Also, I must respectfully complain that the "About Virginia" page on your Senatorial website contains several inaccuracies. It states that "Early European settlers landed in Jamestown in 1607 and established the first permanent colony of the New World," but St. Augustine, Florida was founded 42 years before Jamestown, and it isn't even the first permanent colony in the New World, merely the oldest in what is now the United States. I believe the distinction you claim for Jamestown actually belongs to Santo Domingo. Jamestown isn't even the oldest permanent English settlement in the New World: St. John's, on the island of Newfoundland, is. Jamestown is merely the oldest English settlement in what is now the Unites States of America.
I figured that mentioning Veracruz's status as the oldest continuously inhabited European settlement on the continental mainland was superfluous.
Some go the extra mile and combine this reduced pallet with hand-made letterforms. The pinnacle and most minimalistic of these covers is The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky: ( Big images and more noodling behind the cut )
- Music:Mirah: Advisory Committee
Folks who follow me on Twitter know that I'm considering of moving (well... cross-posting) my blog to one of my fallow and dormant domains. They also know that I'm a bit nervous about this: the recent hacking woes of J.D. Roth's other blog, Get Fit Slowly, and Amagi Games' installation and hacking woes give me pause. What you might not know is that I've grown goofily fond of the phrase "Staggering Fandom" and it will replace "Working on it" as my blog's title.
Next time: 45 year old Japanese puns!
*It prompted me to coin (but not use!) the phrase, "Who appointed [insert offending forum user's name here] [insert compound curse word here]-prime of the 'why do I bother with this hobby' committee?"
Heartbreaking Works of Staggering Fandom got off to a shaky start, and I'm going to keep things shaky by throwing out some honorable mentions in the music category before posting "fans conquer film."
If you're not familiar with The Minibosses, you should be. As far as I know, they're still the video game cover band par excellent.
The Minibosses do a great Mega Man 2 cover, but what The Adventures of Duane and BrandO did to the game's music must be experienced.
(YouTube is cranky today; this might not work right away)
I still don't know what I think of them. Despite my misgivings, I'm eagerly waiting for their Earthbound project.
One of the most famous television personalities in America spent almost 20 minutes of air time with a 22-year-old who wanted to play an improvised Concerto For Two Bicycles, Pre-Recorded Tape, & Instrumental Ensemble. Let that sink in.
I was a little put off by some of Steve Allen's jokes. Give him the benefit of the doubt, though. Watch all the clips. Read up on the guy -- the man was hip.
Does anything this delightful and unique happen on broadcast -or any- TV anymore?
Toward Testing Pirates
The five phases -The Past, The Means, The Motive, The Opportunity, The Life- are an exercise in world building as well as character building. The default, space-piratey setting has plenty of wiggle-room for player details, but we could go into the game with a totally blank slate, too.
Characters end the phases with five Aspects.
Phase 1: The Past establishes the context for player action; MacGuffins and high-concepts emerge here. In the default setting, some dimensional accident sunders human-settled space into two pocket universes for a few hundred years. When the regions merge back together, the unique technologies of one side are in high demand in the other and vice-versa. There's a war and other details, but that's the gists of the Order the default pirates' activities disrupt.
Your characters' Aspect from this phase usually describes what connections they have - who and what are important to them. Players also come up with a World Aspect that describes the established Authority figures -mentors, parents, employers- they'll soon be working against.
Phase 2: The Means is all about you. What did you have going for you? What did the future hold?
Character Aspects from this phase might be some kind of identifying, descriptive trait. The players also discuss World Aspects that represent potential allies.
Phase 3: The Motive is when it all came crashing down. Why and how were you targeted? What have you lost? How did you get away?
A Character Aspect from phase 3 will probably establish long-term goals for the character. World Aspects describe how the Authority maintains its power or how it's corrupt.
Phase 4: The Opportunity describes getting the group together and the first blow you deal to the Authority. In the default setting, it describes your first heist, stealing a ship.
Character Aspects from this phase are totally up in the air. They might connect you the object of your first heist, and a connection to another player-character or to the player-characters in general is encouraged.
Phase 5: The Life is about how you fit into criminal world and what makes you different from common crooks and from the Authority. The players come up with some kind of code or Principles that sets them apart; some lines they won't cross.
Phase 5 Character Aspects are about the kind of stuff do you see happening to this character most often. If we were playing a longer-term game, you'd also help the GM construct an Adversary, a foil that somehow rejects both the corruption of the Authority and the Principles of the players.
Did I miss any tricks here? Is shoe-horning everyone into the victim camp too artificial, or do you think players will happily subvert that convention and make characters who aren't obviously wronged? Where
I'll post the rest of my departures from Spirit of the Century (polyhedral dice, truncated "skill" list, etc.) tonight or tomorrow, and let you know if we actually give it a spin.
Finally, how have I not known about Josh Roby's blog? He writes good things!
First up, the
This one'll probably end up an honorable mention once I get more reader suggestions. In November of 2005, Jerry Holkins, better known as his nome de plume Tycho Brahe, posted a single PBWiki page based on a three-panel webcomic parodying generic fantasy back-stories. The Epic Legends of the Hierarchs: The Elemenstor Saga wiki now consists of an expansive guide to the world and cultures of Battal, lengthy descriptions of each of the (non-existant) thirteen novels of Tycho Brahe's The Elemenstor Saga and the various (non-existant) ELotH games, an episode guide to the (non-existant) 129-episode long エラメン☆ (ElamenSTAR) anime series and its (non-existant) American adaptation, The Wizbits. It's pretty much mind-boggling. References to the series make infrequent appearances in Penny Arcade.
The crowning glory of this category, and one of the things that made me want to pursue this project in the first place, is the venerable gaming amateur press association, Alarums and Excursions. As near as I can tell, it's been published regularly since 1975, and released its 400th issue this January. I can't think of any gaming publications with those kinds of legs. Wikipedia tells me that the pages of A&E are the birthplace of Over the Edge. Before blogs, before messageboards, begore Usenet and BBSes, there were zines, and A&E was, and is, one heck of a zine.
Next time: fans conquer film. Stay tuned!
Apparently, people have been saying stuff like "to play is to create" in the context of role-playing games for years, or at the very least equating game-mastering to game design. I actually expected that. "There's nothing new under the sun," and all. I'm much more disappointed to find out that there's an essay I'll probably never read at The Forge about looking at play as ritual behavior (the link's to my work, not The Forge), but I digress.
There's something alluring and fascinating in the DIY ethic. RPG campaigns, low-fi music, "software libre"... they all have love as their primary ingredient*. I want to celebrate the kind of love it takes to do something ridiculous and great just for the sake of doing it. I want to catalog the greatest fan-projects and talented amateurs.
I have a few projects in mind already, but I definitely need help. Tell me what's out there and What's moved you!
*with apologies to Clay Shirky for the paraphrase.
Quick Gaming Update:
Thanks to Joe, I finally managed to play Over the Edge: Psychosurreal Roleplaying! Finding a copy has been on my to-do list for a while. After last night's game, it's an even higher priority. At the very least I'll beg 'n borrow a copy to read.
The other half of the crew Swashbuckled the Seven Skies while Sam, Buddha, and I searched a few small rooms in a mansion on Al Amarja for a malfunctioning, invisible, psychic white-noise generator powered by a dolphin's brain. All signs indicate that a good time was had by all.
(Visit the recording's Archive.org page! I wrote things there!)
For instance, you can here the noisegate (I assume) kicking in and fading the background noise in and out during some of the quiet sections, like the pauses during the third speaker (Nick Marshall playing Dr. John Wong). Of course, it doesn't help that I used the Levelator in a silly part of my workflow - I added my fade-in and fade-out to the recording and then had the Levelator fight against my work. Oops!
Not depicted in the recording above are the weird stereo-panning things the Levelator can cause when it's working with very quiet stuff. One channel gets boosted, one drops below the threshold of the noise gate and suddenly it feels like the room's spinning.
The full (or nearly full) recordings of our first session and last night were rendered and uploaded to Archive.org while I wrote this post. Follow those links if you have a lot of free time. The compressor/limiter is set much less aggressively than last time so you may have to do some volume adjustments, especially on the first night's recording and especially if you're listened while commuting. I'm unapologetic because the recordings sound pretty darn good for being made on a tiny portable digital recorder.
Though it had its moments, last night's Sign in Stranger session was frustrating. Strange, strange things happened not only around us, but to us, as I'm sure you gathered from the logs. Unlike the surreal energy of our first session, yesterday's seemed unbearably slow. It takes a long time to parse every roll of the dice and we made no game mechanical progress toward any of our goals. The pacing mechanics dragged behind where we thought we were in the fiction: somewhere rather than nowhere, in other words. We were unsure of the boundaries of narrative authority and were reluctant to have the aliens take a proactive interest in our colony and characters. Instead we divided into groups (which certainly contributed to slowing things down) and sought them out.
The temptation to slap something GHOST/ECHO-like onto the game has come up a few times. I've grown rather fond of Jaye McClintock so I hope we do, but it may not be next week.
The movie is full of the sappy and the cute and the drama and the high school, but it has a model of time travel not covered in episode 13 of Lore Sjöberg Alt Text, "Theories of Time Travel." It seems that when you travel backward in time, you take the place of your former self and can re-live, and more importantly alter, moments of your life. Yes, our heroine uses this effect to sing karaoke for ten hours but only pay once. Also, it seems that to time travel, one must physically leap in the air. The animators exploit this opportunity for physical comedy to the fullest.
Speaking of time travel, not only has Joe played C°ntinuum, he's GMed it! What is C°ntinuum? Only the world's most ridiculously complete time-travel role-playing game -- or maybe the world's most ridiculously complete creative creative work on time-travel, period! The creators imagined what time-travelling society must be like, and created slang for it and everything. Check out these definites I've shamelessly stolen from Wikipedia:
Yikes. Joe says his players found keeping track of the things they still needed to do in their Yet was "like doing taxes." I don't care. I'm still excited by this development: Jonathan Walton hacked Mouseguard to run C°ntinuum.and has been putting some gorgeous looking game acoutremonts online. Not that I wouldn't want to try Mouseguard all on its lonesome; I think Burning Wheel (and Empires) needed a pruning, and I'd like to see how it turned out.
- Slipshank
- A time-travel technique where your future self gives your current self something. This accrues a small amount of Frag until you actually perform the action. For example, a spanner sitting in front of the television may be thirsty, but not want to get up. She may then reach under the chair, find a beer, and drink it. It is now necessary for her to, at some point in her yet, get a beer, travel back in time, and place it under the sofa, and she will have a small amount of frag until she does.
- Yet
- A spanner's personal future timeline. What history knows you've done, but isn't in your 'age'. You have 'yet' to do it. "When I slipshanked myself that beer, putting a beer under the chair went into my Yet."
Goodnight!
- Music:Letters to Cleo
James Wallis poses that some art director at Blizzard Entertainment has both an eye for typographic detail and a love for the analog side of the gaming hobby.
Next, Stephen Chrisomalis writes about D&D and Gary Gygax's influence on language. This really is a hobby for word lovers. Thanks to Sean K. Reynolds for the link.
Finally, a piece of investigative journalism on the hacking of Time's "100 Most Influential People" voting system. "moot," the founder of 4chan, is officially number one. The top 21 spell out, acrostically, what may or may not be a coherent message: "marblecake also the game."
"Amused" does not begin to describe what I feel.
I've got twenty new videos on Vimeo and YouTube, but I have a few minor corrections to make. Fixing them on YouTube involves removing the video and uploading a new one. Vimeo lets you upload a new file to replace of an one - you get to keep the same address. Score!
In Emily Care Boss's work in progress you play colonists who've volunteered to leave the Earth forever and live among utterly alien sentients on their bizarre worlds. The various worlds the colonists may choose from are composed Mad Libs-like, by filling in one detail at a time, folding the paper to hide what was written, and passing the paper to someone else. The Mad Libs round generates one potential planet per player: a brief sketch consisting of the size and type of the planet, a few details about the alien species, the other creatures in residence, and the job the alien hosts would like the human colonists to perform. I'm not entirely sure why we didn't choose to care for the giant aphids belonging to creatures whose appealing trait was their shape and whose repellent trait was their lack of a concept of personal space. Instead, we're serving as "beauticians" for creatures with alluring enamel and questionable cuisine.
The Mad Lib outline leaves many more questions than answers, of course. And here's where that "defining feature" I love kicks in. Whenever there's a question about the nature of the habitat or our alient hosts, you ask another player to draw a slip of paper, read it, and answer your question. What slips of paper, you ask? At the beginning of the night, everyone at the table wrote five nouns, five adjectives, and five verbs on slips appropriately labeled N, A, and V, folded them in half, and set them aside so words could be drawn randomly when needed. This mechanic seems a little more concrete than the Fortune Deck from Everway, and less constrained by plausibility than, say, the Mythic Game Master Emulator. The result is deliciously alien, and oh so very fun. Here's how we summarized our experience (in character) at the end of the night:
(Aside: A link to that recording's Internet Archive page, for the curious: archive.org/details/SignInStrangerOffice
No amount of explanation will make that clip less bizarre, but I'll give a little bit of background on some things alluded to but not explained in the recording. The aliens "greeted us by killing one of their number" because Joe drew "cruelty" when asked to describe what we saw when we first opened the hatch of our ship. The "biomechical sausage-excreting monstrosity" came about because Buddha pulled the noun "sausage" when I wondered what was in a particular room of our domicile. I should mention that when asked about the quarters the aliens were taking us to, Buddha drew the word "worm." We live in the maw of a giaganitc creature; our alien hosts were kind enough to furnish it with a single sofa, which explains the "flashback" scene.
I'll be working with the recording of the entire playtest session soon: editing out the dead-space, sending it to the designer, posting it online. The fun doesn't stop there -- we plan to record two more sessions of Sign in Stranger over the next two weeks!
I mainly do video post-prodction stuff, so it was fun to mess around with an audio-only project. ( Technical stuff behind the cut! )
That's all for now -- expect at least one more post about Sign in Stranger's mechanics, more end-of-sessions logs, and a blog post that's actually about me in the near future!
Sometimes I'm actually proud of what I write, even the silly bits like those that make up my post on October 9th. Sure, it's a little rough, a little too self-deprecating, a little too indirect, but there's some phrases in there I'd gladly steal and re-purpose:
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babykoala picked up on one.With Earth Day looming, my pride in my contribution to Folding@Home is once again tempered by concerns about my energy use. Turning off the graphics-card Folding client saves about 80 Watts, turning off the single-core CPU client saves another 40, and turning off my computer and monitor entirely saves 150 Watts on top of that. Now, I haven't checked the accuracy of these figures with all of the tools in my arsenal, just the software that talks to some electronics in my uninterruptible power supply, but they look like they're in the ballpark.
Six more papers based on Folding@Home's results and about their methods have been published since October.
I don't even know how to begin to measure the costs and the benefits involved. In the absence of anything concrete, how does one decide what's worth it?
- Music:Mirah - Advisory Committee
I was seduced by the siren song of In a Wicked Age and did not join Nick for Agon. Wow - we had two tables of five players last night!
Anyway, one of the oracle entries I wrote was drawn -- "Upon being released from prison, an ex-yakuza hitman gets embroiled in a plot of love, revenge, psychic schoolgirls, and Russian demon-mobsters" -- and much fun insued. Now that I think about it, the one I wrote about electronic motets was drawn last time we played IaWA. Yeah, making up stuff crazy stuff about the Cyberpapcy. It didn't help that I was the only person who'd heard a motet, and that was back in high school. Huh. I only wrote three of the seventy-eight entries. Thanks for the screen-time, lady luck!
In addition to role playing, Jason bought Tsuro and we tried it out three times. I logged it, too. It's a very pretty tile-laying game, the object of which is to create and travel upon a path for as long as possible without running into another player, which eliminates you both, or returning to the edge of the board. This lead to many jokes along the lines of, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. What the proverb doesn't say is he kills you too, aparantly." The last player on the path wins. The player elimination and randomness (you only have a hand of three tiles) is offset by it's short and sweet play-time. I think we finished three games in under and hour.
There was only one unclear rule: when a player is eliminated, the active player has the option of trading tiles in his hand for tiles in the defeated opponent's hand before they're shuffled back into the draw pile. The game does not specify whether the active player gets to look at these tiles. Today, I suspect that the intention was for the player to look, but last night we kept the exchange half-blind, and it was still a useful option. In our seven-player game (the game supports up to eight) everyone at the table was nearing the end of their rope by the time the first player was eliminated. The trade rule became a much-needed discard mechanic; as the board filled up, it becomes increasingly likely that every tile in your hand will kill you next round.
I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to play Tsuro, but I'd happily play it again.
We're playing the Torg/IaWA mash-up again tomorrow. The Compleat Strategist's manager, Josh, played with us last time; his character ended up becoming one with the Dalai Lama. It was a strange evening.
I enjoyed playing with him a lot and I hope he'll stick around again, but I might be tempted over to our second table because Nick will be bringing Agon and Zombie Cinema. The last time I played Agon, the first and only time, I got my name in a pdf, and I've never played a game by Eero Tuovinen. We can't have that, now can we? Someday, I'll pull Eero's Solar System, a more generic rendering of Clinton R. Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday, down off my shelf and do something with it. Can you believe that more than its wonderful, story-driving mechanics like Secrets and Keys, I devoted half an entry to my love for its bonus and penalty dice?
Finally, since it seems I'm too scatter-brained to stick to one subject in this post, I've started taking photos of flowers:
In what ways do the act of remembering and the act of imagining what something was like overlap, especially in regard to the imagining of things forgotten?
This post has nothing to do with the fact that the final draft of Paul Tevis's RPG A Penny for My Thoughts went to Fred Hicks for layout yesterday, but since the matters are related in both subject and time, I figured I'd give 'em a plug.
Adventures in Ethics and Science, Lilith Saintcrow's many posts, and Jezebel are among the best on the subject right now for sussing out facts (aside: Gawker's posts are not the best, and I'm not happy that I helped drive more traffic to them).
Earlier, some guy reported that his Bash script, regular expressions, and use of foreigners to defeat catchpas was responsible for the whole thing. His claim has been pretty thoroughly debunked. Bryant Durrell, the main debunker, has a lot of other smart things to say. For one, his last point bears repeating: "The really interesting thing about the troll is that he's right even if he didn't do it. The vulnerability he describes exists anywhere you make automated decisions based on third-party input." Also, his summary of the situation is similar to my own feelings: "No matter what Amazon did or didn't do, intentionally or not, there is absolutely not enough evidence right now to draw any conclusions other than 'it's bad that this happened.'"
I think a few more things are clear. Amazon.com is handling this public-relations disaster rather poorly. Pick a scenario, any scenario, and Amazon is at least partially to blame, yet they have not been contrite. Adventures in Ethics and Science notes that "honesty and transparency will do more to restore customer confidence than ass-covering," and so far, Amazon has only produced marketing-speak and the words of anonymous employees.
Also, the guy freelanced for RPGs, starting with Over the Edge, which makes him a few million times cooler.
One of the saddest things about the whole situation is one of the fuses that set the internet ablaze. I have no idea who "Ashlyn D" is (besides an Amazon Member Services representative), but the response she sent to Mr. Probst looks to me like it was composed by an employee "dialing it in" while working a holiday weekend, or a canned response that never would have been sent had Probst's message been fully understood.
I did manage to express some opinions that I'm proud of. Yay blockquoting myself:
I remain skeptical of just about everything right now...I gave blogging a bad rap in that post, and when I was thinking about this post, Sam listed a catalog of reasons why corrections can propagate quickly in the blogosphere: commenters, trackbacks, page updates, feeds, etc. I conceded, but I offered that maybe only us obsessives get the final word: lots of people have their minds made up already.
I do know that while blogging, twitter, and the rest were great for getting the problem recognized and (hopefully on the way to being) corrected, the medium itself will probably hinder investigating and assigning blame, or at the very least the dissemination of information not colored by (un-ironically righteous) indignation, strained or severed relationships, badwill and attempts to control its damage, and self-interest like that exhibited by the troll.
Maybe someone will write something close to right months or years after the fact, like Gene Weingarten's heartwrenching piece about leaving kids locked in cars. The truth does not necessarily come out at the speed of blogging (micro- or otherwise); it doesn't necessarily come out at all.
I can't help but think of the misinformation -- and worse -- that I run into all the time: the "we only use 10% of our brains" myth and attributing the change of seasons to the Earth's proximity to the Sun and not the Earth's axial tilt are almost benign, but I find them rather troubling. But when I compare early posts on the kerfuffle to the links in my second? Maybe this internet thing will help right things soon.
I haven't done anything stupid and dangerous recently (like, say, letting strange dogs jump at my face or picking up hitchhikers) and I have a hankering. Any suggestions?
On the fourth, I went to the 9:30 Club for the first time, and it was good. Mates of State were especially fantastic. This Saturday night, I went to Glen Echo Park for the first time and I was absolutely blown away. The park is a wonderland of Art Deco and Americana. I wandered around in awe after midnight; before that, I was in the Spanish Ballroom dancing. Practice, practice, practice, right?
Ninety-five-year-old boogie-woogie and blues pianist, Pinetop Perkins, was jaw-dropping. OK, so any of the three pianists from Saturday night could rock a crowd all night long by themselves. Get this: all three were on stage at once, along with the rest of a hot, hot band - it had this guy (who toured with Muddy Waters) on guitar, for instance. It was delicious, decadent overkill.
Speaking of overkill, I thought it was crowded when I went to dance at the Dulles Hilton on March 20th; I didn't know nothin' about crowded. That huge ballroom Glen Echo packed tight. I think my best dancing of the night happened after it thinned out a bit as the hour approached midnight.
I played San Juan with my sister Lena on Sunday (maybe I should mess with logging these plays on BoardGameGeek...). Might this mark her descent into hobby-gaming?
Unrelated to any of the above, I won $50 dollars!
