YouTube is the grand-daddy of online video sites. But it’s not the only online video site.

Vimeo is one of the sites aiming to take on YouTube. They’re doing it by focusing on a slightly different audience:

• Vimeo actively pushes its users to upload only personal videos. This isn’t a place to post TV clips or anime.
• Vimeo promotes a community atmosphere. It’s a bunch of people, sharing personal thoughts and their own entertainment.
• Vimeo has high-quality video, by default. A normal video on Vimeo looks better than a normal video on YouTube, to my eyes certainly.

It’s also easy to use (despite being bought by Google, YouTube still feels cluttered to me), and Vimeo videos have fewer inane comments than on YouTube. I think that’s partly an effect of Vimeo’s community, and partly attributable to their relative size.

Still. It’s a very nice video site, and when I post videos, I prefer to put them on Vimeo if just because they look better and don’t get stuffed with pointlessly negative comments.

A few months ago, I published my first RPG adventure, War in the Deep, a D&D 4th Edition adventure for Heroic Tier players. Here’s what I learned in writing it.

1. Artwork turns a bland adventure document into an exciting one. I searched Flickr for photos licensed under the Creative Commons for commercial use, and I used Inkscape to create color maps.
2. Most people have black-and-white printers, so make sure your maps are still legible when printed grayscale.
3. Play around with fonts. You can go crazy, of course, which is bad; you don’t want readers crossing their eyes as they read. Fonts must be clearly legible. But a slightly more antique font, reminiscent of 1900′s-era type, for example, can give your adventure text the right tone.
4. Beware text tricks. Adventures use a large variety of types of text; background plot descriptions, dialogue, traditional “boxed text,” stats, headers, and map captions (at least). Make each one distinctive, but not wildly so. You only need two or three different font families; use italicization, bold, indentation, borders, and other such effects to differentiate types of text. (I ended up with one font for headers, one font for text, and one slightly different font for stats because the main text font looked weird at small text sizes.)
5. An adventure’s plot must be railroaded. Unfortunate, but true. War in the Deep is a 4-5 encounter adventure. There’s simply not enough space to wait for the players to wander around investigating plot threads in detail or uncover background plots. So the action must move naturally from one plot point to the next, with little variation. Many stories simply won’t work in this format.
6. Direct players from one plot point to the next; don’t force them. In my first draft, characters would simply insist that the players take up a quest or follow them in a particular direction. Several reviewers pointed out the frustration caused by high-handed NPCs (more accurately: heavy-handed GMing), so I toned that down, while still pointing the characters in a specific direction.
7. Write for the GM, not the players. I wanted to describe the differing personalities of three NPCs very briefly and memorably, so I explained that they act like Han, Leia, and Luke as of the end of Star Wars episode IV. The players won’t ever know this; the NPCs are aquatic elf nobles sitting on a council, so they won’t ever mention Alderaan or the Force. But this shorcut gives the GM a handy hook for each character’s personality, and how they interact.

This was a random, wonderful discovery at my local comic shop, and one of the advantages of and reasons for local comic shops.

Barnum tells the story of P.T. Barnum, who gets drafted as a special agent to stop a mad Nicola Tesla from assassinating President Harding in a bid to take over the world. And P.T. uses his circus performers to do it.

It’s wild. The performers run the gamut from a diminutive strong-man to a young punk acrobat to a wily female hypnotist. They’re all…well, they’re all geeks, really, which is part of the appeal. These are social outcasts who Barnum hired, and have formed something like a family.

And they go on a rollicking adventure across America, involving all sorts of then-state-of-the-art technology, from dirigibles to a calculating engine. Fortunately for the reader’s suspension of disbelief, P.T. Barnum’s incessant collecting bug provides a reason for much of this technology to pop up: he’s either actively pursuing it, or his enemies are deploying it against Barnum’s formidable forces.

But, ultimately, this is a fun, light action-adventure story. One could easily compare this with The X-Men, Barnum serving as a manic Professor Xavier and his sideshow freaks as real-life mutants, minus energy powers. And while Barnum delves into a little social commentary about society’s outsiders (and the irony that they now do very well for themselves by highlighting the very attributes that make them outsiders), it’s still mostly the story of stampeding elephants, high-speed chases, and charging pygmy warriors.

Great fun.

Been playing around with TweetDeck, a Twitter desktop client. This lets you not only read your Twitter stream, but also split your stream into separate streams for just certain groups of folks (personal friends, business contacts, etc.).

It works well for its stated purpose, though the tweets take up a lot of space compared to, say, the main Twitter website. So you can only see 6–7 tweets per column, though I can see 4 to 5 columns at once.

But the big advantage is that you get a more comprehensive view of Twitter traffic. You see recent messages meant specifically for you, your friends’ conversations, etc. — all at a glance.

Of course, it’s only useful if you like Twitter. But if you do, TweetDeck’s worth considering.

I’m confused.

I see a lot of articles on the RPG Bloggers Network providing game prep advice. What to think about before a session. What to write down. What to roll up.

Do GMs really have that much trouble preparing for a session?

Seriously. Do we not know how to prep? When I started GMing, I used the advice provided in my GM guide of choice, which laid out the things I’d probably need (maps, enemy stats, etc.).

So, before each game, I made sure I had mapped out any places the players were likely to visit, rolled up stats on any enemies, and figured out what I thought would happen.

Then I GMed. Oh, I’ve tweaked the formula over time—I love world creation, so I suss out lots of details—but I didn’t need to read half a dozen articles about game prep.

And I wonder if other GMs are the same way. Do we really need prep advice? Don’t we know the basics that need to be set up?

I wonder if it isn’t anxiety, stemming from a desire to control the events of the game. Perhaps GMs hope that, with the right prep, the session can go exactly the way they want it to.

Problem is, it rarely does. The story belongs to the players as much as the GM. They have the freedom to pull the story in a different direction, no matter what the GM has prepped.

So, shouldn’t we all just prep the basics, and go with the flow?

This may seem like a simple, obvious topic. But the important things usually are.

I’ve stopped worrying about later in the week. Oh, I’ll put down reminders and mark my calendar. But I don’t think about it.

I focus on today. What can I get done today?

Because that’s all I’ve got. I don’t even have that; I might have a heart attack and die in an hour. Who knows?

But I’m pretty sure I have today. I can focus on today. I can plan today, and work today. Fill the day with Good Work, Done.

Because if I spend much time thinking about tomorrow, today seems less important. There’s always tomorrow. Right?

But our life isn’t made up of tomorrow; it’s made up of thousands of todays. And if we don’t focus on those todays, they slip by and we regret the passage of time.

So, let us focus on today. And make today rock.

Imagine having 100 to 200 role-playing miniatures, in color. Some of them fantasy characters, some of them sci-fi characters, some horror; whatever. And imagine if they cost about 5 cents each, and you could keep them all in a box the size of a hardback book.

I came across these at the D.C. Game Day last year, and I wish I knew the name of the guy who made them. Because they’re ingenious.

First, think about standard RPG tokens, the circular ones printed on heavy card stock. You cut them out and put them on your battle mat. But they’re hard to keep track of, they fall into all sorts of cracks, they flutter and blow around at the slightest breeze, they bend and get creased. They’re a pain.

Okay, so imagine gluing them to the flat side of a washer. Hey. Now they stay put, and they don’t get lost as easily. But you’re still limited to the tokens that your representative game company puts out.

But you’re not.

Go on the web and search for webcomic art. Find some cool web comics. Some will have awesome fantasy characters, some awesome sci-fi characters, some cool monsters; find cool stuff. Drag and drop some great samples to your computer.

Now, open up your favorite image editing application. It can be MS Paint. Crop each strip to just the face of a character (in Paint, use the selection tool, press Ctrl C, then create a new image, change its attributes to 1 pixel by 1 pixel, and press Ctrl V). Save it. Continue for all the strips you’ve downloaded.

(You may not even have to do this much. Many webcomics will have a page devoted just to a list of characters, with facial images already included. Just grab those.)

You now have a bunch of head shots. Drag and drop those into a word processing document. Print it out.

Now go to your local home improvement store and buy a bunch of metal washers; I got 3/18″ washers in bags of 25. Put the washers on top of the faces in your printouts, and make sure they’re a proper size. If not, adjust.

Now you’re gonna make them look fantastic.

Toss your word processing document onto a USB stick or burn it onto a CD, and head down to a nearby office supply store or copier joint. Ask them to print the document out, in color, on nice glossy paper. They’ll show you the papers they have; choose something really nice (you’ll only be using a couple of sheets).

Now cut out the faces, and glue each one onto a separate washer, using normal glue. It’ll stick just fine (though keep an eye on them; mine tend to curl up after I first apply the glue, so I have to press them down once more).

And, boom. You now have dozens and dozens of custom NPCs.

And if you’re in the middle of a game and need a bunch of faceless antagonists, turn your tokens over. The undersides do very well as blank representations of bad guys.

Genius, isn’t it? I just wish I’d thought of it first, in a way. Not that it matters, really, now. I want everyone to know about ‘em and start using them.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about eliminating unnecessary things.

This comes partly because it’s about time for me to Freecycle a few things (Freecycle being a local group of folks that email the group when they have something to give away). And I’ve been wondering, how much do I really need?

Now, that itself is a leading question. Life is not merely a succession of fulfilling basic needs. Technically, I don’t need many of the conveniences in my life, but they free me to concentrate on other things. It’s not necessarily wise to throw those out.

(Do I need a microwave? No, I could feed myself without it. But I’m not getting rid of it.)

However, I have stuff that exists to fill out a bookshelf. My stuffed animals, for example: I have half a dozen of them, and they crowd into a bookshelf. I like them. They look cute. But I don’t get any joy from looking at them, and they have almost no sentimental value. They look okay, but is that all I’m willing to settle for in my environment?

Moreover, I’m sure each one could be loved and cherished by some 8-year-old. Why not give them that experience? Why not do something else with that space?

And, of course, the same thing applies all throughout my environment. And my work — what am I spending time on now? How does this build me up, or build up those around me?

So I look at things to eliminate, and things to shore up. I’ll probably give away several of those stuffed animals, and some musical paraphernalia I never use, and a few shirts and slacks I don’t wear anymore.

I’d rather make a bold statement and live with it, than clutter up my life with stuff that, frankly, isn’t up to snuff.

Ahhh, I love Seth Godin. Some folks disagree with him, sure, but I think they miss his point.

Seth’s been preaching about marketing for quite a few years now, specifically about its need to change. Spewing demands to buy products at people…no longer works. People ignore that now.

And this goes much deeper than advertising, of course, which is what interests me so much. How do you Get The Word Out? About anything? Not by buying traditional ads, and certainly not by making traditional ads.

You do it by making remarkable things, and by talking about it in remarkable ways. Remark-able…able to be remarked upon. Worth remarking on, worth talking about.

I still haven’t learned that lesson. With Otaku, No Video, my podcast, one of the first things I did was set up some Google AdWords. Which haven’t improved our stats at all.

We need to be remarkable. Just like Seth says.

I recently finished reading something special.

Dororo is a 3-volume manga by the “God of Manga,” Osamu Tezuka. It’s essentially the invention of the modern samurai adventure genre.

Man, is it dark. The story opens with a young father who promises his unborn son’s body parts to 48 demons, in return for land and power. As a result, his son Hyakkimaru is born as basically a mewling blob of flesh and bone, which his father casts away. Hyakkimaru is taken in by a sympathetic inventor who, as the boy grows, invents makeshift prosthetic limbs for him.

The young man trains as a samurai, and soon heads off in search of the 48 demons; for each one he kills, he will regain a piece of his own natural body.

This leads to an interesting irony. Hyakkimaru’s prosthetic limbs are in many ways more powerful than normal ones: they hide weapons and can surprise enemies when he removes them. But he is profoundly grateful every time he loses one as a regular one takes place. He deeply values normal limbs, as opposed to the super-charged false ones.

And then he meets a young punk thief, Dororo, who decides to tag along with him (ostensibly to steal Hyakkimaru’s katana when he isn’t looking).

So it turns into an adventure series, in a way: Hyakkimaru and Dororo wandering, searching for demons, and stumbling upon many human tragedies along the way. There’s plenty of supernatural horror and weird creatures, plus Tezuka’s trademark musings on humanity’s foibles and little triumphs.

Which makes it sound depressing. It isn’t, really; Hyakkimaru may be grim at times, and he lives in a dark time, but it’s ultimately an uplifting story of a young man triumphing over great adversity. Well worth the time, if you’re willing to be challenged by a different kind of comic.