Trailers

So the Lovely Bride and I went to see the latest "Harry Potter" film over the weekend, and I thought it. It was pretty good and it made internal sense to me, though the LB went back to re-read that particular book to see what they left in, took out, or created anew, in preparation of the release of the last book.

(And it gets very quiet around the house when a new HP book shows up, as Kate spends her non-painting hours in a chair, reading. But I digress...)

So the movie was good, but the trailers really attracted my attention. Mind you, I am not a major movie fan, so I rarely know when a movie is coming until the week before, when there is an overload of movie promos on the tube (and I know it is Friday when the movie opens and that huge surge disappears). So I was seeing stuff for the first time.

- Like the relentless "If you liked Harry Potter, you'll like ..." attitudes of the Golden Compass (Narnia for atheists) and some other YA book which I had no previous knowledge of where ordinary kid travels through time in the fight between light and darkness. ( I guess the holiday movie Fred Claus, about Santa's slacker older brother, also falls into this category).

- Like Steve Carell in a new Get Smart movie. Steve Miller and I howled at the trailer, the bulk of which was a phone booth gag worthy of the original series. May the movie be as good.

- Like a cute little video for "Across the Universe", which is a Beatles musical (anyone who remembers "Sgt Pepper's" or "All This and World War II" is now making holy signs against the computer screen and praying for their eternal souls). But they used a lesser-known (I had to look it up) song ("I've Just Seen a Face" which you know, but never by that title) and made it even more up-tempo than Paul McCartney usually barrels through. This is one movie I am going to deeply avoid (the story involves a young man named Jude, the girl he meets named Lucy, and Eddie Izzard as Mr. Kite ... OK, I'll stop now before you gouge out your eyes). All the warning side of a horrible project. Still, as a two minute video, it is really cool (and not yet available on the net - another, sadder, odder trailer, is).

And one other thing - what are they thinking about the clientèle when they run promos for Anthony Bourdain's "No Reservations" on the Travel Channel before all this. Did they make a connection between foodies and Harry Potter fans?

More later,

A Small Plug

So, fellow Alliterate and all-around nice guy Wolfgang Baur, also known as the Monkey King, has launched his new gaming magazine, Kobold Quarterly, now available both as PDF and in that new-fangled, limited-edition, dead-tree version. Check it out.

More later,

Basic Questions

I don't discuss the "Big Subject" of Game Design much here, both because I think about it a lot as my "day-job" and I don't usually feel like preaching my particular version of the Faith. But I've been thinking about the basic questions you ask when you start on a game, a world, a novel, or a campaign, and I'm having a hard time doing better than a bit presented on J. Michael Straczynski's old SF show, Babylon 5.

In that show, it was revealed over time that there were two great elder races vying for power (The Vorlon and Shadows, but never mind that). How they defined the philosophies of those two races were the following two questions:

WHO ARE YOU?
WHAT DO YOU WANT?

Now whether these statements match up with that those elder races were doing with the universe is a discussion for some B5 BBS somewhere. My point is that these two questions are a pretty good starting point for your game, and a pretty good touchstone for how you succeed in presenting your vision. If you can communicate those two points, you've got a chance of connecting with your ultimate audience.

Let's roll the tape on a couple classic RPGs to test this out:

D&D and its linear descendants:
WHO ARE YOU? I am an adventurer
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to kill monsters and take their stuff.

Vampire the Masquerade
WHO ARE YOU? I am monster
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to be moral despite my monstrosity (angst!)

Shadowrun (and a lot of Cyberpunkish games)
WHO ARE YOU? I am an freelance criminal.
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to do what I have to do to get paid.

Call of Cthulhu
WHO ARE YOU? I am an investigator.
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to poke around the edges of sanity and try not to go mad.

Sometimes the answers may explain the challenges in the campaign:

Empire of the Petal Throne.
WHO ARE YOU? I am a citizen in a fantasy empire. Which is really in the future, and the advanced technology is magic, or extradimensional manipulation which is effectively magic, and has a Mayan/Egyptian vibe.
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to kill monsters and take their stuff.
(Need to communicate involved, non-traditional world and how it is different. Also, second statement doesn't jive up well with the first)

Traveller
WHO ARE YOU? I am former military personnel in a stellar empire.
WHAT DO YOU WANT? I want to own a spaceship, and so will do things so I can pay off my ship.
(Limited adventure room, short-term goals)

This approach can also open doors and show the nature of your world - Go back up to the top with D&D - What is an adventurer? How is it different than a citizen or a criminal? What defines "monsters"? When are you justified to take their stuff? Some of the flexibility in answering these questions (and there are more than one set of answers for any question) defines where you think the world is going.

Its just a start, and now I'm walking around, holding up this lens to various games and seeing how effective it is. And sometimes the answers reveal as much about how I view that game or genre as it does about the game itself.

More later,

Lovely Parting Gifts

The Origins Awards have been posted, and among the winners are DRAGON and Dungeon magazines from Paizo. A wonderful high point to go out on (Though calling one magazine "Fiction" and the other "Non-Fiction" feels like a bit of a reach).

Also, Wizards of the Coast won for "Best Miniature" for their Colossal Red Dragon, a truly beautiful piece, but one which completely busts the definition of "Miniature".

More later,

UPDATE: And in related news, The Monkey King has been nominated for an ENnie for his Shadowcrag adventure. Woohoo!

The Funny Pixels

So as opposed to a new entry, I updated the Blogroll on the right, making sure that the links were still current, upgrading some Alliterates, and most importantly, adding more comic strips and art:

My Elves Are Different (also known as MEAD) is deeply a deeply "inside the beltway" strip on science fiction and fantasy in general. It was the start of the entire Zombie Apocalypse thing. Best moment? Zombie Tolkien.

Sinfest is happy, perky, morally interesting and generally Not Safe For Work. But once you let Penny Arcade in the door, anything is fair game. It deals with religion, sin, redemption, and getting lucky.

And lastly, the mighty Stan! is doing his Doodle-A-Day. Which is exactly what it sounds like.

And on a more literate side, we have Sacnoth's Scriptorium, hosted by John Rateliff, Tolkien Scholar and general good egg.

Have fun. More later,

UPDATE: OK, one more - Diesel Sweeties is an odd one. It has a paper-based incarnation, as well as a web-version. The web-version is a lot more ...um ... mature ... in nature, and as such, is funnier.

The Song In My Head

So on Canada Day (1 July to us Yanks), I caught a YouTube video of a "Canadian Song" that has been caught in my brain and refuses to leave (except for a brief period when "Call for Super Chicken" replaced it). Here's the video, and the lyrics. Warning: this song is insidious.

The Log Drivers' Waltz
(Albert Wade Hemsworth/Traditional)

If you should ask any girl from the parish around
What pleases her most from her head to her toes
She'll say, "I'm not sure that it's business of yours
But I do like to waltz with a log driver".

Chorus
For he goes birling down a-down the white water
That's where the log driver learns to step lightly
It's birling down, a-down white water
A log driver's waltz pleases girls completely.

When the drive's nearly over, I like to go down
To see all the lads while they work on the river
I know that come evening they'll be in the town
And we all want to waltz with a log driver.

To please both my parents I've had to give way
And dance with the doctors and merchants and lawyers
Their manners are fine but their feet are of clay
For there's none with the style of a log driver.

I've had my chances with all sorts of men
But none is so fine as my lad on the river
So when the drive's over, if he asks me again
I think I will marry my log driver.

And yes, "birling" is a word. It means to spin a log in the water with one's feet.

Mood: Pleased (completely).

More later

July 4

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
"
- The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America
- July 4, 1776

American Justice

EX LIBBRIS

We did nothing wrong.
And even if we did, no one saw it.
And even if they saw it, no one will say.
And even if they say, no one will believe.
And even if they believe, there will be no evidence.
And even if there is evidence, there will be no investigation.
nd even if there is an investigation, there will not be an indictment.
And even if there is an indictment, there will never be a trial.
And even if there is a trial, there will never be a verdict.
And even if there is a verdict, there will never be a penalty.
And even if there is a penalty, no one will pay the price.
Because we did nothing wrong.
- J.Grubb, 2007

(With a tip of the lid to Frabjous Dave, safely in hiding in Canada, for the title.)

More Later,

Suit

So you remember the Harlan Ellison/Fantagraphics feud? The one with both sides making declarations in public forums as the other side's veracity and honor?

Well, according to Galleycat the issues have been resolved. No, you don't get to know what happened, which is pretty much par for the course in these situations.

More later (but not about this),

Fortune

So on the 29th of March, this year, our regular Thursday-night group sat down to play D&D and eat Chinese food. Which, of course, meant fortune cookies. And I drew the following Fortune:

Remember three months from this date. Good things are in store for you.

Having discussed the nature of fortune cookies to be extremely vague, we magnetted the fortune to the fridge with the date, so we could check it out later.

That was last Friday, and while it was pretty much a nice day, it wasn't something that stood out against all the other nice days. Nothing INCREDIBLE happened. So is this myth busted?

Well, yeah, but:
* An impossible deadline DID turn more possible
* I DID play Call of Cthulhu with friends in a nice session, and only drove one of them irreparably insane.
* I DID see the ToC (table of contents) for Hobby Games: The 100 Best, to which I contributed an essay. The games all merit inclusion in the book, and the contributors read like the batting order at an All-Star Game.
* And a summer storm rolled through on my way home that afternoon, and produced in its wake a full rainbow of an intensity that leeched into the IR and UV parts of the spectrum.

So it WAS a pretty nice day, but hardly memorable enough for a piece of typed paper within a cookie to give a shout-out for. But I think that's good enough.

More later,

Rating

Believe it or not, this rating is totally the result of talking about zombies. I guess I have to try harder.



Zombies! Zombies! Zombies!

Furthermore: Booger.

More later,

Out of the Office

I very rarely talk about work and the people AT work, but this one it TOO GOOD to pass up.

So its the stuff of a bad sitcom - you call in sick, go to the ball game instead, you catch a home-run ball in the stands and your picture is on the front page of the local newspaper. Then you spend the next day trying to hide copies of the paper from your boss.

And sometimes the situation is reversed. Here's a picture of the line outside the Apple Store up in the U-District of people camped out for the new Iphones, from the front page of the Seattle Times site.



The guy in the center, in the green shirt, is one of my bosses, Jeff Strain, who is currently on paternity leave. I will note that he IS working on a laptop, probably has WiFi, and even as this picture is snapped was reconfiguring our Wiki.

(But I am going to be in SUCH trouble for this).

Update: Bonus! Then they give Jeff the lead quote in the article from the OTHER daily paper in town (Heheheh).

Leave of Absence

So, its been a week already?

I just looked at the journal, and it has been a week since the last posting, and that a snarky political one-shot. Have I grown beyond public displays of my crankiness, or are blogs just too, too 2004?

Truth of the matter is several things. One of them is a heavy day-job schedule as we surge forward on Guild Wars: Eye of the North. Another is work on The Settlers 6. And also there's the fact that the weather has been very, very nice out here of late, and what time I do have free I choose to spend on the back porch, reading the latest translation of The Three Musketeers and drinking a frozen rum punch.

Oh, and incipient alcoholism from all those rum punches. That's been slowing me down as well.

More later,

This Just In:

As it stands at the moment, the leading Democrat contender for President is a New Yorker. The leading Republican contender is also a New Yorker.

And if you don't like either of them, there is now a huggamugga of a sudden potential bid of ... another New Yorker.

The media really needs to get out of town more often.

More later,

When the Going Gets Tough ...

... the Tough go Clamming.

Yep, clamming. I've spent the past two days out on the Hood Canal (which is not a canal, but rather a fjord, but never mind), engaged in clamming.

It was a rest well-needed. We've been a little spotty on the postings of late, mainly because the workload has been a bit intense recently. Both the day-job and the freelance job are at critical junctures which need a lot of immediate attention to make sure everything works. As a result, there has been precious little time for anything else in my life.

But not for the past couple days. I took Friday off in my first vacation that did not involve bringing along a computer in over a year, and the Lovely Bride and I bundled into the hybrid, crossed to Bainbridge on the ferry (part-way escorted by Coast Guard craft with machine guns on the bows), crossed Bremerton Peninsula, across the Hood Canal Bride and down the other side to the beaches at Quilcene and Dosewallips.

Friday Quilcene was mostly empty, and it is a rich beach for manila steamers. Pick a spot, dig down an couple inches, and you come up with a handful. Saturday, when the low tide hit around noon, it was a zoo - everyone was clamming, including a lot of first-timers (you can tell they're first-timers - I'm giving clamming advice).

Doswallips was where the geoduck hunters hung out. We went there for horse clams, but were not successful (of course, our strategy was 'dig in a random location and hope for the best'). The geoduck hunters here are akin the deer hunters back in Wisconsin - good old boys that are heavily kitted out, packing post-hole-diggers as opposed to rifles, and clamming buckets with padded lids that can double as camp seats.

Civilization, such at it is on the canal, is clutched tight to the seashore, along a thing band between the high tide line and the National Forest. We ended up walking a lot in the national forest, down Falls Creek Canyon and into the murky wilds around Murhut Falls. They were strange hikes - beautiful, but oddly silent. I don't know if it because of the habitat, the season, or the recently-reported plummeting of bird populations, but the woods were strangely silent with only the occasional call.

But the clamming worked out (at least as far as the manilas). We're allowed to pull off 40 clams per person per day, so that means I have had around 80 clams over the weekend. The first batch we steamed over a primitive propane stove. The second batch made it home and were thrown into the pasta.

But I'm all clammed up for the moment, and ready to go back into the fray.

More later,

Huh?

What was THAT all about?

That was about this, an attempt to Blog like it was the end of the world. Sort of a Blogging flash mob Several of my companions chose more realistic (and depressing) approaches to challenge, but I had to be a smartass.

Congratulations to all who participated.

More later,

On The Road Again: Zombiepocalypse

As God is my witness, I never realized that zombies could drive.

I mean, it makes sense. Zombification strips out the upper brain functions, leaving only automatic responses - shuffling, biting, chewing, clawing, digging the gooey parts of the brain out with a forefinger, that sort of thing. And for a lot of people, driving is pretty much automatic, without a lot of attention from the higher brain.

Don't believe me? Tell me about your commute, yesterday, before the restless dead rose up to slay the living. Tell me about one other vehicle you saw on the road. Unless you've seen something out of the ordinary, it has just passed by you without a second thought. Yah see, automatic functions.

So when the world slipped into its present undead state, it really should not have surprised me that hundreds of zombie commuters rose up, lurched to their cars, and drove to work. At the same time I had to make my own commute. Just my luck.

And I know you're asking - with the living dead heralding the end of the world as we know it, why am I going to work? Because my company doesn't have a Zombie Day plan. Sure, I could stay home, but then it's a sick day, which is also a vacation day. I swear that this one business practice was more responsible than anything for the Zombiepocalypse. You get up, and you're feeling a little undead, not so undead that you want to spend one of your precious vacation days on it, so you go to work and before you know it, the front desk staff has killed everyone in accounting and is feasting on their entrails.

Anyway, you know those "slow zombies"? The Night-of-the-Living-Dead shamblers? Well, they drive just as slowly. No lie. So the 405 is a literal crawl. I pass one talking on his cell phone. Who does a zombie talk to on his cell? His broker?

Pulling out into the HOV lane was just as bad. And yes, it is breaking the law since I was alone, but the only cops I saw were lunching on an SUV filled with nuns, so the social order was a bit tattered at this point. No slow zombies here, but only those passive/aggressive fast zombies. One of whom decided by the Frye's exit to suddenly let go of the wheel and consume her car-pool buddy's eyes. So that tied up the HOV, and I'm back in the slow lanes with the shuffling corpses in their Detroit coffins.

The upshot was that by the Newcastle exit I gave up and turned around, with stop and go traffic through Renton. And since EVERYONE is moving like a zombie in their cars, there was no real prob with the undead looking for fresh meat. Got home, patched in remotely to the job, and am taking a vacation day (there will be a stiffly-worded memo coming out of THIS, I can tell you). The Internets are still up (insert IT/Zombie joke here), and the Lovely Bride is out getting something for dinner. So it is not like it is horrible.

But I tell you, if this keeps up, I'm going to consider going freelance again.

More later,

UPDATE: The Lovely Bride just got home:
Me: Hey honey, what's for dinner?
LB: Braaaaaainssssss!

So it looks like its another evening of experimental cuisine. End of a perfect day.

More later,

Update

Still busy, but in addition bummed out about the death of Hansa the elephant, age 6 and a half, at the Woodland Park Zoo.

More later. Really.

Busy

Dear Internet,

It is not that I don't love you anymore, nor do I love you any less. I have just been very, very busy for the past couple weeks. So busy I haven't had a chance to soak in my hot tub. So busy I haven't had a chance to play LotRO. So busy that the last deep discussion I've had involves whether rum punch can be considered in the "Fruits and Vegetables" part of a balanced meal.

More later,

Church and State

So here's where I shear myself away from some of my fellows. A lot of them (in mailing lists and in journals) are comfortable with the idea that science and religions are opposites. Black and white. On and off. Thinking and feeling. Up and down. One cannot exist in the presence of the other.

Actually, I think of them as salt and pepper, which can be combined (in various amounts) but really two completely different things, and have completely different paths to your kitchen table. Salt is a mineral, an edible rock that appeals to certain parts of your tastes, while pepper is a plant (a dried fruit of a flowering vine, actually), which appeals to other regions of one's taste buds. To say that the two are polar opposites is kinda silly, and in the same fashion I think the science/religion split is a false dichotomy as well.

In fact, the two work together better than working apart. Over the course of my lifetime, there have been Biblical stories that have benefited from scientific support. As a lad, the Great Flood was a "bible story", a religious tall tale with a moral ("Don't cheese off the Lord"). Yet over the years archaeological thought has moved from "was there a Great Flood?" to "Was there a single flood or a series of localized floods?") Indeed, discovery of previous legends, like that of Deucalion, act to support the existence of a biblical flood, not diminish it.

Similarly, faith has supported science over the years. Gregor Mendel (genetics), Roger Bacon (scientific method), and Copernicus (astronomy) were all men of the cloth and received encouragement from their church. There are the monks in Ireland who kept knowledge alive in the wake of the fall of Rome, and the flowering of Islam brought new concepts, even new words (Algebra, Algorithm, Alchol) into European thought.

I think that both science and religion are spectrums as opposed to absolutes, and when we have a hard orthodoxy in control in either case, there difficulty for the rest of us. In religion we currently seem to be under the sway of the orthodox forces, but not too many years ago we were in the porgressive grips of Vatican II and the Ecumenical Movement. In science we have seen where the hide-bound individuals who control the mechanisms twisting vital research for their own ends (Gallo and the HIV virus comes to mind). Yet in both cases it is moving across a spectrum (of course, in both cases, the installed orthodoxy wants to KEEP their power, and to that end seeks to exclude others who might disagree. The spectrum becomes a single wavelength).

There is pseudo-religion and there is psuedo-science. Both science and religion can have bad ideas, false leads and dead ends. The Catholic Church, seeking to answer the question - what happens to the unbaptized innocent? - ended up with the concept of Limbo, which was recently abandoned. Science similarly has a long history of mechanisms created to make the theory work - Ether (if light is a wave, how does it travel through a vacuum?) orphlogiston (what is that makes stuff burn?). Now dark matter and superstring theory are similar constructs. Both science and religion have a tendency to pick stuff up, examine it, and discard it if it does not work. In both cases, problems show up when the thought process becomes rigid and rejecting (Papal infallibility, corporate-paid research think tanks), seeking to exert temporal power as opposed to seeking knowledge, comprehension, and understanding.

Science and religion are playing fields, where conservative and progressive forces move back and forth. Orthodox forces in both seem to limit both what is going out (in the way of sharing understanding) and what is coming in (as far as believers or theorists who may hold contrary views). While it is very easy to identify an established extreme as an enemy, it is not representative of the entire spectrum. Indeed, calling all scientists heretics and all faithful people ignorant supports those orthodoxies by restricting the number of participants that need to be controlled, exiling those non-, un-, and wrong believers into some sort of darkness where they may be ignored.

The answer for both spectrums is "more light". More thought, more discussion, more examination of both science and faith. Because only then can either sphere move forward.

More later,