flowery… and kind of backwards, like Yoda.
*An adorable child said she loved the Firefly theme and wondered if he wrote the music, which as it turns out besides the lyrics he did.
*One of the final two questions was a guy trying to get Whedon to settle a bet… what did he think of Lost? (Answer: He’d never seen it. As it turns out, you often make tv or watch tv.)
*The last question was about whether Whedon would ever revisit Firefly. Whedon responded that he’d love to have the question from Fox/Universal or whomever has the rights.

I did think of some questions, but by then time was up. Here’s what mine would’ve been:
*How many times did they make Amy Acker fall down? ^^;
*Claudio has a racist line- while he’s redeeming himself. Whedon definitely noted the line visually. What was he trying to convey there?

So, all in all, I loved it. As a fan of Much Ado, as a fan of Whedon, it’s easy for me to love. But I’m going to guess that lots of other people will love it as well. And that’s from someone who’s touched a First Folio. (11) Much thanks to Joss Whedon and cast and crew for sharing the movie with us, and thanks for your monumental efforts of filming it all in a scant 13 days. My hat’s off to you.

Oh, yes. And we learned that Agent Coulsen lives.

(1) Chances are you’d be right. But that’s not the case here.
(2) It helps the economy, they say. You don’t need to go downtown anyway, they say. Luckily, I live in the boonies.
(3) I didn’t quite realize I had a film badge early on. :P
(4) Overheard in line: “I want to make out with someone tonight.” “X-Men First Class was a terrible movie compared to the first one.” (4a) “Is that Harry Knowles?” (4b)
(4a) That statement is completely objectively wrong.
(4b) Yes.
(5) He spends a lot of time on the Internet
(6) It was 13 days.
(7) You’ve been warned!
(8) One possible exception: my wife played Beatrice in junior high. Although I didn’t see it, I’ll bet that would be my favorite had I seen it.
(9) The Lindhome/Maher scene. Wow.
(10) It’s it.
(11) Really. And that makes me an authority on stuff or something.

Recently, my wife found a book that we’d like to listen to in the car available through Audible. Because of some technological restrictions on the computer she was using, she could not download the file herself. She asked me to see what I could do on my computer. And I could get it to work, for certain definitions of work. It works, as in, it sorta-mostly does the things that Audible says it will do… but only after I had to install software, clear caches, delete cookies, and do a few other things. And, it is completely, completely, completely, totally encumbered by a horrific proprietary format and DRM.

I listen to podcasts. It’s easy. I download the MP3. I copy it to my USB stick. I put my USB stick in the car. Done.

To get an Audible book to work in the same manner… well, I’m grateful that someone else already purchased the book so I avoided any of those steps. Here’s where I started…

1. Sign in to Audible.
2. Find my library.
3. Install annoying mandatory software necessary to download file
4. Be forced to restart browser by said installation
5. Return to site and continue to be prompted to install annoying mandatory software after browser has been restarted
6. Search Audible help pages to figure out how to resolve said prompt
7. Follow help page instructions to no success
8. Search Internet instead
9. Resolve problem based on Internet forum suggestions
10. Unsuccessfully search for a way to download file as a well-supported, non-proprietary format
11. Use help pages to discover that while some cars are supported, mine isn’t
12. Unsuccessfully attempt to add book to a device using “MP3 Player” option (specific device not supported)
13. Learn that because I attempted to add to a device, the “burn to a CD” option is gone from the Web interface (really?) and so it attempts to download book again in earlier manner
14. Watch annoying software crash as it fails to comprehend adding two of the same book to a library
15. Attempt to burn book to CD/DVD (unsuccessful; software already installed in my computer not supported)
16. Install burning software that’s supposed to be supported
17. Unsuccessfully hunt for options to burn book to a CD/DVD through the original annoying software (because it’s not there)
18. Go to help pages to try to figure out how to burn a CD with said software
19. Realize that while it instructs you how to burn from your new software library to CD, it does not tell you how to get the book into your new software library
20. Figure out how to to add book to new software library
21. Authorize new software to work with Audible
22. Wait for something to happen
23. After successful authorization, return to earlier “how to burn a CD” instructions
24. Realize that because I only have burnable DVDs and nary a single burnable CD I’m SOL. (really?)
25. Beg a CD-R from a friend
26. Find out the book will not fit on one Audio CD
27. Beg for another CD-R
28. Find out that I will need even more CD-Rs
29. Find more CD-Rs
30. Encounter a problem with the burning software; while it isn’t made by Audible, Audible still shares culpability for making me use it
31. Insert steps to resolve problem
32. Successfully burned book to four CDs. (1 DVD would be FAR less wasteful…)

And now I’m actually going to need to verify that said CDs work in the device that I want them to work (my car), which will have to come later.

This list wasn’t all of the steps- that’s from memory, and I obscured several steps with things like “resolve problem,” “find” and “figure it out.” This process was also the first in YEARS in which I could not substitute a DVD-R for a CD-R, which I found rather jarring.

So… yeah. I’ve worked in IT for nearly two decades. I’m getting a PhD. I study technology, copyright, and a host of other things directly related to books and DRM and technology. And it’s been one of the most frustrating experiences I’ve had in some time. =P Admittedly, many of these problems will not occur again. Even given that, as-is the process will never be as easy as the one I use to listen to podcasts. It will never allow me to listen to files on the devices I choose in the manner that I want to. And while some will argue that it’s the right of the copyright holder (and keep in mind, that is not uncontroversial, if by nothing else demonstrated by this year’s DMCA rule-making procedure), in this context, the copyright holder and Audible have both lost. If I didn’t care, I could have pirated the book. Simple. Easy. Done. I don’t, for many reasons. Others do, for many reasons. These are some of those reasons.

And down the line, as the years pass, and technology changes? I work with digital archives. My short response: Good Luck.

I may write more that topic later.

It’s awesome.

The Midgard Campaign Setting is based on the home campaign world of famed RPG designer Wolfgang Baur. The patronage project started almost two years ago, and much of that time was spent on the Kobold Quarterly forums, exploring, discussing, and creating the various parts of the world in the manner of Open Design. Other lead chapter designers include Jeff Grubb, Brandon Hodge, Christina Stiles, and Dan Voyce. A dozen other folk, including Ed Greenwood, also contribute to design. Among that dozen, I participated when I could (especially early on), and wrote some spells, deities, NPCs, and offered various suggestions in different places. And patrons gave suggestions, feedback, and ideas. So, given all that…

Midgard has been described as dark fantasy. There’s some obvious real-world cultural influences, as has been demonstrated in other projects from Open Design, particularly from Eastern European, Middle Eastern, Slavic, and Norse folklore. It’s not limited to those concepts, though- there are other sources of inspiration and a whole lot of creativity densely packed in the book. The book is written for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game (PFRPG, Paizo) and includes an extensive appendix for the Adventure Gaming Engine (AGE, Green Ronin). Although it was written with those systems in mind, there’s a great deal of material that can be adapted for other games. The world’s depth is incredible, and it can well serve as the home of many, many campaigns.

Midgard is a unique place. Optional rules make for a particularly interesting locale. Ley lines cover the land, which can be tapped for power. Elemental dragons take an active role in the world, their avarice extended to temporal power. Status matters, and can affect a party as they interact with the world’s denizens.

Chapter 1: Welcome to Midgard. Chapter 1 discusses Midgard’s rich history, cosmology, and features such as Ley Lines.

Chapter 2: Heroes of Midgard. Chapter 2 discusses the races of Midgard. Major races include Humans, Dragonkin, Dwarves, Elves and the Elfmarked (similar to Half-Elves), Gearforged (a steampunk-ish construct race), Kobolds, and Minotaurs. Several minor races are also mentioned briefly. These races may not be what you’re used to; for example, elves have largely left the world, and gnomes tend to be evil creatures that embrace demonic power. Midgard-specific languages, feats and traits are also included in this chapter. The optional Status rules are also found in this chapter, perhaps not intuitively found under the Human entry. The rules seemed based on the rules for status found in the excellent adventure, Courts of the Shadow Fey.

Chapters 3 through 9 discuss different major regions of Midgard. Each one lists major cities, places and personages of interest, and rules and mechanics that can be found in that area. For example, Chapter 5, the Dragon Empire, contains the Dragon Magic section, which has several spells that originate from that area. For another example, Chapter 7, the Wasted West has a very fun table about the side effects from the potions you buy when you go bargain-shopping at the Bottle Market in Maillon. Each area has its own history, themes, and dozens and dozens of adventure hooks. These sections are rich with history and life, and I’ll talk about them more in subsequent posts.

Chapter 10 discusses the pantheon of Midgard. Gods of Midgard aren’t necessarily distant, but their motivations are shrouded in mystery. For a variety of reasons that scholars only theorize about, they work behind masks as they interact with worshipers and other mortals. Each deity has a write-up that includes their known history, notable temples and worshipers, what they expect from their followers, and related information.

Appendix 1 discusses AGE rules, including 25 new backgrounds, 7 new specializations, and magic.

Appendix 2 provides regional encounter tables (yay!).

Appendix 3 lists a few examples for further readings.

Finally, the book ends with an excellent index (double yay!).

I have to mention the art. The book looks terrific. It has some of the best art that I’ve ever seen in an RPG book. The Kobold Quarterly blog has a great Art of Midgard series in which artists discuss their inspirations and ideas.

There are some problems in this first printing, mostly related to typos (page $$, some missing areas from the Table of Contents). I’m sure they drive Wolfgang crazy. ^_^ These will definitely be fixed in the PDF, and I imagine subsequent printings.

The Midgard Campaign Setting comes in hardback, softback, and PDF, and checks in at an impressive 296 pages. It is unquestionably a must-buy. ^_^

Way back in 2010, I mentioned I attended an event at a local gaming store (Dragon’s Lair). I woke up far too early on a Saturday morning so that I could attend the Monte Cook signing. I hadn’t realized it prior to arriving, but after the signing he was also going participate on a panel about game design. I left and got breakfast, fully intending to head home. But then I decided that the panel sounded too interesting to pass up, so returned to the store. Besides Monte Cook, I’d heard of Chris Pramas (founder of Green Ronin), but I wasn’t too familiar with the other folks. The people who had published the Shard RPG were there, as was the lead designer for the steampunk RPG, Tephra. There were also a couple of freelancers writing for Open Design and Paizo- Adam Daigle and Brandon Hodge.

I’ve always found the word “open” interesting. I’ve been a proponent of Open Source and Open Access for some time, and have followed the various open movements colloquially and in my professional and academic work. I found the Open Game License fascinating for a number of reasons I’ve discussed before. So what was Open Design? It seemed to be a way to do collaborative game creation. There was some payment required to get involved, but you received a product at the end, like a preorder, and you gained access to some normally behind-the-scenes aspects of game design. And you could potentially write and get credit for your contributions depending on how the community responded. So I signed up for a project that was using the Pathfinder system, to see what was going on. Although I had been an ardent 3E player, I hadn’t made the leap (well, hop) to Pathfinder.

That project… well, I can’t say that it’s been a big success, since two years out it’s still not released. (For a variety of reasons… Christina Stiles has rescued the project, though, and it’s moving forward again.) All I really contributed to that project was commentary and playtesting. But even then… it was interesting. The process was fascinating. The discussions on the forum were engaging. That style of collaborative game design is incredibly compelling, and shares a lot of the strengths and weakness of open source design. Many eyes, many designs, many conversations. And like open source design, when done well… it works incredibly well.

I’ve now been a patron on all but one of the subsequent projects (that one was a Kickstarter that just slipped by me while I was writing my qualifying work). For good or ill, I own many, many more RPG books than I did going in. I helped in the creation of the Midgard Bestiary for Pathfinder. And I contributed to this book, the Midgard Campaign Setting. Some deities, spells, NPCs… it’s just great to see out now.

I study copyright and things surrounding copyright. My publications and workshops and presentations and posters tend to involve copyright or open access in some manner. Copyright has its purpose and place, but copyright trends have really made it turn into a barrier for some really important activities, including the creation of new works and the preservation of older works. And by the strictest copyright standards, Open Design shouldn’t work. Some of it would horrify the copyright attorneys I’ve been on panels with. ^_^ Copyright isn’t transferred in writing (the only way it can be). Creation of expression is collaborative, which US law has never handled particularly elegantly. The OGL has some problems, and people use it incorrectly all over the place, including how they designate Open Content and Product Identity. People often have a sense of ownership about what they’ve written.

But it works beautifully.

Copyright, as a subject, doesn’t really come up. People share their ideas, their expression, and comment on them, and let other people use them for their own creations. It’s creative collaboration at its best. And the community is both engaged and reflexive. Does this idea work here, and if not, why not? Can we change it to work better? If we can’t use it here, can we use it elsewhere? Do we pitch anonymously, so that it’s really the writing that we vote on instead of the person? Do “bigger” names have a better chance of having a pitch accepted then newcomers? Should they? Different projects are made up of different patrons, and they may come to different conclusions. But so far, it’s worked out in every situation I’ve seen.

I’m not saying it’s easy. There are sometimes arguments. Sometimes discussions get heated. People are passionate about different subjects. But we get through. Sometimes your work isn’t accepted- I’ve had plenty of things rejected. But it’s been a great learning experience. Open Design has led to some terrific works. Kobold Press has put out some terrific books. I highly recommend checking them out. Check out the Midgard Campaign Setting. Check out Courts of the Shadow Fey, my favorite 4th edition adventure of all time (and/or it’s forthcoming Pathfinder version). Check out the best RPG gaming magazine around, Kobold Quarterly. Check out the Kobold Guide to Game Design. I could go on, but you probably get my point. If you’re interested in any of this, become a patron. It’s a great ride.

I haven’t had a lot of time to participate in recent months, since I was working on getting through the qualification process to get to my dissertation. But classes and quals are over, and it’s just (?) the dissertation to go… and I really want to make more time for it. So I hope to see some of you there. ^_^

It’s mainly based on attributes, which is fairly true to the books.  Your attributes define the number of dice you can roll – 2 is base, 7 is, I think, max.  When you’re testing, you roll a number of d6 equal to your attribute, and sum them, to try to beat a target number. The interesting bit is the bonus dice piece – skills and training are represented by bonus dice (which can’t exceed your attribute dice).  But bonus dice are extra – you roll more dice, but still only choose a number of dice equal to your attribute.  So you get *better* results with bonus dice, but it’s never above what someone can achieve naturally with some luck.

Then there are degrees of success, which seemed dumb at first, but I’m liking.  Say your target number is 12, for a very hard challenge.  Your ST might declare that it’s a very hard challenge, and requires extraordinary success.  So you have to beat the target number by 3 for each degree.  If you need a third degree success, you have to sum up to 18 (12+3+3).  Which seemed, at first, as simply a way to make it 18 without making it 18.  But the example makes it a bit more interesting.

They give the example of a man who wants to sing the dirge for a lord’s dead son.  Which is very hard (12).  But then he wants to do it in the lord’s throne room, which makes it third degree.  Simply making it 18 is pass/fail (sure, the ST can mod the failure, but….).  Making it 12 x3 means that you have gradiations. So If you roll a 13, you succeed, but not enough. If you roll an 11, you just fail.

The other bit is that age makes a huge difference, as does status. The older you are, the more XP you have to spend on attributes (basically point buy).  Also the more responsibilities you have. A young adult gets less stats, but can basically do whatever.  The same for skills – more age == more XP == more skills.  But on the flip side, you have Destiny points (which is where I get really impressed).  Destiny points are a lot like Fate point from Philip’s Narrowlands, but (sorry man) better.

You get between 7 and 0 Destiny points (youth get 7, venerable 0).  Destiny points are used to buy merits, which give bonuses (pretty nice ones). You can also get flaws, but not very many (also, adult and above has a default flaw) to add merits.  Any Destiny points you *don’t* spend become your action point pool.  You can spend them, and they regen at important story points.  They give you bonuses, but nothing huge – auto succeed at a minor task, convert a bonus die to a real die, stuff like that. Alternatively, you can burn them, which lowers your total pool, but gives you a much bigger benefit. So a youth gets more potential, which they can invest at the first, or save for more luck.  Age assumes you’ve already spent some to get to an older age….

It’s really pretty cool.

Also, Ben takes off for Australia on Wednesday, so there may not be another podcast for a few weeks (And this one was already delayed a few weeks, for which we’re sorry). We’ll see if Carlos can pull together a few special co-hosts to fill in for Ben.

NOTE from Carlos: Batman Spoilers ^_^

I had been wanting to write more but couldn’t really think of anything else to write about today until I saw the news in my FB feed that Ernest Borgnine had died at the age of 95.  The man had a very long and distinguished career as an actor, winning an Oscar in 1955.  He had more notable roles than the one I’m going to talk about, but my earliest memory of him as an actor was from the 1979 Disney movie The Black Hole.

Star Wars is the sci-fi that imprints on most geeks my age, and there’s no question it left its impression on me as well.  But the first time I saw The Black Hole, it stuck with me in a way I could only put my finger on with the passage of time.  It’s one I wound up picking up out of the discount bin on DVD from Best Buy one day just to go back and check it out and despite its flaws it still holds a special place in my heart because of the things I recognize in it now that I couldn’t as  kid.

Ostensibly a variation on Shakespeare’s The Tempest (and given that Strange Brew is a reworking on Hamlet, it makes me wonder just how much Shakespeare I was exposed to unwittingly as a kid), The Black Hole begins its story on board the USS Palomino in the middle part of the 22nd Century.  A deep space explorer, the Palomino comes across a black hole in a heretofore unexplored part of the galaxy.

The Palomino’s crew consists of Capt. Dan Holland (Robert Forster); Lt. Charlie Pizer (Timothy Bottoms); Dr. Alex Durant (Psycho‘s Anthony Perkins); reporter Harry Booth (Borgnine, with a character name that makes me giggle because it’s the name of an ex-GFs nephew); scientist and ESP expert Dr. Kate McCrea (not making the ESP part up); and their AI/robot companion V.I.N.CENT. (voiced by an uncredited Roddy McDowell).  The nature of their mission is never properly explained, but once the black hole threatens to fuck their shit up I’m not entirely sure it matters much.

After a mishap near the event horizon of the black hole causes damages to the Palomino, it detects a ship that seems to be standing in open resistance to the black hole’s overwhelming gravitational pull.  Even more surprising, the ship is the USS Cygnus.  Long thought to have been lost or destroyed on a deep space mission, the Cygnus not only is impervious to the black hole’s pull but showing signs of life as well.

The Palomino docks with the Cygnus and the crew makes contact with the Cygnus’ current commanding officer, Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximillian Schell, employing what I like to refer to as the “Pac-Man on speed chewing up scenery” school of acting).  Dr. McCrea really wants a face-to-face with Reinhardt, as her father was a member of the Cygnus’ crew when it went missing so many years prior.  The Palomino crew is escorted to Reinhardt by a large, red, menacing robot named Maximillian (no relation to the actor :-p).

Reinhardt informs everyone that he is the sole survivor of the Cygnus’ crew.  He has crafted Maxmillian and a litany of other robots to keep the Cygnus fully functional as he prepares the ship to embark on the greatest voyage mankind has ever seen: into, through and beyond the black hole to whatever lies past.  He offers the Palomino safe haven on the Cygnus until the Palomino can be repaired.  They can then document his journey from this side of reality and relay news of Reinhardt’s genius back to Earth.

The Palomino’s crew is torn by the offer.  Durant has a serious science hard-on for Reinhardt, and is impressed by the tech Reinhardt has fashioned to make such a trip possible.  Booth as a writer loves a good story and finds the Cygnus ripe with possibilities for a great one.  McCrea isn’t sure what to do, given her personal connection to the Cygnus.  But it takes a revelation from a robot of V.I.N.CENT.’s model type named B.O.B. (uncredited voice work from the great Slim Pickens) to make everyone on the Palomino realize just how twisted Reinhardt is in pursuing his vision.  It also changes the stakes for what everyone wants.

This movie has a curious place in Disney history.  It was the first Disney film ever to garner a PG rating, and it earns it (at least in the context of the movies of the time).  It was one of the first Disney movies I can remember where someone dies on screen.  At least two people actually, with one pretty horrifically and it’s an open question about the demise of a third (spoiler alert will come with that later).  And there’s some weighty themes and disturbing images connected to Reinhardt’s master plan.

The movie also suffers horribly (especially in the HD age) from some horribly dated special effects.  The sentry robots that serve as Reinhardt’s security force/army are pretty silly looking today, and the “laser” fire from various battle scenes leaves a lot to be desired.  You can also see the wires a lot of the time when V.I.N.CENT. and B.O.B. fly around (they levitate by some unexplained means).

That said, for the visual weaknessesThe Black Hole possesses in some scenes it more than makes up for in others.  Frankly speaking, I think the model work on the Cygnus and to a lesser extent the Palomino stands with anything released from the 1960s on.  The Cygnus in particular is stunning.  Combined with exceptional matte paintings and it creates the illusion of scale that makes me smile even now almost 30 years later.

And despite Schell hamming it up so bad Jews keeping kosher may need a warning on the box, the rest of the performances range for mediocre-decent (Bottoms as Pizer and Perkins as Durant) to actually somewhat nuanced.  Well, for a Disney film.  That would be Forster, who I still have trouble connecting from this movie to seeing him wooing Pam Grier in Jackie Brown as an adult; and the aforementioned Borgnine who just really gave his all in everything he did.

And then there’s the voice work of McDowell and Pickens as V.I.N.CENT. and B.O.B.  When I first saw this in 1979, I only had the vaguest knowledge of Planet of the Apes, and no clue who Cornelius was in it.  And I’d never heard of Dr. Strangelove.  Amazingly, I might have seen Blazing Saddles at that age, but never would have connected Taggert to B.O.B.  As an adult hearing their voices in these two roles just makes me laugh, and maybe love them a little more.  I wanted V.I.N.CENT. to be real back then and I wanted him to be mine even more so than R2D2 or C-3PO.

If only because I could understand V.I.N.CENT. more than R2 and he wasn’t as whiny as 3PO.

At the same time, as much as I loved this movie it also creeped the hell out of me.  I can’t explain why without getting extremely spoileriffic so this is your one and only warning.  If you’ve seen the movie, nothing here is news to you but for the odd person who might check it out I’d suggest just seeing it before coming back to these last couple of paras.

This is a Disney movie, so you know the bad guy can’t win.  Reinhardt gets his comeuppance when he’s crushed by a giant display screen as the Cygnus is in shambles from an asteroid cluster that gets sucked in by the black hole, which also devastates the ship.  He calls to Maximillian for help, but Max pursues the agenda set out by his programming (I presume) which is to try and complete the mission with the probe ship that provided the relevant info for the Cygnus to plot its course.  Eventually Maximillian gets beaten by V.I.N.CENT. and is left a non-functional husk

(boo-yah!  Shorties will fuck your shit up, motherfucker! No wonder I attached myself to V.I.N.CENT.)

Reinhardt gets a last scene where it’s obvious he’s shuffling off this mortal coil and then we get this weird montage of scenes where Reinhardt’s body is adrift in the void and comes in contact with the husk of Maximillian.  Next thing we know, Reinhardt is somehow INSIDE of Maximillian and standing atop a mountain amidst a fiery pit with armies of the “robots” that are in fact zombified members of the Cygnus crew that Reinhardt used to keep his dream alive.

Back then, I didn’t get what I was seeing and just thought the images kinda messed up.  The first time I saw the movie, I do remember vaguely having nightmares connected to those images.  Maximillian creeped me out to begin with, but seeing him with Reinhardt INSIDE of him messed me up even more.  Never mind the zombie crew walking off into nothing with flames leaping all around.

It’s only when I picked this movie up and watched it for the first time in a quarter century as an adult that it finally registered to me that this movie may have earned that PG rating because it was the first time Disney had shown an actual depiction of hell on screen.  That’s the only interpretation of that scene that makes any sense at all, and it absolutely blew my mind that I had never realized that before.  Granted it was the first time I’d thought about The Black Hole on any level since I ever really thought about movies and what they mean.  But still it was a serious, “WHOA DUDE!!!” kind of moment.

That also made me look at the final scene when the surviving Palomino crew members find themselves involuntarily thrust into completing Reinhardt’s mission in a completely different light.  Are they visiting another galaxy? Another plane of existence?  Have they actually died and are really seeing heaven?  Who knows.

It almost makes me wish I smoked pot or took acid just to see if there isn’t another level there I can conceive of in a rational state of mind.  But that it could still give me a “holy shit!” moment almost 30 years later?  In what was ostensibly a kids movie when released (albeit in retrospect, kinda a fucked up one)?

Well, that’s just a nice added feature :-).

I’m not backing much that isn’t done, currently.

Recently finished projects include:

Auro: A Turn-Based, Cross Platform tactics game.  Looks fun, very old school.

Goblins Drool, Fairies Rule: A matching game for kids.  For my kids.

A Game For All Seasons: A set of smaller games from a publisher that made a game (BattleCon) that I enjoyed.

I’m currently backing:

CLANG: Neal Stephenson’s Sword Fighting game.  It’s got like 14 hours left. It looks fun, I like Stephenson….

Alien Frontiers for iPad: Cause, Alien Frontiers + iPad.

Mage Knight: Revenge: It’s an implementation of Mage Knight (The clickies, not the excellent board game) on iPad.  Cause, Mage Knight + iPad.

Anyone else?

Pic from first week:

Pics from second week:

I created an XBL account for my daughter, so that she can play Minecraft in an online game.

I get an email to her address saying that we have to verify the account (perfectly fine) by an adult.

Click it, and get taken to MSN (MSN? That’s your interface? Really?). Where it has two options – “Get your parent” or “ask by email.” Note that I’ll later find out that the “Ask by email” link doesn’t even work – it goes to a dead page.

Choosing ask a parent gives a confirm or deny link. I click confirm, and it asks me to sign in my account (fine, no worries).

Then I sign in, and it says it wants to verify me as an adult. And to do that, I see this:

“To verify that you’re an adult, you must provide a valid credit card number. A credit card is the only method of age verification we accept.

We’ll charge your credit card $0.50 (50 cents) and a portion will be donated to charity.”

Keep in mind, this is on my SSG Wookiee account. Which I’ve had for years, charged things to repeatedly, and, within the past two weeks, have used to purchase XBL points. This is not a new account. This is not some random account. This is my main account, which has a boatload of history. Just on the first page, I can see over $100 in charges on SSG Wookiee. And yet somehow Microsoft 1. Can’t use that history and 2. Can’t just do a hold and release, it wants to actually charge me $.50, and then donate a “portion” to charity.

I realize that it’s not even a dollar. But I don’t care. I don’t need to be paying Microsoft (oh, sorry, giving to some random charity they won’t identify) to allow me to verify I’m an adult to create a new account on MS.

And MS support confirms, by telling me “Heather B: Because you are creating a new account for a child my friend. That does not count, as verifying that you are an adult. The $.50 goes to a charity when you add your card to her account as a one time charge. That page that you are on explains that to you.”

Also, nice use of “My friend” there. Way to build rapport.

Also, note the “Add your card to her account.” Aka “Register your card as a payment option on her account” rather than just “Use it to verify.”

And the response? Heather B: You can make her a new account using an adult date of birth, and use prepaid codes for subscriptions and points if you do not want to add your card to her account.”

I’m being somewhat of an ass to the person in chat support, which I try to never do.

However, their total lack of empathy or understanding, and use of pure scripted responses which are “do what we say, or screw off” isn’t helping the situation.

And I get this back:

“Heather B: The two accounts are not related and one has nothing to do with the other. So you can put her date of birth at 18 or older, and bypass the parental controls and the $.50 charge. Or you can put in the correct date of birth and the money will go to a charity.”

So MS has just flat out told me to lie about her age. If this happened at my company, I would be in someone’s office 10 minutes later explaining how policies which make long term members feel valueless, along with *encouraging* a customer to lie, is a Bad Idea(tm).

I try not to jump on the “I hate big corporations” and “MS is full of greedy stupid bastards” bandwagons, but this is offensive to me, personally and professionally.

Ah well. Time to lie about her age and delete her account.

They have an awards event every year. It’s a bit under promoted for no apparent reason, so here’s a small attempt to correct that…

http://www.dicetowernews.com/dice-tower-awards-for-2011/

Check them out, listen to all 250+ episodes, then subscribe!  Then come back here once we get our podcast rolling with board games…

Note that this list has completely become my “must buy” list. Some really good stuff on there.

The full list, if you’re lazy, is here

• Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting – Author John Scalzi attempts to talk about privilege in a gamified way, because a lot of people get freaked out by the term.
• A Look at Sexism in Fantasy by Sarah Darkmagic. This is in reaction to the Sexism in Fantasy article at WotC that BJ and I briefly touched on at the end of the last podcast. (Also, the Prismatic Art Collection Kickstarter that she’s running will be over soon, so check it out.)
• (Trigger warning: sexual assault.) Finally, Kickstarter Cancels Tentacle Rape Card Game, from the Border House blog. Links to a lot of related discussion there. (I believe there will be additional commentary from Geek Girls Rule soon.) This one brings up lots of issues, so I’m really interested in what she’s going to say.

I meant to mention three areas:

1. the portrayal of women in geek culture media (comics, games, RPGs, etc.)
2. the treatment of women in geek culture in real life situations, and
3. women in positions of authority in the industries (writers/artists/creators/editors/etc.).

Lots more below.

Here are the recent examples we mentioned:

• Harassment of Miranda “Super_Yan” Pakozdi on Capcom’s reality fighting game show, Cross Assault. More coverage at the Guardian, at Ars Technica, at The Mary Sue and at Penny Arcade.
• The attacks on Bioware’s Jennifer Hepler, which reportedly led to her deleting her Twitter account. Also covered at Kotaku and at Destructoid, and an update to the first article linked at The Mary Sue.
• Jackie Lee harassed at a Magic the Gathering tournament, also covered at the Daily Dot. (Update: Thanks to a comment on a friend’s Facebook share for this link to a terrific response from Jackie Lee.)
• Depictions of females in the Mass Effect series (thanks to commenter Sarah for the link!), also covered at 1Up.

On the Starfire/Catwoman New 52 Controversy

• The Big Sexy Problem with Superheroines and Their ‘Liberated Sexuality’ – Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance discusses the issue- and why the criticism isn’t slut shaming (which is also something we should pay attention to)
• Dear DC Comics, where Michele Lee talks about her 7-year old daughter’s response to changes of her favorite character
• A Response From A Female Comic Book Fan
• Scott Lobdell Answers Your Questions (Even Ones About Starfire), from Comicvine. Scott Lobdell is the writer for Red Hood and the Outlaws. I agree with something he says (or implies): slut shaming Starfire would be wrong. I don’t think that’s what the criticism was about.
• DC Comics: Bad at Math, a fun strip from the webcomic Shortpacked!

Depiction of Women in Comics:

• Women in Comics, An Overview from the comicbookGRRRL blog
• No, it’s not equal, from the really interesting She Has No Head! column at Comic Book Resources
• Grant Morrison Talks Straight About Sexism in Comics
• A Non-Comic Book Website Talks About Sexism in Comics, from The Mary Sue, about an article in the Guardian
• The Rape of Ms. Marvel by Carol Strickland
• Pros: Are Comic Books Sexist? – Some responses from industry professionals. And I should add, I was really disappointed in Mark Millar’s response for reasons I’ll get into later.
• Supergirls Gone Wild: Gender Bias in Comics Shortchanges Superwomen, a 2007 Mother Jones article
• DC Women Kicking Ass, an awesome tumblr.

From the show notes on the podcast: Here’s what if the male avengers posed like the Black Widow, if male superheroes posed like Wonder Woman, and a Why does this female superhero pose keep happening? thread.

The Comics Industry:

• Sexism in Comics
• Where are the Women in Comics?
• An Open Letter to DC Comics: Why Not Go After Truly New Readers?
• Answering Dan DiDio: The Problem With Having only 1% Female Creators at DC Comics
• DC Comics Promises to Hire More Women After Backlash
• Female Superhero Characters and Sex: Creators Explain How Comics Can Do Better – Some interesting professional responses at Comics Alliance
• Marvel Editors Discuss Women in Comics and the Lack of Female-Led Titles
• Women as Comic Book Artists, from a 2005 Pavement article. One of the reasons I list this here is because it addresses manga a bit.
• Big News for Women Working at DC Comics, from The Mary Sue, about the mixed news from DC

Thinking about Geek Culture:

• Normative sexism: Geek edition
• Science Fiction, Geek Culture, and Sexism
• Sexism in Geek Culture, from Geek Girls Rule
• From The Mary Sue, Props: How to Apologize on the Internet for a Gender-Related Mishap
• Sexism in Nerd Culture is Not Okay, from the Escapist (video)

I’ve recently seen some really good discussions in the RPG industry. Paizo editor and author James Sutter’s article, Death to the Chainmail Bikini, discusses some of the issues involved. So does Wolfgang Baur in the latest issue of Kobold Quarterly (which as you can note from the cover, includes the Ecology of the Succubus). We’ve also seen several prominent female writers from the folks at KQ, like Christina Stiles, who has been editing KQ along with Miranda Horner, among others, and is writing Rogue Mage and Midgard Tales, among others. Plus, Tracy Hurley (aka Sarah Darkmagic) is working on the Prismatic Art Collection (another Kickstarter project!) which looks pretty cool. Ms. Hurley also created the Women Fighter in Reasonable Armor tumblr site, in this site’s links. [Correction! I confused Sarah Darkmagic's "More Like This" (in the comments below) with Kirin Robinson's Women Fighter in Reasonable Armor site. Sorry, all! They're both worth checking out.]

Let me say that I understand this subject is discussed very well in some places online. This subject also isn’t easy for some people to talk about or, especially judging by discussion threads, think about. It’s difficult for me. At times, people get really defensive. All I’m asking is that we think about it. There are two responses-to-responses that I’d like to share. First, Sexism in Games Bingo from geekfeminism.org covers a lot of the typical, and usually inappropriate, responses to these discussions. The comments on that link are also worth reading. It’s not necessarily that those responses are wrong per se (although IMHO, many are)- it’s that a lot of them have been addressed for the upteenth time, and those arguments tend to distract from the purpose of the discussion. We can definitely use the bingo card (and its variations in other areas, like skepticism) as a shorthand to maybe consider arguments a bit more. I’m not saying people shouldn’t make any variations of those points- just consider it, and see if they’ve been addressed elsewhere. The other link I want to share is a great post from Kotaku, Nerds and Male Privilege, Part 2- Deconstructing the Arguments. Like the bingo card, it addresses some of the common, often inappropriate, responses that people have in those discussion. (Part 1 at the original site and at Kotaku and their comments are also worth reading. Also, let me add, the attack on critical theory in the comments of the original post was one of the laziest I’ve ever seen. :P)

And finally, I’ll respond to one of the responses I’ve seen: X happens to men, too. The Deconstructing the Arguments article goes into that a bit, but I’ll also respond with what I think… I don’t think that makes it equal. I don’t think that violence against women in comics is the same thing as violence against men. If the overall comics culture didn’t have the issues it does, maybe… but it does. There are more male writers than female writers. There are more male heroes than female heroes. There’s more imagery for men than for women. So the fact that bad things happen to guys as well doesn’t necessarily mean as much as it might. Also, it may or may not be true; for example, that was a response to Women in Refrigerators. And as it turns out, that wasn’t exactly… correct. Bad things happened to male superheroes, but men tended to recover a whole lot better than their female counterparts. They even called this trait Dead Men Defrosting.

In a later post, I’ll talk about some of the writers/artists that got me interested in comics again.

[Edit from CJ: And a friend mentioned we might want to mention a trigger warning, which is a good idea and I apologize for not doing so in the first place. We do talk about violence against women, including sexual violence.]

Open Design’s Midgard Bestiary for Pathfinder, with lead developer Adam Daigle. Daigle is an awesome monster developer who worked on all of Paizo’s Bestiaries and a host of Open Design and other materials- and as of last month was officially hired by Paizo and relocated from Austin to Seattle. And although I am biased, I gotta say that the book is one darned cool monster book. I’d get it without my contributions. ^_^ (I did include the idea of kobolds riding giant sea turtles, though! :P As well as other stuff.)

On the Kickstarter front: A few hours for a Gaming Paper adventure (plus gaming paper, a nifty gaming resource), and a few days for this excellent looking Viking-theme video game, The Banner Saga. Both look super cool. And today was the launch of Open Design’s new Kickstarter-backed project, Midgard Tales, which is going to be awesome. The lead on this one is Christina Stiles, who is both a great designer and really nice. I’m definitely backing, and if I can make the time I’m definitely contributing.

It began when I moved to Wisconsin before my family got here.  I had three months in the (I thought at the time) dead of winter (turns out March-May is not quite winter here, but for a Texan displaced, it was close enough) with no one around except one friend from Austin. And he was a work-friend – we were great friends at work, had serious conversations, etc. But I never wanted to talk to him *outside* of work.

So I was in an efficiency apartment with cable and internet, two TVs (one for TV, one for the Xbox), and a new computer.  But even I recognized that tons of videogames, and Skype chats with home, were not enough socialization.  So I set out to find people to associate with.  Through the magic of Meetup.com, I found out that there was a pretty thriving board gaming community.  I liked board games, I played them in Austin with friends at game night.  So it sounded good.  One met every week in my city, another met every other Friday about an hour away, and a third met every other weekend (both days) about 30 minutes away.

In time, I came to learn that there are lots of differences between groups, but that’s for another post.  Suffice to say that most of my time was spent either playing games, or playing board games.

In that process, I learned a lot about gaming, and became very interested.  I changed from playing Munchkin to learning about Eurogames vs Ameritrash, to hang out with people who read German game magazines, because that’s where you found out about new stuff coming out.  I learned to ID game types by designer (Oh, that’s a Martin Wallace game, you know how that will play out.  Oh, Corey K?  You’ll probably love it.  Etc).  I actually spent more money on board games than video games so far this year.

In the four years since I’ve been seriously playing, things have changed a lot.  Where previously, most of my games were ordered online, or via a 1-3 week waiting period at my local game store, you can now find stuff in Target, Barnes and Noble, whatever.  A couple weeks ago, I found Munchkin, Catan, and Rune Age (a deck building game from Fantasy Flight that, while excellent, is not even remotely mainstream) on the shelves of Target.  I walk in to B&N, and go to their game section, and almost always find at least one thing I’m interested in.  The snob/hipster part of me is a bit offended that the “plebs” can get Rune Age from Target, but that’s quickly squashed as Jimmie pointed out that 1. Gaming is good for everyone and 2. I’m still far more hardcore than them. ;)  The fact that some random kid may walk in to Target, see Rune Age, with a big dragon on the cover, and pick it up, then fall in love with deck builders (and OMG do I love deck builders) is *awesome*.

And then there’s iOS (and, to a lesser degree, Android).  Because let’s be honest. As much as you might love board games, playing them consistently is hard.  Our meetup group meets once a week for 4.5 or so hours, and then once a month on a Saturday.  But even if I went to every one (I don’t, because I have a family, and work, and get tired, and….), that’s still about a day a week.  If I have 5 games I’m in love with, I’ll play maybe 2 a week, every other week.  So it’ll be 2-3 months before I get a second play on a game in some cases.  And that assumes I’m only playing *my* games – every one else there is a fan too, so they all have their games. So unless it’s a game we all love, I play a game once every 4 months, maybe.  Which is not a lot of time to develop strategies.

I got my yearly bonus last week, and rebought an iPod (I had one previously, but sold it (I thought I was getting an iPhone, but that’s a long story)).  And I have my Droid smartphone.

Between the two of them, I have a literal ton (I assume that if I put all the parts together in real life and weighed them, it would be a ton.  I haven’t checked) of games available to me at a minute’s notice, available anywhere (but certainly not in the bathroom, because that’s never where anyone plays app games), with, in most case, a reasonably good AI.

Right now, on my Droid I have Dominion, Elder Signs: Omens, Condado (which is a clone of San Juan), and Labyrinth.  Then I have a couple online card games (Urban Rivals, Cabals, Shadow Era) which have web versions, but also apps.  And that was really nice.  I spent a ton of time playing Dominion (and completely changed how I play it – I’m a ruthless ass hole playing Dominion now.  I mock people who buy feasts.  I laugh at people who still have coppers in their hand at the end of the game), and then picked up Elder Signs and loved that.  It’s probably the best boardgame app available on the Droid.

But then I looked at what’s on iOS, and was flabbergasted.  I bought an iPod *specifically* to play app versions of board games.  Which seems insane, until you realize that board games are 40-70 bucks a piece, so $200 on an iPod that plays 4 games is about the same thing.  And since this posting, I’ve upgraded that iPod to an iPad, because it had even more games.

Currently, on my iOS, I’m playing mostly ports.  I have the follow games right now:

Elder Signs (it’s so good, I bought it on iOS too).

Button Men (a great little dice rolling game)

Zombie Dice (which is mostly a time killer, but entertaining)

Dominion (not nearly as good as Androminion, which is great)

Hive Online (very few plays)

Ascension (the reason I bought the iPod. I love Ascension, and the iOS app is amazing.  I would consider $200 spent *just to play Ascension* worth it, really. Because that’s basically what I did)

Neuroshima Hex (great reviews, confuses me so far)

Bohnanza (fun bean game)

Caylus (A game I didn’t really understand in real life, but have come to really enjoy)

Kingsburg (Much harder to play on iOS, but still a great port)

RK’s Samurai (Still don’t like it much, but I’m learning how to play it)

Ticket to Ride (Hey, it was free)

RK’s Kingdoms (See Samurai)

Roll Through the Ages (much better in person, but fun solo)

Updates:

I’ve added the following:

Small World (a great physical game, haven’t tried the app version)

Cyclades (a game I’ve always admired, but didn’t figure I could find players)

Ghost Stories (another game I’ve heard great things about)

I can, at any given moment, access a  library of 15 or so games (and that’s not including the games that only exist on the iOS which are reasonably good) with AIs, pausing, memory, achievements, and all.  And that doesn’t include the game I want that’s only on the iPad (Small World) and the 5-6 games in development I’m waiting on (Nightfall, Thunderstone, and several more).

It’s amazingly great for a board gamer.  I don’t have to find solo rules for Ascension and fill up my couch with the board, I just launch the app.  I play games like Caylus with a tutorial, suggested moves, and the ability to lose horribly without embarassment.  And, in the case of Caylus, it’s moved from “Eh, that game” to “Yeah, that’s an excellent resource management game, I’d recommend it.”

Then there’s the “I think” part:

I don’t have any desire to play Dominion with real people.  I play, on average, 5-10 games of Dominion a week now.  I used to play up to 50-60.  The AI is fast.  A long game is 7 minutes.  The idea of sitting down with humans, finding the cards, organizing it, shuffling them, waiting while the humans think (and ye gods humans are slow), and the like just doesn’t appeal to me.  I have a friend (who is also a friend’s mom, which is a bit odd to me) who loves Dominion.  She drives 45+ minutes to come to game night, and wants to play with me, because she knows I like it.  But the couple times we did play, I was bored.

Ascension is still great in real space.  Kingsburg is definitely better with humans, and the full board.  But even so, if I’m given the choice between Kingsburg, which I have on my iPod, and something else, I’ll choose something else.

So while I’m flush with games, I wonder if I’m losing my interest in those games.  If I had *every* game on iOS, I’d play them in real life.  But given the limits, it puts an odd focus on things.  People apparently bring their iPads to game night, and play 4 player games on their iPads.  Which is awesome, but also lacks the ability to play with wooden meeples, and cards, and all the stuff that makes gaming so fun….

I played a new game this recent game night (and since the comment, I’ve actually purchased it for myself). I’m not sure, but it may be the most entertaining game I’ve ever played. It may not be the *best* game, as I first thought, but I can’t remember a time I’ve had more flat out fun in a long time.

It’s called Space Alert. It is chaos and awesome rolled up in to one.

If you don’t know it (and I didn’t), it’s a coop game that does it right. All players are crew members on a ship. A ship that is, perhaps, not top of the line any more. And you may not be the absolutely most valuable crew. So you’re tasked with flying a ship that’s programmed to randomly hyperspace to a section of space, spend exactly 10 minutes there, and then hyperspace out. Everyone in the game has roles (Comms officer, captain, Lt, Security officer, etc) that give them a specific suggested task in the game, but it’s not required. Captain keeps track of everyone, Comms plays the threat cards, and, in theory, reports on them. Security officer does the same for internals. Etc.

You have 16 actions per game. You have 5 cards to determine the first 3, 5 for the next 4 (plus what’s left from 1) and 5 for the last 8. As you go along, threats will randomly appear (ships, monsters, etc). You have to deal with them. You can do one thing each round – move, first lasers, launch missles, power generators, etc. Each person does one thing. With face down cards. That can’t be adjusted after the phase is over. Phase 1 is 3 minutes, Phase 2 is 3, Phase 3 is 4. Then you resolve.

It’s simple, but awesome. Because people quickly start yelling at each other.

“Okay, I’ll fire the lasers on turn 7.” “Wait, which lasers?” “The ones in upper red.” “I’M FIRING THOSE?! WHY ARE YOU HERE?! GO POWER THE GENERATOR!”

or

“Okay, I’ll charge the shields.” “Wait, I’m firing lasers. We don’t have any power.” “Yes we do, Derek charged them last turn.” “No I didn’t – you told me to go deal with the battlebot uprising!” “Wait, what room are you in?” “Phase 2 is over.”

And then it resolves. And you watch how terribly awful you did.

Bonuses: Every phase, in the first 2 turns, someone has to jiggle the mouse on the ship. Otherwise, the screen saver turns on, and the ship shuts down for a turn.

You can keep track of XP, and level up, gaining abilities as you go (special cards).

You can get achievements. Like “Lazy bum – Successfully finish a mission using less than 6 cards.”

There’s a fan made computer program that is amazingly done, and handles everything. It runs for 10 minutes, announces threats, etc. After you’re done, you program in the cards, and it plays a summary of your doom, and people can focus more on the yelling.

It’s just amazing. It sounds boring, but it’s so frantic. So prone to get people to yell and scream at each other, then crack up. And, with the right team, a game you feel awesome about beating down (Captain Joe runs a tight ship, so we ended the game in turn 10 with 28 points. Captain Andy left us blown up on turn 9).

I’d also note that you might not want to play this with a loved one. The aforementioned arguments can get really heated. I learned to play this with a nice young couple. They were the quintessential younglings in love – he would fetch her a cup of water if she seemed slightly parched, he would sit out of playing a game because she didn’t want to, they sat right next to each other all the time, etc.

I mention this only to throw in to contrast their in game behavior, which involved statements like “You never listen to anything I say” and “I’m just never paying attention to anything you say again” and “You’re a terrible communicator.”  A while after, they’d return to lovey-dovey, but it was always a bit awkward for the 15 minutes or so after the game….

Of course, I expect lots of folks around these parts are playing Skyrim or Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’m certainly doing the latter at the moment. The only problem looking at those as gifts is that it is incredibly likely your fans of the material already have them. ^^ But it wouldn’t hurt to check. Also, the Humble Indie Bundle 4 looks great, and half the profits go to charity.

Hey, look- The Guild Season Five is now out, just in time for Christmas.

Right Stuf Anime is having a bunch of sales. Of particular note is the remastered Utena DVD box sets. The series had been hard to find for awhile. It’s one of my wife’s favorites. I may have picked up the Soul Eater holiday package…

For the budding RPGer, or someone who might want a bit simpler rule set, Pathfinder’s Beginner Box has been popular. And the Bestiary 3 was just released! Another interesting up and coming d20 game seems to be Legend. It’s a little over the top at times, but it’s an interesting approach to mixing classes, races, and specialties via mix-and-match tracks. That is, you can take a bit of ranger, combine it with a bit of steampunk robot-making, and be a dragon. Or you can be an elven ranger with all of its ranger-y goodness. (I suspect the former option might be more popular, but ya never know.) ^_^ Plus, right now all proceeds go to the Child’s Play charity. Nice. And lest I forget, although I haven’t had the opportunity to play it, the 3rd edition of Mutants and Masterminds sounds fun.

For the eBook fantasy readers out there, check out B. Justin Shier’s Zero Sight and its sequel, Zero Sum. Check out Zachary Rawlin’s The Academy. Both are marketed YA, but fun reads. Of course, if you haven’t picked up Sanderson’s Way of Kings, that’s fun. And Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind and its sequel, The Wise Man’s Fear. If you’d like RPG tie-ins, Paizo’s James Sutter’s Death’s Heretic is really very good.

Come to think of it, I can recommend books forever. =P

Oh, and I did pick up Betrayal at House on the Hill, for board gaming goodness…

And who can go wrong with a squishable Narhwal? (Picked one up for Q, it’s great. ^_^)

Other suggestions?

Rich Baker has had a couple of interesting Rule of Three columns, where he (and other designers) reflect on different parts of 4th edition. Baker mentions that powers between different classes seem very similar, which has definitely been a complaint of mine, and he’s noted that some of the real benefits of 4E also have costs. He also mentions that 4E is mostly a striker show, which I think is true to a large extent. And Monte Cook’s Legends and Lore column has certainly been provoking, as has his return to the WotC fold. Monte has asked some really interesting questions in Legends and Lore, and discussed the game’s history as well as the role of complexity in the game. So far, I like what I’m seeing.

Now, what are the odds they’ll bring back the OGL? =P

Heroes of the Feywild is coming out tomorrow, or two weeks ago if you’re close to one of the favored FLGS stores that can sell it early. Living near one of those stores, I picked it up last week. Solid book. I think I liked Neverwinter a tad bit better overall, but HoF is definitely fun. New races- pixie, hamadryad, and satyr, and several new class options, including the barbarian berserker, the bard skald, the druid protector (I think) and the wizard witch. The themes are a lot of fun- I particularly liked the fey beast tamer, which gives you your own magical beast companion. They’re all decent, though, and I wish they had more room for themes and epic destinies in the book. I was also happy that the pixie was relatively close to the one I made for a home game a few years back, at 4Es advent.

Mine:
Pixie, Not Quite The Greatest Race That Has Ever Existed (inside joke based on a wiki-editing war)
Tiny Fey Humanoid
Ability Bonuses: +2 Dex, +2 Cha
Sorta tiny: Treated as a small character for most purposes, including reach
Speed: 5 (flight)
Languages: Common, Elven
Skill bonuses: +2 stealth, +2 nature
Fey Origin

The official version isn’t identical, but it’s close enough that the player who was playing a pixie can walk right into the “real” version without much modification.

First game was Ricochet Robots, in which you slide robots around the board to get them to a certain point. They only stop when they hit a wall or another robot; the point of the game is to get the robots to their goal in the fewest number of rules. It was a neat game, but not really my cup of tea. Part of the problem was that I was really tired when we started playing, and there were at least a couple of rounds where I didn’t try very hard. ^^;

The next game was Last Call: The Bartender Game. Players are randomly assigned drinks which take a certain number of bottles of specific colors to make. Each bartender starts with several bottles of one color, and you trade bottles around between bartenders, gathering different colors to specific places so you can make the drinks on your cards. If you trade a bottle in one round, you can’t trade it in the next round and you go to the bottom of the initiative track, to borrow a D&D term (basically, you go at the end, but then someone else goes at the end the next round, bumping you up, etc.). The goal is to accumulate the fewest number of ice cubes which you get when making drinks that are “watered down” (which happens when you make a drink but there are some extra bottles at the place you’re making them). Pretty quick game.

The next game was 7 Wonders, which I really liked. Mostly a resource management game that at least thematically reminded us of Sid Meier’s Civilization. Had fun with this one.

The final game of the evening was Betrayal at House on the Hill, which I absolutely loved and will probably purchase soon. In it, your group explores a mysterious old house that you’re trapped in. You play certain characters that have speed, might, knowledge, and sanity stats, which you use during your encounters. The map is randomly generated through the placing of tiles as you explore, and you draw event, item, or omen cards as you encounter them. Omen cards also give you the dreaded haunt roll, which you will fail eventually- and that’s when the titular Betrayal happens. At that point, you figure out which betrayal occurs based on the omen card, characters there, and some other factors, and one person leaves the group and has his or her own evil goals to fulfill, which the group has to stop/escape/survive/defeat. There are apparently many many different betrayals that can happen. This particular game, I apparently was feeding people to the house in exchange for a sort of immortality. ^_^ Lots of fun.

I and some friends have picked up a few board games that were recommended by several people, among them our resident boardgame expert (who owns hundreds of games, including many antiques). One of them was a game that Derek mentioned awhile back, Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer. Interestingly, it also has an iPad app, which has been really useful in learning how to play the game. (Slight aside: recently acquired an iPad, and I’ve been using it constantly. Used it as my sole computer at a conference in New Orleans, and it worked out beautifully. Looking for more apps, so feel free to offer suggestions.)

Some friends of ours picked up Ghost Stories. Cooperative games are relatively rare, so they were pretty excited to get this one. The couple that bought it have been trying it out on their own, and they say it’s been fun. I like the premise- your group needs to stop an evil undead creature from resurrecting in this Asian-themed game, and you cooperate to fight off waves of invading spirits. Looking forward to it. The other coop game they’ll bring is Pandemic, which we’ve had fun with in the past, fighting off virulent disease outbreaks around the world (hmm… we could show Contagion in the background when that comes out…)

I also picked up Elder Sign (go cthulhu!) and Nightfall (horror competitive card game), but I haven’t had a chance to play them yet. ^_^ We’ll probably break ‘em out at the party itself.

One the video game front, I’ve been playing League of Legends… eagerly awaiting the Old Republic, though!

Take a stance against baiting nerd rage and stereotypes of geeks.

Post about how much you love your geeky hobbies or vocation from Monday, September 12th, 2011 to Friday, September 16th on your blog, website, social media account or in a forum somewhere. Then come here and tell us about it. We’ll have a kick-off post where you can stand and be counted.

So, although we haven’t been particularly good about necessarily POSTING here, it really is part of the purpose of this blog; coming out of the basement. Yes, we’re playing with a geek stereotype; if you haven’t read it, look at Mike’s definition of Geeks and Kurt’s definition of Basement in the tabs above.

Heck, I’ll quote a big chunk of Mike’s:

It’s about marginalization. When you get passionate, does the conversation start flowing with you or does it stop and eyes start rolling? It’s “geeking out” when your passion surpasses the audiences tolerance for your obsessive interest. Now, this doesn’t mean a group of people can’t be geeky about a topic because within the group they aren’t marginalized. It just means if that room was full of average people, the dedication to the “geek out” would be relegated to, well, those geeking out. Believe me, when I start discussing Lockean linguistics with gamer friends, I can tell from their reactions that I’m the geek.

So you aren’t either a geek or not a geek. Everyone’s a geek about something, likely more than one something. So you’re not a geek, you’re a geek about X. Like Curly said in City Slickers, it’s up to you decide what that one thing is. Except I still think it can be more than one thing. So it’s more like City Slickers two where Jack Palance’s zombie twin showed up.

Yeah, we’re all geeks about SOMETHING. Some of our hobbies are probably considered particularly “geeky,” but we love them. ^_^

I will blog on this a bit more later; I’ve got a bunch of deadlines tomorrow that I need to meet, but I’ll come back! Really this time. ;)

The 4E game that I was in with the rest of that gaming group died; it was replaced by a Pathfinder Kingmaker game for a short while, but alas, that game also faded. It wasn’t too much of a surprise, but it’s a pity. The other longer more established 4E Dark Sun game is wrapping up. For each of those games, we’re trying to figure out what to do next. I think the first group is going to do a Neverwinter game- the new Neverwinter Campaign Sourcebook is out (more on that later). The second group, we’re still trying to decide. Pathfinder, 4E, Dresden, Savage Worlds, RIFTS, AGE- lots of interesting options.

Time, of course, is always the issue for all of us. The games aren’t weekly- the long-term game is every two weeks, and the others are even more sporadic. Work, kids, school, other hobbies- all of those things factor in to when we can get together, for all of us. There’s rarely a game where everyone is there. And really, that’s okay. That’s the way we have to roll*, and it ends up working out. I’ve been incredibly busy with an ALA copyright project, work, and school, so I’ve certainly had to be the one to miss sometimes. A few things help:

• Commitment and persistence from the DM.
• Interaction outside of the game- if not in person, forums, chat, or similar.
• Someone taking and sharing notes (ESPECIALLY for those sporadic games).

So, the Neverwinter Campaign Setting has been released. In my opinion, it’s a pretty good book. I was a fan of Forgotten Realms, and I think this book did a good job in bringing in the FR flavor- even more than the 4E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting did, in my opinion. It’s got great story, and the mechanics are also solid. There are several interesting new themes, new options for races, new themes, and a new gish class, the Bladesinger. I think it has the potential to be a quite interesting addition to a 4E game.

One thing that WotC and 4E have been very weak in, in my opinion, is adventures. One huge advantage that Paizo has is the Adventure Path series. Each AP can last a hero’s entire career. WotC doesn’t have anything near as all-encompassing, and that hurts. When time is the most scarce resource, anything that saves time is a must. Pregenerated modules save time. The fact that a lot of adventure content is unavailable- particularly the Encounters sessions that are exclusive to game stores- is kind of frustrating. Dungeon adventures haven’t really done it for me. Even the ones that are supposed to offer an overall storyline have been erratic. They’re rarely released on time, and they don’t really have the cohesion of the APs. Plus, you can only play the first part of Scales of War so many times…

On the Paizo front, Ultimate Magic, Ultimate Combat, the Inner Sea Primer, Inner Sea Magic, and the Inner Sea World Guide are all terrific. Paizo’s done a great job. Pathfinder has done very, very well in sales, reportedly surpassing WotC. Liz Danforth over at Library Journal has flat-out stated that the torch has passed. I think that for traditional fantasy role-playing, that might be correct. I like them both, but Paizo really is something special. I believe that WotC has been very odd in its D&D offerings, with board games, optional collectible cards, confusing lines, out-of-print books, and uneven digital forays. I think Paizo’s had a few missteps- I don’t know what the heck is going on with that Pathfinder Society position, and some of the public copyright assertions from employees aren’t really correct (which to be fair, is common)- but those are relatively tiny, tiny quibbles. Their books have been great, and their designers and developers are really approachable. I’ve even had the chance to chat with many of the Paizo folk, and they’re all great. I’ve had a chance to interact a bit with some folks at WotC, but they tend to be a lot less public. There are probably good reasons for that, but it doesn’t help. Another thing Paizo has going for it is the great third-party support, largely due to their use of the OGL.

To be clear, though, I’m still playing both.

I’ve been doing a bit with Wolfgang Baur’s Open Design, when I have time. I’ve had the chance to contribute a bit to the Midgard Campaign Setting, which has been a fascinating process, and I shilled for the new planar project, Dark Roads and Golden Hells, on RPGCountdown. ;) To shill again, I think it’s fair to say that in some ways the book will be a successor to Plansecape- among others, it’s got Colin McComb and Wolfgang Baur as participants. So check it out. ^_^ Open Design’s got a lot of good stuff out. Adam Daigle’s and Mike Welham’s Book of Drakes is their most recent must-have, and I’m not just saying that because Daigle hooked me up with an awesome Kobold patch.

*This might be a word joke. I haven’t decided yet.

First, I’m going to be a teensy bit critical of some users of the OGL.

The biggest problem I’ve seen:
If you use Open Game Content, you’re supposed to designate your OGC derivative material as Open Game Content. You can’t close it, and you can’t declare it Product Identity.

For some reason many people seem to ignore the definitions in the OGL. I really don’t like “definitions sections” in licenses that include words not used in other parts of the license, but that occurs in the OGL, and those terms are not shockingly very relevant to the rest of the license. The license defines “derivative material” (which only appears in the definitions section) and “‘Use,’ ‘Used,’ and ‘Using’” (which includes the creation of derivative material) in such way that the actual license indicates that when you “Use” OGC, your resulting derivative material needs to also be OGC. It’s clear as mud, and people mess this up regularly. That’s easy to do, though, because it’s not clear since it’s in legalese, and even then there are parts of the license that are kind of maddening- and of course, people can argue about different interpretations of those terms. Add that to the fact that only the expression of the game mechanics are copyrightable, and not the mechanics themselves… well, there are issues. =P Anyway, people declare stuff “Product Identity” when they really shouldn’t be doing so under terms of the license. Of course, it doesn’t help that other parts of the license strongly imply that you can declare just about anything product identity; it’s something of a nightmare, and adds to the risk of OGL users.

(As an aside, OGL definitions of “derivative material” and “distribute” are a bit confusing since those terms have meaning under copyright law already; it’s not quite relevant to how the license is used except to add to the overall confusion, just an interesting thing to possibly examine at another time…)

Another mistake people make:
No terms may be added or subtracted from the license that the license doesn’t call for.

This part of the license includes your adding additional requirements for the use of your contributions. You can’t say that anyone using your Open Content needs to contact you, for example.

This part of the license also includes your clarifications or interpretation of copyright law, when those clarifications act as terms that further restrict open content. No, I don’t necessarily need written permission to use your content- even thought it’s standard boilerplate in many print publications, it’s just as untrue under standard US copyright law as it is under the OGL. That one, at least, is a bit understandable; it’s also a regular misconception/deceptive wording/wishful thinking on the part of many regular publishers, who are often advised by their counsel to claim as much as they can, even though it’s not true by the letter of the law. =P The OGL does place some restrictions on material that I wouldn’t necessarily have otherwise that would require me to receive written permission (using PI or trademarks), but it doesn’t restrict everything.

What’s good for the goose…

Some developers use the OGL, but then get publicly unhappy when other people use their Open Content in ways allowed by the OGL. Huh wha? Yes, this might be your blog and these might be your forums, and you have every right to make the rules there- but disallowing OGL material and links to OGL material is kind of a jerk move. One of the points of the OGL is using and sharing open game content. You benefited from it; others should also be able to use that material as well. People I *really like* do this occasionally, and it bugs me. =P

You need to include a copy of the OGL with your product if you’re using the OGL.

Pretty straightforward, but in the past I’ve seen people do otherwise… and some Web sites should really have at least a local link to the OGL available with their Open Content.

Bonus question! If I’m a third party not using the OGL, can *I* use Product Identity in such a way to indicate that a certain product is compatible with a certain system, since there aren’t any restrictions on MY use of the trademarks outside of standard law?

There’s been a bit of OGL-related talk in the Internetosphere recently, and I’ll mention some of that in later posts.

But no, I’m a sap because I heard what sounded like the silliest story, so I just had to look it up. Dex-Starr, the red lantern. A CAT. Yes, a cute cat of evil red rage. So I just had to look at that story- and it was so sad.
http://www.comicvine.com/dex-starr/29-58256/
(Check out the “avenging his owner” pictures.)
AWWWWWWW.

Facebook games are what they are.  I found a couple nice card based ones that occupy me well enough (Eredan and Urban Rivals, primarily, though Clash and Tyrant are in there too).  It’s the 360 part that’s really interesting to me….

I’ve had a 360 for years, and played it a lot.  I typically play things like RPGs, or games like Culdcept or Guitar Hero/Rock Band.  It’s fun.  But Team Fortress 2 is one of my all time favorite games, so I’ve been paying more attention to shooters in the enforced no-laptop time.

I’ve never cared about Halo – I played Halo 1, and liked it well enough, but wasn’t thrilled.  Never tried Halo 2.  Halo 3 was very “eh” to me.  I think I played it a couple times over at Casa Kramer, during one of the big shindigs, but that was really only fun because we were all there, shouting and laughing.  I had ODST, because of the voice cast, but found it just so interminably slow that I gave up.  But for some reason, I started to get really intrigued by the Halo: Reach commercials.  One of the guys at work is a huge Halo player, but he didn’t really convert me.  I think he got me thinking about it, and the commercials (plus the magazine articles) got me interested.  And really, the Armor Abilities sold me.  So I actually picked up Reach on release day, and started playing it.  The campaign was a lot of fun.  And then I did something I almost never do – I launched the multiplayer. 

See, I don’t think of myself as a team gamer – I don’t buy games for the MP, I prefer single player RPGs and the like, etc.  I’m not a social gamer.  Except, really, I apparently am.  I spent *far* more time in TF2 and MMOs over the past two years than nearly any other game.  I love City of Heroes precisely because it makes grouping so easy and useful.  I’ve joined guilds, haunted forums, etc.  My favorite part of WoW became running Battlegrounds.  On reflection, starting about 5 years ago, I really did become a multiplayer person.  I just didn’t realize it. 

I played a few days of Reach.  I sucked.  I wasn’t surprised – I love single player, but I don’t pretend to be awesome.  Even on TF2, I’m happy to get in the top 1/3 for score.  So I was getting murderized in Reach.  Which was not, on reflection, a tremendous amount of fun.  So I started searching around for “tips on playing Halo: Reach” on the internets.  I found several good sites.  I learned I lacked a ton of basic Halo knowledge, and Halo Reach knowledge in particular.   I learned why killing people with an Assasult Rifle was a mug’s game, I learned how shield popping worked, etc.  And I found one tip in particular that has …. well, changed my life is a bit overdramatic.  But severely affected how I game, certainly.  That tip was “Find some friends.”  And I have XBL friends – most of the people on this blog are on my list.  And we did some Borderlands nights, etc.  But it was a hit or miss kind of thing.

The article pointed people to one particular place – the TTL (Tied the Leader) forums.  It said nice things about them, and suggested you go check them out.  So I did.  They have quite a lot to say on the subject of sportsmanship, gaming, and what they kept referring to as “The Good Game Network.”  It was pretty cool, really – this was a group of people dedicated to, in the words of Wil Wheaton, not being dicks.  They were grouped up to play games with people who weren’t idiots, who wanted to have fun, win or lose, and who understood that, at the end, it’s just a game.  That’s almost exactly the creedo of my longtime hangout in TF2, The Old Timer’s Clan.  And these guys played Halo: Reach.  I posted an intro post, and found out that TTL had been closed to new members for quite some time.  But within hours, several people from different groups had posted “Hey, how ya doin’, if you’re interested, come check out our clans.”  Eventually, I learned that the Good Game Network was a large group of clans that all shared the same general ideas – don’t be a dick, have fun, make it a good game.  I checked out a few of them, started adding people to my friends list, etc.

After a couple days, it was pretty clear to me that the guys from Sword and Shield Gaming (SSG) were just the kind of folks I was looking for.  They had an interesting Camelot type theme, were very cheerful, more than willing to help out, and clearly had some coordinated events – Monday Knight Halo being the biggest one.  So, I jumped on.  I wasn’t really planning to join up with them – I was only playing Halo for a while anyway, and didn’t really want the hassle of being part of a group just to play.  But I’d certainly play Halo with them, because they were good guys and gals. 

Fast forward a month or so.  I’ve discovered that I’m a Halo fanboi (although Reach is still the only version I’m really hot for).  I’ve scheduled my gaming around events with the SSG folks, I’ve posted on their forums talking about strategies, weapon locations, etc.  I’ve even signed up for a bootcamp.  And then, after a month of hanging out with them, I apparently amused/impressed/didn’t annoy them enough that they offered me a spot “at the Round Table” (aka in the clan).  I was pretty stoked.  Even in just a month, I’d come to really enjoy hanging out with them, and really respected them both as gamers and as people.  So getting asked to join the clan was pretty awesome.

Fast forward another month, and now I’m at the point where the 360 is a standard part of my nightly gaming – I’ll quit out of Cata or CoH (TOR ended last week, sadly) in order to go play.  And generally, the first thing I do now is not “what game do I want to play” but “What are people playing?”  If there aren’t a couple of SSG’ers on Reach, I don’t even start it up – typically I go play Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.  But even that’s not as much fun without a couple SSG tags in the game with me.

It’s just odd, thinking of myself as the kind of person that is part of a Halo clan, especially this late in the whole Halo clan arc.  But apparently, there I am.  And honestly, SSG (cheesy as it sounds) is more than just a Halo clan.  I know most people’s real names, not just their tags.  I have a number of them in my phone.  I’ve given out my phone number (I think half of the authors of this blog don’t even have my new number) to them for all and sundry.  I’ve gotten text messages from some of the guys.  I know who’s expecting, whose grandmother just passed away, what they all look like in halloween costumes, where they live, etc.  I’m not used to that.  Even among the Old Timer’s, I only knew a couple people’s names, and knew only a bit about them.  But I feel like I could, at any point in time, call up someone in SSG and say “Hey, I’m gonna be in Jackson – mind if my family and I crash in your house?” And they’d be happy to have us there.

And that’s why my XBL friends now have to deal with SSG Wookiee, rather than Ergonomic Cat.

For the Board Game Geek (see what I did there?), Ascension: Rise of the Godslayer is quickly coming to be the new Dominion.  It’s another “build your deck as you play” CCG-esque game.  But there are several key differences that make each of them appeal a bit more or less to certain player types….

Resources

Dominion is all about resource planning.  How many actions, how many buys, how fast you can get to the magic 8 number.  It’s about making a lean, mean, 8 resource per turn machine to snap up Provinces at an obscene rate.

Ascension is much more about having a theme.  In Ascension, you play every card you have, if you need it.  You get unlimited actions and buys.  So if you have 8 runes in your hand, you can decide whether you want to buy 4 2 rune cards, 2 4 rune, or one big ol’ one. 

In Ascension, you feel less like stuff is wasted – you throw it all out, and buy up everything you want that you can afford (or kill everything you want that you can defeat).  But you also don’t feel nearly as awesome as when you hit the 5 action, 2 buy and 13 coins jackpot, and the game doesn’t reward the careful mixing of resource types.  There’s no Market equivalent in Ascension – one card that gives you a little bit of everything, and rewards you for playing it across the board.

Strategy

Dominion is a game of careful planning.  You see the 10 options at the start of the game, and generally, good players know from that point what they want their deck to look like (barring other players buying up the cards).  Generally, Dominion is about making a plan, and executing it as well as you can.  There are a few mitigating factors (focusing on Moats if you need them after people buy up Attack cards, picking which path to go with a Minion each time, dealing with Curse cards, etc), but generally, your strategy is independent of what other people are doing.  If my opponent isn’t buying up my cards, I’m going to do what I’m going to do regardless of what choices he makes.  That can be amazingly satisfying – it’s basically a “whose plan is best” contest.

Ascension has very few fixed elements.  There are 3 things you can do every turn – buy runes (the equivalent of money), buy power (used to kill stuff) or kill a little monster.  However, those three are all on the low end of the ROI scale.  You get at most a 1:1 return on what you spend, or a 1:2 for Honor (aka Victory Points).  You’re much better off buying/killing the stuff that comes out randomly.  For instance – killing The Cultist (the always available option) requires you to spend 2 power to get 1 honor.  Killing a Wind Tyrant from the middle might net you as much as 7 honor for 5 power, if you’ve set it up right.  Buying a Mystic (another always available option) requires you to spend 3 runes to get a card that gives you 2.  Buying a Construct might cost you 2 runes, and get you a free run every turn.  Etc. 

However, at any given moment, there are 6 cards in the middle, mixed between resource cards and monsters.  There are something like 150 total cards, and I don’t think any one card has more than 2-3 copies in the game.  So you’ll never know whether this game is going to be extremely monster focused, making your high production plan useless, or if everything that comes out will cost 7+ runes, making your focus on mid range costs useless.  That means that you can’t necessarily say “I’m going to focus on getting Mystics and things that give 3+ runes per turn” and go to town – you might only see 5 of those cards all game.  So either you’re picking up random things to fill your deck, or you’re wasting chances.  Neither is a good plan.  Finding synergies on the fly is really the key.

That also tends to reduce the trade-off nature to some degree – in Dominion, buying a Province gets you 6 points.  It also gets you a dead card, barring Islands or the like.  And that’s a part of the strat.  There’s a point in Dominion when it becomes worth it to start buying 3 VP cards.  Finding that helps you catch up if you do it right.  And you can spot a Dominion Noob in a second – they buy Coppers or Estates in round 3. 

In Ascension, every card gives you *something* to do.  To be sure, there are a lot of less efficient cards.  But you never get a hand of 5 cards that simply get discarded.  You might not get enough to buy something on the board with every card (although you only need 2 of anything to do *something*), but you’ll get to do something every turn (often 4-5 somethings later in the game).

Winning

In Dominion, you quickly know who’s winning – you can track how many Provinces people have bought, and generally know who’s ahead, and how long it will take to end the game.  You see the stacks shrinking, you know that there are 2 Markets left, so there are 8 in play.  You know that no one has bought Witches, so you don’t need to worry about trashing Curses.  Etc.  You have an early game, a mid game, and a late game in terms of play and strategy.

Ascension is harder to predict outcomes.  Ascension uses a dual victory point system – you get visible Honor in front of you, but every card you buy also gives you Honor at the end.  So on the one hand, you know that Jim has 50 honor in front of him, but on the other, Jane has been buying up Mechana Constructs which give 5-8 honor per card, so who knows?  Your strategy might suddenly change when you get the chance to buy a card that gives you honor every time you play a Lifebound Hero, and notice that there are 4 Lifebound Heros on the board.  Now you’ve got a new goal!

Style

The final thing is purely cosmetic – Dominion is a very contained, restrained game.  Everything is familiar and “real” for the most part.  Ascension is a huge, over the top fantasy world.  Dominion’s wildest card is an Alchemist.  Ascension’s wildest card is something like Lexx, Duke of Lies, or The Hadron Cannon.  It’s a very specific feel.  For some (me included), it’s a fun feel of four warring factions with different flavors, with flavor text tossed in for good measure.  For others, it’s a bizarre and overly done weirdness.  “What the hell is a Mechana?  Why is this one all weird, and that one looks like a hippy?  Do these words at the bottom in italics matter?”  That’s going to polarize your audience a bit.

If you haven’t played either game, you really owe it to yourself to try them.  Both are under $40 for the base set, and both will more than pay for themselves!  Right now, I’m more partial to Ascension, but play Dominion more often.  But both are more than worth the time you put in them.

RPG Geek! Aaaaand… in case you hadn’t seen it yet… Weird D&D Questions of the Past.

RPG Geek: If your geek doesn’t have it yet, Paizo’s Pathfinder Core Rulebook is just amazing. If your geek is a rabid 4E fan, try the Dark Sun Core Rulebook if he or she doesn’t have it yet. And check out the Pathfinder miniatures line while you’re at it. ^_^ If your RPG Geek is in the Austin area, I’m sure gift certificates to Dragon’s Lair or Rogue’s Gallery wouldn’t be amiss. ^_^

Games geek? The Dominion card game and its many expansions is a favorite right now…

Movie? Comic? Music? Try SCOTT PILGRIM. Get the movie. The comics. The soundtrack. GET IT ALL.

Movie Geek… no, any kind of Geek…. no, in Austin? Visiting? Passing through? Looked at it on a map? ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE GIFT CARD. It’s… just… awesome.

So, other people? TV shows? Video Games? Movies? WHAT DO WE GET? I will update this post as I think of things and/or take your ideas! =P

First forum contribution: Star Wars Cookie Cutters!

I say “potentially” compromised because they were using some security (although if reports are to be believed, a lot less than they should have been- including not using a salt). If any of your information was there, it’s a great idea to change your passwords about now.

Kayleigh has moved on to Wonder Pets games that are, at the core, click and find games, but also teach color matching, pattern matching, etc.  They went through a phase of about 5 months of wanting to play on the DS (Nintendogs, aka “The Puppy Game” mostly), but they’ve kinda gotten cold on that.  Kayleigh has become less geeky as Max shifts his focus, mostly.  She likes to sit with me or Michelle and watch videos or the like, but she’s not so interested in the computers now.

Max has almost finished Spiderman: Shattered Dimensions (he can’t beat the final boss on his own) all by himself, and is a pretty hardcore Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 player (his only real issue is that he can’t press the X button fast enough to do the mini-events).  He plays Viva Pinata some, but doesn’t seem in to it.  Katamari is a bit out of his realm with the dual sticks, but he’s working on it.  He played about 10 minutes of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood before we said “You know what?  I don’t think that’s a particularly good idea.”

He is the freakin’ king of Plants vs Zombies.  I don’t even get how he finishes some of the stuff he does, but he does.  He hates sunflowers.  He loves bombs.  He plays 180 degrees the opposite of me.  But it works for him.

Both of them, naturally, enjoy the Wii.  They play against each other at ping pong, or sword duels or the like, and like to ride bikes or wakeboard.  Kayleigh doesn’t really get what she’s doing – she likes to wave the remote around like crazy and see what happens.  Max has strategy and plans. 

They also both love to play “Rock n’ Roll game” – aka whatever flavor of Rock Band/Guitar Hero we’re on.  Kayleigh loves to sing, and to hold the guitar.  Max is a guitar player and a drummer, now that we have new drums.  Kayleigh plays the drums, but only occasionally.  The best part is watching both of them do the “one, two, three, four!” to start a song.  Neither of them play with live controllers, but I’m working on getting Max to really play drums on Beginner.

On the downside, Max has already, at 4, reach that point of “Hey, kid, get off the games and go play, okay?”  He has thrown fits because he couldn’t play games.  He’s refused to do things because he wanted to play.  He’s sobbed uncontrollably because he lost at ping pong to Kayleigh’s wild swings (he tends to put far too much english on a ping pong ball and cause it to spin off the table).  I’m already a bit worried about the amount of games he plays.  However, when he isn’t playing them, he’s more than willing to play kid games – running, jumping, giggling, playing with toys and dolls, etc.  So it’s not too bad.

Also, sometimes I’d really like to get in a couple games of something, but he won’t let me play.  :(

On non-video game fronts, Max watched Star Wars for the first time this weekend.  He enjoyed it.  But he *really* enjoyed the realization that all the people on the screen were scattered around our house in various locations.  He found it hilarious that those Chewbacca toys he’s played with had a big fuzzy moving version.  And he was clearly puzzled by the whole storm trooper vs clone trooper thing, but we didn’t get in to that.

I made him watch “I *am* your father” three times.  He didn’t seem as impressed with that part as I’d hoped.  But Yoda was a big hit.  As was the Rancor.

He’s also been fully indoctrinated in to the cult of the super hero.  He likes Deadpool quite a lot, probably because Deadpool is rather silly, and also has two swords and two guns.  He likes to GunKata me a lot.  He also wants to know the names of every superhero, so we can talk about them with the right names.  And right now, he’s on a big Carnage kick.  I bought the UA2 DLC, which added Carnage as a playable character, and Max adores him.  To the point of running around on all fours like a monster.  I’m not sure how to feel about that.

Oldest daughter is totally geeked out, which I’m quite proud of.  Her birthday money and Xmas money (yes, I’m editing this later, sue me) went to buy, among other things, a Halo Reach hoodie, a Yoda backpack (the kind that is a backpack, but looks like it’s Yoda riding on your back), and various other geeky things.  After shopping for all that, she went over to watch Padded Stick fights (Dagorhir in particular) and brought home a parental release.  So there’s that.

I do actually have a post coming up on the strange trip I’ve been on for the past 3-4 months.  See, my laptop (an ASUS G50vt from Best Buy) went wacky on me.  Of a sudden, possibly tied to power issues, possibly not, my laptop started get hot.  Like, super hot.  When I bought it, it had a warning that said “This is a notebook, not a laptop.  Don’t put it on your lap.  It’ll light your junk on fire.”  Something like that, I forget the exact words.  Maybe it said don’t put it on a flat surface.  Whatever. 

So it’s always run hot.  It’s a gaming laptop.  I expected it to be hot – it’s cramming a fair chunk of power in a portable(ish) box.  But now it was going up to 200-220 degrees pretty much instantly on launching a game.  Mass Effect 2 was unplayable due to stuttering.  I could play maybe 10 minutes of TF2. 

This happened 12 months ago or so, when it was under warranty, and I sent it off to Asus.  They fixed it (they blew it out and reapplied the thermal paste from what I can tell).  Now it’s not under warranty.  So it’s been sitting idle (mostly) for months, which led me to the land of Xbox Live (a scary place), found me a spectacular new community (Sword and Shield Gaming, aka SSG) that Im proud to have become a part of, and gotten me a new gamertag (SSG Wookiee) - but that’s for later.

Here’s the now: Due to stuff happening (a beta, let’s say), I *NEED* my laptop to work.  So I broke down and took it in to a local guy.   Who blew it out, reapplied thermal paste, and updated the drivers.  And it seem to work.  It was running at 110 or so when it used to be 160.  Good sign.  He launched WoW and let it run for 30 minutes with no issues.

So I get it home, try to fire up TF2.  It crashes.  Try to run LoTRO.  No good.  Same for DDO.  Eventually I look around, and see that he updated to the newest generic windows drivers – my card is showing as VGA Card.  My resolution is maxed at 1024×960 (my native is 1366×768).  And things won’t launch.  But it’s still cool.

So, I go to ASUS.  I get the ASUS gpu drivers, I install them.  I can play games, but after 15 minutes of DDO, I’m at 205 degrees.  Which seems bad.  TF2 is too sputtery to play.  L4D has a weird lag every time I turn that I attribute to the gpu.  My friend at work suggested it might have an integrated GPU that had been running WoW okay, but couldn’t do other stuff, but no. 

So now I’m confused.  And hoping this hijack will turn in to someone saying “Hey, do this!”  My current plan, once the 8 gig beta finishes (it’s trickling in right now, probably another 24 hours), is to start rolling back ASUS drivers, and possibly go back to the native drivers and make games work.  But….  Anyone else have more brilliant thoughts?

GPL (GNU General Public License)

The GPL was the first of the “copyleft” licenses, which (oversimplifying a bit) allows the use of GPL-licensed material provided that the user also shares the new work under the GPL. The standard GPL is usually applied to software, although there are other forms of GPL that can apply to different types of media. The license was created by Richard Stallman, an advocate for Free Software. Most “open” movements are based or inspired by this work, including Creative Commons and Open Gaming. A great deal of open source software uses the GPL, although there are other recognized open source licenses.

OGL (Open Game License, Open Gaming License)

The license that reflects Wizard’s of the Coast’s 2000 movement into “open gaming,” with the advent of D&D 3rd edition. It’s not quite an “open” license in the strictest sense of the open movements- it allows a mix of open and proprietary content. Like most open licenses, however, it is not revocable.

OGC (Open Game Content, Open Gaming Content, Open Content)

A term from the OGL, open game content was content designated by the person using the license as the material that could be used by others- basically, the “open” part of the content.

PI (Product Identity)

A term from the OGL, product identity was content designated by the person using the license as material that could not be used by others- basically, the “closed” part of the content.

SRD (System Reference Document)

Strictly speaking, the System Reference Document is the official document that describes the usable content for a specific product, such as the d20 SRD used by 3rd edition D&D. However, there are several other product SRDs and several unofficial SRDs that are basically all referred to as SRDs. The most important part of the SRD, in my opinion, is that they contain information about the content that can be used from a given product. The 4th edition SRD only contains descriptions of the material that can be used; most OGL-based SRDs contain the actual material that is designated open content, and are often used as handy online rules references.

STL (d20 System License)

The d20 System License was a license which allowed people to use the official d20 logo from Wizards of the Coast in order to indicate that their product was compatible with 3E D&D. The license gave them some specific permissions and restrictions related to the use of Wizards of the Coast trademarks and copyrights. It could be changed without prior notice or revoked, and it was.

GSL (Game System License)

The license that covers the 4th edition of D&D, which was not as open as the earlier OGL and is incompatible with the OGL. Early terms included a prohibition on the use of both the GSL and the OGL for the same products. Users must adhere to the most recent version of the GSL, and it can be modified or revoked at will.

FLGS (Friendly Local Gaming Store)

The local shop that carries your gaming goods.

Common areas of confusion (because, well, it’s confusing):

• The law is not black and white. That design is intentional.
• Game mechanics aren’t generally covered by copyright. The specific expression of those game mechanics may be covered by copyright depending on the non-factual creativity involved in that expression. The bar for expressive creativity if pretty low. If you create a derivative of the creative parts (say, for example, you slightly alter the textual description of a creature), you may be infringing copyright. If what you copy specifically covers only the mechanics, you may not be infringing copyright.
• When you agree to a license, you are bound by the terms of that license (probably…). If you don’t agree to that license, you aren’t bound by the terms of that license. If you don’t agree to the license, the full range of rights and exemptions granted under the law to the rights holders and to you as a user of those materials still apply. This doesn’t mean that you can’t do anything with the those materials, it just means that you have to fall under those exemptions in order to use them.
• Trademark law can be confusing. While the d20 logo was trademarked, and you had to agree to the d20 STL to use it, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t say that your product is compatible with the d20 system. Although commercial trade may be involved, it gets into that tricky area where game mechanics aren’t covered by copyright, and you can actually use trademarks in describing the actual products. For example, a company that makes toner ink cartridges can say that those cartridges are compatible with HP Laserjet printers, whether or not HP wants them to (and usually it doesn’t). That doesn’t mean HP doesn’t have any kind of recourse or legal strategy they could trot out; they might say that the quality of those products is so bad that it’s hurting their reputation, for example- but that would probably be seen as anti-competitive and would have to involve some pretty specific circumstances (as all cases do). Anyway, when it comes to the d20 license, you probably wouldn’t be able to use the special d20 logo or any of the other things that d20 STL let you do, but you can still probably give factual information about how your product might relate to other products. This is one of the confusing areas of the OGL, though, because it has terms about using OGL content and indicating adaptability using trademarks.
• As with anything, there’s a certain amount of risk involved in these decisions as they apply to legal matters. I use “probably” and “maybe” a lot here because these things aren’t absolutely certain, and of course you can be sued no matter how good or bad the legal argument is.
• Here’s the essay question: If the OGL basically allows you to create derivative works of mechanics (which generally aren’t protected by copyright anyway) but excludes content designated as product identity AND prohibits your uses of certain trademarks that you may have been able to use otherwise without agreeing to the license, then isn’t it just a glorified covenant not to sue? (I don’t quite think so… but I can see the argument. More on the subject later.)

*WotC’s character builder is going online-only in a Silverlight based application tomorrow. I have the luxury of being a yearly subscriber, for now, and this change doesn’t really directly affect me. It does affect other people in my gaming group, however, and I’m not sure what they’re going to do. (And Silverlight? Really?) Judging from the posts on WotC’s and some other sites, a lot of people aren’t very happy about this change. Even I have to agree that WotC’s communication has been pretty abysmal. I’m pretty sure this is due to Hasbro’s corporate structure, but I have to say I prefer the communication from Paizo. Speaking of Paizo…

*I don’t know if I wrote about this before, but I had been running a game for the females in one of my groups of friends, who decided to ditch the guys and do their own thing for awhile. It was a 4E game, and I like to think it was pretty successful. A new baby/move and work have taken two of the six players, and we’ve gotten one new player in the game. With that change, we decided to start a new game, and we’re going with Pathfinder. I’ve been dying to play Pathfinder for awhile now, and the CB change has made it so that they don’t feel that they’re particularly tied to 4E. I started a campaign site on Obsidian Portal; you can see it if you’re my friend there. I picked up a whole lot of Pathfinder RPG material in the last few days, after subscribing to their latest Adventure Path- and that is a fascinating business model that I’ll ask you all about some time. It looks like I’ll be mixing in some Arcana Unearthed/Evolved in the game as well. Speaking of Arcana Unearthed…

*Met Monte Cook again at an event hosted by Dragon’s Lair this past weekend. Qyandri often accuses me of being a Monte Cook fanboy, and as I was trying to decide which books of his to take to DL for him to sign, I had to somewhat agree. =P (I decided on Monte Cook’s Arcana Evolved, Monte Cook’s World of Darkness, and Ptolus.) I also expected our very own Basement’s Michael to show up with his and Derek’s AE publications at some point. ;) Monte Cook was quite nice, and I also met or saw a host of other game designers that are apparently living in Austin. Chris Pramas, Adam Daigle, Brandon Hodge- all seemed like very cool folk. Speaking of Monte Cook…

*I unfortunately hadn’t been paying enough attention to my dungeonaday.com charter membership since I hadn’t been running anything regularly, but went back to it in preparation for the PF game. It looks like Stan! and the folk over at Super Genius Games are taking over a lot of the day to day activities there. Monte Cook assures everyone that he’s still contributing and ultimately going over everything, but I wonder what that particular change portends, if anything… Speaking of changes…

*Playing WoW again, in the library guild on the Aerie Peak server, with Qyandri. We’ve also brought along our housemate and a bunch of other friends, so Austin is currently a bit overrepresented in the library guild. ;) The Cataclysm changes have us worried, though, so we’ll see how that goes…

The 4E Campaign Book is one of my favorite 4E products to date.

I’ll start by mentioning some of the things I *didn’t* like.
-Elemental Priests aren’t nearly as interesting as the old elemental clerics were. I see what they were going with- they have all these other power sources for leaders, so they don’t need to be restricted to the cleric- but I don’t think it worked particularly well.
-Sorcerer-Kings aren’t as powerful as they used to be, and I don’t think the game captures the arcane/psionic joining that the original game had.
-Defiling. I’m not sure I liked the way they’ve handled defiling and preserving here.
-Almost forgot this one. Editing. How many references to page XX were there? This isn’t the Malkavian clanbook. :P

Things I liked and disliked.
-Wild Talents. I love Wild Talents. I like that they’re included. Some of them are kind of ‘eh,’ though, and there’s nowhere near the diversity and craziness of 2E wild talents, which I thought made for some of the most fun game situations.
-The art. Some of the art was really interesting, and certainly evoked Athas in my mind. Some of it was recycled, which is always kind of ‘eh.’

Things I really liked.
-Alternate treasure. Instead of an item in the item-poor world, how about the favor of elemental spirits, or breakthroughs in the Way? I think these are neat additions to the game.
-Themes. The Dark Sun book has introduced Character Themes, which give more options for your characters. Want to be a gladiator? Add the gladiator theme to your character. Each theme gives you a secondary role, a new encounter power, options for powers at higher levels, and access to feats and prestige class, most of which are quite interesting. Big plus here.
-Templars were reflavored, and unlike the Elemental Priests, I really like what they did here. “Templar” is now a character theme you can apply to your character, and templars are basically sanctioned arcane magic users. Very cool.
-On a related note, the sorcerer-king Warlock pact. Really like this- your warlock was granted power through the rituals of the sorcerer-king.

It’s a breakdown of what I see as the four core tasks that constitute most gaming experiences. I’ll leave a link to the full article, but for  a tease, here’s the Cartesian graph that finally let me start wrapping my mind around where I was going.

Look forward to any comments.

How Games Talk to Us.

So, today is a very geeky day.  It’s Star Wars Day #2, because Star Wars was released 33 years ago today.  It got overshadowed by Empire day, but….  It’s also Towel Day, because DNA (Douglas Noel Adams, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and other books author) died two weeks ago, and today is the day to remember his death, and to carry your towel.  It’s also the Glorious 25th of May, which for Pratchett fans, means you can wear the lilca if you were there.

Because of this, it’s also also also Geek Pride day.  Apparently this is a newish holiday – it’s maybe 5 years old.  In principle, I’m all for this.  Celebrate Geekiness.  Hell, that’s kinda the point of this blog.  In practice, I hate it.

Here is the wiki page.  I call your attention, specifically, to the manifesto.  I’ve bolded the parts that particularly offend me.

Rights:

1. The right to be even geekier.
2. The right to not leave your house.
3. The right to not like football or any other sport.
4. The right to associate with other nerds.
5. The right to have few friends (or none at all).
6. The right to have as many geeky friends as you want.
7. The right to be out of style.
8. The right to be overweight and short-sighted.
9. The right to show off your geekiness.
10. The right to take over the world.

Responsibilities:

1. Be a geek, no matter what.
2. Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
3. If there is a discussion about something geeky, you must give your opinion.
4. To save and protect all geeky material.
5. Do everything you can to show off geeky stuff as a “museum of geekiness.”
6. Don’t be a generalized geek. You must specialize in something.
7. Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
8. Wait in line on every opening night. If you can go in costume or at least with a related T-shirt, all the better.
9. Never throw away anything related to geekdom.
10. Try to take over the world!

 Let’s examine them individually after this broad comment: I get that geeks can be repressed, feel like outsiders, not fit in, etc.  I was a geek, but I was generally able to fit in.  I know it’s hard out there for a geek.  But if it’s ever going to *not* be hard out there for a geek, we’re gonna have to do more than just quietly sulk.

The right to not leave your house.
Seriously?  This isn’t good.  I know the instinct.  I’ve had days when I just didn’t want to talk to anyone but my family, and I just wanted to sit on the damn couch, play games, and have pizza delivered.  YOU CAN’T DO THAT.  As much as it’s enjoyable, you can’t let yourself do that.  You’ve got to get out.  You don’t want to, but YOU HAVE TO.  Encouraging people not to is actually not so good for us, as a … species?

The right to have few friends (or none at all).
Don’t revel in this.  Seriously.  It’s not good.  It’s not healthy.  I know.  People are idiots.  They’re annoying, and difficult, and it’s easier to just play games.  DON’T.  I’m not saying join a dance club.  But you can find some people you can stand to hang out with for a few hours from time to time.  If you’re painfully awkward, use the internets.  Kids these days have it easy.  Meetup.com and Wizards.com have a great source of social networking.  Boardgamegeek.com does too.  And when all else fails, you still have a FLGS (Friendly Local Game Story).  Apparently going out to meet new people is hard.  DO IT.  They’re geeks.  You’re gonna play DnD.  It’s the most tailor made social situation you could find.  And occasionally, you’ll be shocked to find out you actually like them.

The right to be overweight and short-sighted.
I’m back and forth here.  I know.  We need glasses, we’re out of shape.  And you need to be comfortable with who you are.  But maybe just a little star afterwards that says *But we’re trying, okay?  I’m not thrilled with the idea of geeks going “I’m fat, I’m slovenly, and I’m proud of it!”  DON’T BE.  Our places should not have to have signs that read “If your odor or hygiene offends, you may be asked to leave.”  Seriously.

Try to be nerdier than anyone else.
Don’t.  Be yourself.  You’re nerdy.  Trying to out-nerd everyone is fun for a bit, but it doesn’t build any actual relationships.  You just end up competing, and then you’re done, and you go home with no friends.  Be who you are, embrace your nerdiness (although really, I prefer geekiness, but….), but don’t try to turn it in to some weird point of pride.  Because then, that’s all you’ve got, and that’s not good.

Attend every nerdy movie on opening night and buy every geeky book before anyone else.
This one is just being picky, but – we’re not a monolithic, homogenous group.  As evinced by this blog (if anyone else posted), geeks are a diverse group.  Some geeks aren’t going to want to see things you want to see.  It’s okay.  We don’t need to be creating inter-geekdom rifts over whether How To Train Your Dragon is a geek movie, because it has dragons and animation, or if it’s a kids movie, and only idiots want to see it.  Go see movies you want to see, and take your friends.  That being said, if they make another Serenity, you all better fsckin’ be there opening night, next night, and all week.

I hate to say this, because it will sound flip and disrespectful, but it’s the same sort of thing as other minorities go through, though on a lesser scale.  Be harassed for who you are.  Band together to stop being ashamed, and embrace your uniqueness, and revel in it.  Then come over the top of that, and become a full person, who has things that inform who they are.  You can debate where the balance between embrace and inform is, but at some point, pride can cross over to isolationism, and then you’re unhappy.    I know, I’m over simplifying, but that’s what worked for me.  I’ve integrated geekiness in to my life now, and it makes me much much happier than when I defined myself solely by my geekiness.

It’s pretty interesting now.  If anyone doesn’t know, my son Max is autistic (technically he’s on the autism spectrum with a diagnosis of PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified), but…).  So it modifies things a bit.  Ignoring the fact that my 16 year old sent me a text message today that read “Two by Two, Hands of Blue” for no discernable reason, has arguments at school about how many Death Stars there were (she was wrong, strangely),  plays MMOs, and mocks people for liking Star Trek, there are the little ones.

Both of my kids (aged 2 and 3) can use touch screen phones.  They can find the games they want, select them, play them, and then close out and pick new ones (Max is better at it than Kayleigh, but both are pretty good). 

I’m pretty sure they’re both getting Android tablets once they come out (I wasn’t allowed to buy them iPads or Touches).

Max has a complete understanding of both how to use a mouse and a touchpad.  He is currently playing Insaniquarium – an older PopCap game about feeding fish.  With the right set up, he can do pretty well.  He knows to buy more fish, he knows (mostly) to feed them, and he knows his goal is to get the egg for a new fish.  He also creates and deletes profiles (thanks Max).  And he can spell his name on the keyboard, although he is insistant that Max is spelled MNAX, not MAX. 

He can also navigate around the 360 Netflix and pick a show off the list, and play it, although he likes the shoulder buttons too much, so it’s hard to get just the one he wants.

Both kids play dragon and princess.  Max very much enjoys being dragon, and Kayleigh enjoys “Oh no!  Dragon’s chasing me!”  They have a ton of dragon toys, and seem to be quite fond of them.  Kayleigh desperately wants to be a mermaid right now.  She can also identify manatees by name. 

They’ve both seen (and requested to watch) the old Rankin-Bass Hobbit movie.  They also enjoy rolling big squishy dice.

So that’s a start.  ;)

If you’re curious my search path, I was looking to see if Brooks Mitchell wrote for any websites besides the one I read him on, because I don’t much like the rest of the content on that site.  If you don’t know who Brooks Mitchell is (and I don’t expect anyone does), check out Snowfly.com – he’s pretty interesting.  In any case, I searched for “Brooks Mitchell” Call Center.  And apparently that got me to the PDF for Travis County Justice Center.  Which I had to open, being morbidly curious.And there was some really amusing stuff in there.  I think I enjoy it because I build the story in my head, based on the list of charges.  There’s a lot of bad stuff – assaults, family violence, drugs, etc.  Some of them are clearly car accidents and the like, and that’s bad.  Those I kinda skip over,  and find the nice chains.  Also, there are some awesome names.  Also I learned that apparently assault by strangulation has a specific charge – there’s assault, assault with intent to harm, and then  Assault with intent/reck (presumably reckless disregard?) impede breath/circulation.  Seems highly specific…..

Forgery of a Financial Instrument. x5  Credit Card Abuse.  Theft $100k-$200k.  Theft $1.5k-$20kx23.  Attempt to obtain prescprition drugs fraudulently.  Possession of a Controlled Substance PG1 <1g. 

Presumably PG1 relates to the type of drug.  I like to imagine it’s vicodin.  So here’s this nice lady, just trying to get by.  She’s got a few (okay, 5) fake credit cards, and she’s really stressed about it cause the balances are really high now.  She’s made about $300k, but she needs to get her new supply of meds, and she can’t convince the pharmacist that the prescription is real.  He finally calls the cops, and they show up, and bust her.  Awwww.

Theft 100k-200k, Falsely Holding oneself out as a lawyer.

“No, no, I am a lawyer.  I’ll just need my fee up front – $100k, and I’ll make sure all your problems go away.”  Cut to courtroom.  “My license?  Um, I don’t really…you see…it’s…” *clang*.  I like to picture this guy like Jeff Winger from Community.

Riot participation, 2x Organized Criminal Activity. 

There were at least two of those on the same page.  “Let’s start a riot!”  “Yeah!  Awesome!” 

A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** BURGLARY OF HABITATION
A**** B**** C*** PROHIBITED WEAPON
A**** B**** C*** UNL POSS FIREARM BY FELON
A**** B**** C*** ENGAGE IN ORGANIZED CRIMINAL ACTIVITY
A**** B**** C*** ARSON
A**** B**** C*** THEFT >=$20K<$100K
A**** B**** C*** FAIL TO IDENTIFY FUGITIVE INTENT GIVE FALSE INFO 

Dude has three first names, which sets you up for failure.  But MAN, that’s like a modern Shadowrun game.  “I didn’t want to get the license, so I just upped the TN by one, and got it.”  “We need cash.  Let’s go knock over some houses.”  “BUGGER!  The fuzz!” “Set the house on fire!  Then run!”  “Aw, man, they caught me.  Is the ST gonna use my fake SIN against me?  Yeah, he is.  Man!” 

Burglary of a Habitation.  Burglary of a Habitation.   Attempted Burglary of a Habitation.

Had to go for just one more, didn’t you?

That guy’s name is Clarence.  I’m gonna guess he’s a white collar crime type of guy. 

Dude named Marco arreseted for laundering 3k-20k in cash.  And another guy named Salvatore (either his middle name is IX, or he’s the 9th guy with his name, it’s not clear) was arrested for carrying a switchblade or brass knuckles.  Another guy named Stevo for: 

GAMBLING PROMOTION
KEEPING A GAMBLING PLACE

Apparently he was driving a mobile home full of slot machines, while drunk? 

Reading the list, it certianly looks like there’s a mob presence in Austin, going by the names and the crimes…. 

Also, the sheer number of DWI arrests makes me wonder why I ever got on the highway.  I particularly like when they’re combined with Assault on an Official and Obstructing Highway Passageway.  

Disclaimer: None of these people were convincted of anything, based on the document I was reading.  It’s all just setting court dates for the alleged offenses.  Innocent until proven guilty.  IANAL. 

See when I was in college, I wasn’t trying to draw to inside straights or check-raising nut flushes to take down pots. I was wondering why I couldn’t ever pull down a swamp when I needed it or trying to figure if I’d left myself enough mana to counterspell if I had to on my opponent’s turn. Yes, dear readers, I was a Magic: the Gathering geek.

I’d gotten into the game when it was just starting out, and although I didn’t have any of the power cards from the early sets, between the ex-wife and myself, we had more than enough cardboard crack to put together decks of varying sizes and effectiveness. Finding just the right mix that made a deck potent enough to kill opponents quickly was something I aspired to but never really got the knack for. I played in exactly one organized tournament and found myself blistered in two matches to bomb out miserably. If “n00b” and “PWNED” had been part of the parlance of the day, they would have been applied to me quite liberally.

There were a few other geek related outlets for me, dabbling in RPGs (Call of Cthulu, which is how the ex and I met), and the odd strategy game (I had a few Avalon Hill bookcase games in the day, a couple of which have survived the divorce and multiple moves since then). Movie geekery was ever present, video gaming a distraction at the arcades that not longer exist on The Drag (Le Fun and Einstein’s I still miss you sometimes).

Flash forward a decade and a half later (Jesus, it’s been that long?) and I find myself drawn into bar league poker and develop some proficiency at it. Eventually that would lead to the bi-monthly cash tourney I play in today. At this particular juncture it only netted me a third place finish in the bar championship, garnering me a spot in the quarterly championship and an autographed picture of poker pro David Williams. Williams had just finished second to Greg “Fossilman” Raymer at the 2004 World Series of Poker Main Event. Looking at the picture I knew only that Williams won a shit load of money and that he bore a striking resemblance to Tim Duncan.

A year or so ago, I’m listening to a poker podcast and I find out Williams has two other claims to fame beyond his poker play. He apparently has appeared in a commercially available foot fetish porn video…and before he became a high stakes card player he was a professional on the Magic: the Gathering circuit. It turns out Williams is only one of several former Magic pros turned Poker Players. The transition in card games has proven quite lucrative for them, to the tune of several million dollars.

About this time I also learned about Bertrand Grospellier, or ElkY as he’s better known. ElkY was a world ranked Starcraft player (another game I had some familiarity with, though I never conquered it). ElkY also plied his geek trade professionally, in his case in Korea where Starcraft is bigger than I ever imagined. He hasn’t won a WSOP bracelet yet, but does have high stakes WPT and EPT titles to his credit and some deep cashes at the World Series last year. A bracelet for him is only a matter of time.

That there should be this particular intersection of geek culture and gambling really shouldn’t surprise me. There are skills these geek outlets foster that lend themselves well to poker. Knowing your deck construction well to know the odds of drawing a card you need isn’t that far removed from calculating outs and relating it to pot odds. Resource management in Starcraft is just a different shade of bankroll management in poker. And both realms tend to reward the more intelligent participants well.

So was my involvement in these aspects of geek culture preparing me to be the card player I am today? Possibly. Can I build on that and extend my skills beyond doing well in the various home games I play in here? The answer to that question may come in July.

As many of you know if you’re friends with me on FB or follow me on Twitter, I got confirmation of receipt of my wire transfer to the Rio in Las Vegas. I am now pre-registered for WSOP Event 54: $1000 buy-in No Limit Texas Hold ‘Em. It’s not the best bankroll management to make this leap. Standard bankroll management dictates you shouldn’t spend more than 10% of your roll on any one buy-in.

But my play this year has contributed most, if not quite all of my buy-in. It’s been a dream of mine for a little while now. And as Cake once sang, “As soon as you’re born you start dying…so you might as well have a good time.” I don’t harbor illusions I can win this thing, though anything is possible. It is one of the things I love about this game. But I think my chances of cashing are better than average. After that, who knows?

I know a lot of you have already wished me luck on FB or Twitter, and to you I extend my deepest thanks. I hope I represent for the geek kind well.

Now shuffle up and deal.

It was at a game store in Madison.  I was reminded that game store employees are assholes.  I waited in line for 7 minutes to buy a thing of dice for $9 while someone did a huge preorder, and the guy tried to find it all, etc.  When I called later to find out who had run the game, he just said “I can’t keep track of the people” and was done.

But.

It was an old school game store.  As in signs on the wall that said “Stench is only for Troglodytes” and “If your clothes or hygiene offend patrons, we may ask you to leave.  Hygiene counts!”  And two dudes playing Warhammer with beards down over their bellies.

It was kinda funny, really.

This was my first game of 4e.  I have to say DAMN, they did a good job.  I read the quick start rules, and a pregen character from one of my friends (who should post here, but doesn’t).  That was really all I needed.  It was *very* odd being the guy asking questions about the rules, but the other players were nice, and the basic rules are pretty simple.

I have to say, I’m really impressed with 4e.  I was really skeptical when I was watching it come out, but it’s really well done.  We were all first level, but no one felt like they had to cower in the corner.  Everyone had interesting things to do all the time, and the daily/encounter/at will breakdown was really interesting.  We were very synergistic even without any preplanning (my character is a Warden – having an ability to grant everyone combat advantage made me extremely popular).   We had to look up a sum total of one rule, and it wasn’t even very important (how far you can jump with an athletics roll).  At first level, I felt like I had a character, not a potential.  And there were plenty of things for me to decide on at the beginning, rather than needing 5-10 levels to get it going.

The Encounters system is good too.  I came in, sat down, and got 2 minutes of “Here’s where we are, here’s what’s in front of us.”  Then we jumped in.  There was a minor (very ) minor puzzle, because they’d solved it last encounter.  There was a challenge room where we spent 10 minutes investigating, making decisions, and doing things.  Then there was a big fight with a nasty monster where I got a beatdown, and then we gave a beatdown.  I left feeling very satisfied.

Or, put differently:

I want to hang out with Joss Whedon.
I want to *be* Aaron Sorkin.
Kevin Smith is the guy that shows up at the game cause he’s friends with someone else, and I can’t tell him to leave.

Wolf populations are on the rise in WI. Wolves are eating deer. Hunters shot less deer.

The logical conclusion?

Wolf hunts.

………………

I….

It’s….you see….deer….wolves….hunters are….

I can’t even really begin to address this. But it’s made my head hurt so very very very very very much today.

I actually found that story while looking in to this one: http://www.jsonline.com/business/90405254.html

Not in that paper, but that’s the online version that had the story I was looking for.  The comments in that story frighten me tremendously.  From comment 1, it’s intensely political, completely lacking in context, and vitrolic rhetoric.  It’s not until the “Hey, I work there, here’s the facts” that it settles down.

People just worry me, all over.

The Anime Industry runs on copyright infringement.

Just about everything the fan community does with anime is infringing somehow. This type of statement could be made about fandom in general, but it’s particularly true with anime. And the anime industry wouldn’t exist as we know it without it- in Japan as well as the US.

In Japan, we see a thriving doujinshi industry, fan-created comics that may use the characters and character designs of other works. They’re highly derivative, highly original, highly accepted, and highly illegal. In “Free Culture,” Lessig attributes this to Japan’s lack of lawyers. In many cases, creators and industry people don’t seem to care, or even approve. Some famous manga authors got their start with doujin.

Anime did make it to the US in a limited fashion (most famously, Macross, Voltron, but also things like Grandizer, Spaceketeers, and Battle of the Planets). The practices of trading fansubs (fan-subtitled works) and fan translations grew the industry tremendously. Then and today, there could be problems with just about everything fans do. Fansubs, fan translations, fan art, fan fiction, anime music videos, anime showings, all of it- all very possibly infringing.

But the anime industry wouldn’t exist without the fans, and notably the work of the fansubbers- without people in Japan taping shows off the air or laserdisc, and sending the shows to their friends overseas. Without people translating the shows and making subtitled versions and sending those versions to their friends. Without distribution being set up, particularly after the rise in popularity of the Internet. Without fan clubs showing the works in local communities and local universities. And all of those actions are potential infringement.

The anime community, and particularly the fansub community, developed a code of ethics. Don’t sell fansubs. People can pay for the cost of the media and shipping, but that’s it. (At that time, video over the Internet was unthinkable except in stargazing dreams.) Encourage the purchase of US licensed anime goods. Stop distributing material once it’s been licensed in the US. People really didn’t worry about copyright law so much. That’s not just true in the anime world, it’s pre-Internet (really if you want to go back a bit further, pre-VCR), but it just didn’t come up quite as much. You can trace mentions of copyright in news stories and journals and so on going back decades- issues with copyright have increased exponentially. It used to be something lawyers worried about, and became something that everyone has to worry about. There are a variety of reasons for this. I talk about it quite a bit in my other blog, but take a look at books by Lawrence Lessig, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and William Patry if you’re inclined to learn more on the subject.

But things happened. File-sharing became possible, then prevalent. People panicked. Laws changed. The anime industry and anime fandom was part of all of this and caught up in all of this. There’s still an uneasy codependent relationship there, which is different from the relationship between the **AAs and other types of fans. There have been a few research papers on the subject which you can probably find with a little digging (I’ll post some after I have a bit more time to dig them up).

At any rate, this tension between copyright law and ethics, between fans and producers, still exists. I certainly buy a lot of anime. But I’ve also watched fansubs, and I’ve also participated in anime showings and conventions and a lot of the other fan activity that occurs.

Like anything else involving copyright, the subject is not black and white, and it’s not easy, and we shouldn’t pretend that it is.

Since I’ve gotten older, however, there have been numerous games that sink their hooks into me and won’t let me go. Everyone knows I’m a Rock Band fanatic. Also pretty hardcore into Left 4 Dead. I didn’t really think I got the Mass Effect phenomenon until I realized I’d started up a new career with a different character almost immediately after I finished the game with my first one. And don’t get me started on the Bioshock titles (please, Hollywood, if you’re going to turn every game into a movie, at least get this one right and put it in David Fincher’s hands if he’s interested).

But what is it that pulls me in? Story plays a big part in Bioshock, to a lesser degree in Mass Effect. But that certainly doesn’t explain Rock Band or my latest obsession Plants vs Zombies (if you’re not familiar with it, don’t laugh until you give it a shot. If you’re not sucked in after the first hour, you’re a better person than I).

Gameplay is obviously the key, but what is it about the game play that makes such a difference? I figured this is the best audience to pose the question to: what gets the jonesing started that you say “Just one more screen/mission/level…” and next thing you know you’ve lost a couple of hours and find yourself late to wherever you need to be?

I’ve been involved with anime for some time now. I met my wife at that anime club when we were undergrads. My first publication of any sort was a story in Animerica back in the late 90s (although that’s my only anime-related publication to date). I helped start the anime club at Syracuse University. I was active at the UT anime club for many years, and I’ve been the faculty adviser to that club in the past (don’t let that fool you, though- I’m only “faculty” in the most technical sense of teaching at a University, but I’m still a doctoral student). And a good part of my current interest in copyright came from my initial brushes with copyright in anime fandom.

Long story short, the subject is one I find important. ^_^

An (edited) bit of the source material that annoys me so today, a question about our “1 year in position before transfer” policy:

“my question is in relevance to the expansion [we] plan to achieve within the next coule of years”….”I would hate to lose an opportunity because I am more constrited than another applicant”….”So I guess my query is this … chance for anyone already hired less than one year….”

I can’t even blame it on someone with english as a second langauge, because, seriously, this is Wisconsin.  We have maybe 10 people in the whole company that speak languages other than english or western european languages (german, etc) at all, much less as a primary language.  And most of those people are programmers who work in Chicago, and don’t follow the 1 year policy.

This annoys me.  It’s reflective of the nature of this site, sure, but come on.  If he’d gone to a gym and gotten in to a pick up game of basketball with a group of 20 year olds, it’s not a thing, as long as he can keep up.  If he’d gone to a bar to watch a sporting event of note, and there were 20 year olds there celebrating, and they started high fiving, it’s not a thing.  If he’d joined a community theater group and been Claudius to a 20 year’s Hamlet, and they hung out, it’s not odd.  But if he games, it’s weird?

(I am now diverging from his situation, as I don’t want to discuss his particular situation, but this isn’t uncommon – I even run in to comments like this at my board game night). 

I think it might be a hold over from the “games are for kids, grown ups don’t play” thing, which is patently bs.  But people still think of games as “that thing kids do.”  Not to be the sports basher, but some how sports gets a pass on the “that’s a thing kids do” front (note: I am jealous of sports – they get to be mainstream, and (presumably) fun at the same time) which games don’t, generally. 

And yet games are a hell of a lot of fun.  They’re good for you compared to some of the alternatives (primarily watching TV).  Many of them are social events in some way, whether it’s board games and yelling at people not to touch your pieces, MMOs hating the community around you, FPSes shouting “BOOM!  HEADSHOT!” or RPGs shouting “BOOM!  FIREBALL TO THE FACE!”  Even single player games tend to push you to forums, faqs, etc at some point.  Even if they don’t, you’re still (presumably) thinking. 

On top of that, it’s rare to find someone who, as an adult, genuinely dislikes games.  They may find video games confusing, or think that board games take too much time, or whatever, but if you get them a game they like, they have a blast.  RPGs are a bit exempt, as there’s an embarassment factor, but I’ve found that it’s rare that people don’t enjoy RPGs once they get in to them too.

Where was I going with this?  Something about “GET OFF MY LAWN!” I think.  Maybe I’m just rejustifying the existence of this site, and being thankful for the gaming groups I’ve had over the years.  Maybe I’m just prepping my alibi for 5 years from now when someone says “What’s that 40 year old dude doing playing games with 20 year olds?” and I can just link them here instead….

As some of you know, Apple released a new toy this week. You might have seen a thing or two on the news about it. I had made up my mind to refrain from picking up an iPad initially, but I could only avoid succumbing to temptation for a couple of days before I was in line at my local Apple store picking one up.

I’m not tech savvy enough to comment much on the pros and cons of the hardware. I’m a hardcore iPhone user, so the software piece I was already used to. I think the thing I’m finding most interesting about it is the way some developers have used it to rethink the way we consumer media. I think once I find an RSS reader I like for this thing, my time spent with the printed word is going to shoot through the roof again. The Marvel Comics app alone is mind-blowing for how it’s made me look at a medium I thought I knew in a whole new light.

I’ll definitely write more after I’ve had more time to use it, get familiar with it to make up my mind on what I like and what I don’t. But I’m looking forward to the ride with this thing.

And the attention garnered by people coming up to me in this coffee shop asking, “Is that an iPad?” certainly doesn’t hurt :-).

But man, reading about them just makes me feel bad.  I ended up on Wikipedia today, looking for Mr. Mxyzptlk information, and ended up reading the summary.  And it’s awful.  So much bizarreness.  My favorite lines follow:

He is killed when Superman sends him to the Phantom Zone at the same time that Mr. Mxyzptlk begins an escape to the Fifth dimension, tearing him in two. Remorse over the killing prompts Superman to drain himself of his powers with gold kryptonite.

The incident features alternate universe versions of Superman, Batman, and Deathstroke and implies much chaos that was not shown, such as the planet Mogo visiting Earth to reclaim an old land mass.  (We’ll get to Mogo in a minute).

During Grant Morrison’s Justice League run, the higher-dimensional nature of Mxyzptlk’s fellow genies was played to its logical conclusion of possessing power ‘two degrees of infinity’ higher than any normal beings; Qwsp refers to himself as encompassing both time and hypertime in addition to our spatial dimensions

Batman asks his 5th Dimension counterpart Bat-Mite if he is really an imp from the 5th Dimension or just a figment of his imagination, to which Bat-Mite responds that the two are one and the same.

It was explained in the Silver Age Superman comics that the reason that Mr. Mxyzptlk could affect Superman is because Superman is susceptible to magic.   (Because no one else ever thought to try that).

And now, let’s look at Mogo.

A sentient planet.

Who is also a Green Lantern.  Mogo is a sentient or “living” planet, technically genderless but often casually referred to as male. When it is desired, its affiliation with the Corps is marked with foliage arranged into a green band, marked with the standard Green Lantern Corps lantern symbol, circling Mogo’s equatorial area.

Bolphunga the Unrelenting was one of Mogo’s first direct adversaries

In Tales of the Green Lantern Corps Annual #2 (1986), a prophecy narrated to Abin Sur suggests that Mogo will be the last Green Lantern. In a battle with the “Empire of Tears”, Ranx the Sentient City will explode a blink-bomb within Mogo’s core, killing the sentient planet and ending the Green Lantern Corps forever.  (I can’t even parse that sentence without a face palm).

Ada Lovelace was, arguably, the first programmer.  She wrote the algorithms that Babbage’s difference engine ran on.

The day is being used to promote/celebrate women in technology and such.  Which is good.  But it sort of served to remind me that I’m *way* out of that sphere.

It’s been over 10 years since I had a position that qualifies as Sysadmin, and at least 8 since I even had a technical job like server support.  I do a lot of technical things in my job (analysis and report writing and excel wizardry mostly), but I’m in no way in IT any more.  It’s not like I didn’t know that, but I hadn’t thought of it in terms like that.  Ironically, it became fairly relevant today, as my team was trying to combine exported data from our tracking systems with other data in Excel, then get Word to do a mail merge off it to send out semi-automated emails.  And I thought to myself “If this were 10 years ago, I could have just written a bash script that would parse the data, send it straight to the smtp server with all the commands embedded, and be done with it.

It’s sort of interesting to look at this group – the majority of us were employed together in some combination, doing some kind of technical work (we haven’t all worked together at any time, but all of us have worked with at least a few other people, and I don’t think there’s anyone that is more than one degree separated from anyone professionally.  And of the group, it’s interesting how many people are still in that world, and how many aren’t.   I think most of the people on here aren’t in IT any more – Jake is firmly there, Enrique is, as far as I know.  The rest of us are pretty much out doing other things.  We still have a few friends that don’t blog here that are fully IT, but most of us aren’t there.

I wonder how many of us still self-identify as IT-types, though?  I’m more of a stats/analyst now, and (shudder) a member of management (I’ve been a supervisor/manager for 6+ years now, which is about as long as I was in IT, counting from Tech Support through Server Support).

Until now, I’ve never really had gadget lust. I’ve liked some stuff, but there’s never been anything I’ve wanted to hug and pet.

I like my 360 and my laptop, but that’s really because I play games on them.

Now I have a Droid. Perhaps iPhone users feel this way, but it’s because they don’t have a Droid.

The phone just works for me. I’m interested in Twitter, because my phone makes it easy. I’m using my personal calendar, because it’s easy. I feel happy times when I get it out.

Don’t tell Michelle.

While looking at box office totals for each year of the 80s to jog my memory, I found myself struck by the top 6 films of 1981. The first 5, in order:

Raiders of the Lost Ark
On Golden Pond
Superman II
Arthur
Stripes

Number 6 that year? The Cannonball Run. $72 million. MILLION!

Even sadder…I know I contributed to that figure. At least twice. To be fair, Adrienne Barbeau’s boobs figured…prominently…in my actions, I’m sure.

This one was written 2 months after the others.  In that two month window, they changed about 80% of the game (to their credit, it was much better in a lot of ways, unlike, say, Star Wars Galaxies).  Prior to that, the game had gotten really buggy.  I was unable to play without it eating my PC alive, so I gave up….

But I still want a pudding faucet (you’ll understand if you read – that’s what we in “the business” call a hook.  Or a teaser.  Or …. I dunno.  Look, just read it).
I took a nap.  It was, I admit, a long nap.  Something like two months.  I think I needed it – before the nap I was blacking out randomly, hearing strange noises, and just randomly running in to walls for hours at a time.  Then I heard something about “new rams” and “new mothers are bored” and poof, I’m awake.

But man, things are different.

I mean, it’s not like I’ve been here for ever.  Okay, well it is, kinda.  But not.  But now, once again, things are different.  All that combat stuff I got taught in the dojo, fighting Bob over and over again?  It’s kinda still relevant, but then it’s not.  Crazy.  But then Neo said something about them always changing things, so….

In any case, I woke up refreshed and renewed, and ready to go save some people.  Or shoot them.  Whatever presented itself, really.

I whip open my phone – Tyndall’s surely been freaking out – I mean, I was the One!  Or, well, not the One, cause Neo was the One.  I guess I was the Two (should I have named myself Wot?), or something.  Ah well – nothing wrong with that.  My battlecry of “It’s time for number two!” isn’t inspiring the fear I thought, but you know….

Anyway, I open the phone.  And there’s a couple new names in there.  Flood and some Agent Gray.  Flood looks like he needs to be sipping a mint julep and shouting at the neighbors about how they wouldn’t know a gentleman if they fell on one, but he still looks like more fun than Agent Gray.   I mean, Gray.  Not that we live in a really shiny happy colorful world, but come on.  That’s like saying “Hi, we’re the stodgy ol’ machines.  And we mean it.  We put the Stod in Stodgy!  Or maybe the Gy.  Something.”  So really, I’m not gonna call him, it’s just not likely to be worth much.  So that leaves this Flood guy.

*ring ring*  *ring ring*.

*sounds of a wild party, someone either being killed or … um… you know*  “Hello?”

“Uh, yeah, is this, um Flood?”

*squeal of what might be a pig, or possibly a smallish monkey* “No, no man.  But hang on.  I think he’s around here, or maybe in the hot tub.”

Okay, so this is looking good.  I mean, really – I’m spending the majority of my life here in the Matrix.  Even though, you know, the whole point was to free my mind from the Matrix and get out more.  But have you seen Zion?  Seriously?  I mean, there’s a couple good parties, sure, with lots of half-naked people in sweaty clothes bumping about, but you can really only go to that party so many times.  Sometimes you really just want a latte and a good issue of Ladies’ Home Journal/Sports Illustrated/Playfish/Whatever your magazine of choice might be (I figure if you can make anything you want, people aren’t gonna stick with the “traditional” fare).  I was kinda starting to wonder where the secret back room was with all the buckets of chocolate and unending pudding faucets and stuff for the loyal troops.  Turns out that Zion’s not really big on that, because it’s not real.  Yeah, okay.  But this Merovignigianain (I dunno, it’s random characters.  Or french.  Whichever) dude apparently has it all.  And I mean, if you’re gonna be spending most of your life somewhere, and you *can* randomly create a room full of hot tubs and shrimp cocktail, why wouldn’t you?  Anyway, Flood picks up.

“blah blah blah, need your help, blah blah blah, get stuff, blah blah blah, Zionite interference.”

Yeah, makes sense – like I said, they’re not big on the hot tubs.  And, I mean, I know how many new guys there are – probably Zion will have to send a couple of them over to mess with Flood – probably like a big friendly rivalry – you know “Ha ha! We got the Mona Lisa this time!  Next time you might get it, if you’re not so slow!”  Then they go have drinks, and laugh about it.  I bet.

So, I step up to the road, and I look for a cab – I mean, apparently I’ve gotta go like 800 yards.  That’s like 8 football fields or something!  Come on!  I’d tried that whole “jumping over tall buildings” thing.  I think I pulled a muscle.  A groin muscle.  So not good.  Strangely, no taxis.  I mean, come on!  This is … well it’s…. I mean… this is …. well, it’s a city, certainly.  It likely has a name.  And it’s kinda big.  So I mean, they have taxis, right?  Or … police?  Fire trucks?  Pizza delivery guys?  Come to think of it, I can’t really remember seeing anything except about 5 different types of cars…. Hmm….

Annoyingly, as I find myself on the brink of a great and powerful revelation, someone rudely shoots me!  With an assault rifle!  Which probably explains why I don’t see many cops – when every ganger around is armed like a small aggressive country, it’s a bad idea to have a big target sign on.  But I mean, he shot me!  Outta no where!  All the other gang guys I’d met before just stood around politely, presumably doing whatever it is gangers do when they aren’t out, you know, ganging.  Trading graffiti signs, or something.  But this dude saw me, and just took a pot shot!

Strangely, it didn’t hurt that much.  A lot less than I’m used to, actually.  I check my guns – that one really nifty shotgun I found that used to read “55-75″?  4-4.  4!!!  I mean, math isn’t my strong suit, but that’s like, a lot less!  So I’ll just stick with my tried and true method of “Hooligan-Fu”.  Punch to the face!  Kick to the groin!  Butt to the head!  Then grab, hold him down, and kick him in the face!  Now we’re talkin’!  Weird thing is, gangers used to be really polite – if I was hitting him, he’d stand there and take it.  If he was gonna shoot me, I’d spend my time mostly being shot.  This time, while I’m punching him in the face, he shot me!  At the same time!!  I mean, really, come on folks!  That’s just not right.

Anyway, I’m giving up on cabs – maybe they just don’t drive to hooligan infested waters.  Streets.  Whatever.  I put on my “shoes of glowy yellow code” and start hoofing it.  Maybe when I’m done, Flood will let me use his hot tub….

“You see, this profession is filled to the brim with unrealistic motherfuckers. Motherfuckers who thought their ass would age like wine. If you mean it turns to vinegar, it does. If you mean it gets better with age, it don’t.”

Marsellus Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Marsellus is talking about boxers in the above quote, but he could just as easily be talking about Hollywood or film in general.  Whether it is failing to utilize “actresses of a certain age” until they really need someone to play old old, or in a more technical light going back and touching up effects to erase wires and boom mikes that would otherwise be visible in the shot, film works very hard to facilitate an illusion.  Some of these sleights of hand hold up well no matter the number of years that have passed.  Others…not so much.

This came to mind recently in a discussion with some of my fellow basement dwellers about the film Independence Day.  As Sam put it, “I hadn’t watched it in almost a decade… and I was pretty drunk at the time.  It seemed pretty good when I was a teenager. And again when I was drunk years later.”  Now he and his lady fair were laughing at it when they weren’t cringing at how horrible the acting, dialogue and action were.

This observation struck me as odd, given their recollection of it is exactly what I remember being true about the movie then and that was part of it’s charm.  I think I described it back then as being The Poseidon Adventure with aliens, a disaster flick that is laughable for how seriously it tries to take itself.  The main thing that keeps it from being a 90s Michael Bay film for me is that it never quite goes over the line of taking itself too seriously.  Sam sees it otherwise, and as such the years make its flaws much more evident for him, where I see this cheese as a serviceably aged cheddar.  You wouldn’t put it out for guests, but melted on toast it does what it has to.

I got to thinking about the movies of my past that I love and which wouldn’t hold up so well for me today, now that I’ve worked to earn the label of movie snob.  Some of the movies I hold dear from my youth still have the same hold on me today they did then (Raider of the Lost Ark is the first to come to mind).  Others I look at and have to wonder what the hell I was thinking (Clash of the Titans, anyone?).

Later this year, Disney is going to be releasing a sequel to one of my favorite pieces of celluloid junk food from my youth.  Given the original had a shelf life considerably shorter than the average Twinkie, I considered five movies I loved from my youth that aged less than gracefully, and five that still embody the Don Lockwood credo of “Dignity…always dignity.”  It’s a rather arbitrary delineator, but I’m cutting the list off at anything that was released after I graduated from high school, and a movie can’t qualify for this list if I didn’t see it for the first time until after I went to college.

Moldy Cheesits

1. Tron (1982) – It’s not just the effects work that has been left behind, though the light cycles are still wicked cool.  Listening to some of the tech-speak in this movies is downright painful for just how Clu-less it was even then.  I know the laptop I’m writing this on now has hundreds of times the power of your average consumer desktop from back then, but I still wince when I hear Jeff Bridges’ Flynn talk about how “Somewhere in one of these….memories is the evidence!”  As a kid raised in a video arcade, it will always be special to me because I loved the games it spawned.  But I’ll be happy to see the tech updated for modern times not just in the dialogue but in the finished product on screen.  If Ducati could make a cycle that looked that wicked awesome, I’d go out and get a license to ride one even if doing so would terrify me beyond belief.
2. The Karate Kid (1984) – Part of me is actively ashamed that I ever liked this movie, let alone that I went and saw it multiple times in the theater the summer it was released.  Let’s be frank here: the role of Mr. Miyagi is pretty freaking racist in the way it plays to stereotypes of Japanese-Americans (and seriously…a nom for Best Supporting Actor that year?!?!).  Ralph Macchio gets on my last nerve with his whiny bullshit.  And it wasn’t a crush on Elisabeth Shue, as I don’t think I saw her in anything after until Leaving Las Vegas.  I recognize that there’s going to be a fair bit of teen angst in any coming-of-age flick, and this has the added handicap of being an underdog movie as well.  But for fuck’s sake…what was I thinking.  And while we’re at it, Bill Simmons needs to lay off the crack pipe.  There is no way in hell this is one of the 15 best sports movies of all-time.  You won’t argue about this Bill because THERE IS NO ARGUMENT!  You’re on drugs, end of story.
3. Krull (1983) – I have no excuses beyond being a really stupid kid for digging this movie when I was 11.  The only justification that I can recall was being enraptured by The Glave. the star shaped weapon that Ken Marshall slung around this horrible sci-fi/fantasy hybrid.  Bad effects work, worse story, worst acting.  I think the Glave effect was a holdover from the discs of Tron.  That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.
4. Iron Eagle (1986) – Ok, forget how utterly implausible the premise of this movie is in a post-9/11 world, how in the hell did the idea seem believable pre-9/11?  Doug Masters (Jason Gedrick), son of an Air Force pilot shot down and held prisoner in a rogue Middle Eastern state, conspires with his dad’s old wingman Col. Chappy Sinclair (Louis Gossett, Jr.) to steal two F-16s from an Air Force base, fly them halfway around the world, bomb the base and rescue his dad.  The only thing this movie does for me today?  Gossett, Jr. winning the Oscar 4 years prior for An Officer and a Gentleman starring in this makes Jamie Foxx doing Stealth make sense.
5. Modern Problems (1981) – I hadn’t thought about this movie in a long, long time.  It came up as I was combing the lists of box office results from the 80s trying to think of movies that I went nuts over at the time.  I think I probably only saw this movie because as memory serves, my parents absolutely loved it when it came out and it got a shitload of replay on Showtime in the year or two after release.  Chevy Chase as a strung-out loser air traffic controller who gets imbued with telekinetic powers when exposed to radioactive waste.  Yes, this is something that was greenlit in the 80s.  To it’s credit, the “sex” scene he has with Patti D’arbanville is still kinda funny (and I use the air quotes around sex in this context very deliberately if you’ve never seen the movie).  But seriously horrible 1980s comedy excess at work.

So what still holds up over the years for me?  Raiders as mentioned above is a given.  After that:

Fine wines and aged cheddar

1. An American Werewolf in London (1981) – I don’t remember exactly how it was I managed to get to see this at such a young age.  My parents weren’t draconian about me not seeing R-rated features, but even then this would have been a bit extreme for them to allow.  Must have been on cable.  All I remember from then and still know now: the scares it throws at the viewer still make me jump, and the transformation scene is still fucking magic.  As a plus, as an adult I appreciate the wry humor of the movie so much more.
2. Ghostbusters (1984) – Time hasn’t been kind of some of the effects work, especially in the age of HD.  The green screen is pretty painfully obvious with the gargoyle scenes and some of the long shots of Mr. Stay-Puft. But the movie’s still brilliantly funny, well written with great, memorable scenes.  My guess is that I saw this more than a dozen times in the theater (back when admission was still a dollar or two, and God doesn’t that make me feel old).
3. Poltergeist (1982) – Is it the clown?  A little person (god rest you, Zelda Rubenstein)?  Drowning in the half-done pool in the backyard?  The gnarled old tree?  This movie hit on a lot of phobias for a lot of different people, never mind the creepy little girl that Carol Ann Freeling (the late Heather O’Rourke).  Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg hit all the right notes on this one.  I can feel the hairs on the back of my neck standing up just thinking about that damn clown.
4. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) – Not much I can say to this beyond that it was a teen movie then that resonated with a lot of adults.  Almost 25 years later, that’s still the case.  I was Cameron back then.  I don’t know that I’m any closer to being Ferris today, but I know I’ve let some of my inner Cameron go, and am thankful for that.
5. The Fly (1986) – I was too young then to get Cronenberg’s whole thing with the New Flesh.  Was way too young still for Videodrome or Scanners, and I still don’t know I get that Videodrome now.  Back then, I thought it was both the coolest and the grossest thing I’d ever seen when Jeff Goldblum first showed Geena Davis how Brundlefly would “eat”.  Today it’s still really gross…and really freaking cool.

Honorable mention on the latter list for The Last Starfighter, which holds a similar place in my heart to Tron.  I welcome your recommendations for your favorite vintages of film, or that cinematic leisure suit you’re embarrassed to admit you loved once.

When last we left Firbolg, he was standing over a body, rummaging its pockets for stuff.

Things haven’t changed a lot in a week. More bodies, more rummaging, and more interesting stuff, to be sure. But you know, that’s what it’s all about, in the end.

Tyndall’s been a real help. Things started out slow, sure – go talk to three guys. Each of them has vital information for you! Like, you know, hit stuff hard, and don’t die, and the matrix is all craaaaazy weird.

She couldn’t tell me that herself? Come on, really. This has taught me a valuable lesson: fundamentally, the Matrix is actually made up of the laziest SoB’s you can find. Case in point: Recruit a new blue pill. My thoughts went somewhat like this:

What’s this mission? I have to go help a blue pill? Great! I know all about that – you get there just before the agents, you help them sneak out of the office, being all cool and god-like (I can see you, Mr. Anderson! I can always see you! And, uh, you should probably stop doing that, or you’ll go blind). Then you get them in the car, and then all this cra… what? No? I have to do what now? Walk to someone’s apartment? And pick up the pills? Aren’t they just code that I could….No, I have to walk there. Could the guys that have the pills take them to the recruit? No? Too busy, eh? Well, okay, I guess that’s why you have tenure, right?

So I haul myself over there, narrowly avoiding Janet and Madonna (Apparently it’s the Dance Tour of the century, with guns) and some other ladies. I burst in the door, expecting to be awash in a bustle of important and exciting activity.

And they’re standing around. Not even, like, using the machines. Just looking at them. I think one of them has a beer, but he hides it quickly. So I find my contact. Broomfondle. Yeah, dude couldn’t get the name generator to work either. I mean, come on. Broom Fondle. He who fondles brooms. I mean, maybe it’s a really bad, really obscure Hitchhiker’s joke, but man. Why not just call yourself “NoneofthenamesIwantedwereopen”? Oh, that wasn’t available? Dang.

So I pick up the red pill from Broomfondle (I don’t mind admitting I was a bit nervous. I didn’t have Anti-Perv loaded or anything), and all goes well. Can I have the blue pill now? You…you don’t have it? Some other guy has it, in another room? What, are they like matter and anti-matter, and they’ll explode if they get to close? I’m not putting that in my pocket! But no, just some other guy has it. That’s his job – he’s the Blue Pill Holder Man. *sigh*.

Oh well – while I’m here, I’ll just dig around in your large cardboard box…. AH HA! Loot! A fedora. Very nice, very stylish. It’s got this weird yellow background, but I’m still wearing the ratty beanie I started with, so I’ll throw it on.

It … it won’t go on. I mean, my head is right there, the hat is right there. But it just won’t fit on my head. It bounces right off. So I ask ol’ Broomy for some advice.

“That’s a ladies hat.”

“No, no, it’s a fedora. They’re really guy’s hats, though occasionally women will wear them to be edgy.”

“Nope, check the color – the yellow background means ladies. Blue is for guys.”

“Not pink?”

“Pink is not cool.”

*sigh*. “So I can’t wear the hat, even though it fits, because it’s for a woman.”

“Right.”

“You want it?”

“Dude, I don’t go that way. Not that there’s anything wrong with it….”

So, I stuff it in my pocket (fits surprisingly well in there, especially considering the two shotguns, three rifles, and assorted stakes, holy water, and silver bullets….) and head to the door. I open it up, and there’s Traylor. “Traylor, eh? Single or double-wide?” He’s not amused. Ah well, I guess being a key Zion op like these guys means you lose a little perspective.

“So, I need that blue pill.”

“Nope.”

“Huh?”

“Nope.”

“Look, man, don’t make me drop names. I mean TYNDALL herself sent me here.”

“Yeah, I know. We’ve had 50 other newbies come through here looking for pills too.”

Wait, I’m…I’m not special? Everyone else is doing the same thing? I know that’s just not right – when they woke me up, Niobe herself told me how special I was. Traylor’s just mad about the double-wide crack. I mean…that didn’t come out right…. Nevermind, more important things are happening. I have a Mind to Free tm

“Seriously, come on. There’s like, Agents or something, going to pick him up right now. In shades. And black suits. *MATCHING* black suits.”

“Fine, whatever. No! Wait! Better idea! See that cop?”

“Uh, yeah. I was kinda wondering why he was just standing in the corner….”

“He’s a construct. He’s the only one that really listens when I talk, and doesn’t look at me funny when I tell him about my idea for a duck powered….nevermind – I want you to fight him for the key.”

“Uh, you know that the whole goal of Zion is to free people, right? I mean, really, we’re on the same side here. I’m pretty sure that your job as Blue Pill Holder Man also requires that you hand over Blue Pills when people ask. I mean, honestly, I could just take the Red Pill, that’s the one that really does stuff….”

*Target Acquired!*

Bugger.

So I kill poor little construct, handily (Hey, it ain’t Screaming Monkey Kung Fu yet, but I’ve leveled up. I can kick you in the groin *and* hit you over the back of the head now. BOO YA!). Rifle his pockets (God, I do that a lot. They never said it was going to be like this….) and find the key. Open the desk, blue pill! YEAH!

Tyndall calls me (she’s always watching too, creepy ol’ lady that she is….) and tells me to head to the recruit. I check my map.

38 meters.

I check again.

36 meters (I moved, in my shock).

So basically, I ran 200 meters to get here, had to deal with a guy that has a thing for household cleaning appliances, had to beat up a pseudo-cop, all so I could walk 30 meters, to the building across the street? Seriously? And these guys are now doing what? Standing there?

Laziest SoB’s ever, I told ya.

Don’t even get me started on the bizarre desire to sniff everyone’s butt. I’m starting to wonder about these people. But then I remember. KUNG FU! BULLET TIME! WAAAAAA TAAAAAAAAAA! And it’s on again.

To that end, I’m going to try to, you know, blog more. 

First up, I’m stealing an idea from Shamus Young (http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/) who is sort of a geeky superstarish.  And also from myself, about 3 years ago.  Technically, I did it before I saw Shamus do it, but he did it much better.  I’m doing a sort of in-characterish send up of an MMO, or another game, or what have you.  It’s not strictly in character – it’s more me editorializing about it, and imagining things about the character in game.

I’m being inspired by Shamus’ MO of “go for old games, not the newest and greatest.”  But I’m doing him one better – this is for a game that ISN’T EVEN IN EXISTENCE ANY MORE.  Matrix Online.  It’s unlikely anyone reading this has ever even played the game.  So bonus points there.  And even if someone wanted to compare it to the game itself, or got inspired to play, they’re screwed.  So, yeah.

I don’t know if I’ll continue these – I’m playing a few games, but none which really lend themselves to the silliness.  So to start, I’m just stealing what I wrote back when I was playing MxO, editing it a bit, and pasting here, then calling it a “new post.” 

Still better than most of the other slackers, eh?  Keep in mind this post was written long ago, so don’t snicker at things like “I don’t like to fly spaceships” when you realize I’m playing ST:O.  When I wrote this, I had played MxO in beta pretty heavily, but didn’t subscribe.  About 9 months later, I picked it up, and gave it a try again.  It’s theoretically targetted at people playing MxO, who would get the in game references.  But they won’t admit they played any more, so….

So, part I:

Because WoW is fun, but I have a jones for something that’s not orcs n’ elves.  CoH lost its shine, and I don’t like to fly spaceships.  Oh, and I have an SWG account my family uses, but, you know, NGE, so $5 for MxO is a pretty dang compelling argument.
 
So, I buy it – $20, download, install in an hour or so.  Not bad.  I load it up, hear the familiar sounds of the launcher, and the keys, and actually get excited.  Interesting.  20 minutes of fighting with SOE later, I have a station pass, and I’m ready to go.
 
Same old character creation options.  I’m a sucker for the facial tats, so on they go.  I remember clothes being pretty quickly replaced, so that’s easy enough.  I know my stats, I’m going MA, so that’s easy enough to pick. 
 
Then we get to the crux of things.  Redpill/Bluepill name.
 
I’m sure to all the vets, it’s old hat, but coming off beta, where I only had to try 3-4 times to get one of my top listed names, I’m a bit shocked.  My old names are all gone (Wireline, Kinrowan, Murphy, Esper).  Some of the new ones I thought up, also taken.  I figured.  So I move on to more obscure.  Stuff I wouldn’t be horrifically offended to have.  No go.  My daughter is making a character too, so, off to the internets.  A listing of thousands of god names!  Excellent!  All the obvious ones are taken.  So we move to more obscure.  Here’s a list of east African tribal gods!  Excellent!  That one has 13 letters!  Taken.  Um, okay.  Cool sounding Latin phrases!  DENIED!  Random religious references?  NO!  I think back to my days of DnD, and lore.  My toon is Irish.  He’s big and hulking.  *sigh*  Firbolg.  And annoying enough, it’s open.  Orcs and elves, how close you are.
 
My poor daughter is having less luck, so we move more obscure.  Egyptians gods I’ve never heard of.  Denied.  Assyrians.  Nope.  Nordic folk heroes.  Nope.  At one point I actually banged on the keyboard, and hit accept.  Denied.  Desperation sets in.  KTHXBYE!  Nope.  OMGWTFBBQ!  Nope.  HerbalViagra.  Denied.  In retrospect, that one was probably for the best
 
I should note that the grammar prude in me refuses to allow me to hackerfy my names with leet.  My daughter has no such compunction, but it doesn’t matter.  Finally, she picks an Egyptian goddess name.  There are a total of 3 pages on the ‘net, and all say “A local goddess.”  Great.  It goes through!  Only an hour after starting, and we’re in!

But it makes me wonder about the poor people in the Matrix.
 
“Mr. McKennitt, we have been following you for months.  We think that you are finally ready to take the first steps to greater awareness and free your mind.  Do you accept our offer?”
 
“Wait, is that a dayquil and a nyquil?”
 
“Quiet.  Take the Dayqu…The red pill if you accept.”
 
“Weird. You sure about this?”
 
“Yes, I’m sure.  Look, Tyndall said that I have to give you one or the other.  If I don’t, I can’t do any more missions, and then I’ll just have to go grind thugs in the park for a month to level up, okay?”

“Uh, I’m getting a little nervous here.  I mean, you’re just some guy.  I mean, yeah, you have some really spiffy sunglasses, and that coat is like, pure leather goodness, but I mean come on.  I’m not sure a random stranger with a name like Hitmanny offering me drugs is really a good life choice….”

 ”JUST TAKE THE GORRAM PILL!”
 
“Okay, okay, okay.”  *swallows*
 
“Well done, Mr. McKennitt.  You are now ready to begin your journey in to the Matrix.  By what name shall we call you?”

“Well, I kinda like Andrew.  I mean, it’s my real name, ya know?”

“No.  Sorry, not cool enough.  Besides, there is already an Andrew.”
 
“Wait, what, sorry?  There’s already an Andrew?  As in, someone else in the entire world has my name, and that’s it?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know.”
 
“Drew?”
 
“No.”

“Andy?”
 
“No.”
 
“Ooooh, okay, I know – Sir Killer!”
 
“No, no spaces.”

“Uh, okay, SirKiller.”
 
“Taken.”
 
“Killerman.”
 
“Nope.”
 
“Hacker?”
 
“Uh-uh.”

“OOOOH!  This will blow your frikkin’ mind.  REALITY!”
 
“Are you kidding?  We’ve got reality, r3ality, r34lity, r34l1ty, re4lity, and about 14 others.  Some dude is even r341179x.”
 
“Really?”

“Yeah, we hate him.”

“Uh, okay, how about…”
 
That proceeds for about 2 hours.
 
“Okay, jeez, glorbyborbyfloopaloos!”
 
“Uh, no.  We do have glorbyborbyfloopalos available…No, wait, we don’t.”
 
“Can I have that other pill instead?”
 
“No.”
 
“Please?’
 

I guess you get past that eventually, but man, that’s gotta dampen the new guy’s fires, eh?
 
But I dive in, eventually.  Tutorial’s all the same, except now with less random lock-ups.  And there’s a tv I have to watch, where it loads up ads to get me interested in playing the game I’m currently playing.  Maybe it’s some dual level philosophical thing, but I doubt it.
 
Then I have to kill Bob again.  Poor frickin’ Bob.

But now I’m out, and in to the wide world of the Matrix!  I pop in, and shock of shocks, there’s a collector!  “Ah ha!” thinks I.  I know these guys.
 
I run up.  “Okay, Clio, what do you want?  Keys?  Rings?  Pins?  Rocks?  Rotten carrots?”
 
“No, I want your ID card.”
 
“Wait, no.  They told me never to give this away, because people could, like, steal my money.  Or something.”
 
“No, really, gimmie.  I’ll give you a letter, and a shotgun.”

“DUDE!  Sold!”
 
“Okay, here, take this letter.  You must now seek far and wide, ranging the Matrix, braving great danger, until you find the man this letter is for!”
 
“Wait, is that him right over there?”

“I don’t see anyone.”

“No, seriously, he’s like right behind you.  I could hit him with a rock from here.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You’ve been standing here for how long?”

“9 months.”

“9 months.  And the guy is right over there.  Like 30 seconds walking.”

“Look, take the **bleeping** letter.  Someone else is coming in who is more important than you.”

So I take the letter, and walk a bit.  Hand it over, get me some health pills.  Now I gotta start killin’.  Well alright.
 
Shotgun to the chest for you, Mr. Runner!  Blam!  Oh, I uh, I missed.  OW!  Again!  Blam!  Ha!  Got ya!  For, um, 1/8th your life?  You can take 8 shotgun blasts in the chest, and you’re just standing around, doing nothing?  You know, there’s a circus in town….  But now for the fun!  Charge in, Kung Fu Monkey style!
 
No, wait, no Kung Fu monkey.  Uh, Self Defense.  Isn’t that what they teach women at the Y?  “That’s my purse, I don’t know you!”  Foot stomp, run!
 
So he’s dead.  And he’s carrying….information?  Wait, what kind?  Like, I rummaged his pockets and found a shopping list, and 3 phone numbers, and this is valuable to someone?
 
Matrix is fulla freaks, I tell ya what….

I’ve always been something of a Kirsten Dunst fan (I should say “we,” since her image long graced the window of Q’s workspace), and this is just fanboy/girl heaven. ^_-

So, Kirsten Dunst + Princess Cosplay + Akihabara + 80s cover!

http://boingboing.net/2009/10/19/murakamis-short-film.html (picture)
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/24/murakami-akihabara-m.html (video) (some anime images NSFW)

Akihabara, for those of you who don’t know, is an area of Tokyo famous for its tech goods and its anime/otaku stuff. It is awesome. If I ever get a chance to go back to Japan, I’m spending more time there. ^_^

The comments on the BoingBoing post are to me, shockingly negative. This video made my day. ^_^

Now I confess that on occasion Q and I can probably be a bit… curmudgeon-y when it comes to today’s youts. ^^; And we’re possible even the slightest bit judgmental regarding our fellow geeks/nerds/insert favorite appellation here (sort of akin to Derek’s lament in an earlier post). It’s true; some of us are more socially inept than others. But I haven’t given up! (4) Work on it, folks! Yes, geek heroes such as these performers are great, and yes, they’re really nice and will make conversation with you and perhaps even be interested in what you say- but you don’t have to try so hard! ^_^ Gambare! You can do it! A tiny bit of advice:

-Sometimes your jokes will work and be incorporated into the performance! That’s awesome! You totally succeeded in being clever! Go you! (Seriously.) You don’t need to keep on calling for the same joke as the show progresses! As Q aptly reminds me, brevity is the soul of wit. ^_^
-Kids, some of you have lovely voices. Your harmony kind of detracts from the show on occasion. You may be able to do that at a more appropriate time and place, like playing Rock Band, or perhaps the shower. (5) Go you! Just not at the concert we’re paying for unless it’s appropriate (like when playing pirates or zombies)! (6)
-Not a problem this time, but when they were here during SXSW last time around- there’s a good chance that Felicia Day would, in fact, mind if you tried to wander off with her (7).

DESPITE this, you are our people. Yes, even you socially-awkward-guy-wearing-a-Munchkin-shirt. We love you too. (8)

Just don’t stand too close to us. :P (9)

(1) I must add, that because of a similar typo I spent the better part of a year thinking that the duo was “Paul & Strom.” No kidding.
(2) …if such a thing could ever be said to be inappropriate.
(3) That’s my Paul and Storm cover band.
(4) I can’t speak for Q. She’s given up on you. Don’t let that discourage you. :P
(5) These are Not Optional. Work on it.
(6) I never expected to be writing that line either. But it’s true. Pirates for Paul & Storm, zombies for Coulton. Them’s the rules.
(7) I’m willing to be proven wrong, but I’d consult your local laws before proceeding.
(8) But not like, that way.
(9) I mean, you can stand next to us and talk to us and everything, but recognize the value of personal space. ^_-

GO.

ps. hello everyone! :)

There have been several questions lately regarding the future of the Star Wars Miniatures and Roleplaying Game and until now I haven’t had definitive answers to give you. After a lengthy evaluation, Wizards of the Coast has decided not to renew the Star Wars license with Lucasfilm. We’ve had a long and fantastic run, but with the economic downturn, we have made the tough decision to discontinue our Star Wars lines.

WotC is no longer going to have the Star Wars RPG license and is discontinuing its miniature line. I am a bit saddened by the news; I’ve got every WotC Star Wars book and I enjoy the system. I had fun with some of the people on this blog. ^_^ Plus, my regular group just started a game. I really, really hope that this news doesn’t mean that we won’t play it to completion- we’re going through the freely available Dawn of Defiance campaign, and having fun. ^_^

My group has been a bit burnt out on 4th Edition D&D. Star Wars is close enough in rules to 3.5 and 4e that it was familiar enough to get rolling, and in truth, in a lot of ways I personally prefer the SW mechanics to the 4th edition implementation of encounter/daily/utility powers. ^^; We’ll see what happens!

I’ve followed them from game to game; I’ve played Everquest, World of Warcraft, Everquest 2, Dungeons & Dragons Online, Tabula Rasa, City of Heroes/City of Villains, Guild Wars, Hellgate: London, Lord of the Rings Online, Age of Conan, Aion, Champions Online, Eve Online and others I probably just can’t recall off the top of my head.

I resisted Warhammer Online and their disastrous foray into tabletop Warhammer, which they enjoyed but dropped after a few weeks (and some of them spent hundreds on the game). Ouch.

This time around, I’m playing with my wife, and that’s been solid. We’ve gone back to the only game she enjoyed in the past: World of Warcraft. It’s a strange thing- there are definitely times when I don’t like Blizzard (the gay gamer issue, the bnet lawsuit, the strategy guide lawsuit), but they also do a few good things with their fans and have generally made a fun game. Several of my friends have joined again as well, but I’m not sweating their leaving this time around, if (and when) they do. (I’m certain that Star Trek and Star Wars will be too tempting…) We’ve got a solid guild (for librarians and library-interested people!) and we’re having a good time. ^_^

I have a follow up building to paying for games, based around the fact that there are a fair chunk of good, free MMOs out there. But yeah….

I hate that.

When Congress passed the law and then-President Bill Clinton signed it in 1999, lawmakers were especially interested in limiting Internet sales of so-called crush videos, which appeal to a certain sexual fetish by showing women crushing to death small animals with their bare feet or high-heeled shoes.

The case is about the 1st Amendment rights of a guy who wants to sell dvd of dog fights.

Question: How many people are in space right now?

Answer: 6

Well, it depends whom you ask. The group of friends I game with regularly have a tendency to be game jumpers, and unfortunately most of them are ready to move on already. Their one complaint that I have to agree with is that there aren’t enough missions. You pretty much must do every mission to get to the highest levels. The dearth of missions makes the replayability of the game an issue for them- it hasn’t bothered me yet, but I completely understand where they are coming from. There’s new content coming out next month with the Blood Moon update, but by then it will be too late. They’ll be gone. I plan to stick around, however, so drop me a line if you decide to give it a shot.

I also picked up Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 for the Xbox 360. Now, I wasn’t particularly thrilled with the Civil War storyline, where the heroes went to war over the registration act. For one, I’m probably one of the few that *liked* Speedball from his early days, and his character changed in ways that I don’t find compelling at all. More importantly, though, I had absolutely no sympathy whatsoever for the pro-registration side (led by Iron Man). The pro-registration side seemed motivated by fear and did what they felt necessary to achieve security, and of course there are obvious intentional analogies to real-world events that make the reaction in what is usually an escapist story a bit less than compelling. The game makes you pick a side, and I’m curious to see what happens when the other side wins… so as soon as I have a chance, MUA 2 will be up.

The next MMO my group is trying is Aion. As a former Tabula Rasa player, I have a free first month, so I’ll give it a shot.

There are a lot of different ways to pay for your games nowadays.  Apparently there are people out there that pay a sum of money, and receive some sort of physical device they keep for ever.  It’s odd – I’m going to test this idea out in a month or two when I do that sort of transaction for Borderlands, Dragon Age (CE) and Alpha Protocol.  So, say you pay $60 for an RPG type game or a shooter, and get 120 hours of enjoyment out of it.  Then you play it again later for 30 hours or so.  You’re looking at $.40 per hour of entertainment.  If the game is something shorter, you start to get less, but even if it’s a 12 hour game, that’s $5/hr, which is movie price.

Then there’s the ever popular renting of console games.  I’m pretty fond of that one.  Pretty much I buy RPGs and Rhythm games, and that’s about it.  Everything else is a rental.  From a cost/hour perspective, that’s probably your best bet (assuming you actually play it once you get it – I’m horrible about renting them and turning them in a week later unplayed).  If you get a good game, you’re looking at anywhere from 8 hours to 40 hours for a rental price, which is $5 to $10.  So you’re anywhere from $1.25 to $.15 per hour in cost.  Pretty good return.

Then you get an MMO.  Initial investment is the same as a game, or less.  First month, you’re probably playing 2-3 hours a night on average, assuming you enjoy it.  Now you’re at $1/hr, which isn’t bad, but isn’t great compared to the other types.  But then next month, you’re still enjoying it.  Now you’re getting 60 hours for $15 – $.25 per hour.  The difference is that if you play less, you can’t make it up – you bought a game, if you play 5 hours now and then 50 hours later, it’s 55 hours.  In an mmo, it’s by month.  So you lose value if you don’t play it.  Shamus (shamusyoung.com and escapistmagazine.com (no relation)) has a bit on this that says it well, and is what prompted me to do this.

And then there’s free to play.  More and more, I’m coming to be a fan of free to play (which is really microtransactions).  You can play as much as you want, and if you want to spend some money, you can.  But you can get by just fine without doing it (in a good f2p at least).  DDO is doing it perfectly, imho – f2p with purchases, or just subs – best of both worlds.

But people complain that you can’t really play unless you pay.  I call bs on that.  If you’re lazy, or you need the shiniest and best, then you can’t (ironic, coming from me).  Take my current f2p obsession, Wolf Team.  It’s a shooter.  You earn gold for doing things, and can buy gold or AP.  Gold is used for weapons, and a couple other things, AP are used for stuff that makes you better – stronger wolf, can’t blow yourself up with grenades, etc.  If you’re lazy, or not very good, you might need better weapons – having the basic stuff may mean you can’t play.  And items have a duration.  But really, they give you a sniper rifle.  They give you a machine gun.  They give you an uzi.  The sniper rifle you get takes three shots, or a headshot.  The sniper rifle you can buy is basically one hit.  So if you pay, it’s easier.  If you’re skilled, you’re fine.  I’m playing with the basics only on purpose, to get better.

DDO is the same – people whine like crazy, but you don’t have to buy a damn thing.  You get a lot of stuff for free, or you can spend $5 or $7 every month or two.  And you’re doing a hell of a lot better than an MMO still.
Course, there’s a multiplier effect of some sort – $.50/hour for a game that’s okay is probably worse than $1/hr for a game that kicks ass, but I think there’s a limit – there’s mediocre, and there’s good, and there’s awesome.  But paying $1/hr for good and paying $2/hr for awesome come out the same in a lot of people’s minds, I think.  It’s hard to argue that an MMO is superior to a single player game in most cases.  But a single player game isn’t significantly better.  Unless it’s KoTOR, you’re getting enough fun for a good price.  And that seems to be the key.

Now, here’s the question: first game. Player’s water broke. Rushed to hospital, baby born 14 hours or so later. Auspicious first game or not? ^_^

Location: Abandoned Factory

Object: Stick of Butter

Synopsis: A journalist makes the ultimate sacrifice to get her story as a case of late 21st Century identify theft evolves into a dangerous game of cat and mouse.

Cascade

“Where am I?” Cascade whispered while twisting in his chair to test equally restrained legs and wrists.

The few minutes since Cascade had rebooted seemed like seconds–and the fact that his hands were bound did nothing to slow the relativity of time. While the digital bits of his mind had come to life well before the more groggy organic parts, those few digital add-ons observed equally vague details and answered no questions, save one. Three hours had passed since someone shot him outside of Simon’s apartment. Just a strong tazer shot, but enough to blow his lid, both grey matter and silicon.

Three hours and he could be anywhere.

Distant pricks of light rained down from unseen sources above, illuminating more shadows and myths of the eye than concrete details. Rows of metallic arms swung listlessly in front of him, as if manifesting midair out of the shrouded firmament above. The chair holding Cascade rested only a few feet away from the nearest arm; he could see how the implement descended into a steely claw swaying over silent conveyor belts. The robotic limbs gave the impression that he waited within the skeletal ribs of some alien beast. Or, if the dull thumping he could just make out were indeed currents crashing against some distant hull, that he had become Jonas to some near death whale of machinery and darkness.

“Where am I?” he muttered louder, to no one in particular but expecting an answer. He’d likely already be dead if they didn’t want answers. Hopefully.

Frankly, he’d already decided to spill his guts, if it would do any good. Then again, only God threw you into the belly of a whale and expected you to come out again. Whoever had gone through all this–well, Cascade at least wanted answers before they finished the job.

The footsteps came low at first. He tried to pin the echo distance. Two-hundred meters: the compartment must be monstrous, let alone the entire plant. Two sets of footsteps. Men, or damn hefty gals, one larger than the other.

“Tyrone, you’re awake.” The voice came from the smaller man. Cascade sensed a familiarity in the Little Man’s use of the name Tyrone. Nothing good could come of anyone who actually knew Tyrone.

“Where are we?” Cascade corrected.

“See? I told ya Tyrone’s a direct kid, Max. A good kid once upon a time. You were a good kid, weren’t you Tyrone?”

“Still am.” Cascade grimaced.  “Least, I’d still like to be.”

The Little Man nodded to Max, who pulled out a knife along with what looked like nothing so much as a thick bar of butter. The big man sliced off a bit from the top, then swallowed it down. The knife looked far too cruel to Cascade to exist for just cutting butter.

“Now that’s a problem. Because we know you should be finishing twenty more years over in SuperMax, not hooking up with some fruit district attorney here in Atlanta.”

“His name’s Simon,” Cascade spat. “And how we spend our time together is our own concern, not yours.”

Max cut a deep piece of butter off, swallowing the slice without a word. Cascade wondered if the fellow was born mute or made that way.

The Little Man smiled. “I don’t give a damn about who you’re blowing, Tyrone. I’m just interested in what you said to get out. Max is interested, as well. See, when he finishes that bar, if I don’t like your answers, he’s gonna skin ya as a message to anyone else who might rat on me. Surely you remember how good Max is with a knife?”
 
“No, I really don’t.” Cascade slumped in the chair. No way out of this except maybe the truth. “You see, the name’s Cascade. Tyrone’s just cover.”

“Nah,” the Little Man said as Max took another slice. “We ran DNA–you’re Tyrone, alright.”

The Little Man pulled out a small gun, pointed it at Cascade’s neck. “Let me remind you how your old boss does business, Tyrone.” The wires shot forth faster than Cascade’s add-ons could track; electricity raced through him again, followed by a mental void.
 
—
 
“Dammit!” Claire slammed her fists down as the visual link faded to snowy static. “That’s what I get for going cheap. Two months of being a gay ex-con down the drain along with twenty-thousand dollars.”
 
No more Cascade, no more chance to see what Simon knew about the investigation into Governor Wilkinson. God only knows what that psycho had done to Tyrone. It could take months to rent out another puppet the DA might fancy, and her publisher wasn’t likely to wait.

“Shit, Tyrone, what a waste.” Then again, Claire consoled herself, the cons whole life had already been a waste long before her. Maybe there was a story here after all.

—
 
Tyrone woke to pain. His head burned so hot that his eyes refused to focus. Sweat soaked his skin cold enough that he vomited from the nausea induced by the contrast. The acidic spittle mingled with a thickness that could only be blood. Tyrone wondered why he wasn’t choking, only to realize that part of his body’s lurching came from the spasm of involuntary coughs; his mind simply couldn’t catch up in time to the torrent of agony his body endured.

“Oh, Tyrone, I hope you enjoyed your time out.”

Tyrone knew that voice. From somewhere. But where was he? Why hadn’t the prison guards stopped this?

“You’re just a blank note for our message,” the voice continued. 

Tyrone’s eyes focused enough to see a big fellow approach; he could almost remember that the voice didn’t belong to someone so large. The hulk gulped the last bit of some yellow slime from his knife. A greasy smile spread across the man’s face as he redirected the blade against Tyrone’s abdomen. Tyrone wasn’t sure he could actually feel the carving of the knife into his chest, but he screamed all the same.

In an effort to be competitive with the web and TV, print is trying something new.

According to the BBC, the first video in print ads will appear in September in Entertainment Weekly in a few markets. They play some video (maybe audio too?) when you turn the page to see the ad screen, like opening one of those annoying-as-hell greeting cards that plays music.

The video-in-print ads will appear in select copies of the US show business title Entertainment Weekly.

The slim-line screens – around the size of a mobile phone display – also have rechargeable batteries.

The chip technology used to store the video – described as similar to that used in singing greeting cards – is activated when the page is turned.

Each chip can hold up to 40 minutes of video.

These things are hitting the L.A. and New York markets and nowhere else, but they are just too cool to not end up other places. Anyone wanna buy me a copy and ship it? I’ll post video of the magazine with the video playing inside. — Wow… how very surreal would that be?

I give you, ZOMBARITAVILLE! It’s those songs you just can’t claw out of out of your head, rewritten for the undead who just want claw into your head.

I like to view college as a few years of constant anal rape with the hope of a reach around at some point in the future.

That sounds bad, doesn’t it? That’s because I’m pretty burned out on college. And you know what? It wasn’t the classes that burned me out; it wasn’t the idiot students that are a decade younger than me; it wasn’t the professors who manage to go through an entire semester without learning the name of a single person in their class of 16 students; it’s the god damn price.

Up until this point, I’ve been taking out student loans to cover my course, and help a little with bills. I paid rent, bought groceries, and blew fun money from the part time job I had. It wasn’t much, but I was comfortable. My first semester back in school was a breeze. So was my second. By the end of the summer classes, I was beginning to worry. I’m now three years in, a Junior, and all I do is worry. Tuition has skyrocketed under Texas’s orgy of deregulation, and there’s no end in sight. I’m going to be in school for at least another year and a half unless something derails me, and more and more, that’s looking like it’s going to be the money situation. I had to take out a massive loan this year to make sure I can pay my rent while in class, because the jobs I’m finding in town are really damn hard on full time students

I am paying almost 400 dollars more for 12 hours of class this semester than I did last Spring. That wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t paying close to 175% of what I did three years ago.

When/if I graduate, will I even be able to pay off this massive debt in the following decade? Will I be paying off my student loans into my 40s? I think so.

Am I alone in this almost crippling worry? I’d like to hear what you internet heathens and social networking savages have to say about it.

I got laid off a month and a half ago and suddenly I had nothing to say. It was depressing, really. I got laid off from a shitty, low paying, part time job in a filthy building that was giving me health problems like the first 20 minutes of Joe Vs. The Volcano.

I was working for a form printing company called Gulf here in town, and while it was by no means an ideal job, it allowed me to do stuff like Pay The Fucking Rent and to occasionally Pay My Goddamn Bills On Time. I took the job with them because I’m in college and needed to work at a place with semi-flexible hours from semester to semester.

I’ve spent the month doing odd jobs and freelance to pa my bills, but with the fall semester about to start, it’s going to get very hard to scrape by. I’ve been looking for freelance work on oDesk.com as a writer/editor/proofreader, but I’ve learned that it’s almost impossible to compete with people in the Philippines who are willing to badly do what I do well for a dollar an hour.

I’ve also been applying for anything I could find that would allow me to make enough money to live off of and go to college at the same time. So far, no luck.

This is going to be an interesting couple of months for me, I think.

Title: A Place to Keep Them

Genre: Ghost Story

Object: Horseshoe

Place: Circus

SYNOPSIS: A young man on a first date becomes unexpectedly bound to the latest object of his affection, a free-spirit with a collection even more odd than his own.

————

The young couple clutched hands as they ran through a pasture packed with rows of cars abandoned with all the grace of a minefield.  They chased the nighttime glow of a distant bonfire, around which rested a cluster of tents, bustling crowds, and a swirling feast of scents and cacophony. For James the aromas struck him the most: burning cedar, melted butter, and the hint of animals all floated heavy in the open, pastoral air.

“Okay, brilliant idea,” Sally gushed as they approached the grounds.

“I’m glad you think so,” James returned. “Especially since it’s your idea.”

She smiled at him. “Like I was really going with you to the lake for a first date. At least you’re ambitious.”

“Woah.” James felt the heat flooding into his face. “All in good fun; I’m just stunned you knew about this place. It was one helluva drive.”

“Gave us time to get to know each other,” she said.

James laughed at that. An hour drive into the country had resulted in maybe fifteen minutes of actual conversation, but the festivities had apparently wiped away those uncomfortable moments. She seemed at ease now, perhaps opening up his chances for later.

Sally lifted her nose to the air, her short blonde hair whisked by the wind as she sniffed. “God, you have to love that smell. Why don’t you get some popcorn, I want to check out the ponies over there.” She pointed toward two Shetlands, one white and the other a motley gray, drinking from an old garden hose. Children swamped them with watchful parents at a distance. A few cameras flicked, but the ponies seemed oblivious to all the attention.

The smell of butter led James deeper into the festivities around the bonfire. Shouts arose from various tents in waves, rising and falling in excited exclamations. The masses made him nervous. For all his earlier platitudes, this night had required extensive planning, likely all for not.

Near the bonfire, the smell of cashews and sugar mingled with the heavier scent of butter. The lines for food took more than a few minutes, and James wondered how easy it would be to find Sally if she decided to wander. For a moment, he considered whether it might pay to try and pick up someone else for tonight. He laughed aloud at the thought. A few people stared at his outburst, but he shrugged. It was a circus after all. It had taken weeks of small talk on the bus to get Sally to go out with him, no point in wasting so much work.

His popcorn finally in hand, James pushed his way back to the ponies through the growing crowd.  Nearly two hundred people must be gathered about the pavilions, he guessed. Why had so many people driven so far? You could see more exotic animals in a zoo and see a decent street show without leaving the city. He supposed that had to be the attraction.  Simply coming out into the fringe and gawking at those living there, losing oneself in something beyond the mundane status quo. That attraction to push beyond the boring trappings of the everyday James understood. Not that he wanted anyone gawking at him, but he enjoyed exploring certain fringes. Even near the Shetlands, the crowds had grown denser. At first Sally was nowhere to be seen. Agitated he scanned the crowd more closely, fighting the urge to simply leave.

He started to move closer to where the ponies stood mindlessly drinking. Watching them stand there somehow agitated him further. Why would people watch them doing nothing? A lion he could understand. It instilled fear and respect, the threat reminding people of a mortality easily overlooked in the hustle and bustle of modern life.

A glimpse of a blue dress brought him back to his search.

Not Sally’s t-shirt and jeans, but a sleeve, almost teal, a dress too formal for the circus. James realized he shouldn’t know what the dress looked like from a sleeve, except he did. He had one just like it at the lake.

The woman in blue disappeared in the crowd, but James hurried after her. His hand slipped into his pocket, pushed deep past his wallet to grasp a pocket knife beneath. It was small, but sharp—always sharp enough.

Near the edge of the grounds, he saw the figure in blue disappear into a small tent. The raven hair and bronze skin just how he had remembered it. Reason slipped from his mind as he rushed into the dark tent, pulling out the knife, without one thought for how many people might be within the canvas walls. He flipped open the knife determined to complete what he had already finished years ago.

When James entered he stopped cold. There stood Sally, in her t-shirt and jeans, smiling at him. “For a moment, I thought you might leave,” she whispered.

“Where’s Rebecca?” He shouted, pointing the knife at Sally while scanning the tent. “How did you find her?”

“Oh, James, I found them all well before we found you. They always come to me, out here in the wild. They always ask the same thing—a safe place to corral your kind.”

“You’re insane,” he muttered. “Where is she?”

“That’s difficult, James. She’s in the lake, where you left them, and she’s with us. All of us.”

James made to throw the knife, but hands pulled at him. Dozens of strong, icy hands with slender fingers pulled him to the crowd. He whimpered as they held him, much as they had whimpered. Sally reached into a crate in the tent, pulling out a horseshoe in one hand and nails in the other. “We bind the devil to us today,” she said with a smile. “So he’ll do no more harm.”

James screamed as the nails splintered first his feet and later his hands, attaching the iron shoes one by one, until all that remained were his neighs.

“Yeah?  That’s cool.  You wanna, like, start looking at stuff to see what you should write about?”

“Nah, that’s a lot of work.  I think I’ll write about, um, you know, like, girls.  And video games.  And why there aren’t any girls that play video games.  Cause that’s cool, and also, like, girls would think it was sensitive and stuff.”

“Dude, you know that, like, studies and stuff show that more women play games than ever before, right?  That now it’s more an issue of finding out what games girls enjoy, and treating them like, better?”

“Eh, I dunno.  I think everyone knows that girls don’t play games.  I mean, like, when I’m all ‘Hey, are any of you guys girls?’ no one ever answers me.”

“Okay, so, should we like, go do some research and stuff?  I bet there are some studies and things out there….”

“Nah, I’m pretty sure I can figure it out.  I know a lot about being a girl.  I play one in WoW most of the time.”

I’m pretty sure it’s about 100% like that.

For those non-manga fans, in Japan people tend to purchase magazine collections of serialized comics that are often categorized based on their target audience, the most common being shojo (girls) and shonen (boys). Here’s a breakdown of the most common types of manga- note that readership is not necessarily constrained by target demographic. Here’s Shojo Beat’s definition of shojo:

Shojo (show-joe) means “girl” in Japanese. Shojo manga are often characterized by a moody, abstract art style, with close-ups of characters’ faces intermingling with dreamy backdrops. In contrast to action-oriented shonen (boys’) manga, shojo manga ruminate on themes of emotion, love, identity, and responsibility that often play out internally. That said, shojo manga are by no means just for girls. Shojo stories are about aspects of life that concern everyone—boys and girls, old and young. Note: The word shojo normally appears with a circumflex or macron over the first o, as in shôjo; we removed it for the sake of simplicity and readability in the magazine.

American companies and distributors have attempted to release similar magazines in the US; earlier examples are Viz’s Animerica Extra and Pulp, and TokyoPop’s (then Mixx) Mixx-zine and Smile magazines. Smile even had the same “girls” demographic as Shojo Beat and was a home of Sailor Moon for awhile. (As a side note, back in those days I had the opportunity to interact with some of the people at Mixx, which had it’s own bizarre internal politics and public controversy that might be worth examining.) None of those magazines are around anymore, but Viz’s serialized publications eventually became Shonen Jump and Shojo Beat. Holly and I were big fans, and are pretty disappointed with the news. It sounds like others might be disappointed as well. We were automatically subscribed to Shonen Jump for the remainder of our subscription, but we canceled that; Shonen Jump has never had stories that really interested us quite as much.

This departure leaves the American serialized comics market pretty bare- the only thing we’re subscribing to now is Yen Plus, which is nothing if not diverse with Japanese, Korean and American stories for different audiences. Yen Plus has an unfortunate tendency to use their magazine for what is basically advertising- that is, they’ll show a graphic novel’s worth of stories from a particular title to try to get you to buy the graphic novel series and then drop the title. Despite that, it’s got some interesting stuff, particularly if you’ve got diverse tastes.

Here is story one from this year’s contest.

The required prompts were

Genre: Historical Fiction
Place: Photoshoot
Must contain a: Corkscrew

Light Obscured

I had to pull the story for reasons I’ll explain later. I’ll put it back up if I can, but hopefully I won’t be able to do so.

Kurt wanted a list of all my games, but I’m a little busy for that, so I let my iPhone do the heavy lifting. Here are all my games. Let me know if you want to drop by and use them for a few dozen months.

Just click an image to see the games in detail.