Homosexuality != Edgy

All right, folks, I'm gonna lay it out right here and now. If you write a story whose entire existence revolves around the fact that a character is gay in a transparent attempt to be oh-so-avant-garde, you have written a bad story. I think we passed the point a long time ago where guys having sex with guys and women having sex with women were enough to make any given narrative "edgy".

Do we have an understanding, Internet? There is no edge.

Writing about characters who happen, by some stroke of coincidence, to prefer sexual relations with their own gender has as little bleeding-edge art quality to it as writing about characters who have bottle-blonde hair or work on farms for a living. It's just an aspect of character. If you're straight, does it dominate your entire bloody existence? No. It's just something you happen to be, just like you also happen to be an insurance salesman or an astronaut or The Goddamn Batman.

Batman never gets laid. Does anybody give a shit? No, because he's too busy going out and being awesome! His sexual preference is almost entirely incidental*. Can you imagine Batman manufactured as a character solely for the purpose of being an exemplar of straightness? How fucking boring would that be?

So here's the thing. It's all well and good to write gay characters. I do on a regular basis. But you can't let what gender they get hard/soggy for be the only thing that defines them. Gay folk are people, not sexual preference incarnate. It irks me especially when a writer does something like, say, write a story in which a homosexual man is married to a woman for no good reason. Ostensibly to hide his sexual preference, but from who? The only people who give a shit anymore need a good hard smack upside the head anyway. Everyone else on the planet just goes with it. Unless you are extremely personally religious there is no need to deny yourself like that in this day and age. And at that point you are the one who needs a smack upside the head.

Just thinking about that story makes me want to punch someone in the throat.

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You guys don't know what it's like to be straight. It's horrible.

* Which is not to say he shouldn't go ahead and get it on with Talia al Ghul. Because rrowr.

Stargates and Dentistry

I went to the dentist yesterday. The hygienist who cleaned my teeth was incredibly cute, and had really pretty eyes. She also didn't harangue me about the caretaking of my teeth, as the other hygienist I've seen used to. All in all, it took a lot of the terror out of going to the dentist. Just thought I'd make a note of that. Considering my rampant flirting and all.

I'm finding myself becoming ever more fond of Stargate: SG1 and its Atlantis spinoff. First off, there's Claudia Black, pictured here. I think she's gorgeous. Secondly, both series have a sense of humor, which I find as something that is sorely lacking in most science fiction shows. The genre has a tendency to take itself so goddamn seriously. Thirdly, the shows seem to be a refuge of sorts for good actors fleeing from their own canceled series. Claudia Black, for instance, played Aeryn Sun on Farscape for some time, a show that I enjoyed the few times I watched it. Recently I caught an episode featuring Morena Baccarin of Firefly fame, and Jewel Staite (also from Firefly, and another personal favorite of mine) has a recurring role as a doctor on SG: Atlantis.

Overall, though I haven't any honest idea about the overarching metaplot of either show, I just enjoy watching the characters interact. There's a bunch of gobbledegook about ancient weapons of mass destruction and suchforth, but I can hang on to the plot of the current episode just fine without having to know what precisely it all means. Shows that are exclusively metaplot-driven--like The X-Files in its later years--drive me crazy, because if you miss just one episode all of a sudden you're completely out of the loop. Characters die, secrets are revealed, people have sex, and when you tune in the next week you're sitting there going, "Why the fuck is the T-1000 suddenly in the FBI?"

It's refreshing to not have to worry about that sort of thing.

----
"Looks like we have a John McClane here."
"...What're you talking about?"
"Die Hard."

Portrait of Grad School as a Catholic Schoolgirl

I'm going to start completely off topic by addressing a commercial I just saw on USA. This commercial (for Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest--which is to say, for the last good PotC) muses on the subject of the "fairest pirate of them all". It notes that Orlando Bloom has the hair (fair enough), that Johnny Depp has the makeup (affirmed by the shot of him in full cannibal-god facepaint), and that Keira Knightley has "the chest".

I adore Keira Knightley (now that there's a year or so of distance between me and the debacle that was At World's End), but nobody is attracted to her because she has boobs. Because she doesn't. The girl is in the same category as Natalie Portman. She's practically concave.

Don't take this to mean I have something against small breasts. I just think it's kind of ridiculous that Mademoiselle Knightley is being advertised as having something that she clearly does not.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

I spoke to my short story prof earlier today. I'd tried once before and failed miserably, and damn near missed her this evening. I caught her just as she was leaving, though, and we had what I think was a fairly productive talk. It basically came down to her apologizing for pressing the point so hard in class, that she was just trying to get me to branch out into different things. Which I can understand, but I also explained to her that writing fantasy and horror is when I have the most fun, and that I find literary fiction to be rather boring, in all honesty.

That led to kind of a strange place, wherein she compared my seeming inability to like literary fiction because of my fondness for high-energy and plot-centric genre material to her inability to like jazz because her musical realm of choice has always been rock. Which makes sense if you squint a little bit and try not to think too hard.

Then things returned to normalcy, and she pointed out that everyone has a tendency to teach to their strengths, and that perhaps she doesn't know enough about the fantasy genre to really help. When she asked for a recommendation for a short story collection, I said I'd bring around Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman and a couple old issues of Fantasy and Science Fiction for her reading pleasure. She seemed to take well to that.

Anyway, the main thing she told me was to not worry about the thesis, that what I write will work for it. Or that they'll make it work, or whatever. The main thing was that I would be able to construct my thesis out of the sort of stuff I like to write. So I suppose I'll hang about for a while and see how things go.

----
"So I figure I'll dally with graduate school for a while longer, make out a bit, see if I can get her to take her knickers off, and if she won't...I'll go find something else to do."
"An easier girl, you mean."
"Yes."
"Men. You're all alike."
"Hey, y'know, sometimes the penis just asserts itself."

This...Might Be A Problem

I'm aware that I haven't made an update in quite some time. There's a perfectly good reason for that, and the reason is this: school started. I've been up to my neck in the beginnings of grad school for the past several weeks, and I can't say I'm altogether fond of it. Things didn't improve today when we had our first workshop session. I wrote one of the pieces that was workshopped, and while the class seemed to think highly of it in general, the professor didn't like it near as much.

Her major beef with it was that it was a genre story. Urban fantasy, specifically. She seems to think that the science fiction and fantasy genres are used as crutches by younger writers, especially those who feel insecure enough in their skill that they want to have something stable (like, say, genre conventions) to shore up the weak spots in their storytelling. She thinks my writing is better than that--which I'm afraid I can't exactly say is flattering, per se.

But that's all well and good. Her opinion is just as valid as mine, which in turn is just as valid as that of the next guy in line, particularly if the next guy in line happens to be an unmedicated drunken schizophrenic. Everyone's entitled to their opinion, and she just happens to opine that genre writing is "lower class".

The problem of the post title is her assertion that one cannot piece together an MFA thesis with "this kind" of writing--by which I assume she means genre writing. This is a problem because I write nothing else. I'll do some moderately realistic/literary stuff when I'm writing for the stage, but beyond that it's all Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. We spent a whole class period in this short story course talking about knowing what our material is, what we work best with and what we like to write...and my material is Weird Shit With Pretty Girls In. That's pretty much all it comes down to. And if I can't compose my thesis using those kinds of stories...I guess I'm not going to have a thesis, then.

So it would seem I'm at an impasse. The main thing that baffles me is that this woman, who was on the selection committee for the program, seemed to think that genre writing was not my standard schtick. Even though the story that I offered up as my writing sample was comic fantasy. It had a thief, and a princess, and a tower with a wizard in it! I can't fathom how it could have come off any other way. Aside from which, I included with the application the required letter talking about myself as a writer. Here is a direct quote from it:

I have a distinct leaning towards genre stories, especially fantasy and speculative fiction. I think that it is in the extreme conditions that these genres so often present that the best, most exciting, and most illuminating stories can be found.

...Does that sound like genre writing is not my standard schtick? I'm beginning to think that someone wasn't paying attention when they accepted my application.

----
It's like when you're watching a play and someone walks on stage naked. You get used to it eventually--it just becomes another costume--but until then you're just sitting there going, "That guy's naked."

Look Who's Back

Well, the wedding was absolutely lovely, even if the call-and-response liturgy was entirely unexpected and gave me the crawling heebie-jeebies when it happened. I've never been to a church service, have never even been that terribly spiritual, and to suddenly find myself in the midst of over a hundred people droning back a monotone reply to the minister from memory was, quite frankly, terrifying.

The sad thing was that I had just started to tear up a little bit from how pretty the whole business was when that happened. After that I sort of disconnected, probably for fear that something of the sort would happen again.

The reception was also quite nice, and I got to run into a friend of mine I hadn't seen in quite a long time. I also discovered that a single glass of chardonnay is enough to put me severely off my balance if I haven't eaten anything. The solution to that was simple, though: eat summat, then drink another glass. It tasted like gasoline, but at least it was chilled.

The rest of the night was fun, frivolity, and ridiculous gyration that may or may not have been construed as dancing by those present. There was supposed to be an after-party, and a couple friends and I waited at the appropriate hotel for a time, but there was a mix-up with the wedding party's limo so it didn't get started until quite late, by which time we had already given up and decided to get some sleep.

So all in all, the whole business was successful, and I did not forget my pants.

----
"Anyway, you didn't look in there, so you don't know. Nobody knows. It's like Schrodinger's Wolfman."

Countdown

So in about ten hours I'll be taking off for the wedding, and I'll be pretty much incommunicado until Sunday evening. You know what that means. That's right, I'm leaving my laptop behind. My precious laptop. Why? Because I have Pepper, and she can do all the things I'd be doing with my laptop anyway (internet, email, music, etc.) while still fitting on my belt. Talk about convenience.

Unless, of course, the hotel doesn't have WiFi. But honestly, the piece of crap hotel I stayed in earlier this year when I went to the regional American College Theatre Festival in Texas had WiFi, and that place was practically falling apart. It was seriously awful. Their idea of a continental breakfast was cold cereal dispensed from weird tupperware nozzles, a styrofoam cup of a strange juice cocktail with fruit chunks floating in it, and a slice of bread that you had the choice of rendering into toast before smearing it with peanut butter or jelly. Classy, right?

Also, before I forget, I mentioned The Accidental Survivors recently, and a couple of the guys from the podcast, Rob and Fraser, actually came through and dropped a line. That is, in my opinion, quite classy. Fraser was also kind enough to offer a slight correction as regards the Survivors group makeup: "While it is true that there are four Canadians (though we are trying to get Chris deported), Chuck is very, very American."

So it would seem that my alien theory has been debunked. Oh well. I should probably get some small amount of sleep here soon, lest I find myself too groggy in the morning to pack. That would be bad, as I might forget to include something important.

Like, you know, pants.

----
"I am going to make this pencil disappear..."

A New Look

Things are looking positively 16-bit around here, now, I must admit. Similar, just 16-bit. Part of the reason was because I wanted to see if I could do it. I'd always been kind of sketchy at spriting (and both the d20 and the katana are indeed sprites, just blown up without any sort of sizing algorithm to keep their pixelated look) and I wanted to see if I was any better at it with a direct reference.

That's a fancy way of saying that I wanted to see if I could trace a picture with a computer, I suppose.

The other reason was that I had picked up those images from elsewhere on the interweb, and I figured maybe it was time to make them completely my own. I'm sure whoever took those photos would much prefer to keep them for their own use, and who am I to argue? Also, you have to admit, there is something intrinsically geeky about not only having a d20 for your profile picture, but a 32x32 d20 sprite. And I kinda like that.

In any case, I'm happy with the new look. It came out much better than I expected.

Another addition to the page is on the right-hand side, directly below the Delectable Webcomicry section, Ye Olde Podcastes. Ever since I got Pepper (the name of my iPod Touch, so called after Iron Man's Pepper Potts, even though it has a picture of Kaylee Frye* as its wallpaper at the moment)--an incident that coincided with the release of the Penny Arcade game in the Dungeons and Dragons Podcast--I've been listening to podcasts nonstop, and I figured that it was about time to share the wealth.

The D&D Podcast is precisely what it sounds like: all D&D 4e, all the time. I tuned in to it for the joint Penny Arcade/PvP introductory game, which was all kinds of hilarious even if it wasn't precisely my style of gaming.

Horror on the Orient Express, at www.yog-sothoth.com, is an actual play podcast of a group of very British folk playing through the Call of Cthulhu adventure of the same name. It certainly has its moments, though I'm only one episode in thus far listening.

Master Plan is one that I've recently picked up. It's a podcast about game design, and all the pitfalls and trappings thereof. To its credit, it gave me the idea for the game (no, this is a new one) I'm working to make on the side. I'm actually working on two at the moment, though my experiences as a fledgling game designer will have to wait for a different post. Anyway, the actual episodes of Master Plan are quite short, the longest coming in at thirty minutes.

The Accidental Survivors is four Canadians (at least, I get the impression that they're all Canadians--they might be aliens) sitting around having a drink and talking about gaming. Their topic changes from episode to episode, but it's almost always informative and entertaining.

The X-Play Daily Video Podcast differs from all the rest of these in that it actually has video, which is kind of nice. I always found X-Play entertaining (perhaps the last entertaining thing on G4...that network needs to die) but was never able to catch new episodes. The ability to watch their reviews on the go is a definite plus.

So that's pretty much it as regards updates. If I can, I'll be back later to talk a bit about my thoughts on tabletop game design. Because I'm sure you'll be wanting to hear.

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* If you don't know who Kaylee Frye is, you should be goddamned ashamed of yourself. She is only the most adorable mechanic to ever grace any screen, big or small. Go watch Firefly. NOW.

"It's Splug!"

Of Iron Men and Pepper Potts

So I've just recently returned from my viewing of Iron Man, and I have to say I was surprised by it, for the following reasons specifically:

1. It didn't suck.
2. It was awesome.

Let us be honest for a second. As much as I used to be a Marvel fanboy (now fully reformed and on the DC side of things), Marvel movies don't have a habit of turning out that well. Stop and think for a second. The Punisher. X-Men 3. Daredevil. I haven't seen Spider Man 3, but I understand that it sucks pretty spectacularly, too. So needless to say, I didn't have the highest of hopes for this one. I was never even particularly fond of Iron Man--I just happened to pick up some of his trivia by way of tangential geekdom.

What I discovered when I saw Iron Man was a film that was structured very tightly plotwise--every scene had a purpose to it. There was no meandering, no tedious exposition on superpowers and the place of heroes in the world. You start out with a "hero" who's a weapons manufacturing magnate with a blood alcohol level high enough his bodily fluids could be used as jet fuel, and you damn well go from there, holding on to the plot by your fingernails as it swerves periodically into oncoming traffic.

The other thing Iron Man had going for it was Virginia "Pepper" Potts, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and pictured above. I now have a serious fanboy crush on Pepper, because she is adorable. I suspect that I am also a big Gwyneth Paltrow fan as a consequence, but that's fine by me.

The world could use more 5'10" tall pretty.

----
Let's face it. This isn't the worst thing you've caught me doing.

Review: Exalted, Second Edition

Imagine for a moment that you're in the frigid north, the coniferous forest drear with the pallor of winter. In a clearing, you see a circle of fire. Inside that circle of fire a one-eyed sorceress glowing like the noontide sun and wielding a golden seven-section staff fights a losing battle against an imposing man in heavy armor wielding a massive sword forged of jade. Then, looking beyond them, you find two massive armies clashing in all-out pitched battle, blade to blade. On the left are the forces of humanity, the military might of a small frozen kingdom, and on the right are the terrible and beautiful armies of the Fair Folk, resplendent in armor of gossamer spidersilk, some mounted on shrieking birds, others on griffins screaming as they swoop through the air, and others still shepherding six fierce, bellowing dragons with jeweled scales.

Then the ground erupts beneath the faerie army as a twenty-foot clockwork suit of power armor piloted by a demigod martial artist bursts from an age-old hidden chamber below, uproots a tree to use as a club, and attacks the dragons single-handedly.

Sound insane? Sound awesome? Sound both? That was a selection from the climax of the only Exalted campaign I've ever played in, and it was insane over-the-top magical kung-fu fun. So when I went to read Exalted, Second Edition, there was a lot of good will for it to draw upon. Happily, it didn't disappoint.

For the uninitiated, Exalted is a game in which players take on the role of Exalts--the chosen of the gods patterned after great heroes of old like Heracles, Perseus, and Gilgamesh--and go forth to save Creation and bring the awesome. Bringing the awesome comes easily to Exalts, and is even mechanically supported by the game. It's the part about saving Creation that's going to be tricky.

The world of Exalted, or Creation as it's known, is beset on all sides by terrible foes. You have the Fair Folk, who are fairies and elves rendered old-school style as dream-devouring glamorous terrors that hail from the unshaped Wyld outside of Creation. Then you have the various fallen Primordials, the original shapers of Creation usurped by lesser gods with the help of the original Exalts, who are divided among the Neverborn, those Primordials killed and eternally imprisoned in the Underworld, forever seeking to bring the rest of the world to the same oblivion they have found, and the Yozis, those banished to the demon-world of Malfeas and perpetual torment. The Yozis don't tend to set foot in Creation often, but their cousins the Neverborn have powerful ghost-lieutenants called Deathlords that enter the world of mortals and do their bidding, spreading death and decay wherever they walk.

On the more mortal end of things, the largest organized government in Creation is on the brink of collapse due to the sudden disappearance of its head of state, the Scarlet Empress. Their once-powerful defenses now useless without a powerful potentate to operate them, thieves and brigands are growing bolder, as are the darker things beyond Creation's veil.

And the gods who exalt mortals in the first place? They're not going to do anything about any of this because they're hopelessly addicted to the Games of Divinity, which they play at all times in their Jade Pleasure Dome in the celestial continent-city of Yu-Shan. So it all comes down to the Exalted to set things to right in Creation, which will obviously be no easy feat.

So obviously the setting is one of the most notable aspects of Exalted, presenting a broad array of locales and potential conflicts for the players to get involved in. The chapter that covers Creation is basically candy for any GM who likes to have fluff and pretty visuals to use, which certainly includes me.

Mechanically, the game seems to be constructed pretty smoothly. Exalted uses White Wolf's Storyteller System, in which a player attempting an action rolls a number of ten-sided dice equal to the character's appropriate attribute score plus their appropriate ability score, counting those that come up seven or greater as successes. If enough successes are rolled to meet or exceed the difficulty number set by the GM, the action succeeds. It worked perfectly well for its previous edition, and I'm sure it will continue to serve elegantly.

Second Edition's combat resolution works differently from most games I have played in, however, as it doesn't operate on an initiative system. Instead, battle is measured in ticks of time, and each action has a speed in ticks. A character takes an action, and then must wait that number of ticks before they can act again. It seems in some ways to be much more fluid than an initiative system, and perhaps more realistic, but I don't see that it is in any way superior to rolling initiative. Just different. It does fit the high-speed kung-fu style of Exalted, though, and that is very important.

Stunt dice, mentioned earlier as the mechanic that encourages players and characters to bring the awesome, are extra dice awarded to rolls with particularly impressive descriptions to back them up. So instead of saying, "I hit him", the player is mechanically encouraged to say, "I slam my gauntleted fist across his face with such force that nearby trees shake from the shock" because they'll gain an advantage. Interestingly enough, this makes doing awesome things easier than doing mundane things, which seems to work perfectly with the flavor of the setting.

Something else that sets Exalted apart mechanically is its charms, magical techniques only available to Exalts and other supernatural beings that allow them to perform extraordinary feats. Each charm is linked to an ability, meaning there are melee charms, dodge charms, athletics charms, etc. These form the core of the Exalted's power, and creative use of charms can be helpful or even vital to a character's survival. Second Edition adds Excellencies to the mix, three basic charms expressly used for improving dice pools related to the ability they're taken for. Their flexibility is welcome, particularly the Melee Excellencies, which can be used to improve attacks and parries both.

The most significant improvement over its previous edition is in the way dodging and parrying are handled. In Exalted, First Edition, a player had two basic choices when their turn came around. They could defend, holding a dodge or parry in reserve and not acting, or they could attack. A sketchy third option was to split the dice pool between defense and attack, but in my experience that effectively crippled both. Both pools would be reduced to somewhere in the neighborhood of three to four dice, and for several enemies that wasn't even enough to get past the opposition's armor. Which meant that players either defended perpetually and never damaged foes or attacked, leaving themselves wide open to a counter unless they invested heavily in dodge charms, which in turn caused a constant drain on a character's essence (magical power used to activate charms). In short, it didn't work very well.

In Second Edition, a character's defense is determined by static values based on their attributes and abilities that an enemy's attack must meet to land. So there is no longer a defense action that a character must take to avoid getting their ass kicked. Instead, attacks and other actions incur a minor defense penalty that temporarily lowers the DV until the character's next action, modeling to what degree the action leaves the character open to attack. Which means that the player doesn't have to decide whether to defend or not, but how much to compromise that defense by how they act. This seems significantly easier to deal with to me.

There were only a few things that I didn't care for in this new rendition of Exalted, and those were layout-based. As always, any company professionally publishing textbook-sized RPG rulesets ought to hire a proofreader. Aside from the handful of simple typos, there was the significant strangeness of the description of cudgels and clubs in the equipment listing being precisely the same as that of slashing swords. The stat block was still appropriate to the weapon, so this seems an anomaly at absolute worst. The index was not a great help to me, though it does have a complete listing of all the charms in alphabetical order. I could see that coming in handy. There were one or two pieces of artwork that didn't quite live up to the standards of the rest, which tended to oscillate between serviceable and bloody awesome. My particular favorite is the full-body illustration of Arianna, the book's canon example of a Twilight caste Solar. But then again, I've always had a weakness for female spellcasters.

There are a number of other new and interesting things that I haven't the time or inclination to go into (like the social and mass combat rules--both of which are interesting, but I don't see myself using either very often anytime soon). I haven't even mentioned that the setting fluff that segues between chapters assumes the form of well-illustrated full-color comics. It's a full 396 pages without the index and the character sheet in the back, so covering all of it in detail would be damn near impossible. Suffice to say that I am immensely impressed by the setting in particular and the fashion in which the mechanics support it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a Creation to save.

----
"Would you rather times were better, or simply more boring?"

A Look Ahead

So I now have three things in the queue to write reviews for, if only I could thoroughly finish any of them. Of course one, the core book for Exalted, Second Edition, I only got yesterday, so I at least have an excuse of some sort for that one. Though judging from the setting material I've read thus far (and what little I know of how conflict resolution works in it) I expect I will be treating it favorably.

The second, of course, is Final Fantasy XII, which I have been having great fun with despite running into a few gamestalling moments along the way. The main reason I haven't gotten around to writing a review for this one is because the game is so bloody long. I'm over thirty hours into it and I suspect that that is maybe halfway through. It's positively mindblowing. And epic. I'd try to combine the two words, but I suspect that it would come out sounding like something a particularly gifted courtesan would be able to do after rigorously practicing for several years. Which is awesome in its own way, but not the kind of awesome that abounds in FFXII.

The third is a little Japanese doujin game called Perfect Cherry Blossom I downloaded. It's an incredibly pretty game, aurally and visually, but it's also a hard as fuck vertical scrolling shooter in the spirit of the Raiden games. I really like it, but trying to actually get through the whole thing is practically an exercise in masochism. ...Though it is very, very pretty masochism, which I suppose partially makes up for it.

So those are things I have planned just at the moment. As soon as I finish one or all of these I'll start doing my writeups of them and post them here. It's good practice.

----
Jim thinks you're all pretty fucking lucky he's here.

At A Touch

So I got a new toy a few days ago as part of a package graduation present (which also included my first very own suit, in which I look rather like Adrian Monk, but I digress). Said toy was an iPod Touch (pictured at right), which basically amounts to an iPhone without the phone. I've got almost my entire music collection on it (which doesn't quite come to two gigabytes with 424 songs), an episode of Firefly ("Out of Gas", if you're wondering), three audio podcasts (the Penny Arcade D&D 4e game as released so far), one video podcast (the most recent X-Play one), and five photos (in order: Jewel Staite, Keira Knightley, Zooey Deschanel, Emmy Rossum, and Natalie Portman). With all that, I haven't even broken the halfway point in terms of its eight-gig storage. It is a glorious bit of gadgetry, one that I have resolved to carry with me at all times. I even bought it a dapper leather case with a screen protector and belt clip to keep it from physical harm.

I'm also able to plug a little FM transmitter that I got years ago with my first MP3 player into it so I can listen to my iPod over the radio in the car. It's like a PDA that on which I just happen to be able to listen to music, watch videos, and access the internet through a WiFi connection.

Honestly, with gizmos, who needs girls?

----
"Ship like this'll be with you 'til the day you die."
"Because it's a deathtrap, sir."

An Echo Of An Echo

I've never been fond of how blogs tend to parrot news by linking it, and that on occasion such links actually turn out to be the first in a chain one must follow to finally find the actual bloody story. I've resolved to never just link a story here, but I think I'm going to make an exception.

Florida Bar Wants Jack Thompson Disbarred For Ten Years.

This brought a bit of a smile to my face, even if the verdict is only a suggestion. For those of you who don't recall Jack Thompson (AKA Wacko Jacko AKA Yack Thompson) he's the Florida lawyer who has been on on a righteous, religion-fueled crusade against the video game industry and its "murder simulators". Read here for more specifics (that is, so long as the article hasn't been strewn with graffiti).

See, the sad thing is that Thompson has some good points. Nobody wants a fucking ten-year-old playing Grand Theft Auto IV. As little as I happen to like ten-year-olds, kids don't need to see that shit. It will probably fuck them up if they do, and that's how you wind up with adolescent convicted murderers. Films are regulated by law. It is illegal to sell an R-rated film to someone under seventeen. There are no such regulations for video games. There's the ESRB, but all they do is offer suggestions. What effectiveness they have comes from the willingness of video game retailers to abide by those suggestions, a willingness which is often sorely lacking. If you could make an easy extra forty bucks at no cost to yourself by ignoring someone's strongly-worded suggestion, you'd probably do it, too.

So he's right, there needs to be some kind of official body that oversees the rating of video games. If you give the ESRB legislative backup to legitimate their ratings and thereby make it illegal to sell M-rated games to little kids, the problem would probably be solved right there (so long, of course, as the federal involvement was reasonable and overseen by people who know what the fuck they're doing). With that done, video games would pose no more threat than, say, Lord of the G-Strings does on late-night cable.

That's shit nobody needs to see, but I digress.

Thompson's problem is that all his nutjobbery--from denouncing The Sims 2 for lechery because a third party made a nude patch for it to promising to donate ten thousand dollars to charity if someone created a video game based on his Modest Video Game Proposal then balking when someone actually did--has obscured his actual intent. People just think of him as a whackjob nowadays, and his behavior at his court hearing for misconduct is cementing that. It doesn't help that in the "lengthy objection" Thompson seems to (if I'm reading it correctly) compare himself to not only Jesus Christ and John the Baptist, but to the Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

Bloody hell, that man has problems.

----
It is a little goblin with a big-ass crossbow.

Grues, Games, and Gainful Employment

So I now have requests in to several individuals to allow me to use them as professional references when I attempt to get a job this summer, and I'm just waiting to hear back before I start filling out online applications.

Seems like the old "sidle up to the place of employment with the classified ad clutched in hand" method of job-hunting seems to have fallen by the wayside. On the one hand I'm a bit disappointed by that, but on the other I'm glad to be saved the trouble.

In any case, I've got two projects that will also be keeping my attention for the rest of the summer, along with (hopefully) my job. The first of them is a bit of interactive fiction that I started last summer, but put on hiatus when school started kicking my ass. I picked it back up again yesterday and added a few more rooms on to it, along with at least one instant game over for the player.

In my experience, IF enthusiasts seem to like those. At least, the third or fourth time I was strangled by the janitor in The Lurking Horror, that was the conclusion that I drew. Strangely enough, it had to be the time I went to try to catch the snippet of the game where you realize he didn't blink the entire bloody game that I figured out how to beat him. Go figure.

The other project is (at the suggestion of a friend) to write my own role-playing game. I've been working on the opening fluff since yesterday, and I've got a good solid four pages or so of it (single-spaced, at that). I'm liking it. It's going to have some nice layers to it, I think. Or at least as many layers as Western steampunk fantasy can have. After I'm done writing this I'm going to post a chunk of the fluff on Literary Bushido, just for the hell of it.

So between those two and the job I'll (optimistically) get, it seems I'll have a fairly productive summer. And hey, one of my reference hopefuls just emailed me and said that he would. Just one more to go before I start putting in applications.

Then I will be gainfully employed. How about that?

----
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus was one of the primary reasons I actually put down the money for a PlayStation 2, so I was hoping for one helluva gaming experience when I finally popped it into the disc tray. Fortunately for me, I wasn't disappointed.

Colossus is like if Princess Zelda and the Prince of Persia, as representatives of their respective franchises, were to get utterly shitfaced at some shinding for the video game elite and wind up having incredibly hot, totally unprotected sex on the couch in the back room. Then, in the morning, they find they're both incredibly embarrassed, vow never to speak of that night again, and return promptly home.

Then six weeks later, Zelda discovers she's pregnant, and Link flips out and leaves her because he's been off questing for the past eight months. So, in grand romantic comedy style, Zelda and the Prince wind up together because of twue wuv, and when the little tyke is born they give the Cloverfield monster a call and ask him to be the godfather, which twists the kid's development in a serious way*.

The baby, if you follow the extended and painful metaphor, is Shadow of the Colossus.

In Colossus, you play as Wander, a seemingly archetypal young male heroic sort, who has come to the cursed, unpeopled land that serves as the game's setting in an effort to bring back to life a young woman named Mono. Wander's relationship to Mono is never made clear in-game. Is she his wife? Girlfriend? Sister? Mother, by dint of time-traveling weirdness? Does she owe him money? You never bloody find out. All you know is that she was sacrificed because she had a cursed destiny, and the story (for the sake of simplicity) seems to leave it at that.

Anyway, Wander arrives with Mono's body in a shrine, and there is given instructions by a voice from above calling itself Domin to slay the sixteen great colossi in this cursed land to complete the spell that will resurrect Mono.

So Wander sets out, astride his very talented stair-climbing horse Agro, to kill the terrible beasties and bring his girlfriend/sister/debtor back to life**.

As implied by the anecdote at the beginning of this review, the game plays like a cross between The Legend of Zelda and The Prince of Persia. Wander has a decidedly Link-like arsenal (a bow and a very European sword) but has some very Prince-like moves (the ability to grab hold of ledges and shimmy along them, for instance). His animations are very fluid, transitioning easily from one to the next.

Fluidity, however, does not imply grace. Wander has a tendency to stumble as he runs--a purely aesthetic addition, as it doesn't actually affect the distance he traverses, but it makes considerable sense. If you were hauling ass away from a sixty-foot titan that uses chunks of buildings for armor, you'd probably stumble a bit, too. Also, he freely flails about in grand ragdoll style as the colossi try to shrug off the deathgrip he uses to scale their furry hides.

The controls that make Wander do all these things--jump, shimmy, climb, and stab--are fairly intuitive. I'd hardly any experience at all with the PS2 controller when I began to play, but had little trouble in picking it up. There's even a button specifically used for targeting the colossi, which is really bloody sensible if you think about it, seeing how there are no other enemies in the entire game. I will warn you, however, that your right index finger will feel like it's about to break off from holding down R1, which is used for climbing. Also, it would've been nice if the jump button had not been the same as the mount button. There were a number of spare controls left, so I don't see why that wasn't possible, but having the same button do both leads to tedious moments when you're trying to mount Agro but instead wind up hopping beside him like an imbecile.

Riding Agro is something else to be considered. Agro is very much a character on his own terms, and acts considerably realistically as regards general horsiness. What this means is that any and all commands you issue Agro are more or less suggestions, which Agro may or may not take. He tends to be fairly agreeable, but he certainly isn't Epona. It takes him some time to respond to kicks that prompt speed and to tugs on the reins, which is frustrating initially but actually turns out to be incredibly useful as that same horsey intelligence means that you don't have to control Agro directly to keep him from running smack into walls--a definite bonus in one colossus battle where you have to ride him backwards in order to shoot the massive sandworm chasing after you.

This game pretty much redefined "epic" for the entire industry, I'd have to say.

Unlike Zelda and Prince of Persia, Wander gets no equipment upgrades and learns no special moves during the course of the game. He has everything he's ever going to have at the start of the game, and it's up to the player to make the best use of the lot of it. This basically means that each colossus battle is a puzzle resolved by divining how to make use of the tools and tactics at Wander's disposal to bring down the beast. You'd think that would get old fairly quickly, but let me assure you that it doesn't. Each colossus brings something new and entertaining to the table, keeping the game's central conceit from getting stale.

The game is short, clocking in at around nine hours, but that seems to be a good length for it. It manages to finish out the story (albeit in an anime-ambiguous sort of way) and make its exit before it wears out its welcome. Those nine hours, unfortunately, don't have a great deal of replay value. Once you've figured out the schtick that'll take down each of the sixteen colossi, there's not much left to do. There's not really anything left to do. The game is composed wholly of pretty landscapes, epic boss fights, and dark, bittersweet storytelling.

To sum up, I enjoyed this game immensely, even if its resolution left me as emotionally confused as a budding bisexual schoolgirl. The attention to detail is extraordinary, and everything from the colossi's models to the voice acting is excellently executed. Certainly worth the purchase if you're a freak like me who is only just now getting around to playing games released in 2005.

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* Sadly, it would not surprise me if there was a fanfic somewhere whose plot unfolds in precisely this fashion. The internet is a scary, sad place.
** If you're more the thoughtful sort (i.e. not Wander) you'd be asking serious questions at this point. Questions like "Why am I doing what a voice in a skylight tells me to?", "Why are there no people around here?", and "You want me to kill fucking what?"

Zen and the Art of Magic

I decided today (or yesterday, I suppose, depending on how you look at it) to go apply for a job at a nearby newspaper that I'd seen advertised. It seemed to be the ideal sort of thing for me: sitting at a desk taking calls from people wanting to buy classified ads. Nice, clean work environment, a steady paycheck, and I'd be working for a publication--being a writer, that's always a bonus.

Unfortunately, when I checked their classifieds today/yesterday (it's almost three in the morning, I'm not being too strange) I found that they were no longer advertising for that position. It makes me worry that it was already taken. I'm going to go there and make sure, of course, but I'm not holding out much hope. Hope has a nasty way of coming back and biting you in situations like this.

I've looked at a few other jobs. None of them appeal to me as much as the newspaper gig, but some of them might be serviceable. I'll just have to see how things turn out.

To deal with the disappointment, and also that I might have an activity while I waited to grow tired enough to go to bed, I took all the new Magic cards I've gotten over the past week or so and constructed a deck. It's blue/white, and its base is the deck that I threw together for last Friday's sealed deck tournament. I took out some of the things that just didn't function well within it and tried to limit it to being decent at only a few tasks. What I wound up with was a goodly number of denial tactics, spells that do unpleasant things to my opponent's creatures, and a small horde of my own creatures (almost all of whom have some manner of evasion ability, like flying).

The weird thing about the whole process is that I got very calm, very focused, and very content while I was sorting through what cards were going to go in and what ones were coming out. There was some serious Zen shit going on, and I have no idea why. I just sort of blocked out everything else, and an hour and a half or so later I had a deck that I think is actually pretty good, considering. It needs deck protectors, of course, because I think there's summat like three or four rare cards and two foil cards in there. While I may not be hardcore like some folk (I don't, for instance, drop $360 to buy four copies of a complete set) but I still like to protect the cards from accidental drink spillage and suchforth.

I don't know when I'm actually going to get to use my new deck. I suppose, like with the job opening, I'll just have to see.

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I don't know if anyone's ever slit their wrists by determined papercutting, but if I have to spend several hours a day stuffing inserts into newspapers I might just be the first.

Misanthropy and Wal-Mart

I was at Wal-Mart a couple days ago buying a copy of Final Fantasy XII and a sack of hamburger buns when it suddenly occurred to me that I positively adore the self-checkout option. Perhaps it was because I had to wade past the crowd of small children raising funds at the front doors, or it could be that I simply wasn't in a terrifically congenial mood, but I felt the need to come up with something to explain this sudden and inexplicable affection for automated purchasing. What I conjured I believe I shall dub the Strong Misanthropic Principle, and it reads thusly:

"The fewer people I have to interact with in order to get my necessary shit done, the better."

It's fairly simple, straightforward, and to the point. None of this weird vagueness of meaning associated with the regular old anthropic principle and all its myriad variants. Of course, the various anthropic principles (strong and weak) could all use some consideration at some point, because I have some very pointed, and probably very unique, views on precisely how wrong the lot of them are.

I have pointed views on lots of things, however. Honestly, it's a surprise that I don't just stab people when I turn around in a crowded room.

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Balthier? What's that philanderer doing here? I'm supposed to kill him, not these imperial scum!

Friday Night Magic

Well, tonight I played Magic: The Gathering for the first time in about four years. I actually did better than I thought I would, oddly enough. It was a sealed-deck tournament, wherein each participant got a tournament pack (45 spells and 30 basic lands) and two booster packs (15 cards each) and composed a deck on the spot. I wound up playing blue/white, primarily because I had some nasty blue spells and one big white Angel, Twilight Shepherd, that was a 5/5 with flying, didn't need to tap to attack, would come back from the dead one time after she was killed, and had really pretty artwork. She was epic, and I managed to (somehow) bring her out in almost every game I played in. A definite gamewinner, for certain.

The competitors were not a fairly diverse lot, gender-wise. There were nine men, including myself, and one incredibly intrepid (and cute) woman who I think was a few months pregnant and not shy about her decolletage. I expect she got a distraction bonus during gameplay.

See what I did there? That was French. I could've just said "boobs", but I went the classy route.

Anyway, in the first round I was up against Mr. All Business, who had a habit of using as few words as humanly possible to express his thoughts. Take this exchange, for example, which took place after our first game (each round was best of three games):

Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "...I'm sorry?"
Mr. AB: "Draw or play first?"
Me: "I'm not sure if I know what you're asking."
Mr. AB: "Do you want to draw a card first, or play first?"

At that point I managed to divine that he was asking (since I'd lost the previous game) whether I wanted to go first or second, as the first player to go doesn't get to draw a card. It only took three tries. This habit didn't irk me so much as make me feel uncomfortable. It was terribly impersonal. Also, when I won the second game we played, he started picking his cards up before I actually went through the motions of taking my turn and issuing the winning attack and whatnot. It was a little thing, but it was kind of rude.

So anyway, after that I went on to my next opponent, The Rules Lawyer, who was built like a bloody football player. I got my ass handed to me two games in a row by this bloke, who was significantly friendlier than Mr. All Business but also happened to be brutally in command of all the minutiae of the rulebook. An example:

The RL: "So I attack with my 2/2 creature, here."
Me: "Okay. I block with my 2/2. They both die."
The RL: "Nope, see I activate this other creature's ability, which removes my creature from play until the end of the turn, but damage was already dealt, so your creature dies from lethal damage but the damage doesn't affect my creature because it's out of play."
Me: "O...kay. Shit."

He pulled that kind of shit both games. Apparently he'd been on the serious tournament circuit and that's where you pick this stuff up. It was beyond me, though, and my knowledge of the mechanics was so rusty I was in no position to argue. After we were through playing, he asked if he could leaf through my deck just to see what I'd put in it, then he took a look at the other cards I wasn't using. He promptly informed me that here are several cards that I should put in my deck, and also I should have been playing black and something because I had some wicked awesome black spells.

I told him I always went black back whenever I used to play, and that I figured I should try something new. He shrugged and seemed to think I should've gone black/some other color anyway.

My third opponent was The Aging Newbie. He was in his late fifties, looked like, or maybe he was in his early fifties and did a lot of drugs early on. Distinct possibility. Anyway, he only started playing a month or so ago (as had the token woman) and was still a bit sketchy on the rules. I helped him along as best I could in spots, though there was one bit of advice I was going to give him afterward that I forgot to. He was always very nervous about attacking, even when he had six or so creatures and I only had three or four. Sure, he would've lost some of them, but they would've taken a few of my defenders down with them. In any case, he was the nicest of the lot. The rest of them were apparently just in it to win, but The Aging Newbie seemed to want to sit down and play a game, which was refreshing. I won both games I played against him, but I think he took it in stride.

Most of the people there seemed to have lost track of the fact that Magic is, in point of fact, a game. Maybe half of us actually seemed to be having fun, and the rest were crouched vulturelike over their cards with determined grimaces. They were the ones who filled out the top four at the end of the third round and got to continue. The other six of us hung around long enough for the random drawing to determine which two got special foil cards, then sidled on out into the night.

For some perspective, by way of listening I found out that one of the guys what didn't make it to the final four makes a habit of buying complete sets of Magic cards. But he doesn't just buy a single complete copy of a set, oh no: he buys four. So he can be sure to have four copies of each card in the set for deckbuilding purposes. That's insane.

It was an interesting experience, all told. I'm just sort of sorry that it was so gorram competitive. I mean, I went in there knowing it was a tournament, and that practically by definition there would be some manner of prize at the end, but I didn't know anyone would be so bloody dead-set on winning. I guess it was too much to expect a pleasant and sociable game with people I hardly even knew.

In any case, I think I've got Magic out of my system now, at least for the time being. It's one thing playing a game friendly-like, and quite another playing for fame, fortune, and foil cards. I'll take friendly-like anyday, and I even began to feel partway through the tourney that perhaps I should have spent my evening with friends instead of with complete strangers. I think I would have felt somewhat more fulfilled by that.

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Well, ah'll be Gosh Durned. Ain't this a fine how-do-ya-do.

Review: Dwarf Fortress

So a few days ago I downloaded a freeware game called Dwarf Fortress. I had heard interesting things about it, so I decided to give it a shot, not expecting altogether much. What I discovered was an incredibly and strangely addictive game that is an ingenious exercise in real-time strategy and low-level artificial intelligence.

The game starts out by naming and fractally rendering a world. This isn't just the little swatch you're going to build your soon-to-be village, on, however. This is the entire. Bloody. World. It simulates corrosion by running water, raises a few mountains, busts out some greenery, and suddenly there's landscaping. Then it goes through and names each individual location (I believe in the world belonging to the screenshot above there is a Swamp of Despair or some such) and determines where the civilizations of this new world make their homes. It then (evidently) generates legends and folklore for the world. The whole process takes around ten minutes.

Now would be a good point to mention the graphics involved, or the lack thereof. As you can tell in the screenshot above, everything is rendered in colored ASCII characters. The whole business was baffling as hell to start out with--I could barely tell plants and trees from grass--but after a while you get used to it, and the interface begins to make more sense. And the time that would've been spent on graphics has apparently been rerouted into the gameplay itself.

After the world is generated, you choose a place to plop down your group of intrepid pioneers, and then you're off. You have a handful of dwarves (represented by smiley faces of various colors, depending on their profession) and some limited supplies, and the name of the game is civilization...that is, the forging thereof.

I set my first fortress by and in a sandstone mountain. This may not have been the brightest thing, but it certainly made digging by my miner (who has officially reached "legendary" as his mining skill) easier. Unfortunately, it also meant that there was almost no proper stone to build things with, so I had to make do with wood for a good long while as supplied by my woodcutter and shaped by my carpenter.

Here's the thing, though: each dwarf isn't defined merely by their profession and randomly-generated name. Each one has an array of skills (which may or may not be related to their profession) and a collection of likes, dislikes, and thoughts that can be accessed by selecting them. Their thoughts in particular can serve as a guide for improvements to the settlement. And it's always amusing to take someone as useless as a jeweler and turn them into the campus cook.

Speaking of such, each dwarf must be fed, clothed, and otherwise taken care of lest they become grumpy, fall ill, or even die. This is easier than it sounds, however. My hamlet (that's its official title) has a little over thirty dwarves, and there have been no complaints about hunger. Early on there were problems with food rotting in the stores, but that was taken care of by setting aside an area for trash outside the mountain.

After the first year of game-time, traders begin stopping by the village from other civilizations. Most of the traders that have come by Diamondcastles (that's the name of my hamlet translated from dwarfish--kind of poncy, I know, but what can you do?) have been elves, who are literally tree-hugging hippies. They refuse to take any goods manufactured from wood. Since I only recently struck upon a vein of workable stone, there hasn't been much actual trade, so I can't really speak to that aspect of the game.

Similarly, I can't speak to the combat/military aspect, as I only today set up a group of individuals whose collective profession was literally "peasant" as recruits, and they're a ridiculous little lot. There's four of them, and their job is (or would be, if the dwarves actually spoke) to stroll around outside the mountain and shout, "Four o'clock and all's well!" Also, the late game in which the village becomes a true bastion of short, bearded culture protected by siege engines, and the--well, intergame, for lack of a better word--in which a lone dwarf strikes out from the fallen ruins of said bastion of culture to set up another somewhere else in the world are equally mysterious to me.

To say the absolute least, there is a shit-tonne of content in this game, and the dwarves behave in surprising and sometimes very human ways. One threw a party yesterday around the statue in the main hall (represented by the white omega symbol above).

I have only two problems with this little gem: its interface, which is not the most intuitive thing in the world, and the complete micromanagement clusterfuck gameplay must become once the fortress becomes large enough. The interface is a series of menus accessed by keypresses (as seen above), which wouldn't be so bad if all the menus behaved more or less the same. Most of them seem to want to be off in the corner playing by themselves instead of joining the rest of the class, however, so it's a bit of a crapshoot as to whether any given menu will operate with ease. Unless there's some mechanic to take the "micro" out of "micromanagement", which happens to be a major part of the early game, the late game has to get indescribably complex. I have yet to get there, however, so it's hard to tell.

In any case, I would heartily recommend this game, as it is by and far worth the download. But only play it if you happen to have several hours to spare. You wouldn't think that watching smiley faces scooting around would be that engaging, but the second time I sat down to it I lost two and a half hours. After all, those smiley faces have gotta eat.

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I'll build a well when I get to it, dammit!

Concerning Colossi

It has been a fortuitous day, today. Remember that PlayStation 2 I've been chatting about for so long? Well, I was finally able to buy the bloody thing. I got it set up and spent a little under two hours playing Shadow of the Colossus, and the whole business rocks on toast in a serious kind of way. Once I've played a good chunk of Colossus (and potentially beaten it) I'll post a review.

Game reviews are actually something I hope to make a regular part of this blog. I would be utterly content to review games for a living, if it was at all possible. Unfortunately, I suspect that those jobs happen to be extremely competitive. Lots of folk want to write about video games for a living.

In any case, my next post will most likely be a review, though not of Colossus. It will cover another (freeware) game, Dwarf Fortress, that has seized my attention in a very violent way and doesn't seem to want to let it go. I'll never know what precisely makes ASCII games so addictive. I suppose because the graphics are so bloody simple that a lot more time gets spent on the actual game. That makes a kind of sense, really. The game industry ought to be informed.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've a minor domestic crisis to attend to.

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There can only be one...kind of.

...It's Over?

So I took my last final exam as an undergraduate today. ...Last final exam? I think this may be the only case in which that phrase is not actually redundant. Anyway, I was terribly worried about it, mostly because I hadn't really gotten a chance to properly study for it, but it all seems to've turned out all right.

I won't be getting to walk for graduation this evening. I have a show to do, and it would kind of put them in a bad way if I wasn't there. Main character and all that. I'm not especially fussed about it, though. The only thing I'd miss would be the sense of closure I'd get from it. I've been at this malarkey for four years, the absolute least I should get to do is prance around in a dress^H^H^H^H^Hrobe and mortarboard for a bit and have people clap for me. But what can you do?

I'm not sure what I expected, with graduation. What I would've liked was for some sort of Highlander-styled academic Quickening to take place, with lightning jagging down from the sky and infusing my jerking body with the sublime power of a Bachelor of the Arts, but I don't think that Real Life has a budget for special effects. Which is a shame, if you think about it. But I'm not sure what I expected.

I expected to feel rather more accomplished, I guess. Don't misunderstand me, I feel accomplished, just not in any profound sort of way. Mostly I feel tired. The sort of exhaustion you get after finishing a massive project and seeing that hey, maybe you did an all right job with it after all. Which I suppose sums up my feelings about how my undergraduate education went.

I'm not looking forward to being on the low end of the graduate totem pole next fall, though, wherever I wind up at. And I'm going to miss the friends that I've made in this program, of course. There's no guarantee that I'll never see them again, and if I hang around here for my graduate schooling I more than likely will see them, but somehow I'm not sure it'll be the same. There were a lot of people who I really liked, and a few people who I was only just getting to know but whose company I enjoyed, and leaving all that behind (in a sense) is kind of distressing.

On the other hand, escape from undergraduate school means being able to move out, which is a definite plus however you cut it. I'm not sure where I'm moving to or when, but I know that it will most certainly be out. And as part of a sort of package graduation present, my parents have gone ahead and paid for my ordered copy of CthulhuTech, which is most definitely groovy.

Also, with my Saturday paycheck, I'll finally be able to pick up that PlayStation 2. So all in all, life is pretty good, I think. Things'll be a bit confused for a while, but it'll all turn out.

Things usually do.

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Sing from your VAGINA!

Jerry Holkins Is A God

And today's Penny Arcade proves it. The funniest thing? I know exactly what they're talking about. In my younger days, I myself experienced a great deal of puzzlement over what precisely a vagina looked like. Sure, there were those line drawings in Sex Ed, but they basically rendered the female body with the featureless crotch of a Barbie doll. Like Tycho, I'm not going to go into details as to what shape my abstract pubescent theories gave vaginas, just know that it did indeed differ significantly from the real article (which I have since seen both by way of the internet and up close and personal-like).

Even as far back as kindergarten, boys give consideration to this mystery of the universe, as well as hypothesizing as to the uses of various other feminine anatomical features. I recall sitting in a circle with several other little boys one day as we all attempted to divine what strange and unique purpose breasts served.

The running theory was that they were how girls peed.

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In the fifth grade, I knew someone who claimed to have seen a vagina. He told us wild tales about them, like some mad woodsman.

Finals Week Cometh

And I suppose I could make a joke about having to clean up after it, but that would require effort on my part.

In any case, here I am, a mere three days away from being a fully-fledged graduate from a state university--and I'm oddly calm about the whole business. I mean, sure I have two finals that will involve summat like two hours of solid writing each, and I still have to finish my final project for Stage Costume (only three more renderings to go!), but otherwise I'm feeling pretty good about the world.

I spent a chunk of the morning yesterday relearning how to play Magic: The Gathering by watching the videos concerning the topic that Wizards of the Coast has posted on YouTube. The acting is subpar and the humor is eye-rollingly painful, but they weren't a bad primer. If you want to have a chuckle at a guy who loves gesturing more than life itself, you should take a look.

Now, you're probably wondering, "PS, you handsome devil you, didn't you shrug off the old addiction to cardboard crack some years ago? What's got you peering into the depths of the black abyss of collectible card games again?" And that's a perfectly valid question, particularly when phrased in that precise manner. The answer is simple.

I got to reading a book called Gaming as Culture, a more or less scholarly look at tabletop RPGs, computer RPGs, collectible games, and the subculture associated with it all. It was an interesting read, one which I agreed with on some occasions (like when it asserted that there can be as real a sense of community in something like World of Warcraft as there can in meatspace) and disagreed with on other occasions (like when one essayist basically suggested that all roleplaying games are hypermasculinized powertrips engaged in by males who have been desexualized or feminized by society and in which women are at best marginalized and at worst openly degraded), but the articles on collectible games reminded me of something that I had never really gotten around to: Magic tournaments.

I'd never engaged in tournaments because my deck basically took cards from just about every set ever released, except maybe the first two, and tournaments are very picky about what they allow in terms of cards. But I discovered with this book that there are sealed-deck tournaments, in which you show up, pay your entry fee, get a tournament pack and a couple of boosters, and proceed to build your deck on site. So its playability (insofar as being legal) is basically guaranteed. It also means that nobody gets an undue advantage by slinging money around and picking up the best cards to stick in their decks. You get what you get, and that's it. There's a certain bourgeois appeal to the whole business.

So Friday after next, I'm going to attend my first ever Magic: The Gathering tournament. I'm hoping it'll be as fun playing as I remember it being.

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I'm gonna rip yer face off.

Reality as a Matryoshka Doll

Imagine for a second that there is a game programmer. For the purposes of this thought experiment, we're going to assume that this programmer is of uncanny talent, prodigious intellect, and unusual bloody-mindedness.

This programmer is sitting at a computer. Again, for the purposes of this experiment, we're going to posit that this computer is one of unusual potence as regards processing power.

Now this programmer is, at this particular moment, endeavoring to create a game engine that can animate something--say, a robotic arm--with as much accuracy as possible. He starts out by going at it the usual way, having the application instruct a texture-mapped polygonal model that has been bound to an invisible skeleton that defines its range of movement to follow specific predefined animations laid out by the model's designer.

Around about three in the morning, after his fifth cup of coffee (two sugars, no cream) and a quick pick-me-up sandwich (BLT, naturally) it begins to occur to his sleep-deprived brain that there must be a more efficient way of going about all this. That the whole laborious process of designing the three-dimensional object, texture-mapping it, designing the skeleton, binding it to the skeleton, recording its necessary animations, and uploading it to the game engine could be made completely obsolete if only the game engine would presuppose the existence of such a mechanical arm and its functions in the first place.

So he gets a sixth cup of coffee (gin, no cream) downs it, and gets to work.

Two days later he has created an engine that animates objects from the subatomic level on up, and manages to compile it and set it in motion before passing out in a puddle of his own drool.

And as he does this, a virtual void is suddenly and violently populated with a set amount of raw matter, which promptly begins the task of coalescing into virtual planets, virtual stars, virtual galaxies, on and on until on a smallish volcanic planet virtual life springs up, which then proceeds to quickly and violently evolve, altering the world on which it lives, and eventually producing (of its own accord), a virtual robotic arm in a virtual lab of perhaps not the precise design required, but close enough to do the job.

Then somewhere on that smallish (now blue) world, it turns out that not only has this experiment produced a virtual robot arm, but that there is, as it turns out, a whole host of virtual programmers. And one of them happens to be of uncanny talent, prodigious intellect, and unusual bloody-mindedness...

----
We may need you to play twing-twang.

Life Lessons

Here is a brief list of things that I learned today:

• You should always pay your parking tickets. If you don't, the next time you get pulled over the bench warrant for your arrest will land your sorry ass in the slammer for the duration of the weekend and cause you to miss two performances of the show you're currently in.
• I can sing well and beautifully (...most of the time) on a stage in front of two hundred people, but put me in front of a karaoke mike in a room with ten tipsy folk in and I instantly become hideously and painfully tone-deaf.
• "Lesbian buttfucker" is potentially the silliest and best insult ever.

I'm sure there are other, more profound things I could have discovered today, but why go in for profundity when there's funny to be had?

----
I believe.

Idiocy or Genius?

I can't decide which one You Have To Burn The Rope is. It might just be the first ever example of a constructionist/reductionist video game. It distills gaming down to its absolute essentials--means, method, and execution in pursuit of an ultimate victory. The only way they could have made it any more compact would have been to do away with all the tunnel business at the start. That aside, playing through it is worth the ending credits song alone. But don't take this as a recommendation, per se.

I just want to see if anyone else is crazy enough to think this is actually weirdly neat.

----
My world view allows for ghouls to haunt Weir outside of Halloween.

Cthulhu! In! SPAAAAAACE!

Well, not exactly, but still. I'm of the opinion that only great good can come of fusing giant biomechanical robots, human were-horrors, alien fungoid insects, and HP Lovecraft's Great Old Ones themselves. And that is precisely what CthulhuTech does. It's certainly a more upbeat form of the mythos, seeing how it is actually possible for humanity to fight back...and who hasn't ever felt the pressing desire to uppercut a great and ancient evil being from beyond the veil of reality? Because I know I have.

It seems to use some toned-down variant of the Storytelling system from World of Darkness and Exalted. Everything is rolled using groups of d10's, though the success mechanic is slightly different. The major players seem to be the military, backed up by pilots of the aforementioned biomechanical Engel mecha, an underground organization whose soldiers, Tagers, have fused with otherworldly horrors and can shape-shift into them at will, and then the Bad Guys, who are a motley collection of aliens and sanity-shattering terrors that have their own complex relationships among themselves.

I think this sounds awesome. Who's with me?

----
You're naked.

The Conference

Sebastian Cross stood from his office chair and circled his desk, hands behind his back. The hologram of a dark-haired human female face mounted on the desk’s corner followed him intently.

“Well,” the face demanded eventually, “if you don’t have them, then who does?”

“I’ve been wondering about that precise question, Cara,” Sebastian said, pausing at a mirror to preen. He smoothed his suit and his long, glossy black hair, then turned back to the hologram of Cara Simmons. “And I have some ideas. I think you do, too.”

“Of course I do. Dr. Winter left in a terrible hurry.” Cara smirked. “I haven’t any idea why.”

Sebastian smiled widely. “Why should you? At the moment, he is the most likely suspect. Him and his…pet. Loathsome creature.”

“Kind of like you.”

The smile on the Aztechnology exec’s face twisted into a snarl that bared his teeth, in particular his long, pointed upper canines. “Watch what you say, slitch! I could have you turning tricks as a joygirl next week if I wanted.”

“I’d like to see you try.”

Before Sebastian could spit another invective, the desk’s built-in commlink chimed. “Answer,” he growled instead.

Another face appeared on the desk, this one older, bespectacled, with snow-white hair and a pointed Van Dyke beard.

Sebastian’s eyebrows rose. “Speak of the devil. Dr. Silas Winter.”

“Most decidedly not at your service,” replied the man in the projection.

“You have Winter on the line?! I want to talk to the son of a bitch.”

“A moment, Cara,” Sebastian said. Then, to the desk’s commlink, “Conference.”

“Winter! You were the one who had ‘runner scum trawling through my warehouse!”

“Of course I was. Who else would it have been? But I am not calling to speak with you, Simmons. I washed my hands of you when I left Renraku. I did not much appreciate the attempt on my life.”

“I should’ve had you shot in the head. Can’t replace brains with cybernetics, can you?” Cara pursed her lips smugly. “How’s it feel to not be able to sling spells anymore?”

Winter’s face remained entirely impassive. “Sebastian, I was calling to inform you that I shall soon be in possession of not only the Elder Medallion but also the only extant copy of Al Azif. I have a—competent—team working to track it down. An unorthodox team, given, but competent.

“Considering how Ms. Simmons relieved me of all magical ability when she had my body crushed under several tons of concrete and steel, I have no actual way to use either item. But considering that you have a condition you wish to have remedied, and that what we seek may contain answers to both our problems…”

Cara’s sharp laughter cut into the conversation. “I’m sorry to tell you gentlemen, but an individual in my employ has already acquired the book. Rhea has gone to retrieve it from him and should be back momentarily.”

“Well,” Sebastian said, smiling a little too pleasantly as he took a seat behind his desk. “It would seem we are at an impasse.”

----
"The Pink Lynx? Is that what we're gonna call it?"

Mission Aftermath

"Aaagh, my face...God..." Legs touched the scorched, blackened swath of charred skin that covered the better part of the right side of her face. She tried feebly to heal it magically, but could only convince the edges to close in about half an inch before she felt exhaustion overcome her. "God damn them, my face..." She fell to her knees on the highway's shoulder, gripping the guardrail to keep herself upright.

Behind her were the burning, twisted remains of the team's van. The gas tank's eruption had blown out the back completely, severing one of the doors at the hinges. Helen and Sturmdrang had managed to claw their way out after Legs and were standing a few feet away, bleeding freely but still alive, looking down the highway as though they could catch sight of the other shadowrunner van.

"They killed Pretty Boy," Helen whispered. She tossed her dark hair back, revealing pointed ears, and clutched at her right shoulder. Blood oozed between her fingers. "That fragging elf killed Pretty Boy. Ripped right through his vest."

"His own damn fault," Sturmdrang rumbled. The dwarf pulled the cracked goggles off his face, revealing the mirrored eye-shields behind them. "It's what you get for bringing gloves to a gunfight. Screw him and the elf that dusted 'im. I wanna piece of that scrawny ork bastard that shot me up."

"If I hadn't been driving I'd've given him something to reckon with. Don't like shooting blind."

Sturmdrang laughed, rolling the cigar in his teeth as he evaluated the damage to the goggles. "Who does? Besides, what could you do if Martha hardly fazed him?"

Helen grimaced. "I can think of a few things." She popped her neck and sighed. " ...Mr. Johnson isn't going to like this."

"Those sons of bitches."

Helen and Sturmdrang looked at each other, then to Legs, their attention drawn by the raw venom in her voice. After a tense beat Helen stepped forward, extending a hand cautiously. "Legs? You all right?"

The magician's features, half beautiful and half horribly burned, were twisted into a horrific snarl that only emphasized the grotesquerie of the dichotomy. "They fragged up our run. They killed Pretty Boy. And then they called up a fire spirit in the gas tank."

Helen's eyes widened. "Shit. Is that what happened?"

"Yeah. That's what happened. It's all over the astral plane, I could see it blind. And when I get my hands on that mage, they're going to fucking die." Legs hauled herself to her feet and wheeled on Helen and Sturmdrang, her blonde hair flying, scorched flesh livid in the moonlight. "BECAUSE THEY SCARRED MY FACE!"

Literary Bushido

I've just made the first post over at my protected writing blog Literary Bushido, for those of you who are interested (and who are allowed to read it). It's a brief swatch of my most recent addition to The Fair Folk, a story which seems to be insisting on becoming a novel as I compose it. And seeing how I composed both the new section of Fair Folk and this post while fueled by Mountain Dew at this ridiculous hour of the night/morning, I think I'm going to go on to bed now.

It's the sensible thing to do, after all.

----
So you heard Big Blue's pitch. Now for the democratic response...