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Dec. 19th, 2009 @ 05:39 pm
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I'm getting into a bad habit of not updating LJ on Saturdays.
This post doesn't really help. |
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Dec. 18th, 2009 @ 06:37 am
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Letters to Santa Written by Shakespeare Characters
Dear Santa, The trifles you brought me last year meant absolutely nothing. What's the point of gifts when everything is falling to shit all around you? Why didn't you steal the family account information I left out for you last year? That would have meant something. Do you ever feel like everything is just a big conspiracy? Do you ever want to hurl yourself out of your sled and fall down, down, down onto the cold hard street below? Look out for the slings and arrows. — Hamlet
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A colleague sent me some notes from a seminar she recently attended about cyber safety for children and young people. details about the presenter are below. i thought the advice looks pretty good for parents who aren't that familiar with the Internet, but interesteing reading... there is information about if your child is being cyberbullying, but i would expect that parents should also know if their child is also harassing others, and if they are, making them realise the impacts of this for other people and for themselves.
( Internet Safety and Cyberbullying Tips ) |
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I remain dubious and uncertain about Mist-Robed Gate, a game of "emotionally tempestuous arthaus wuxia", which is a real shame considering how awesome a core concept/theme combo that is for a game.
My big problem isn't that the game is built around a gimmick (which it is), or that parts of the game aren't explained all that well (they aren't), or how it distributes spotlight time (although I think there are issues with that). No, my big problem is with creator Shreyas Sampat's authorial voice, which irritates me in ways I find difficult to articulate. He's not as bad as Vincent Baker, whose writing style in Dogs in the Vineyard just aggravates the shit out of me, but he's still annoying. The voice of Gate is both smug and lazy, and the constant feeling I get from it is "Here's this cool thing I thought of, because I'm cool, and I'm going to tell you about it because you're probably not cool enough to think of it yourself. But once I give you the general outline I'm just gonna drop it because I can't be bothered explaining it properly or using examples. Figure it out yourself if you think you're as cool as me. Which you aren't." This is the kind of thing many readers may not notice, or care about - and hey, they probably shouldn't - but it distracts me from the actual game because I'm too busy getting irate about the delivery system.
But anyway, lemme try to put my issues to one side and look at the game. There's not a lot here, but what's here is mostly pretty interesting. Gate is meant as a general system for playing a certain tone of wuxia game, and assumes the group will do the definition work itself; there's no setting described, and no significant discussion of the genre other than a filmography. Characters are important members of groups and factions created by the groups, whose goals bring them into conflict. There are no mechanics involved; PCs are defined by signature visual displays - colour, behavioural quirk and weather - which are mood-setting tools that show up in fight scenes. Each player gets two blank index cards, one for a prop (which can be an NPC or non-physical thing) and one for a set/location; these get filled in during play whenever a player wants to introduce a new element, and I think that's a really interesting way to get players involved in a game. It's something that could have gone further; Gate recommends talking over tone, style and so forth for maybe half an hour before the game starts, which feels like dead time to me. Why not allow players input over those elements in play as they do with sets and props, allowing for tonal shifts that reflect what players are really interested in?
Players take turns setting scenes, doing stuff and getting into conflict with other players, and that's where the gimmicky part of Gate comes into play as stakes are raised through the 'Knife Ritual'. The game starts with a knife on the table, sheathed and covered by a cloth. As tensions rise, you can uncover the knife and point it at another player, who either gives into your demands or escalates by unsheathing the knife and handing it back. As it passes round and round the table, stakes get higher, until you finally stab your rival's character sheet with the knife, which kills that character. And now everyone's stabbing everyone else, and it all becomes tragic and bloody in the end. There's more to it than that, and I'm not describing it all that accurately, but the actual flow of the Knife Ritual is poorly described and confusing. Reducing the level of tension and taking the knife out of play requires a Wirework scene, in which two players describe their big wuxia martial arts fight - these are pretty much random, decided by drawing a ballot from a hat after the other players vote on who deserves to win. The concept is really interesting, and there's nothing wrong with a gimmick that really adds to a game's feel and play (like Dread's Jenga tower), but it's hard to see at this stage how the Knife Ritual handles in play. And I don't like the essentially random nature of the wirework system, or the way it heavily favours outgoing, fast-talking players over more withdrawn ones.
What else is in the 48 pages of PDF? Not much, really. There's a LARP version of the game, which means nothing to me but could certainly be handy for live-action players. There's a filmography, which is quite strong and a good overview of the genre, especially in distinguishing 'emotional wuxia' from more straightforward martial-arts movie. And there's 12 pages on how to make green tea and dumplings for your group, which is the point where the condescending authorial voice got even more obnoxious and I wondered why the hell I was paying for something I could Google in seconds. Yeah, I get it, your games are like a dinner party that your friends flock to, that's great. But less time complaining about bergamot overwhelming the authentic flavour of green tea, and more time explaining how and why to move the knife around the table, would have made Gate a better game.
Given all this, I'm reluctant to recommend Mist-Robed Gate; there's the core of a really interesting wuxia game here, but it's buried under condescension, muddied systems and stray chapters from a cookbook. At some point I'd like to tease those good points out from the rest and give the game a bash, and I think it would be fun. But probably not enough to justify paying for the rest.
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Dec. 16th, 2009 @ 06:01 pm
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I was going to write something reasonably substantial tonight, but it's just too fucking hot. |
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Dec. 15th, 2009 @ 01:37 pm
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It looks like I'll be publishing two anthologies of short-short fiction next year, which is pretty exciting and a welcome break from my usual focus on publishing maths textbooks.
Preparing for the project, though, I'm finding that I'm more ignorant than I would like about short fiction authors on the world stage. Australian, American, British, yes, these I know pretty well. But I'd like to include work from Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Indonesian, Japanese and even New Zealand authors, and rummaging around the corners of the internet looking for such people (and samples of their work) is time-consuming and oft fruitless.
So if you've got any recommendations for interesting writers from those countries, working in any genre, and (if possible) links or pointers to specific stories that come in around the 1000-word mark, let me know.
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Yesterday, while indulging my insatiable need for graphic novels at the Brunswick library, the pink-haired hipster standing near me pulled out his mobile phone to tell his girlfriend that he had just found a Harlequin romance novel sponsored by NASCAR. I doublechecked this with him when he hung up, and sure enough there was a romance novel with a prominent NASCAR logo, left alone and unread on the shelf. We had a good chuckle, and I went home thinking that the world was a silly and amusing place that could contain such a ridiculous thing.
Today I found out that there are in fact 36 NASCAR romance novels published by Harlequin (with more to come), that they are wildly popular with a specific demographic, and that Harlequin and NASCAR are both making primo bucks over the deal. And now I feel less that the world is silly and amusing and more that we should burn everything down and mail the ashes to the aliens. |
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Dec. 13th, 2009 @ 06:58 am
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This is possibly the single most accurate summary of my life and personality ever created.
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Dec. 12th, 2009 @ 02:56 pm
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Melbourne's CBD has long been home to some unusual buskers, such as Awesome Guy Who Plays Drums on Old Pots, Teenage Breakdance Crew Who Don't Care What Decade It Is, Statue That Blinks and Annoying Theramin Spaceman. But today I saw what may be the greatest - and by 'greatest', I mean 'most nonsensical' - busker ever. Yoga Bear.
Yoga Bear, to be clear, is a man wearing a full-body electric blue plush teddy bear costume, who does yoga. And people watch him. And put money in his hat.
I think this is glorious, if only because it negates any normal human concept of 'entertainment'. You would not normally pay money to watch someone else do yoga. You would not normally pay money to look at a man in a blue teddy bear costume just standing around, unless you are two years old or deeply, deeply stoned. And yet, combine these two elements - and tell people that you are deliberately combining these elements, so they know what they are looking at - and you can presumably make enough income to negate or at least subdue that nagging voice that tells you you've wasted your life and should have taken up plumbing or heroin.
I want to extend this. I want to push the boundary so far it falls onto another map. I want your ideas for intrinsically meaningless and non-entertaining forms of entertainment that become entertaining through sheer appreciation of their meaninglessness. I want your professional eaters, your bacon jugglers, your dog shavers, your flatulists.
Enthrall me with your ideas. I will read them. And then call that performance art and ask for two dollars. |
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Dec. 11th, 2009 @ 09:25 am
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I just stumbled across a organization called Kiva.org, who organize loans for start-up businesses in the developing world. Kiva collects micropayments from donors, aggregates them into a lump sum and then loans it to the entrepreneur through an agency in that country; when the loan gets repaid, you get paid back and can move your micropayment over to a new recipient.
It's a pretty neat idea, and an initial check on Wikipedia makes Kiva look genuine and reputable. Does anyone have any experience with them they want to share before I start donating some money?
(EDIT TO ADD: Okay, seeing a lot of positive comments and no concrete negatives. Think I'll send some money their way. Although I'll try to direct it towards loans with low interest rates, which will take a bit more research and thinking.) |
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Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 06:09 pm
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I will say this for Tony Abbott - he's put together a frontbench and suite of policies that are sure to be big election hits.
In 2004.
However, I have my doubts that in 2010, the general public will be all fired up to vote for the things they voted against in 2007.
So until Abbott gets a time machine, or a lick of fucking sense, I'm content to keep laughing at him. |
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Dec. 9th, 2009 @ 01:58 am
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it's amazing how one small change can make a difference to an advertising campaign....
the new windows 7 advertisements in australia follow the global ideal of "i'm a pc and windows 7 was my idea."
here's the american advert:
and here's the australian one....
did you spot the difference? ( Read more... )
the fiend
the thing that gets me about most of these adverts? the people in them are most definitely npc, if you get my meaning.... |
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Hero's Banner is a strongly character-focused game of dramatic low fantasy, and I know that's a boring start to the review but the core concept of the game is difficult to boil down to a punchy soundbite. Fundamentally, the game is so directed at the characters' internal journey that there's not a lot of external stuff to hang a review hook on - and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
The default PCs are young nobles in a sketchily-defined medieval-Europe-with-occasional-magic setting. They aren't defined by any physical, mental or other concrete attributes, but solely by the strength of their commitment to a set of Influences. There are three Influences - Hero (a role model), Blood (family ties) and Conscience (personality trait) - each of which has a rating between 1 and 100 (all start out roughly equal). Each influence also comes with a related NPC, a behavioural ideal, and an ultimate goal that the PC will try to meet in play. The other PC trait is Passion, which is defined as an emotion (love, anger etc) by the group before play; it starts at 1, but rises inexorably in play until endgame.
Gameplay is broken down into scenes, framed by the GM, which typically put a PC in a conflict situation in pursuit of a goal. At some point, you roll percentile dice against the most relevant Influence. Succeed and you move towards your goal, fail and you remain where you are. But if that sounds boring, you can call for a reroll, with a bonus and narration rights over the outcome, but at the cost of your Passion rating rising. Succeed or fail, you rejig your Influence ratings so that the difference between the highest and lowest traits equals the Passion rating. When Passion reaches 100, so too does one of your Influence, and you achieve that goal. But when that happens, it's endgame - the other two goals are forever lost, and you have to narrate your character's triumphant, sad or bittersweet death. That makes me a bit suspicious about how much monitoring the GM would have to do to control the pace of the game, making sure that all the PCs reach endgame at around the same time rather than one peaking early and being left out; the game discusses this but doesn't provide any concrete tools to avoid it.
Mechanically it's a clean, streamlined setup with a few interesting additions I won't bother going into here. It's very much about what characters want, what they'll sacrifice for those goals, and how they make hard choices, all of which are fantastic and powerful roleplaying opportunities. Most of all, it's fast (or looks it, anyway), and you could easily start and finish a character's story in a session or two. Moving beyond that, the game recommends a generational campaign where your former characters become the Hero Influences of another set. I think that's an interesting conceit, but I question whether it has real resonance in such a sketchy and generic setting; surely one of the major benefits of a generational campaign is seeing the long-term consequences of character decisions, and those consequences are more defined and cascading in a firmly realised setting. My immediate impulse is to set it in Freeport or Thieves' World (yes, that's ego talking), both of which are engaging settings that allow for strongly character-based play; it wouldn't take much to loosen the restrictions and open up the range of PC types.
Anyway, quibbles aside, if you like A Song of Ice and Fire or tragic fantasy where the focus is strongly on intensely personal stories, Hero's Banner has a lot to offer. Just be prepared for occasional bursts of math as you rejuggle your stats after every scene.
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Dec. 7th, 2009 @ 07:50 pm
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I was going to write a review of Hero's Banner, but I'm so stuffed with soy-and-haloumi vege burgers that I can barely see straight.
Maybe tomorrow, when I'm less bloated with health. |
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Dec. 6th, 2009 @ 08:39 pm
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I'm going to attempt to lose about 10-12 kilos over the next 2-3 months.
I just want to reassure all of you that I'm not going to blog about it.
PS - Barnaby Joyce on the front bench? Champagne sketch comedy! |
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