I write a lot about self-improvement, and the importance thereof.
So, what do you do when you just have no energy for self-improvement? When you just don’t feel like improving?
Take a break.
Really. Stop working at it for a while. Watch some movies, read a few books, and just relax.
Don’t rest forever, of course. But I believe that a properly balanced person will instinctively know when it’s time to start improving again.
Breathe.
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I’ve been working on a D&D adventure, War in the Deep. It’s an underwater adventure in which the players are transported to an undersea kingdom, where they have to rescue a princess consumed with bloodlust.
(Which, incidentally, you can buy at DriveThruRPG for $5!)
Anyway, here’s how I designed it:
I started with the reason for the adventure. This was originally part of a larger campaign, where the players are seeking seven different magical stones, and the king of this undersea kingdom has one of them. So, they were going to travel there to meet him. The question was, what would prevent the players from just requesting and taking the stone back from the merfolk?
I didn’t have a good answer for that, so I began flipping through the Monster Manual to get ideas for the creatures that might be in that area. That’s when I stumbled on the sahuagin.
The sahuagin are nasty brutes who mostly raid coastal towns. They’re basically underwater goblins: they sneak up out of nowhere, attack anyone they find, and steal supplies.
Sound like fun antagonists. So what if they’re the real antagonists? What if they’re attacking the undersea kingdom?
Okay, so how to get the players involved in a war between the merfolk and the sahuagin? Well, the players are traveling to see the king. What if his daughter is in danger? An easy reason would be kidnapping; let’s flip that around. What if she went off in search of danger, lusting after sahuagin blood?
And there was my plot.
So then it was a matter of designing the conflicts. I wanted to expand the time spent traveling to the merfolk’s central city, so I added an early encounter with a sahuagin raiding party. I then added an enclave of aquatic elves who would help the players get through that area if the sahuagin proved too powerful. I also conjured up a High Council of the aquatic elves, who could answer the players’ early questions about this area of the world, and the conflict between the merfolk and sahuagin.
After encountering the merfolk king, the players then had to find the princess. I figured the king would know at least roughly where the princess was, so I made that easy; the players just traveled north to a border town. On the way, they traveled above abandoned merfolk villages (as the merfolk prepared for war, they abandoned their easily-attacked villages).
Up to now, the players had been fighting sahuagin raiding parties, so I wanted to get across the feel of a large war. So I designed the next battle was a real battle, with dozens of sahuagin and several siege weapons assaulting this northern border town. The princess is in among the fray, giving it something of a Battle of Helm’s Deep feel.
Now what? How to finish this up with a satisfying ending? I’ll let you think about how you’d do it, and I’ll answer in part 2.
I haven’t been able to keep up with this blog this week, due to the new job. Fortunately, it’s calming down this week, so I think I’ll be able to get back into a more normal blog routine next week.
It’s weird, how much mental energy is required when starting a new job. I’m not overwhelmed with work; I’m overwhelmed with new inputs, even when those inputs are “just” peoples’ names. All the change is painful.
And I’m someone who keeps telling folks the importance of accepting change. Can’t quite take my own medicine, can I?
In any event, that’s why I’ve been incommunicado this week, and hopefully everything will be relatively normal on Monday.
A little personal blogging today.
I start my new job today. I’m nervous; Pop Rocks jumped around in my stomach as I drove in. Took longer than I expected, so I got in 10 minutes later than I thought I would. Which increased my nervousness.
But this is a new opportunity. A new adventure. As I heard on Sunday: you fear that which has risk, so fear is a sign that you’re risking something. And risk (when it comes from the heart) is almost always good.
So, I’m risking. And excited.
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It’s Friday, review day, and I’m going to talk about a very special movie for me. A formative movie.
I watched An American Tail when it was first released in theaters in 1986. I was ten years old. I was enthralled, and still remember the visceral thrill of several sequences: the storm on the ship, the singing of “Somewhere Out There,” and the dockside cat chasing scene.
You probably all know I’m an anime fan. Well, that’s part of my larger interest in animation itself. I watched with fascination several discs of weird Russian animated films and shorts, and have watched animated shorts from all over the world. Animation just fascinates me.
And I think I can track it all back to An American Tail.
I re-watched it recently. That’s always quite an experience, returning to a childhood favorite with the cold reasoning of an adult.
The story falls apart. There’s very little connective tissue to link one scene to another; the entire movie almost feels like an excuse to put half a dozen intense sequences on screen.
But those sequences are intense, and I’d put three of them on par with anything Disney or Miyazaki’s ever done: the storm at sea, in which Fievel confronts a storm sweeping across the deck of the ship; the dockside cat chase, with its desperate scrambling to fire off a huge mechanical contraption; and the final search for Fievel, an amazingly quiet scene of an emotionally demolished boy.
The first two scenes are frenetic and powerful, with bold but careful uses of color and movement. Neither scene ever confused me; instead, they presented a lot of action, going in what seemed like ten directions at once.
And it sold me on its protagonist. Fievel wasn’t just a boy in danger; it was a boy lost in a wondrous but confusing place. The genius of the premise lay in the fact that he wasn’t attacked by cats at every turn (any more than the entire mice population). He was just…orphaned.
And I loved its representation of turn-of-the-20th-century New York (and America in general): amazing, ruthless, hectic, and truly a land of opportunity. Flawed, certainly; there are sweatshops, discrimination, and a classically crooked politician (not evil, just completely crooked).
But it quickly becomes home for the characters. Despite all its flaws, despite the tragedy of the story, America still represents great potential.
And it’s saying a lot that I believe this despite the flaws in the story. The movie can be difficult to follow at times, but it gets across deeper things. Which is more than most works of art can say.
I’m certainly glad I re-watched it. It’s usually worthwhile to track down those old gems of childhood, if just to re-experience them.
![[IMAGE]](http://www.somewhatfrank.com/images/2008/07/03/mattlogo.jpg)
Twitter’s great; it lets you keep in touch with lots of people.
For those of you who’ve already jumped onto the Twitter bandwagon, you may have heard of folks who have several Twitter accounts. I have 4 — my main account (BrentNewhall), BrentRPG for an online game I play through Twitter, OtakuNoVideo for my podcast, and Gunwave for announcements about my online game.
How do I manage them all? Through Matt, the “
What’s even more cool: Matt was built in 4 days by a development team, just to see if they could do it. See the full story.
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I start my new job next week, supporting a military contract with a combination of training, configuration management, and web design. Or, at least, that’s the initial charter, based on my interview.
I face a number of challenges:
Even more problematically: Much of this can’t be specifically planned. While I can plan to meet with clients, I won’t know who to meet until I get there, nor do I know how to deal with them.
So, while I have a basic plan, I’ll need to react quickly while keeping my plan up-to-date.
And all of this must be done while I’m still learning everyone’s names, remembering where the bathroom is, etc. And teaching adult ed classes every evening.
I’ll be tired, stressed out, and probably cranky once I return home from my classes at night. But it’s a fantastic opportunity, and by the end I’ll have grown and improved.
And thank goodness for Getting Things Done.
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Much as I enjoy running tabletop RPGs, I don’t much enjoy playing a character.
This is partly because characters have relatively little to do at any given time. Consider combat: in a four-person party, I’ll spend at best four-fifths of the time twiddling my thumbs, watching everyone else fight. Even outside of combat, I’m just one of several adventurers.
Also, role-playing is social. As quoted in a recent post on Sin Aesthetics: “Enjoying roleplaying is rather like enjoying dancing: At some point you have to throw your inhibitions to the wind, admit you might look like a fool to passing spectators and enjoy the moment. Also like dancing, which at first may seem like a fairly limited activity, roleplaying has almost infinite depth and variety in the experiences it provides.”
While I can “throw my inhibitions to the wind” with good friends, that’s tough to do outside of intimate groups. And my role-playing friends don’t really reward good role-playing. They’re good guys; they’re just focused more on killing stuff and taking loot than on role-playing, at this stage.
And that’s one of the big limitations of role-playing: it requires a certain kind of mentality. Now, I think practically anyone can learn to role-play, just like anyone can play a game of charades. But it’s a mentality that I don’t get much of a charge out of.
Part of the trouble, too, is that I create worlds. I love thinking up cities and societies and people. If there’s going to be someone in the whole process doing that, why not me?
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Just finished reading Frank Bettger’s excellent book How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling. Bettger was a friend of Andrew Carnegie, who encouraged him to write this book after hearing Bettger’s life story (a former baseball player who applied himself to self-improvement as a salesman until he became incredibly successful).
Besides explaining the principles and ideals that he began to follow, Bettger describes following Benjamin Franklin’s self-improvement plan. When Franklin was still a poor baker, he decided to improve himself by writing down 13 “subjects,” or aspects of his personality that he wanted to improve:
Franklin then focused on one subject each week. He’d reflect on it, observe its use, and try to live it out over the course of the week. After the 13th week, he’d return to the first, thus covering all 13 subjects 4 times each year.
Bettger chose six of the same subjects, and added seven of his own. He writes, “At the end of one year, I had completed four courses. I found myself doing things naturally, and unconciously, that I wouldn’t have attempted a year before. Although I fell far short of mastering any of these principles, I found this simple plan a truly magic formula….Remember Franklin was a scientist. This plan is scientific. Reject it, and you reject one of the most practical ideas ever offered you.” (emphasis mine)
I’ve decided to follow suit. I’ve been collecting “subjects,” and while I only have 10 at the moment, I’m sure I’ll find another 3 in the coming weeks. Here’s my list:
I’m planning to write up an index card for each subject, with inspirational quotes and such, to carry with me and pull out at odd moments.
Wish me luck!
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When I first watched Star Trek: The Motion Picture, my parents warned me that it was long.
Now, I grew up on the original Star Trek series. I loved it. I was willing to put up with a lot. But boy was that movie long.
I recently got the chance to watch the newly remastered and re-edited version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. The original director partnered with a special effects company to restore some of the effects that were rushed out at the time.
Now, many of these restorations/special editions are attempts to improve the effects; make it look like what the director always wanted. In this case, the director and the SFX company were both very clear on one point: that all the effects had to look like they had been produced in 1979. They should look like excellent 1979 effects, but nothing modern.
They also edited down some of the longer shots. Thankfully.
And the result is a very, very strong film. While watching it, I couldn’t even tell what had been changed (and I have a good eye for special effects). Even the long shots of V’ger, the alien craft, were now majestic, but I couldn’t tell what had been cut out.
The plot has always been an interesting one; Kirk struggling with command again after a long absence, the crew settling into its old habits, perplexed discussions about the incomprehensibly vast V’ger, and the steady drip of discoveries about it. It’s like one of the better original Trek episodes. Nothing mind-bending, but definitely an entertaining and edifying use of your time.
Kudos to everyone involved!