Cop Spotting

So after a recent traffic ticket (no, I didn't mention it here - jeez, I don't have to tell you guys EVERYTHING, do I?) I found myself sensitized to the local police presence. Hyper-sensitized. To the point of wondering "Wow, do I see cops EVERY day?". So piqued, I spent most of January keeping a notebook in the car, and every time I saw I cop, I wrote it down (once I had reached a safe and convenient spot) where I had seen the officer, what branch the officer belonged to, and what he or she was doing at the time.

I quickly found I had to develop a bunch of ground rules:

• I would count by instances, not numbers of police vehicles. Four cops responding to a call in the International District would count as one, not four.
• I would only count vehicles, not officers. Foot patrolmen got a pass. Motorcycles, police vans, and those dinky little parking vehicles the Seattle cops used all counted.
• No fair counting cops parked at police stations. Ditto fire stations and city halls. That's just cheating.
• Similarly, no counting officers in my living room or at my dining room table (Hi, Dave!). That's cheaty as well.
• Wreckers, fire trucks, emergency vehicles and anything else that has bubble dome lights is a count for another day. 
• Only count as IDed it you can figure out what branch they belong to. Most of my unidentifieds are motorcycles, since they are hard to pull out affiliation as you drive past them.

I ran this for the first four weeks of January. My normal commute is down Benson and Talbot to Renton, then north to Bellevue either by I 405 or back roads, depending on crowds. Once a week I would drive to Federal Way for comics, and once a week I would drive downtown to the ID for Tai Chi. Upon looking at the notes, I saw that I rarely traveled on weekends, staying home to work, and though I would get out to play games with friends, I did not rack up enough instances to really rate them, so I'm taking Sunday and Saturday off the table.

So what did I end up with? Here's the summary - 47 sightings over 20 days. That's over two, nearly two and half police encounters a day. Let me did into the tables a bit:

Day	Numbers
Monday	04
Tuesday	08
Wednesday	17
Thursday	06
Friday	12

Note - Wednesday gets the big number here, but that makes sense because it is the day I'm doing Tai Chi downtown and getting comics. More travel = more sightings. But Friday is not out of the ordinary as far as travel but gets a higher number, while Monday is the slowest day. So if you're going to violate traffic laws in the Renton and Bellevue areas (which this blog does NOT endorse), Monday is your best day.

Location	Numbers
I-405	14
Bellevue	09
Downtown	06
Benson/Talbot	10
I-5	03
Lake Washington Blvd	03
Auburn Way	02

There is a surprise there, but one I did not expect. Lake Washington Blvd. is a noted speed trap for drivers who are avoiding I-405, the main artery between Renton and Bellevue, but it pales compared to local cops in Bellevue proper, or along Benson and Talbot, which seems to be a new hotspot in the evenings for squad cars.

Affiliation	Numbers
State Police	06
Bellevue Police	09
Seattle Police	05
King County Police	03
Renton Police	11
Other	03
Unidentified	10

So we have here an embarrassment of riches for the various departments keeping an eye on the streets. Renton and Bellevue have the lion's share, which is to be expected. Most of the Unknowns are, as noted, motorcycles. The others are New Castle, Redmond, and Auburn, but oddly enough, nothing from Kent, where I currently live.

Activity	Numbers
Patrol	29
Responding	05
Ticketing	07
Parked	02
Accident	02
Breakdown	01
Unoccupied	01

The vast majority of the cops were in motion from one place to another for reasons unshared with me (my lone Redmond cop I picked up in Bellevue and followed all the way to Federal Way). Responding was in motion with the lights flashing. Tickets, Accidents, and Breakdowns were all pretty obvious. Parked is a none-of-the-above situation, where they COULD be waiting for the unwary, but I have no proof that they were not reporting in, doing paperwork, or just keeping the speed limit down by their presence.

So did I learn anything (besides the fact that there is probably a better way to do tables on Blogger)? Just a bit. The sample size is still pretty small, but it shows that there are likely heavy and light days in rotation, that the bulk of the police seen are in motion, and that supposed legendary speed traps were not, and new ones may be opening up. If anything, this type of activity needs more spotters and a more cohesive way to manipulate the data. In short, enough with the long-hand calculations - there's gotta be an app for all this.

Next up? Sketchy research on why there's never an officer when you need one.

More later,

The Kid of Death

The K of D: An Urban Legend by Laura Schellhardt, Directed by Braden Abraham, Seattle Repertory Theatre through February 20th.

Before getting to the heart of the matter, a detour into the bidness side of show bidness. You'd think that holding season tickets might render you immune to the long touch of fund-raising for theater, but such is not the case. If anything, you are moved HIGHER up the list because you actually GO to theater and you enjoy it and should be disposed to part with a tad more to keep the lights on.

One recent phone fundraiser from the Seattle Rep was refreshingly honest - "I know you gave us money, but we were damned fools and spent it, so we're back." Probably the best pitch I've heard in years, but I still put him off, saying that the Lovely Bride handled donations (which is true). And she kicked in a bit to help out the Rep at the end of the year. And those contributions go to thing like the Yes Project, dedicated to getting more young voices on the stage and more younger butts in the seats.

And K of D is a part of one this Yes Project, and though most of the audience was considerably grayer than the target demographic, it is an excellent start.

It is a one-actress show, the actress being Renata Friedman, who plays The Girl, and moves with quicksilver grace as she inhabits the other characters in the play, holding down multiple ends of the conversation, downshifting from animated bounds to a dancer's stillness, holding the moment, containing and embodying the story.

The story itself (as we get to the heart of the matter) is about story-telling, in part, and the growth of an urban legend. But is it also about the hermetically sealed world of the young, before consensus and convention and even reality has a deepening effect. It is a place where magic still exists, when magic and the uncanny, is the best interpretation of the events of the larger world.

The place is a small town in western Ohio, and the urban legend is about Charlotte McGraw who loses her twin brother in an accident, stops talking to people, and picks up a strange and deadly superpower. Charlotte's silence is portrayed with mute delicacy, but the rest of her pack, the gathering of young teens who hung out together, do enough talking. We're thrown into their conversations early and without proper IDs, but The Girl doubles back and soon we know that Becky always has a cig and Stephanie has that squeaky fearful voice and they become internalized.

They are the stable ones in this town, in their own way of thinking. The adults are quirky with a good layer of menace beneath it. Charlotte's mom is a teacher with a bit too much competitiveness in her heart. Charlotte's dad is a bit of a thug, but a bigger thug is Johnny, who hit Charlotte's twin with his rusted blue Dodge as is the unrepentant villain of the piece. We start out telling stories about telling stories, but soon settle into the real tale of watching an urban legend unfold.

Friedman is all the characters, shifting smoothly from one to another. But this is no monologue, but as the stagecraft and in particular the sound couples and supports as an invisible partner, from the voice calling off-stage to the frogs and the closing of a lid on a glass jar. Friedman is perfectly timed, creating that bit of misdirection that is part of the magic. (OK, I will throw in one gripe - they identify a heron's call at one point, but use a loon instead. Loons sound mournful and sad, while herons sound like a bag full of ratchets. It's a small point).

And at the end, its the type of play that people who don't go to see plays should go see - it doesn't have a big name or a big issue or a big meaning. It is solid and powerful and well-written acted. I liked it, and the Lovely Bride loved it. On the way out, she said "Well, that's the best hundred dollars we've ever donated."

Indeed.

More later,

Walking in Pittsburgh

Steve Lammert posted this up on his Facebook Page, and I had to share.



Godda say, it made me tear up n'at.

More later,

(Five of) The Ten Little Indians

The problem with the permanent record that is the Internet is that every photo, comment, and action has the chance to resurface suddenly and without warning, creating that embarrassment of looking back at your college photos at any time, and a reminder of how the years have worn on.

Case in point, the photo to the left. It is a promotional shot for the South Park Conservatory Theater's production of Agatha Christie's Ten Little Indians (Also called "And Then There Were None"). The time is thirty years ago - 1980 would be my guess. And the players were all part of my D&D group.

Let me back up a moment. The Lovely Bride's mom, Nardi, is an actress and a stage director, and at that time was involved with South Park Conservatory Theater (which was situated in South Park a large county-fair-sized park south of Pittsburgh). They were doing a production of Ten Little Indians (yeah, it goes by other names, but that was the one we used), which is a manpower-intensive plays - a lot of roles to fill. A bit of a challenge for straw-hat volunteer theater.

So Nardi turned to her daughter's D&D group, which met regularly at the house. She had already grabbed me for a production of Arsenic and Old Lace (I played one of the cops), and she recruited some of the rest of the team to fill in the other roles.

We were all murderers, of course, of one type or another, and are bumped off over the course of the play.

The young lady to the left, I fear I have forgotten her name, played Emily Brent, transformed into an elderly woman through the wonders of makeup. Next to her is Kirk Botula, who now is COO of a tech firm in Pittsburgh, but at that time was playing Anthony Marston, an effete twit who presages his own death with a toast at the close of Act 1. Next to him in yours truly, with my stern grown-up face on, since I will be aged as well to play General Macarther (No, not that one), who sent his wife's lover to his death during the war. Next to me is Jeff Liebmann, who posted this photo to Facebook in the first place, as Doctor Edward Armstrong. Jeff's now a Unitarian minister, and still has the beard. And reclining on the settee is the Lovely Bride as Ethel Rogers the maid. All of us were second bananas who would add to the body count.

It was summer stock and it was fun and it showed I had a high forehead back in those days, and that my hair was not more manageable than it is now. And while I have not descended into the full grey-haired, wrinkled look of the old general, I have picked up a few grey hairs and wrinkles along the way.

More later,

Animaniacs

Kind of busy right now, but I had to share this, liberated from Andrew Sullivan's site:



More later,

Tombstones and Breeder Tags

I think there is a PHD dissertation, a heavy coffee-table book, and a permanent spot as a pundit on NPR for anyone who creates a definitive history and analysis of bumper stickers and similar vehicle personalization devices. From mudflap girls to fake bullet holes, from "Don't Mess with Texas" to yellow ribbons (now sadly in decline, despite the fact that we're still in Afghanistan, people), what we put on our cars is a window into who we are and what we want others to think about us.

And recently, I've hit two new phenomena, which I have chosen to name for lack of better things to do.

The first involves Tombstoning. I noticed this a couple times over the past few months. The entire back window of the vehicle ahead of me is taken up by a full decal saying in something along the lines of "In Loving Memory - *Insert Name Here* - You Will Be Remembered". The vehicle itself has been turned into a memorial for the loved one, with the back window of the vehicle its epitath.

I find this touching, but also started wondering - is there a time limit on vehicular mourning? If another loved one dies, do they get the slot, or would a simple additional line merit? Is it bad taste if the deceased died in a vehicular accident, or merely ironic? Does it effect resale value? I don't think Miss Manners has the answers for these questions.

The other new effect is something I'm calling Breeder Tags. They are pretty popular, and you see them on the back window of vans and SUVs. Usually it is Dad, Mom, and a number of kids, divided by gender and sometimes by age/height. I know this one has gone national, since the ones I've seen have been Disney-inspired, where everyone except the girls are wearing Mickey Mouse ears (and the young girls are princesses).

Part of this strikes me as justification - I need the big vehicle because I have a lot of kids to haul. I'm cool with that, though I notice that some are a little be disingenuous - What looks like a large family at first blush turns out to include dogs, cats, and even goldfish. Now your back window is not an IRS form, and you can claim as many dependents as you choose to stick there, but it just doesn't stand up under examination. It feels like a criminal use of the inherent promise of a "Baby on Board" decal.

And there was one set that combined the first development with the second. It was a set of breeder tags in the lower left-hand corner with one member positioned at the top of the windshield, with wings and halo. And all at once I am consumed by the sadness of losing a child and creeped out by the fact that you'd want to broadcast this to people zipping along at 60 MPH on I-5.

More later,

Girl Genius Day

OK, here's the plan.

Over to the right, there are a bunch of online comics that I read. One of these is Girl Genius, which is a very cool "steampunk romance/mad science" strip by Phil and Kaja Folgio. With me so far?

Now, Phil and Kaja have written a novel, Agatha H and the Airship City, from Nightshade Books (which is a small independent publisher of really good SF novels, but I digress). It is a novelization of Agatha's origin story. And said book is available at your local independent or chain bookstore, or online at Nightshade or at sites like Amazon.

The plan is that, if you want to buy the book, buy it today. That way there is a bump in the electronic sales (it is at #27 in books at Amazon as I write this). It's a birthday present for Kaja. Also, if you're in the Seattle area, Phil and Kaja are doing readings in the area over the next couple days.

Am I buying the book? Well, to tell you the truth, I bought it a while back, at my Local Comic Store. It showed up there just before Christmas, and made a great gift for the Lovely Bride. So if I can get it back from her, I'll read it. No, really.

More later,

Return of No Quarter (Part II)

With the new year we bring into being the latest crop of new collectible quarters from the US Mint. And as in years past I'm going to go over the designs with sarcasm dripping from my cudgel of kindly observation.

For those who tuned in late, the US Mint, having successfully launched the state quarter collection, is doubling back and taking a second dip, this time with a "National Parks" series. Actually, since not all states HAVE National Parks, it is the National Parks/Forests/Monuments/Recreation Areas series, and is also referred to as the "America the Beautiful" series.

One thing that has struck me is the improvement of technology and design since the state quarter program. I think the designs are more challenging then they were previously (see - Wyoming's State Quarter) in their attempts to show depth of field with a bas relief. Similarly, the subject matter is more concise and directed than the grab-bags you see in then previous States collection. On the other hand, the challenge of showing natural vistas or national battlefields loom large, as getting a message across in the space of a small circle.

But enough serious consideration, on with the snark,

Gettysburg National Military Park - Pennsylvania

One of the great battles of the Civil War, which, with Vicksburg (see below) sealed the fate of the Confederacy, shows Abner Doubleday preparing to lay down the first official bunt in baseball. No, no, I'm sorry. Actually, this is the monument of the 72nd PA regiment, which fought at the Bloody Angle and caught Pickett's Charge in the teeth. It is a great monument (but that's another series of blog posts) in that it captures the feeling of the hand-to-hand combat, but the statue probably gets the nod over the other monuments because it is PA's coin. Home field advantage, you know.

The coin itself captures those levels of depth I was talking about. We have the partial cannon in the foreground, making this feel more like a window than a display. The monument itself is centered and has the dominant white space. But beyond it we get the rolling hills and farmland of Pennsylvania which sets the monument into the greater world.

The monument itself was the center of a fight that reached the Supreme Court, by the way. The rules for placing monuments (yeah, they have rules), a battlefield monument should be placed where the main line of the battle existed. In the case of the Angle, the 72nd PA was driven back by Pickett's Charge, rallied, and fought back to the original front line. The Supreme Court ruled in 1891 that the monument should be placed at the original line of scrimmage instead of counting any forward progress. Talk about a booth review on the play.

Rating: A (Way Cool)

 Glacier National Park - Montana

So here's the problem of trying to create perspective: It doesn't always work. The intent here is to show the mountain goat on an outcropping in the foreground, with pines in the middle distance, and Mount Armadillo-Head Reynolds in the background. The problem is with little or no white space, we have little feel for perspective, such that we either have dwarf pines or the mountain goat is the understudy for Paul Bunyan's big blue ox. Further, the musculature of the the furry goat blends too easily.with the rocky outcropping behind it, with a deep cut along the goat's back is the only strong defining line (which in turn looks like the mountain ridge behind it). As a result, the goat disappears into its background like carved chameleon and the resulting coin is a muddle of textures.

Rating C (Meh)

Olympic National Park - Washington

So this comes out of the same kit as the Glacier Quarter - Animal, Trees, Mountain - ship it! But this works a bit better, because in part of the use of the white space of the Hoh river to clear up an otherwise muddled lower half of the coin. The elk has a clearly different surface treatment than the background, so it pops from the plane of the coin.

Still, it is the part of the scenic mountain series that we have seen way too often, even if it features Mount Olympus, which always gets second banana treatment when compared to Mt. Rainier. And the little splashy marks where the elk steps in the water? It looks like we're dealing with the rare electric elk, and soon salmon will be floating to the surface, shocked by its lightning hooves.

Rating B (Not Bad)

Vicksburg National Military Park - Mississippi

American History is filled with internal conflicts and divisions, and none so bitter as when Dr. Loveless sailed his steam behemoth up the Yazoo river, and was only foiled by Secret Service agents James West and Artemis Gordon.

OK, its really the USS Cairo, which was not AT the final Siege of Vicksburg (which was wrapped up almost simultaneously with the Battle of Gettysburg, creating an interesting dualism in the coins). The Cairo had been lost the previous winter on the Yazoo, but was later raised and is now on display at the Vicksburg National Park (there were gunboats at the Siege of Vicksburg - just not the Cairo). So Mississippi has a coin dedicated to a Union victory, depicting a Union gunboat flying union pennants. I think it is a very gutsy move, but I can't wait for the nutters to get wind of this one.

As a coin, I have to say that this is really impressive. Single image, dynamic, good balance of white space and carving. It is probably the most industrial coin we have seen, practically a steampunk quarter, and will probably be the coin the people really look at when it shows up in their change. Unlike the plethora of natural vistas with wildlife (Not that I'm pointing any fingers .... WASHINGTON).

Rating A (Way Cool)

Chickasaw National Recreation Area - Oklahoma

This is the tough thing about giving every state their own National Park quarter - not every state has a National Park, and even when you spread it out to include memorials and recreational areas things are still pretty thin on the ground.

Case in point, Oklahoma. The Oklahoma City National Memorial would have been most dramatic and meaningful, but the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building is still a raw wound in the American psyche, even 15 years later. Fort Smith is part of the Trail of Tears, and Washita battlefield commemorates Custer's attack on Black Kettle's Camp. Neither of the two is great grist for national coinage.

So, Chickasaw, which the National Park booklet describes as "An Oklahoma Oasis" (which, of course, says something about the rest of Oklahoma). It is a nice, verdant park with mineral springs and creeks and not a lot as a stand-out feature. Except, maybe, for the Lincoln Bridge, depicted here. Built in 1909 to celebrate the centennial of President Lincoln's birth (giving us the Civil War trifecta with this year's coins), the bridge itself just celebrated ITS centennial, making it a favorite as a historical feature. So that's why a coin for Oklahoma has a very un-arch-typical Oklahoma scene.

The coin itself is not horrible at all. It actually has a sends of balance from left to right with the river banks, and from top to bottom with the mirrored white space of stream and sky. The addition of the birds in flight both underscores native wildlife (which must have been in the design document for a lot of these coins). The bridge melds into the treeline behind it, but may come out better in the final casting. In short, it is a completely suitable rendering of a relatively obscure and traditional feature. And it still better than the West Virginia state quarter, another coin-with-a-bridge.

Rating B (Not bad, but when it is all said and done, it is STILL just a bridge).

And that's it for this year. Tune in next year for the "All Points of the Compass" edition - Maine, Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and, um, New Mexico (OK, one of them would have to be more in the center).

More later,

Midgard

Yes, the rumors are true. I am helping Wolfgang Baur and some very talented writers with creating a Midgard campaign setting, exploring the world that Kobold Quarterly has placed its Free City of Zobeck.

And by "helping", I currently mean, "asking a lot of pointed questions about the world  and how we build campaign settings in general."

Hey, we even have a trailer!


More later,

Picasso

So Friday I took the day off from work, with the excuse to go see the Picasso Exhibit at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM for you non-locals). The SAM itself merits its own entry, so let me concentrate on the exhibit itself. And mention the crush of people who ALSO decided that that last Friday was the time to go. So there were a LOT of people, such that with timed ticket and two sets of lines, it was a crush of school kids, old folks, and bozos like me listening to the provided audio track (and kudos to the young woman who thought enough of others to park her stroller in the media room and carry her child, just like in the old days. You, my dear woman, rock).

So Picasso himself, I've had mixed emotion about. On one had he is Twentieth Century Art with a capital "A". On the other hand, the process of the art is such that it becomes unmoored from representational art and starts drifting, balloon like, into an emotional realm.

What that means is, that when it works, it works very, very well, and when it doesn't, you end up scratching the side of you head and asking "Is that a nose? Is that an idealization of a nose?" When I was young LIFE or LOOK magazine did an article on Picasso (this was in the 60s) and then two weeks later ran a series of letters, each one of which declared that their seven/six/five/four/three/two year old could paint better. Which is part of the point and nothing like the point.

This Picasso, he confuses me, and I think he wanted it that way.

The exhibition itself comes from the Musee National Piccaso in Paris and reflects works that the artist considered part of this legacy, and consists of finished works as well as sketches, studies, and uncompleted projects. That gives an idea of what lies behind the thinking, as well as minor or personal work. Les Demoiselles d'Avignon is not here, but represented by similar works, and Guernica shows up as preliminaries and a photo-progression of the work shot by one of his lovers. Yet he has generated so much material, in so many different media and in so many different ways, that the entire experience is unexpectedly overwhelming. I overheard one patron say that he felt like he had just left a Thanksgiving dinner - he was overloaded on art.

And of the art, yes, the early Blue and Rose periods show him capable and establishing himself as an Artist-with-an-A. It is his cubist work that connects for me at the most basic level - I find the transformation of figure into planes and the creation of motion through angles to be exciting. This is the part that works. And yet after this, as it moves most fully into Picasso' style of teardrop shapes and morphable eyesockets that I lose a bit, that the excitement is not as present. It feels like he is doing art because that is what he does.

Massacre in Korea, Pablo Picasso, 1951

My greatest surprise was to find Massacre in Korea at the exhibit. A "sequel" to Guernica, inspired by Goya's The Third of May, 1808. I had thought its purported subject matter was part of the resistance to the work (it was supposedly critical of American involvement in Korea, and it easier to chastise fascists than Americans), but now dealing with the piece up close, I find that it is effectively a lesser work - clunky where Guernica was fluid, heavy-handed where Guernica was universal. The message is clear, but execution fumbles.

I guess that is where I come down to on one of the finest artists of the 20th Century. When inspired, when in action (ever with still lives and portraits), the artist Pablo Picasso was impossible to define except in terms of his own brilliance. He had the ability to reach into the heart of his subject without directly stating it - he was jazz in a visual media. And when it doesn't work, whether for limitations on the part of the artist or the viewer, it feels like a parody of his material, like the 60s comic artists (and yeah, you can see Bob Crumb in some of the work, or Basil Wolverton),

Sometimes he was pushing the envelope to see what lies next, and sometimes Pablo Picasso was following in the well-trod path of ... well, Pablo Picasso.

The exhibit is in town for only a week more, and worth cutting class to see it. Good luck with the crowds.

More later,

Ten Years

ArenaNet celebrates its tenth year anniversary with a retrospective about us, our games, and our world. Enjoy.



More later,

New Year's Expansions

Last night we had an New Year's Gaming Eve here at Grubb Street, and had a very nice evening indeed, with a variety of games played, in particular expansions of games we already knew.

I asked the Lovely Bride for a Christmas for a game we could play together. Usually that is my job in the relationship, and we would end up with a nice European board game or something for Playstation 3 (we just finished the Indiana Jones Lego game after a year or two). I discovered that I should NOT leave the LB alone in a game store with such a directive, since she picked up THREE expansions - for Settlers of Catan, Carcasonne, and Alhambra. Plus I had an expansion for Ticket to Ride that I hadn't cracked open yet, so this became a gaming session to play expansions.

Board game expansions are a little wonky, or rather wonkier than RPG expansions. How far do you go with it? Are you looking to create a new experience with well-known features? Are you seeking to extend the experience of the original game? Are you trying to correct weaknesses in the original? Are you trying to make a popular original (which would be one reason to do it in the first place) even more popular? It is sort of like movie sequels, and filled with many of the same perils.

So here's how we did:

Carcasonne: Princess and Dragon. The original Carcasonne is a tilebuilding game with a lot of quirky little rules in it (we tend to play the later Carcasonne: Hunters and Gatherers, which is set in prehistory and is a bit more streamlines). One of the challenges with Carcasonne is that it is like watching someone put together a jigsaw puzzle for most of it. Indeed, the game pulls people together as someone gets a city piece that he can't put anywhere, and people start lobbying for a particular play to help themselves. In addition, the original game had a problem with "mega-farms" - large, sprawling amounts of territory that will tip the game for one player.

The Princess and Dragon expansion is billed as taking the game into fantasy, but actually takes it more into randomness. New tiles bring into play and move around the Dragon piece, which takes pieces (meeples) off the board. The sudden swinginess introduced prevents someone from taking an early lead and holding it, but proceeded to carve a huge swath of empty cities, untended farms, and abandoned cloisters through the center of the map. We went through a phase where the time-honored strategies were suddenly blowing up in our faces, and quickly descended into a giggling mass of disaster. Result: It did make the game more fun by making it less serious. Your well-thought-out play can be overturned by a Dragon rampaging through your home.


Settlers of Catan: Traders and Barbarians. The original Settlers is a classic, the first to hit the beach in the new wave of European Boardgames, and remains an excellent game to teach people who has grown up on Candyland and Monopoly to show that board games don't have to be boring. It is nearly a perfect game in itself, the Platonic ideal, which makes it tough to expand. Traders and Barbarians is a bunch of individual expansions which could encourage repeated play, but the sheer number of them left the gang unwilling to experiment - after one "reminder game" to teach new people, we moved on to other activities. The addition of Fishermen, Camel caravans, and Barbarian raiders looks interesting, but it is toy box that will have to be sifted through.

Ticket to Ride: 1910 Edition. The original Ticket to Ride was brilliant and flawed. A train-building game that was easy to access, its small cards were difficult for the young and the old to shuffle, and its game play (determined through routes pre-selected on cards) tended to funnel everyone through the same corridor of the Mississippi valley, which made for frustrated play and nearly destroyed relationships. 1910 is a patch that works nicely - New decks of reasonably-sized cards, plus a 1910 deck of destination tickets, which concentrated on more east-west lines than north-south lines, making the valley of death less frustrating. Using both original and 1910 cards produces a much more random game where what tickets people had were not as clear.

Alhambra: First Expansion. The original Alhambra is another excellent core game involving tile-building a city, and buying those tiles with four different types of money cards. This expansion creeps around the edges, tweaking the game with small improvements that increase complexity without gumming things up too much. There is now a mechanic to interrupt the game to grab the city piece you really want. There are cards that let you change one type of money card to another. There are bonus cards that make you want one particular piece very, very much. And there are worker's tiles, which can increase in value depending on their adjacent tiles. We added ALL of these, and found that the original game stood up very well, and encouraged people to engage with the game when it was not their turn.

That's the lot of them, for the moment. In general, expansions, like the games themselves, vary in success. Carcasonne created a very different game, while Alhambra's deepened the play experience and Ticket to Ride's patched some issues. I don't make resolutions, but were I to make one to play more games, I would say that I was well on the way to keeping it.

More later.

Happy New Year

We leave 2010 with these words, apparently a traditional poem but gathered, set to music, and sung beautifully by Pete Seeger:

I get up each morning and dust off my wits
Open the paper and read the obits
If I'm not there I know I'm not dead
So I eat a good breakfast and go back to bed.

Happy New Year, everyone.

More later,

Commercial Break

Busy at the moment, but I wanted to note a couple things before they get past me.

First off, the new Guild Wars novel: Edge of Destiny, by J Robert King, is now on the shelves, and it is, in a word, excellent. Strongly recommend it for fans of both Guild Wars and of fantasy in general. Here's Chapter One as a PDF.

And speaking of Guild Wars, my co-author on the first Guild Wars book, Matt Forbeck, sees the US release of his original novel, Ammortals. Also worth checking out!

And finally, I've done a foreword for a new PDF product from Zombie Sky Press, called The Faerie Ring, designed by Scott Gable, on the Lords and Ladies of the Fey.

OK, back to the subjects at hand.

More later,

Happy Holidays!

Art by Joseph Christian Leyendecker

Merry Christmas from everyone at Grubb Street, and best wishes for a safe, sane, and festive Holiday Season.

More later,

Solstice

Now begins the long climb back to daylight.

More later,

The Power of the Hat

So one of my favorite gifts this year arrived early. The Lovely Bride has been trying to get me a Santa Claus hat for like three years running, and encountering some basic problems:
     1) It is too early in the season. Apparently despite the fact that you've been bombarded by Christmas carols on the Muzak since Halloween, the hats don't show up until later. Like after 1 December.
     2) It is too late in the season. Near as I can figure, only three Santa hats are delivered to each store, and they disappear within twenty minutes of delivery.
     3) No one makes plain Santa hats. Previous experiments involved ones with antlers, and one with a salmon through it. They didn't fit me anyway, so they get put on the stone dragon out front, or on the bronze cat out back.

Yet this year the Lovely B was in the correct spot at the correct time and gave me a hat of the correct size, and I have been wearing it throughout the season, eschewing my normal baseball caps. The results have been interesting to say the least.
     - It is a perfect disguise. People see the hat and not me. Had a couple encounters with people who looked right through me. since I looked so unlike me in the hat. I became amazingly invisible. Should I ever launch a multi-state crime spree, this is the hat I will wear!
     - Strangers talk to me. Usually it is a "nice hat" kind of comment, but it took me aback the first time it happened. Now I manage a "ho, ho, ho" in response.
     - Small children find me amusing. I am asked if I am Santa. I tell them that I am temping for him. That seems to put them in a quandary about my status, since I am obviously not an elf.
     - Older friends are merely amused. And these are people who know I wear Hawaiian shirts in the dead of winter! They know for a fact that my fashion sense is not on the same scale as, say, Daredevil's radar-sense or Spider-Man's Spider-Sense. But still, they are amused by this daring fashion choice. It takes nerves of steel to wear a Santa hat
     - People think I work there. When I've been shopping, people assume I am a sales person, because who ELSE would where a hat?

All in all, I would say that it is a most successful present, and I am delighted to be wearing it. And the Lovely Bride has sworn she will steal it back and put it away as soon as the season is over, so everyone is spared having to put up with this in June.

More later,

Busy Box

So Mark Evanier, over on his blog, always posts a picture of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup whenever he's busy, a state that lasts one, maybe two days at the outside. I've been busy for the past week and feel like I'll be busy for some time to come, so you guys get Campbell's Cream of Tomato. Why? Because I like Cream of Tomato better.

I am busy because of:
   A) The Day Job
   B) The Novel
   C) Christmas
   D) The new season of Iron Chef.

And the answer is:
  E) All of the above, plus I now have an iPad.

This last was a Christmas gift from the company (yes, I will pause for a moment as everyone says "I wish -I- worked for a company like that). A couple years ago it was a Kindle, which brought me into the world of E-books, something I would not likely do of my own volition. So I am dragged, with only modest kicking and screaming, into a new thing.

And to be honest, I am still discovering what I want to do with this new device. How it fits into my personal cosmology. The Kindle turned into my travel book, and has not slowed my purchase and consumption of dead tree editions. The iPad is still up the air, and has been used primarily so far for 1) impromptu access to the Internet, and 2) playing games. For the former, I've ended up installing a WiFi hotspot up here at Grubb Street, and for the latter, I've started slow (because of the other four things on my list). I started checking out Rogue clones, and ended up with a very good descendant called 100 Rogues - more compact and colorful than the original type-face version. But beyond that (and the free planetarium program), I really haven't had much chance to explore.

So where do I go with it? I don't know quite yet. It feels like it could be a large chunk of life in 2011, or just a interesting distraction. I'll keep you posted, when I have more time.

More later,

Thirty Years Ago

More later,

What New York Superheroes See

I found this particularly amazing:



More information on the flight here.

More later,

Old School Tekumel

So a group of us had the chance this afternoon to play Empire of the Petal Throne. Not the more mind-bending Sources and Glory version, or the more genteel TOME version, or even the GOO version. No, the original, first published by TSR in 1975 (!) and later reprinted by Different Worlds.

It was the old, refreshing rush you get from the old National Geographics that have been in your grandparents' attic for a bajillion years.

The plot was fairly straightforward - the group in Jakalla, gets word of an abandoned temple of Ksarul (Doomed Prince of the Blue Room) up in the hinterlands, decides to check it out. Kidnaps a priest of Ksarul en route as a guide. Since I got there late, I entered the game as said Priest of Ksarul, and we fought Vorodla ("the Flying Undead") and Hra ("the Bloodsuckers") before my priest angered the god Ksarul (grabbing a magical scepter that the god specifically told me NOT to grab) and being bodily lifted into the Blue Room, where he would be tortured forever. Then I generated a slave we uplifted from the group to carry on the fight.

And it was fun. A definite roll back to the good old days of roleplaying. Character creation was easy, and life was cheap. The mechanics were simplistic to the extreme, but there was a lot of room the PCs and the GM to move around. Most of the mechanics were ill-formed to handle the challenges of the adventure (How do you detect a trap in those pre-Thief days?). We were making stuff up on the fly. My Priest managed to face down a horde of Ksarul-created undead (at least once - then I had to have magical help). And one of our players ran through three characters over the course of the afternoon.

It was a great reminder of how wonderful and how frustrating the old rules were, and how you could not take it horribly seriously, and how the interaction between characters would be as interesting as those against the monsters. (The party wizard was a Wizard worshipping Thumis, Ksarul's rival, and my priest was planning an accident for him before we left the ruined temple). And it had all sorts of wonkiness, like award XP to the one who killed the monster, which encouraged kill-stealing but also made it possible to give XP over the course of battle. Or making everyone over 4th level divide XP by two, which meant we would be forth level forever, except the wizard (sorry, magic-user) who found the Book of Qiyor and ended up skipping a level immediately.

And a good time was had by all. More later,

Make 'Em Laugh - 15 Things

So we talked about 15 influential games, and 15 things which influenced my games. And then one of co-workers mentioned 15 things that influenced her sense of humor. And I thought about it considerably longer than 15 minutes, and come up with the following list of 15 things that influenced my strange sense of humor:

The Dick Van Dyke Show: I am not alone with this - about half the scriptwriters in Hollywood were sold on the idea that this was how comedy was written, and in a broader sense, how corporate creatives lived in the world. You worked with people you liked. You made jokes. Your bosses were mildly insane. You were married to Mary Tyler Moore. When everything is working well, this is the TV show I am living in.

M*A*S*H: The TV show, not the movie. The show was in endless syndication even when I was in college, and represents the TV show I am living in when things are not going so good. I and my design colleges have talked about "Meatball Design" and "Editorial Triage" like we were honestly subjected to attacks by Five O'Clock Charlie.

George Carlin: Representing the stand-ups, George was another college addiction, with his album Class Clown. I was too young for Lenny Bruce, which is Carlin's predecessor, but Carlin's love of language roped me in. Plus, ANYONE can do his "Hippy-Dippy Weather Man, with the Hippy-Dippy Weather, Man" routine. He got old and more pointed but I still love his stuff.

Tom Lehrer: Of course this is obvious, from other entries in this blog, but he gets the nod from the album/musician comics and the political comics, edging out Alan Sherman. "Pollution" was the first one I remember hearing, but his stuff is just a cool now as it was in the 60s (though now it sometimes requires footnotes to explain what we thought was so troubling back there).

Doctor Demento: Wind up your radios! I got to hear a lot of Tom Lehrer and others thanks to the good doctor, broadcasting on Friday or Saturday or Sunday nights on the Pittsburgh radio. That and Pirate games (with Nellie King and Bob Prince) were reasons to have a radio.

Monty Python: Back to college, where the Pythons were a regular feature of late-night PBS out of the Chicago stations. It was, for many people, the first introduction of what Britain was supposed to be like.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: Edges out A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To the Forum only by the fact that I saw it first. The first time I saw it, at the old South Hills Village theater, I didn't know most of the cast, but I knew they were funny. Only later did I get the idea that this was a collection of the comedic talent of the age. Others have tried to replicate it - Cannonball Run, Rat Race, but none have succeeded.

Woody Allen: From the movie people, he just edges out Mel Brooks. Yeah, there was standup before, but What's Up, Tiger Lilly, Bananas, Take the Money and Run, Love and Death and Sleeper were a run of seriously funny films.

P.G.Wodehouse: Does this surprise anyone? I mean, does this surprise anyone who encountered Giogi Wyvernspur and Tertius Wands, who were cut, if not of the same cloth, of at least cloth two bolts down? Before the entire Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie presentation on BBC, I read a lot of the adventures of Bertie and Jeeves. And it was genre as high art form - there was a single plot with continual variations.

The Odd Couple: The TV show, the movie, and the play that predated both of them. You can see the eroding effect of other media on the characters as you make the progression between them. Still, though the combination is classic (Two and a Half Men really should be sending a piece of the action to Neil Simon), Klugman and Randal are the best Oscar and Felix. Oh, and like Monty Python instructed about Great Britain, so did the TV show instruct about New York City.

Blackadder: Back to the Brits, with this funny, erudite, and literate bit of fun, which unleashed Rowan Atkinson on the rest of the West. The second and third seasons are the best, when Blackadder gets to devour the dictionary and spit out the best parts.

Warner Brother Cartoons: I know way too much about stars of the 30s and 40s from watching these as a kid on TV. They were on TV because they were cheap, and if the kids didn't get the references to Bogart and WC Fields, who cared? I think my interest in that era (and black and white films) comes out of those old cartoons.

Marx Brothers: And speaking of old movies, the Brothers Marx were the gold standard of the era. Yeah, they were creatures of vaudeville, and Groucho's character was an evolution of the stock figure "The German Teacher", but still it was classic comedy, and they get the nod for that era.

MAD Magazine: Another view into New York City, it showed you could go after both political and economic issues. By claiming Madison Avenue as one of its early targets, it had a lot more depth than any of its imitators, and infused an entire generation with good-natured cynicism about the consumer marketplace.


Firesign Theater: Another group that reached me by a comedy album, they were more head-oriented than Cheech and Chong, and that's saying a lot. Their most coherent production, and the one I would send you to first, was "The Adventures of Nick Danger, Third Eye," which was on the album How Can You Be Two Places At Once When You're Not Anywhere At All, which had the album cover of the cast (duplicated) in front of a poster saying All Hail Marx and Lenin (with Groucho and John Lennon) shown below.

And you wonder while I am such a strange individual.

More later.

The Triumph of Intellect and Romance

OK, I was going to post something else here, but this just completely boggled me.



More later,

Dancing On The Edge

Dancing at Lughnasa: by Brian Friel, Directed by Sheila Daniels, Through 5 December, 2010.

Many (many) years ago I had the chance to see this play at the Milwaukee Rep, but demurred. Instead the Lovely Bride took a Good Friend to it and enjoyed it thoroughly, such that it went into the category of "things you really should have seen" that would pop up every so often in our conversations in the years since.

I, for my part, felt little guilt about passing up on this opportunity, as the play had been presented to me as being a) Irish, and b) about five sisters. For the first case, I am only merely tolerant of plays in Irish brogue - it takes about ten minutes for my ears to properly callus up and I can understand what is being said. Further, theater about the Irish (in particular theater about RURAL Irish) usually deal with bonecrushing despair, deprivation, and oppression, and English-Language theater loves it because its within walking distance of London.

For the second point, I knew that it would be about female bonding, and any males presented would be fool or leches or both. Team that up with Irish and you know you are not heading towards any kind of happy ending.

Still, when the opportunity presented itself once again to attend it with the Lovely Bride, I did not shirk, but faced this Irish play like a man. And while it was very much as I expected it (indeed, the couple next to me bailed at intermission), it was very good, well-written and well-acted, and worth the trip (sorry, couple next to me - you lose).

The play is the adult reminiscence of the adult Michael (Benjamin Harris) of a summer in his aunts' cottage in rural Ireland (warning!) in 1936. He is the illegitimate child of Christine (Elizabeth Raetz), and the pair live with Christine's four sisters - inflexible Kate (Mari Nelson), joking Maggie (Gretchen Krich), motherly Agnes (Linda K. Morris), and simple Rose (Cheyenne Casebier). Elder brother Jack (Todd Jefferson Moore) has returned from Africa, where he was a chaplain at a leper colony and has gone a bit off his nut (male figure as fool). And Michael's bio-father (Troy Fischnaller) is a con artist whose infrequent returns delight Michael's mother and then plunge her into depression when he leaves.

And the household is both light and dark - struggling to get by while at the same time exuding warmth and family. The dancing of the title fits in as analogy for sex, for society, for the world outside, and for tradition. And all this brightness as adult Michael foreshadows the storms that will swamp the home.

And about half-way through the final act, I finally get it. This is what it is all about - that last summer when they are all together, when they are dancing. After this everything caves in slowly as the family breaks up, as hearts are broken, as the flesh weakens and the mind wanders and things will never be the same. But for the moment, everything fits together, everything works, and there is hope for survival. Yeah, that makes the trip worthwhile.

The cast is generally brilliant, in particular the women. Maggie swaggers and kids effortlessly. Kate is brittle almost to the point of breaking, Agnes has deep waters flowing, and Christine is by turns commanding and vulnerable. And Cheyenne completely disappears into the role of Rose.

The men are a bit more of a mixed bag. Harris engages as our mouthpiece into this world. Moore, as Jack, plays the fool, broadly at first, but with increased dignity as he recovers in the family (though with a dark edge as they cannot expect what he recovers to become). Fischnaller was the sole disappointment, in that if he's got a welsh accent, I'm a member of Monty Python.

The production values were high and convoluted, to the point that the stagecraft was at points blocking the action.

Do I still not regret going to the first version of is some 17 years back? No. Am I pleased to have gone now? Yeah, for reasons that would not have been clear to me as a callow youth back in '93.

More later,

Happy Thanksgiving

From everyone at Grubb Street.

More later,

Snow. My. God.

So, counting the physical time in the car, the dinner, the evening spent working at the friends' house, the sleeping at the friends' house, and the omelets in the morning, it took me just over 19 hours to get home yesterday.

No, I'm not talking about commuting from the East Coast. I'm talking about a normally thirty- to forty-minute commute from Bellevue (where my company is based) to Grubb Street (which in near Panther Lake on the East Hill of Kent - the key word here is "hill").

Yes, it is the start of the snow season here in Seattle, where madness rules on the streets and we all tip towards anarchy.

I thought I was smart. I had packed a travel bag on Monday morning and took it with me to work. I left the office early, at 4, before the sun went down. Little did I dream that it was already far too late and that I was doomed.

Doomed, I say! Already thick flakes were coming down, adding to a snowpack that had been accumulating all morning. An inch, maybe, and mere sundry in Pittsburgh terms, but in this land of insufficient plows and sparce sanding, enough to completely shut down the city. Already the roads were slick, and made worse by the fact that there were people who had no clue how to drive in snow (I'm looking at you, little miss "5 miles an hour with your flashers on" - thanks for completely snarling the traffic behind you for miles with your sociopathic rejection of standard commuter mores).

Still, only a half hour to reach Renton itself, at the base of the hill I needed to climb. Still daylight. But then everything fell apart. My first choice route up the hill was solidly blocked. OK, we go to the second. A half-hour later I am still not moving on my second choice. Another half-hour not moving at my third choice. Apparently there were accidents on I-5, and they were channeling the traffic onto the surface streets. At in the meantime the snow beneath my tires had become ice and things had a hard time moving even on level. There was no way I was going to get up the hill and home.

A call the Lovely Bride who called friends in the Kent Valley, a level shot from where I was currently stranded. They were more than willing to help, and I did bring my own luggage. So I spent a very nice dinner and evening working (I had also brought hard copy to work on), and crashed on the spare bed in one of the offices.

And in the morning, the roads still glistened with now-compacted ice. I made a valiant attempt at omelets (better than I normally do, but still too brown) and made another attempt at the now-mostly-empty hill leading up to Grubb Street. With the direct sun and the passing traffic, it was mostly easy, but once getting on the roads on top of the hill the ice returned.

Now I am home safely. The Lovely Bride is making a fire and the Houseguest is working on her files. And I get to change into some dry socks, which I did NOT pack into the go bag.

Ah well, I learn as I go forward.

More later,

Someplace Special

Still busy - have another video. This one is of my home town, Pittsburgh, and my old neighborhood appears around the 15-17 second mark.



It is interesting in both what they counted as worth seeing and what they did not. Carnegie Museum gets a reference for Flashdance? When right across the street is a statue for Steven Foster? Phipps Conservatory and Beuhl Planetarium get the short shrift? We miss both Point Park fountain and the stadiums (and Clemente park)? And you give us Warhol's grave but not his museum?

Oh, and you drive right past the Galleria without noticing it, but that I can understand.

More later,

[Update]: The other thing to notice is that most people get around Pittsburgh by back roads and local routes. Everyone has their own way to get through town.

We Are A Global Community

Busy right now, so here's Harry Potter singing Tom Lehrer's "The Elements"



Oh all right, here is the original



More later,

Veteran's Day

In Flanders Fields

IN FLANDERS FIELDS the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

More later,

Play: Maiden, Mother, Crone

Three Tall Women by Edward Albee, Directed by Allison Narver, Seattle Rep through 28 November.

Not content to merely lead off with God of Carnage described in numerous locations as "Albee-esque" or "Albee-lite", the Rep decides to bring us a big steaming chunk of original, caffeinated, leaded, fully locked and loaded Edward Albee himself.

And it is a reminder that Albee is a much better writer.

One truism I stand by is "If you do something wrong long enough, it becomes a style". So when one goes to an Albee play, one knows what one is getting into - plot is minimal to non-existent, will take place in one room of a house, characters provide their own Greek chorus as phrases are picked up, reiterated, spun back on the speaker, there is a lot of talk, and most of it is about sex and death. To complain about such things is like grousing about the coldness of snow or the blueness of a summer sky. It is just so utterly useless.

So, the plot, then (and spoilers abound). Act One deals with three women, A, B, and C ....

OK, I guess I have to step in here, because by denying the characters names, Albee unbinds them from the narrative flow. That's important, later on, but at the outset it feels like approaching some modern art piece that is a random assortment of pigments, and titled "Untitled, No. 57". OK, back to the plot.

There are three women, A, B, and C. A is elderly, going senile, her body and mind failing her, her emotions as brittle as her bones. B is a middle-aged caregiver, jollying her along, tolerating the abuse, both supporting and mocking. C is a young woman, sent over by the family lawyer, to get signatures on documents that will not be forthcoming, pedantic and confused by dementia. The three spiral through the old woman's stories and are frustrated from accomplishing anything or moving forward. No central plot or theme seems to emerge. Then the old woman has a stroke. Curtain.

Act Two, the three woman are back, but the youngest is dressed as a flapper, the middle-aged woman as a 50s society wife, and after a few moments, the eldelyr woman herself enters in a sensible gown and stands regally over her dying body in the bed. Yes, it all works, and the play proper begins. The first three women you met were just to lay some groundwork - the real play is with these three incarnations of the dying form in the bed. They could be metaphysical echoes of the old woman's life, or the last dying memories caught between the synapses. That doesn't matter, because they rewind the woman's life and, this being an Albee play, talk about death a lot.

The only way to take on Albee is at full speed and head-on - nuance just lies there. And the actors are for the most part up to task. The elder goddess is played by Megan Cole, who snaps neatly between Alzheimer victim to grande dame who know what the others think (for she lived those parts before). The middle child is Suzanne Bouchard, who is a bit too carnivorous in the first act, but carries the pain of her age in the second. Alexandra Travares is the youngest version, irritating as the lawyer, a slender reed in the second. Cole does the best of the three versions (though the Lovely Bride preferred Bouchard better). Nick Garrison appears in a dumbshow role as "Boy" (Yeah, its an Albee play).

It is a better play that God of Carnage, in part because it dispenses with the artifice of a constructed plot. No single event brings together the women of the first act, nor divides the women of the second. At no point can any of them throw up their hands and just leave. They do not have the problem of Xeno's Exit - there is no place to go and no one gets out of here alive. The gravity of their universe pulls them together. No comedy here, but humor is present, and unlike God, you don't hate the characters by the end. And in the end you realize what you have is a single character study, from the outside in (the old woman of Act One is the center of that universe that cannot hold), and then from the inside out.

And after it all, there is a bit more meat here than in the earlier play, more to chew on. It is serious theater with a capital sear, and done very well indeed.

More later,

Election Day Cleanup

So here we are, about a week after election day and I finally get around to reporting the results. Part of it is the result of not having a machine over the weekend (another story) but part of is because of the nature of Washington State Elections. We vote by mail, and the ballots must be postmarked by election day (In California, they have to have arrived by election day). So the result is that close elections will hang fire for a couple days before the near-final results are known. Oddly enough, I'm good with this, but this is why people in the business of shaping a narration for this election thought our Senate race would make us the "New Florida" (Spoiler Alert - It didn't).

So, how did things go?

Some things surprised me. Some things saddened me. Only one did both.

I-1053 (Tim Eyeman hearts the oil companies) PASSES - This is the one that both surprised and saddened me. Really, really bad idea that will come back to haunt people (Heck, in the time since the election, Eyeman has already challenged a fare increase for the ferries fares as a "tax").
I-1082 (BIAW hearts big insurance) FAILS
I-1098 (Bill Gates and his Dad want to pay taxes) FAILS
I-1100 (Costco wants to keep the Stranger staff drunk) FAILS
I-1105 (Smaller distributors want to keep the Stranger staff drunk) FAILS
I-1107 (Beverage companies want to avoid taxes) PASSES - this is what happens when you put a candy tax on the ballot so close to Halloween.

R-52 (Cute Puppy wants to repair schools) FAILS
Amendment 8225 (Redefine interest calculation to let the state take advantage of Federal loans) - PASSES (which is surprising because it is a relatively complex issue, which voters supposedly would not understand)
Amendment 4220 (Allow judges to deny bail under narrow conditions) PASSES Handily.

And what have we learned? The people have pretty much sent a message that new taxes, new fees, and closing loopholes are off the table. Get ready for deep and painful cuts in services, since that's the only option you've got left.

King County Amendment 1 - (Revise charter's preamble to put business on same level as environment) - PASSES
King County Amendment 2 - (Remove duplication of effort in Public Disclosures) - PASSES
King County Amendment 3 - (Allow Sheriff to negotiate collective bargaining, but not for important stuff like wages or benefits ) - PASSES
King Count Proposition 1 (Cute Puppy wants to keep cops, firemen, and rest of the government) - FAILS

US Senator - Patty Murray (the media hesitated long and hard even though more King County votes piled up in her favor - finally, denied of their promised narrative)
US REP, 8th District - Dave Reichert

State Senator, 47th District - Joe Fain, who out-hustled Claudia Kauffman (and I just found out he's brother to a local sports radio host - the stuff you don't learn until later).

Representative, 47th District, Position 1 - Mike Hargrove (Two-Thirds majority to raise any tax, plus Representative who has pledged never to raise a tax = what could go wrong?)

Representative, 47th District, Position 2 - Pat Sullivan.

State Supreme Court Justice Position #6 - This is, oddly, the one that is hanging fire, refusing to resolve. When the ballots first went out, Sanders had a comfortable incumbent's lead. Since then, though, a lot of stuff that happened recently (racially-tinged statements made alongside fellow Justice Jim Johnson, who, alas, was running unopposed on this ballots), combined with articles from the Stranger and Times on past questionable behavior has resulted in late ballots breaking towards challenger Wiggins. At this point, things are so close that Sanders is already claiming fraud.

Position #3 - David Meyer
Position #6 - Matt Williams (I'm O-for-2 on this one).

And what is the larger picture? Well, pretty good considering that the recent election was supposed to be such a massive rejection of the current administration that time and space would be ruptured, Bush would be put back into office for a third term, and the Rangers would retroactively win the World's Series on a 5-4 decision. Instead, a populace frustrated with the economy turned the more volatile House over to the party out of power. Sounds about right (In the state house, the Dem majorities are reduced by not overturned).

Actually, what is interesting is that most of the US House Dem losses occurred in areas where conservative "Blue Dog" Democrats were running AWAY from the achievements of their party, Of the thirty+ Dems who voted against Health Care Reform, less then a dozen are coming back. Meanwhile, the "progressive wing" of the party held its own, with a couple notable exceptions.

But as noted above, the state government is charged with covering anticipated shortfalls without increasing taxes, raising fees, or closing any loopholes. So buckle down for a slew of "local Cute Puppy lacks funds, must be tossed into shredder" stories. Because that is now the new narrative.

More later,

Theatre: Lovecraft at Play

H.P.Lovecraft's Pickman's Model, Adapted by Vincent Kovar, John McKenna, Dustin Engstrom, and Ron Sandahl, Peon Circle Theater. through Nov. 13, 2010.

Dying=easy. Comedy=hard. Horror=Really tough in live theater.

Horror lurks best in the mind, so its champion media is the printed page, equaled perhaps by the glory days of radio, when the eldritch horrors are conjured in the mind. Even movie-making, whether it is the shadow of the knife or the Grand Guignol, has more tools available to it to chill the blood and disturb the soul. Live theater, in particular small live theater like the Open Circle, now in Belltown, has a greater challenge. Yet every Halloween they unearth Lovecraft's cadaver and make the bloody best of the media.

Pickman's Model is a mash-up of the title piece, broken into two acts and adapted to Seattle, and The Music of Erich Zann which is played pretty straight and inserted into Act One as a piece of performance art. The construction is by a small horde of adapters, and does not hang together as neatly as one would like. There is info about the connection the Malicious Dr. Reid and the artist Pickman in the first act that is forgotten in the second, and the Malicious Dr. R starts promising and villainous in the first act but recedes to an afterthought in the second.

Let me back up to the main frame of this picture. Act One is a gallery opening for Richard Upton Pickman's latest work, and while attempting to present a backstage look at a gallery show gives us a bit of a jumble. The proceedings include a dance performance of Music which really works in and of itself, though attempts to link the music and the paintings are a bit strained. The latest portrait is revealed (all pictures are blank canvases to us, a very good move as we fill in the unpleasant details), and everything goes to hell. Pickman's former artistic agent Thurber (Marianna De Fazio) and news photog Eliot (Kenna Kettrick) decide to go off and confront Pickman about what he's really up to.

Act II is that confrontation, with Simon Astor creating an amused, definitely plummy Pickman, too clever for his own good and delighted by the chaos he creates. Many hints are dropped, and the history of Seattle's Underground is rewritten to good effect, before the nasty devils below come to take their due, leaving the protagonists slamming around in the dark for a while, firing off camera flashes, while we the audience, are led to imagine the worse. It goes on for a bit too long, and I seemed to be always facing the flash when it went off.

Act II holds together much better than Act I, and shifting two of the protagonists to female characters works nicely, and it made the old story set in the East quite at home on the west coast. Lacking the mighty special effects of a Seattle Rep, the small theater does its best with blank paintings (good), flash cameras in the dark (irritating and silly in places) and unearthly tones (which went from irritating to creepy and back to irritating). The connection between Zahn's music and Pickman's paintings through the lizard-brain is well-researched, but still feels tenuous, a ghost that vaporizes if considered too long.

Adaptions do not need to lockstep into their original forms, and this one actually manages to deliver both straight and evolved versions of Lovecraft's tales. Worth checking out, even if we are past the due-date on that Halloween pumpkin.

More later,

DOW Breaks 11,000

Well, broke. It happened a couple weeks ago, when I was busy going into all the initiatives. But I'm sure that you heard about it from other sources, since even such a transient benchmark like this is worth reporting. Right?

No? Well, you probably were out enjoying your tax cut. What, you didn't hear about that, either?

Actually, there is a lot we don't hear about, and a lot of things that we think are true that, turn out, aren't quite as right as we thought.

You know, if only we had a 24-hour news source that could get this information into the hands of the people. It feels weird, but it honestly feels like we know less now than we did back when Walter Cronkite talked to people for a half-hour (and he was quoted that when he said "for more details, see your local newspaper", he meant "for ALL the details, see your local newspaper").

I don't know if the media is just naturally contrafactual or just behind the times. When we first pitched into this rabbit's hole of a recession, the media seemed to be deeply in denial, yet now that we are (painfully slowly) working our way out, we seem determined to hide promising signs as much as possible.

It is not just economics. We seem hellbent on cultivating our fears. An ironic rally in Washington outdraws a hatefest a few weeks earlier and is brushed off. We pull combat troops out of Iraq two weeks ahead of schedule and there are grumbles at best. A real, live terrorist threat that is foiled and everyone shrugs because that's the way the system is SUPPOSED to work.

I mean, I'm supposedly cynical, but it feels like this part of the room has gotten really crowded over here. And if no one else is going to say nice things, I'm going to have to do it. No, no, don't thank me. I give myself about three days before I gos back to my grumpy ways.

More later

Fifteen Influences

So I promoted the "15 Games" meme, and following it around, found one guy who talked about the fifteen things that influenced him. And that was a different question than the 15 games, so I started to put together a list of influences (though it took more than 15 minutes to put together - memory being what it is).

I concentrated on things that influenced be before I started writing professionally. Everything influences to some degree, but I looked at the foundation material, so it is all pre-1980. Here's my list.

Lord of the Rings/Hobbit - Makes sense, in that the massive infodumps of the intros and appendixes, not to mention "The Shadow of the Past" all were foundations in the art of worldbuilding. That influence does not extend to the Simarillion - I had moved on to other things by the time that came out, and while I read it, it felt dry compared to the previous books. But all of the above (and Tolkien's short fiction) got me in gear with Tolkein's idea of "Subcreation" - as we are created things, so too do we create.

The Bible - The Bible comes in at all sorts of odd angles - Bible as Moral Operating System (Gospels), Bible as Historical Record (Pentateuch), and Bible as Science Fiction (Revelation of John, Ezekiel seeing the Wheels). The DL Gods came from my gods who took their name from Rev Barker's book Everyone in the Bible.

Silent Planet Trilogy - OK, you read the four Tolkien books out, what is next? Written by fellow Inkling CS Lewis, the trilogy that starts with Out of the Silent Planet is science fantasy (oddly, never embraced Narnia). My original campaign Toril (whose the name later went to the Forgotten Realms' planet) was originally called Torilandra.

Face In the Frost - As book about wizards, again in the era where anything with magic in it was billed as "In the Tradition of Lord of the Rings". It think it gave me a lot of thought about people who were inside the "profession" as it were, where the profession was magic.

Emerson Lake and Palmer - Listened to this a lot in college - call it Anthem Rock or Arena Rock or Progressive Rock, ELP and Yes and Genesis (Pre-Phil Collins) and Led Zep were all influences. Oh, and the Roger Dean covers as well for Yes!

Harlan Ellison - Found the original Dangerous Visions in the school library in the early seventies, and it pretty much blew my mind for alternate views and showing the SF could be more than Asimov and Analog. In early college, most of Ellison's oeuvre was still in print, so I got to load up. He was a master of the first line and the last line of a story (and a rival for Arthur C. Clarke for that last line stinger). I always credited Ellison with the idea that the gods need worshipers more than vice versa.

2001: A Space Odyssey -Speaking of Clarke. Not the movie (saw it years later in college), but the Clarke "adaptation" which grounded in to me the idea of unexplainable aliens and mankind's possible place in the universe.

The Raven - Not the Poe, but Roger Corman's brilliant adaptation that ignored everything from the original poem but the name. Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and a young Jack Nicholson. The wizard duel at the end pretty much set a LOT of D&D spellls (No, go look). I watched it on "Chiller Theater" - late night Pittsburgh TV with Chilly Billy Cardille(y).

Sword in The Stone - The Disney movie - another piece that kept with me was the whole Merlin/Morgan polymorph duel. Not much else, but that just was brilliant.

Fafhrd and Grey Mouser - Another discovery in early college, set up the whole idea of the urban fantasy (That is to say, a city in a fantasy world). Loved the early works, though the later stuff, sadly, ventured into softcore porn.

Connections - James Burke's series was influential in the idea that everything needs to fit together, though not in the fashion you might think. His pinball delivery and hands-on example was pure science history porn. I thought it was earlier in my life, but actually showed up in 1979 in the states.

Earthsea - Another book that was "In the Tradition of Tolkien" - no it wasn't, but it was short and pognient and concentrated on moral decisions as opposed to explaning everything. Again, the first three were my base.

Omniverse - A fanzine (!) by Mark Gruenwald that pulled together the various earths of DC and Marvel and started for me the idea of continuity through multiple products and issues. In the ages before the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, this was the coolness. Add to that the old Marvel Team-Ups and Marvel Two-in-Ones and you have the basis for the nascent comic book campaign that became the Marvel Super Heroes game.

Roy Thomas's Conan stories - While on the subject of comics - Never read the Howard originals - they did nothing for me, even with the Franzetta covers of the age. Instead I found myself attracted to the B&W versions of the stories. John Buscema's Conan (and Frank Thorne's Red Sonjas) defined those characters in a way that broke canon, and most people don't even care (and yeah, the Wikipedia notes that these guys were not the first to protray these looks, but they were the definitive appearances when I was young).

The Early Steampunk Movies - The Great Race, Those Magnifient Men in the Flying Machines, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Around the World in 80 Days. Heck, even Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Steampunk before Steampunk was cool.Amazing how many of these were done decades before the entire "goggles as fashion statement" era of today. Of the group, The Great Race is probably the best - Tony Curtis, Natalie Wood, Jack Lemmon, and Peter Falk as Max, as in "Max! Press the Button!" (a major tagline of my earler campaign.

There are more - the Princes in Amber, Elfquest, Cerebus, Monty Python as well as stuff that didn't impact me - Lovecraft showed up late for the party, and though I loved Bradbury, I felt closer to Malacandra than Mars (and John Carter didn't show up at all).

More later,

More later,

The REAL Election

So when I arrived last week for the Thursday D&D game, M opened the door and asked "Who are you voting for?".

And I told her I had already posted my endorsements. She waved a hand and said, "No. In the REAL Election."

And the penny dropped and I knew what she was talking about, and I said "Braniac V".

OK, let me explain. I knew M was a hard-core Legion of Superheroes fan, and that they are electing a new leader. Now for everyone else I will bring you up to speed on what this means.

The Legion of Super Heroes showed up originally in the 60s as part of Superboy comics. It consisted of super-powered teens from the FUTURE, which allowed Superboy to have science fictiony adventures and gave him a group that they didn't have to worry about in the rest of continuity. The original group was, in the methodology of the 60s, white guys and girls, with notable exceptions like Chameleon Boy (Orange) and Brainiac V (Green) and they all came from different planets and all had goofy rules like no married couples or duplication of powers.

Now, one rule was that the leader of the legion was an elected position. AND that the fandom (in those days, the kids who wrote into the magazine) could vote. This was an ancient version of a transmedia feedback loop, where the consumers are invested with decision-making powers. It is also a reason why "Legion Fandom" was one of the first and most enduring of the various comics sub-fandom groups.

This was easier, by the way, when comics were stories were smaller (a backup feature in Superboy, with fewer pages than even a standard story today) and were published every 6 or 8 times a year. Now people follow entire continuities of interlocked books, with major events rewriting and rebooting things at a regular spate. The Legion Elections went by the wayside.

But now we are in the age of the Internet, and it is easier to get that direct feedback, so DC is running its elections online here, with all the advantages and dangers of such actions.

Now the current incarnation of the Legion has been around for only six issues or so, so most of the votes will be for the previous incarnations and memories of those characters. For me, the golden ages of the Legion were way back in the sixties when they were a backup in Adventure comics, as well as the 80s, when they played holographic D&D.

OK, you're caught up, to point of where I told M that I supported Brainiac V, the descendant of the Superman villain. And she pointed out that Brainiac V regularly went crazy from being too smart, but that's sort of the point - with Brainiac V its not a question of when he's going to wig out, but how much damage is done in the process. I'm looking for a good story, not good governing.

M, by the way, was torn between Chameleon Boy and Phantom Girl, so I present her opinions as well. So get out there and vote for Legion Leader!

(Oh yeah, and go vote in the other election, too).

More later,

November: The Jeff Recommends

If you live in Washington State, you have received your ballot and voters' guide (two voters' guides if you live in King County). And you've pulled out the handcart and brought the voluminous amount of paper into the house and put it right next to the gas bill you've been meaning to put in the post.

Now here's the thing - don't forget it (don't forget the gas bill, either, but do you need me to tell you that?). This year they need to be mailed by the 2nd of November, which means some of you will think of it as a WHOLE MONTH away rather than less than two weeks. I know you. I think the same way, and never fail to be surprised by the tyranny of the calender (sure, it gives us an extra day every four years, but in FEBRUARY. How about an extra day of summer instead?).

Here are Grubb Street's endorsements for the ballot, based on the long march through the initiatives and the previous primary. I may come back to some of the points later, time permitting, but I want to get these down for those who are voting right now, dammit.

I'm not alone in telling you how to vote - here are some other guys, and I will update as I go along. To my surprise, I find myself agreeing with the Seattle Times more often than the Stranger.
The Seattle Times is the local paper of record, and represents the more traditional voting blocks.
The Stranger is the snarky hipster weekly, and its endorsements are NFSW, but they gets major creds for inviting people that disagree with them onto their blog
Publicola is lefty and urban in its outlook, but unlike the Stranger gets out beyond the Seattle city limits and actually thinks about Olympia.
The Seattle Weekly has woken up and finally realized that its uptight Seattlelite market actually cares about politics, but have yet to get into the endorsement biz. Their blog, however, is starting to pay attention to politics.

Here goes (you might want to dig through previous entries to get past the snark):

I-1053 (Tim Eyeman hearts the oil companies) vote NO
I-1082 (BIAW hearts big insurance) vote NO
I-1098 (Bill Gates and his Dad want to pay taxes) Vote YES
I-1100 (Costco wants to keep the Stranger staff drunk) Vote NO
I-1105 (Smaller distributors want to keep the Stranger staff drunk) Vote NO
I-1107 (Beverage companies want to avoid taxes) Vote NO

R-52 (Cute Puppy wants to repair schools) Vote YES
Amendment 8225 (Redefine interest calculation to let the state take advantage of Federal loans) - Vote YES
Amendment 4220 (Allow judges to deny bail under narrow conditions) Vote YES
NOTE: On 8225 and 4220, I had some crackerjack jokes set up for them, but they haven't gotten a lot of attention so I'm running their descriptions straight.

King County Amendment 1 - (Revise charter's preamble to put business on same level as environment) - vote NO
King County Amendment 2 - (Remove duplication of effort in Public Disclosures) - Vote YES
King County Amendment 3 - (Allow Sheriff to negotiate collective bargaining, but not for important stuff like wages or benefits ) - Vote HUH? (OK, NO)
King Count Proposition 1 - (Cute Puppy wants to keep cops, firemen, and rest of the government) - Vote YES (but is really suspicious of the Cute Puppy right now).

US Senator - Patty Murray
US REP, 9th District - Suzan DelBene

State Senator, 47th District - Claudia Kauffman (Note: I want to point out, if I don't get a chance to mention it elsewhere, that challenger Joe Fain has run a textbook perfect campaign. But even recognizing the organizational skills, Fain takes credit for one of the dumber moves for local democracy - making King County Board positions non-partisan, allowing candidates to hide affiliation. But that's a rant for another day).

Representative, 47th District, Position 1 - Geoff Simpson. (Note: Yeah, that surprises me, but the potential combo of I-1053 requiring a supermajority for raising fees or closing loopholes PLUS any candidate who swears never to raise taxes is a bad combo).

Representative, 47th District, Position 2 - Pat Sullivan.

State Supreme Court Justice Position #6 - Charlie Wiggins

District Court, Southeast Electoral District: Note - these are races you haven't heard of and most of you couldn't care, yet these are the ones where the fewest number of people will determine the winner. The good news is checking with Voting For Judges, and a little googling shows that all four men are qualified, sober, and capable.
Position #3 - Darrell E Phillipson (incumbent)
Position #6 - David Tracy

I don't do endorsements for races with a single candidate (sarcastic hat-tip to our state for letting Supreme Court justices being determined in the primary). As I know more, I will post it.

More later,

15 Games in 15 minutes Meme

This one has been bouncing around the net, and I thought I would give it a shot. Originally it was for computer games, but it's jumping the species membrane and gone viral.

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen games you've played that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

Here are mine:

1. D&D (in all its versions)
2. Magic: The Gathering
3. Panzerblitz
4. Monopoly
5. Risk
6. Civilization (Sid Meier's, though AH's is good)
7. Traveller
8. Project Marvel Comics, which evolved into Marvel Super Heroes
9. Call of Cthulhu
10. Diplomacy
11. Bridge
12. Eurorails (and all of the Mayfair train games)
13. Freedom in the Galaxy
14. City of Heroes
15. Empire of the Petal Throne

Ones that showed up after I had reached 15 were Mah Jong, War of the Rings, Mille Bourne, and Guild Wars (d'oh!). What is interesting is that each of the games is attached to a particular age or a particular place, or most of all a particular friend or friends, which is what made them memorable. Cool.

Oh, and consider all y'all tagged.

More later,