A panel from Blankets, by Craig Thompson

Last night, I met with a couple of old and new friends to talk about Craig Thompson’s Blankets.

Blankets is a 500-page graphic novel that helped to establish the American graphic novel scene. It’s a memoir of the artist’s childhood and teen years, centering on his childhood relationship with his kid brother and his teen relationship with a girl.

Disconnection and relationship form the book’s two major themes, which is fitting, considering the situation: a couple of guys, some of whom know each other and some of whom don’t, sitting down and wrestling with a book.

We remarked later about the importance of gatherings like this. Of spending a few hours with other people, talking, debating, pointing things out.  This is how relationships are made.

Moreover, relationship is a fuzzy, organic thing — the group doesn’t have a moment where everybody stands up and shouts, “I’m interfaced!”¹ It’s not a binary thing. We talk and we grow closer, and the group becomes more. Different.

The work comes first, then the rewards of sharing and relationship and support. But first, slices of bread and opinions, shared across a table.

¹ Yes, that’s an MST3K reference to Overdrawn at the Memory Bank.

Cracked has an excellent article on 5 Creepy Ways Video Games Are Trying to Get You Addicted. It’s not simple scare-mongering — though there’s certainly a hushed tone of passion in the article — and it sparked some neurons in my brain about mental models and tabletop role-playing.

© Wizards of the Coast, D&D 3.5 Player's Guide

My first GMing experiences were spent with players themselves unfamiliar with tabletop role-playing. We mostly knew each other, and we had a shared, unspoken belief in exploration. We came into tabletop gaming with few preconceptions and fewer goals. We just wanted to try out this “new” thing.

When I began GMing in earnest later, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: players applying online gaming experience to tabletop gaming.  World of Warcraft players were–consciously or subconsciously–creating characters that fit their online gaming experience.

On the one hand, applying related knowledge makes sense. However, the key word here is related knowledge. It’s unwise to assume that computer gaming is similar to tabletop gaming.

Okay, time for an example: I had one player say that we needed a character who’d “pull aggro.” Direct quote. For those unfamiliar with World of Warcraft, aggro is a term for aggressiveness, a quality that monsters use to determine which enemy to attack.  A standard WoW tactic involves crafting characters that can attract the enemy’s attention and soak up large amounts of damage, distracting the enemy from physically weaker characters that are helping from the sidelines.

In tabletop games, there is no aggro. The GM decides in the moment which monster attacks which character. The mechanical rules required for a computer game are just that: mechanical rules, simplifications to give the monsters something reasonable to do.

Similarly, I’ve had players refuse to play characters that interest them because the party didn’t have a character that filled a particular standard party role.  I’m starting to get angry when I hear the oft-repeated claim, “We won’t last a week without a healer. Who wants to play a cleric?”

In tabletop, it’s the GM’s job to craft encounters that challenge the party. If the party doesn’t have healers, the GM has to take that into account. That’s not a deficiency in the party.  A GM who can’t deal with this–or who ignores it, or who exploits it to kill the party–is a bad GM, and should not be gamed with.

Play whatever character you want to play. A party of all monks isn’t imbalanced; it’s awesome.

"Book Addiction" by Emiline220 on Flickr

My friend Nick graciously invited me to a short-lived book club: two sessions, this coming week, discussing Craig Thompson’s graphic novel Blankets. Brilliant idea: debate one book, and we’re done. We can convene again if it goes well. Minimal pressure.

I decided I wanted some ammunition besides my memories and my hand-written notes, so I just went online to find some awesome, inspiring, deep book club questions.

I couldn’t find any.

Plenty of advice on how to start a book club, the sorts of finger foods to serve, and a few generic questions (“What did you like about the book?”).

So, I hereby propose a few questions to get people thinking about and debating a book:

• When you think about the book, what’s the first thing that you remember?
• What are the turning points in the story?
• What stood out?
• What made you uncomfortable?
• Which was the most memorable character?
• What do you disagree with?
• If someone asked you why they should read this book, what would you say?
• What was weird?  Was the weirdness effective?  That is, did it add something?
• If you had written this, what would you have done differently?

What would you add to the list?

As some of you may know, the classic arcade game cabinet that I built about a year ago died a while back.  Couldn’t even get to the BIOS.

I asked around on Freecycle for anyone local willing to get rid of an older computer.  Unfortunately, the replies I received were from people trying to get rid of ancient computers, like 386s.  That wasn’t quite sufficient.

Finally, on Wednesday, I broke down and bought a $200 desktop EeePC.  It came with Windows, a lot of games, and not much else.  I forgot how stripped down those things are:  no CD-ROM drive and no wireless card.

Of more direct concern:  it came with Windows XP pre-installed.  The first iteration of my game cabinet ran Ubuntu Linux, which drove the big question:

Do I keep Windows on it and struggle to set that up for what I need, or do I struggle to install Ubuntu and then set it up using my ”known good” configuration?

This is how technology is complicated.  It’s not so much the complexity of the components; it’s the complexity of their interaction.

The EeePC isn’t built to support the installation of a Linux OS.  It’s just not easy to do (my initial attempts to boot off a USB drive were complete failure).

On the other side of the fence, it’s much harder to configure Windows and the various apps for exactly what I want to do (start an app in full-screen mode, for example).

There’s no right answer.  One makes a choice and moves forward in one direction.

I spent a few hours trying to install Ubuntu via a USB drive. Unfortunately, the EeePC simply wouldn’t boot off of USB, no matter what I did, and some Googling indicated that EeePC desktops often have that problem.

So I abandoned Ubuntu and concentrated on installing MameUI. After fiddling with the keyboard controls, I finally got it mostly, essentially, working. I’ve still got a few more things to fix, but I can play games on my cabinet now.

This is why optimization rarely works. We can’t know what’ll work until we try.

Lamp, by didbygraham on Flickr

This week, I started a new role-playing game. I’m running it very differently than I run most games. It’s a D&D 4th edition game, created primarily to test out the classes and races in the new third Player’s Handbook.

Since I’m already running two other games, which takes up much of my time, I decided to run this game using almost entirely pre-published materials. I bought a dungeon crawl-style adventure (more accurately, a ”temple crawl”).  Very little world design is required on my end.

This is weird. I love to create worlds; I typically spend a lot of time fleshing out my gaming worlds.

But this frees me up to do that in other games, and to just run the game.  I can focus on NPCs and larger world questions (I’m thinking of adding a Tékumel-style empire).

As with so many things, denial is a form of freedom.

over the sun, by mindfulness on Flickr

A personal proposal:

Physical Energy Maintenance:

Every night: 5 minutes of Tai Chi, a 30-second push-up, a 30-second sit-up, and a few minutes of strength training with an infinite resistance machine.

Three times a week: 20 minutes of running.

Emotional Energy Maintenance:

Every morning: 5 minutes of journaling.

Spiritual Energy Maintenance:

Every week: Church attendance, and helping out with church youth group

Mental Energy Maintenance:

Every night: Read a book for 30 minutes.

Every week: Read magazines for 1 hour.

Every two weeks: Research something in detail, beyond just jumping around Google.

Ironic, how much of wise living consists of resisting one’s impulses.

Imagine the cheesiest, cheapest Renaissance Faire possible.  Imagine the weird, driven employees of said Fair.  Imagine the Faire’s in danger of shutting down, and what those employees would do to keep “their” Faire going.

That’s the premise of All’s Faire, a serial comedy showing on blip.tv.  I stumbled across this on my Roku a few months ago, and was hooked by, of all things, the acting.

This show is full of impressive comedic performances. I’d love to know where they found these actors. There’s the over-the-hill owner and king of the fair, the over-eager minstrels (who are composing a ”Medieval Rock Opera”), a wide-eyed “wench,” a vain knight, a ”Celtic warrior” absolutely dedicated to realism (he’s vowed not to break character until the end of the season), and the long-suffering manager.  And that’s only about half of the cast.

Sure, there’s no Laurence Olivier here, but this is a shoestring-budgeted comedy, and it works. Each episode advances the plot–if slightly–and clocks in at under ten minutes long.

Better, because there’s an actual story, the show doesn’t have to fall back on one actor’s comedic skills.  They bring what they have to each scene and problem.

It’s rainy, and I have a sore mouth, and a sore arm.  But I’m excited, for two reasons:

1) I pulled all my old blog entries off the Internet Archive, wrote a quick Python script that converted them into an RSS feed, and imported them into this blog. I’m still cleaning them up, but for the first time in a decade I have my entire blog, all in one place.  All twelve years of it.

It’s a silly project, in a way. But this is part of me, and it just felt right to consolidate it all in an easy-to-browse way. I’ve been reading back through it, and man have I been a jerk at times.

2) I’m working with an artist to re-start Red Ax, a comic idea I had several years ago, but never got off the ground. Here are some samples of the artwork:

Ax, the protagonist

Ax, possible cover image

The initial antagonist

Why am I restarting a comic book?

I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately.  Naoki Urasawa’s Pluto, Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan, Scott Pilgrim, the recent Unknown Soldier remake.  A wide sampling, really.

I’ve loved the comic medium for many years, despite a singular disinterest in the comics market during my youth (I’ve never been particularly enthralled by costumed superhero stories).  While my drawing skills are improving, I can’t draw like a pro yet.  So, I’m hiring an artist for this one.

Also, fortunately, the Red Ax story has stuck with me for years.  Many stories are products of their time; after a few years, they no longer tug at my brain.  This one does, and this feels like a good time to start this up again.

Why not?

Greta Garbo playing Anna Karenina

I finished reading Joel Carnegie’s translation of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina a few days ago.

This isn’t a review. What could I offer that thousands of other reviewers haven’t?

However, I will point out three things that stuck out at me:

1) This was an eminently readable book.  This undoubtedly has much to do with Carmichael’s translation. For example, according to his notes, he spent a great deal of time deciding on the most natural method of referring to characters’ names.

The Russian style of referring to people by ”Name Son/Daughter-of-Parent,” such as ”Ivan Petrovich” (Ivan Son-of-Peter), simply sounds foreign to non-Russian ears, so he changed that throughout the book. The result still captures the author’s intent, which is not to confuse readers.

2) To paraphrase my mother’s reaction to the book, I never thought there were so many thoroughly modern people living a hundred years ago in Russia. I felt their pain and frustration as thoroughly as I do my friends’.

3) Anna Karenina is a strongly moral story. Characters make mistakes and live with them. The book is careful not to judge them, and just as careful to point out the consequences of immoral behavior.

And finally, an obligatory note to all you struggling writers out there: When Anna Karenina was first published, the critics dismissed it as a ”trifling romance of high life,” according to Wikipedia. Ha!