The Apex of the Puppeteer’s Art

StringsImagine a fantasy film about the misdirected prince of a dead king, sent out to get revenge against a neighboring nation. A movie of swords, enslavement, armies, and death.

Now imagine this is all done with stringed marionettes.

Moreover, imagine that these marionettes are aware of their strings.

Strings is an award-winning 2004 puppet movie, directed by Anders Rønnow Klarlund with puppeteering by Bernd Ogrodnik. It’s set in a fantasy kingdom of swords (very important for cutting strings) and monsters (cobbled together from leftover bodies).

The plot includes many twists, starting in the first few minutes, which I have no interest in spoiling. This is a dark story, dealing with slavery, child endangerment, mutilation (though it’s just unscrewing wooden limbs, it’s horrifying to the characters), and a few other squicky themes.

It’s also lavishly constructed and presented. The sets feel spacious and lived-in. Outdoor spaces feel like they’re actually outdoors.

The creators clearly thought through the consequences of their premise. The gate to the city is simply a bar raised over the gate. If your strings can’t get past it, neither can you.

Most importantly, only a few minutes into the film, I was completely entranced by it. These puppets act, despite no facial movement. A head dips slightly, or turns, and I could see the character thinking. Amazing.

Puppet theater has existed for many decades, of course, and Strings builds on a rich tradition filled with great skill. This is a film that showcases the apex of the puppeteer’s art.

Yobi, the Five-Tailed Fox

Yobi, the Five Tailed FoxEvery so often, you stumble upon a hidden gem. This is one of them.

Yobi, the Five-Tailed Fox is a 2007 anime film from Korea. It’s a quiet, rural tale of a shape-changing fox that takes on the form of a young girl. A handful of “troubled youths” are being forced to attend a special summer school near Yobi’s territory, and she investigates. These kids aren’t future criminals; they’re just kids who have trouble adjusting to normal school.

As is common in Asian films, forest spirits like Yobi have a special kind of personality. They’re more than animals, but not quite human. Yobi herself, while having the body of a 12-year-old, acts like she’s half that age. She’s curious, petulant, and constantly drinking in new information.

Refreshingly, she’s not threatened by the human world in an environmental sense, although that theme does rear its head. Her interactions with people open her heart to strong feelings, forcing her to make difficult choices in contrast to her care-free forest existence.

And what a beautiful world she lives in. The film’s drawn and animated like a Studio Ghibli film, with lush colors and great attention to detail. If your jaw dropped upon viewing My Neighbor Totoro or Castle in the Sky, as mine did, Yobi will feel just as rewarding.

I finally get BattleTech

BattleTech

BattleTech © Catalyst Games Labs

I remember standing in a hobby store with my older brother. He was probably there to buy more Car Wars material. I had been wandering the dusty aisles, past ziplock bags of dice and rules printed on dot-matrix printers. I reached up to a shelf and pulled down a book covered with giant robots. It was a BattleTech manual. (I think it was one of the early, unauthorized Robotech supplements, thus proving that anime was in my blood.)

I opened this book and began to read. My mind spun, trying to comprehend dozens of pages packed with tables and numbers. I put it back on the shelf, cowed and intimidated by this game.

I kept that impression for twenty years.

Fast forward to PAX East 2013. I was walking into the tabletop area with a few friends at the beginning of the first day. My eyes fell on a table covered with hex grids, small mountains, and little toy train trees. And little plastic mecha models. Laying in a heap on a corner of the table: a few pamphlets emblazoned with a BattleTech logo.

Like a young child, I pointed and yelled, “BattleTech!”

My friends blinked at me, and I turned to them and said, “I wanna play this.” Excitement must have crept into my voice, because a few agreed to play with me.

I sat down, and a friendly guy walked over and offered to teach us how to play a basic game.

I loved it. More importantly, I understood it.

This undoubtedly is due at least in part to our guide’s clear explanations. He knew exactly what to explain and when to explain it. He gave us just enough choices to keep us interested, and as we got ourselves into dangerous situations, he’d explain the rules that governed that. Then as we got a hang of the game, he backed off.

I won’t try to explain the rules here, because I think a textual explanation just won’t do the game justice. Check out the Quick-Start Rules. Broadly: you calculate the defender’s to-hit number, which is 4 plus modifiers based on cover, damage to the mech’s systems, etc. For each attacking weapon, the attacker rolls 2d6, adds them together, and hits if the result is equal to or greater than the to-hit number. Damage is specified by the weapon, and is usually a static number. You also roll 2d6 to determine where you hit the enemy; each part of a mech has its own amount of armor.

One thing I love about the game is the relative fragility of mechs. A mech degrades quickly but can stay in a fight for a surprisingly long time. The game is a matter of managing failure, doing your best to stay in the game with a rapidly deteriorating mecha.

And because of the world’s fiction–innumerable fights across hundreds of worlds–I didn’t get too caught up in the outcome of that one battle. You do your best, but this is war: you’ll lose a good number of battles.

Overall, I can’t wait to play again.

You can download the Quick-Start Rules for free.

Going APE: Guy Kawasaki’s advice for self-publishing

 

Guy Kawasaki's APE

Guy Kawasaki’s APE

APE is not a book for anyone. This is a book for anyone who wants to self-publish a book in the modern era of electronic publishing and Kindles.

Its author, entrepreneur and investor Guy Kawasaki, writes with a comfortable clarity that must grow out of many years of writing and public speaking. His prose strides straight from point to point, never wandering off-topic except to explore useful side trails (like good books about the actual writing process). Yet it’s never a breathless race to the end; it’s a comfortable stroll with a friend.

Throughout the book’s three sections (Author, Publisher, and Entrepreneur; thus the title), Guy remains relentless practical, focusing on the present reality of self-publishing. What are the trade-offs between the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad? Should you format your book as you write it? What are the most commonly used software tools, and why are they favored?

And more importantly, the book doesn’t stop with publishing. Guy also writes about the promotional side of the writer’s life. How do you publicize your name without becoming a jerk? How can you build a true community of fans?

I found APE so useful that, after reading it for the first time a few months ago, I’m now re-reading it carefully. I want to extract and internalize its lessons. If you ever want to publish a book, you will find practical advice here.

APE costs US$10 for the Kindle and $16.50 in softcover.

Hok the Mighty

Battle in the Dawn coverMany fantasy books are set in a fantastical past, like Conan‘s Hyborian Age: a time of magic and high adventure before recorded history.

What if someone wrote a novel using fantasy adventure tropes–a powerful hero fighting wild creatures, spanning different environments–and set it in the actual historical period before recorded history?

Now imagine it was written by a Pulitzer-nominated author who beat out William Faulkner for a literary award. Manly Wade Wellman, besides having the greatest name for a fantasy writer, was that author.

Battle in the Dawn collects the handful of short stories that Wellman wrote about Hok the Mighty. But rather than write random “adventures,” Welmman advanced every story further in Hok’s life, starting with his adolescence and leading through the establishment of his tribe and his explorations across his world. While this book barely qualifies as a novel, there is a constant progression from story to story.

But more interestingly, Hok is Cro-Magnon, an early modern human. His people have achieved sentience, but they have no technology to rely on (besides stone and spear). Savage–but historical–beasts dominate Hok’s world, from sabre-tooth tigers to mammoths. Neanderthals serve as an orc-like menace, as brutish sub-humans who only know how to kill and eat.

Wellman wrote Hok in the breathless style typical of early sword-and-sorcery fantasy, mostly during the late 1930’s and early 1940’s. I found that charming. The stories feel exciting and adventurous and big.

A reading of Battle in the Dawn is a fine way to spend an evening.

Holy Flying Circus!

Holy Flying Circus DVD coverBack when Monty Python released their film Monty Python’s Life of Brian, the public reacted with shock. Based on the trailer, the film appeared to make fun of religion, and it seemed to make fun of Jesus.

The former was true, and the latter not. But how to explain that to the public?

The Pythons were asked to go on a talk show. That talk show episode became a milestone in the public appreciation of comedy and satire. You can watch it on YouTube, of course.

So. Let’s say you wanted to make a documentary out of this whole event. How would you make a documentary about the Pythons?

You’d make a Pythonesque documentary.

Holy Flying Circus is a 2011 BBC made-for-TV movie centering on this talk show appearance. Except it’s not a documentary:

  • It’s not completely historically accurate.
  • Its actors play caricatures of the Pythons. In fact, at one point in the documentary, the actor playing John Cleese takes an aside to reassure the audience that he is playing a caricature of John Cleese “mostly inspired by Basil Fawlty.”
  • In a nod to the original Python show, most of the major female characters are played by the male actors in drag.
  • Every time Terry Gilliam gets an idea, he immediately grabs spare paper and animates the idea. All of the animations are immensely inventive.

The actors mimic their chosen Pythons (or, at least, their caricatures) extremely well. I often forgot that I was watching Charles Edwards and Darren Boyd instead of Michael Palin and John Cleese (the two primary Pythons of the film, as they’re the ones who went on the talk show).

The film moves at the unpredictable pace of an episode of Monty Python, often breaking into fantasy sequences. And yet, even so, the dialogue often makes very important points about the nature of comedy and parody. This is not just silly.

Most importantly, Holy Flying Circus uses historical events to tell a story, helping us think about parody and censorship. How appropriate to its source.

50 Games in 50 Weeks: Qwirkle Cubes

Qwirkle Cubes (Schmidt Spiele)Qwirkle Cubes combines Scrabble with dice.

The game comes with 90 six-sided dice. You draw a “hand” of six dice, which you roll immediately upon drawing. The first player places a set of dice in the middle of the game to form the “grid.”

Play then proceeds in turns, with players adding dice to the grid, getting points for each die added of the same color in a row or column, and additional points for completing a row with all the available symbols. That’s a little complicated to keep track of in play, but one gets used to it.

Unlike in Scrabble, all players can see all the players’ hands at all times. This allows you to plan according to how you think your opponents will play their dice.

So, while there is a random element to the game, the game quickly evolves into a strategic conflict as you build out rows and try to block your opponents.

The only complexity comes in remembering the rules governing which symbols and colors you can add to a row or column on the grid. While these rules aren’t complicated, I made several illegal moves in my first game due to my confusion. Even by the end of the game (each lasts for 20–30 minutes), I felt unsure I fully grasped those rules.

But overall, it’s a game suitable for kids and adults, that provides sufficient strategic complexity to challenge experienced adults.

Make Something Every Week: Ray Harryhausen Tribute Video

I resolved at the beginning of this month to try something new for the next 3 months:

  • I will read twice as many books as movies I watch.
  • I will spend at most 30 free minutes on the computer each weekday evening. This time includes email, social networks, YouTube, and general surfing, but not time spent writing or otherwise making things.
  • I will spend at most 90 free minutes on the computer each weekend day.
  • I will make something every week, and I will publish something every month.

I might not complete the weekly thing by the end of the week, but I should have at least a solid draft. The thing may be a dice game, a short story, a gardening video, or anything else that takes creative effort.

Last week, with the death of stop motion animator Ray Harryhausen, I read tributes in which people promised to re-watch a Ray Harryhausen movie. I was struck that Harryhausen (and his estate) probably profited nothing from this. I doubt he received any royalties from the movies he worked on. So I thought: what would Ray want us to do?

I think he’d want us to make some stop motion ourselves.

So I grabbed a Gundam model kit and made this:

[iframe_loader width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/5ScqYHeSqRM” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

I learned a few things:

  1. With a basic understanding of lighting and camera position, you can create something very quickly. My camcorder has a photo mode, so I used that to record each frame of the animation. Once I set everything up, the actual animation took maybe 10 minutes.
  2. Tape down your model.
  3. Gundam model kits are perfect for stop motion. They have a wide range of limb motion and stay where you put them.

50 Games in 50 Weeks: Thurn and Taxis

Thurn And Taxis board game components

Thurn And Taxis board game components

Thurn and Taxis is a Euro board game that’s somewhat like Ticket to Ride. In addition to building routes, players also explicitly dominate regions.

Your options are determined through a deck of cards, each representing a region on the board. Each turn, you can play a card to add a route in the region specified on the card. As your routes grow, you can score them, and as your routes connect cities, you can score them, as well.

One interesting strategic concern lies in timing which routes you score. You can score them early (thus locking them in) or wait and try for a higher score.

Moreover, Thurn and Taxis contains many different ways to score and win the game. This dramatically increases your strategic options, and helps to make the game a little less directly competitive.

Indeed, players of Thurn and Taxis compete less directly than they do in, say, Ticket to Ride. For example, one player can’t block another player’s route. However, you score more points if you claim a region first, so the game becomes more of a race than a fight.

Because the board contains a small number of cities, the game ends pretty quickly. Time-strapped players, take note: a game of Thurn and Taxis takes about one hour.

Overall, I found this to be a deeply strategic yet easy to learn (and set up!) game.

 

50 Games in 50 Weeks: Alhambra

AlhambraAlhambra is a territory purchase game: you collect cards representing different kinds of money, then use that money to buy square pieces of a garden. You get points based on how many pieces of your garden you can fit together (each piece has some walled borders, and you must join sections appropriately), and the types of garden pieces you have.

Alhambra‘s a wonderfully consistent game: just as interesting early in the game as it is near the end. You have to pay attention during others’ turns as they collect money cards and buy garden pieces, since 4 garden pieces are available to buy at any given time. You must plan your turn effectively. Moreover, the ongoing score is an effective but imperfect predictor of success.

It’s easy to grasp, because there are so few parts to the game. Kids could play it, though they’ll likely get blown away by adult players. Adults will find depth to the game’s strategies, without too many options at any given time.

This probably all old news to most of my geek viewers, thanks to the Tabletop episode on Alhambra. If you want to see the game in action, here you go:

[iframe_loader width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”http://www.youtube.com/embed/DpsQbnup0oE” frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen]

 

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