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Eileene described to me a newly developed tattoo technology designed to make the tattoos erasable. Until recently, methods to “remove” tattoos didn’t work very well at all; you could burn away the inked skin with a laser, but you’d still be left with a tattoo-shaped scar, the tattoo preserved (fuzzily) in pink where once it had been indigo. The new system employs ink that has been suspended in microscopic plastic sacs, tiny enough to be injected directly into the cells, because otherwise they’d just wash away. The ink itself is easily disposed by the body; the plastic sacs are not. So long as the sacs remain intact, the tattoo remains. The sacs, however, are very sensitive to lasers, much more sensitive than the skin itself. If you should change your mind about these new tattoos, shine a laser on the skin. Before the skin burns and scars, the sacs break, releasing the ink, which your body digests and excretes.

I don’t know how the new procedure measures up in price, or whether it has other shortcomings, but all-in-all, it seems pretty clever.

Yet not so clever that it bottles the mind, striking me with future shock, even though it probably should. I have never been particularly prone to future shock in the first place.

Perhaps this is because I read a lot of hard science fiction as a kid, describing, in a manner plausible to an adolescent, all kinds of impossible things. Next to teleportation, a permanent-as-long-as-you-want-it-to-be ink is positively humdrum.

Perhaps I am largely immune to future shock because I have a mind for abstraction. Like a proper mathematician, I consider whether something is possible, not whether it’s feasible. Most technological limitations are ones of feasibility, and especially of economic viability, instead of sheer possibility. The idea of a dye that only breaks down in the presence of a very narrow set of environmental stimuli is easy to conceive; we’ve had them for generations. The trick was finding one that was also non-toxic, and cheap, and otherwise fit the bill. This particular trick was so tricky that an alternate approach found success first, one limited only by how tiny we could make plastic bags. Again, we’ve made plastic beads with liquid inside for a while; it was only a matter of making them small enough and fragile enough, but not too fragile. The technical difficulties may be significant, but conceptually, there’s not much to it.

I think, however, that the absence of shock over something that should be shocking marks a generational trend. The speed of technological advance has been accelerating since our ape ancestors came down out of the trees. The span between stone axes and fire was tens of thousands of years. In ancient history, things stayed pretty much the same for hundreds of years at a stretch. By the Industrial Revolution, the world changed within a lifetime, and kept changing visibly within everyone’s lifetime. Now the world changes regularly not within a lifetime, but within an individual’s youth, while he is still psychologically flexible.

There is nothing new in noting that technology changes the world, or that the change is accelerating, or even that we are growing more aware of change. I think something happens, though, when radical change happens before adulthood: change itself becomes an expected norm, even if the specific nature of the change is unexpected.

To illustrate what I mean, consider William Gibson, who admits to writing his sci fi classic Neuromancer on a typewriter; he could not afford a computer until after the book sold. Curiously, once he got his first computer, he was so worried about the mechanical grinding noise coming from the disk drive that he thought something was broken. He was deeply disappointed with the reality of computers; he was already prepared for computers as they appeared in his ultra-hip novel. It’s a good thing for his readers that his vision of the computer future was not informed by computer reality.

Alvin Toffler’s influential Future Shock described the implications of accelerating technological change, and especially human incapacity to absorb too much change too quickly. But he may have been writing for only one generation, that which had to face too many changes in life, but not so many that perpetual change became the expected norm. The challenge for upcoming generations may be how to live with a rate of change they find too slow for comfort.

Posted by at 6:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I finished Mike Carey’s The Devil You Know this morning. Eileene picked it up on sale with high hopes: Carey wrote the Lucifer comic book series, one of the few (very few) spinoff titles to feel like it’s actually compatible with the Sandman comics from which it was born.

Felix “Fix” Castor is a self-taught exorcist in the near future, a time when the dead have begun to walk the earth again. He runs a free-lance office that can’t quite keep up with the rent, which prompts him to take jobs he’d rather not. This includes an apparently simple case to remove a ghost from a government archive for personal documents of historical interest which rapidly winds deeper into a web of theft, prostitution, immigrant slavery, and murder. Castor knows he should just let it go, especially since Asmodeus himself has warned the exorcist away, but just can’t bring himself to—first for the money, then to aid the ghost he’s supposed to vanish.

The Devil You Know is fair to good. I think. It’s very difficult for me to judge.

My perceptions are badly distorted by the novel’s similarity to Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series (Storm Front, Fool Moon, et al.), both being adaptations of the hardboiled detective novel by moving them to modernity and adding ghosts, werewolves, and demons for seasoning. The similarity of the protagonists—Felix Castor and Harry Dresden, respecdtively—is especially pronounced.

Both act as narrator, telling the story in first person, and spend a fair amount of time justifying themselves instead of describing unfolding events. That’s because they both are impetuous to a juvenile degree, noble and petulant by turns in a way that interferes with my sense of identification and sympathy. Neither can keep his mouth shut, despite his better judgment, especially when a choice quip presents itself. So they end up sabotaging their lives, and especially their relationships with their feisty women friends, all of whom perpetually complain of being left in the dark while the heroes go risking their necks. Both are rare cases of magically capable humans in a world where magic exists, but close enough to the fringes that many people can continue to disbelieve. This skepticism, coupled to impetuosity, explains why both protagonists can never make ends meet, or even be taken seriously, despite rare talents and a clear demand for their services—which they provide as freelance exorcist or magician. Pretty much the same thing, since Dresden’s cases all revolve around identifying and dispatching some supernatural entity. Their magical powers make them targets for weird inconveniences, about which they gripe endlessly.

The supporting casts are also quite similar, although this is more obviously an artifact of emulating classic detective novels. I mentioned the feisty women. There’s also crime lords, thugs, exorcist/magus competitors with fewer ethics but greater professional success, and a disinterested demon to taunt the protagonists for being in over their heads.

For all practical purposes, The Devil You Know is the same story as the Dresden formula. I read Dresden first, and it’s messing with my sense for novelty, creativity, background and character design to a degree that I’m hesitant even to talk about the writing quality. But I’m going to. Carey is, in many tiny ways, the better wordsmith. There is no passage one can point to and declare: “There! That is flatly superior writing!” Nonetheless, phrase by phrase, Carey tells the same story, and does it tighter, cleaner, and with just a bit more edge on the human capacity for sin, which is what the hard-boiled is all about. The difference, though subtle, is sufficient that I might recommend The Devil You Know on its own merits, while I wouldn’t recommend the Dresden Files without prompting from someone looking for books like them. At the very least, I’d recommend The Devil You Know to anyone who enjoys the Dresden Files series. I’d be more hesitant about the reverse.

Posted by at 5:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the news this morning included the verdict for Lieutenant Colonel Stephen L. Jordan, commander of the Abu Ghraib prison. Rumsfeld’s claim that the soldiers who photographed themselves grinning beside abused prisoners were just a few bad apples became a mantra for those who found the truth embarrassing; to the rest of the world, those photos were the final, damning proof that the U.S. tortured prisoners, and did so in ways that clearly had nothing to do with interrogation.

In keeping with Rumsfeld’s transparent claim, only the soldiers themselves were charged with, let alone convicted of, abusing prisoners. Military law holds officers responsible for the behavior of soldiers under them; an officer is presumed either to be aware of his soldiers’ behavior or derelict in his duty to be so, and is responsible for enforcing proper military behavior in the soldiers under him. Axiomatically, some officer was responsible for the abuse of prisoners. Perhaps many officers are legally responsible, if many were aware of and condoned the abuse, but it is legally impossible that no officer be.

Accordingly, an officer was found. Officers directly in charge of the interrogation were mysteriously nowhere to be found; this was convenient for those who would be embarrassed by the detail they could be compelled to provide in a trial. Jordan supervised the interrogation task force; in the absence of an officer more intimately tied to the interrogations, he was to be held responsible.

The charges were strictly pro forma. Before the trial even began, the court martial dismissed charges of making false official statements concerning the abuse. The court acquitted Jordan of mistreatment of prisoners. The court absurdly found him innocent even of dereliction of duty in preventing such abuses; officers are legally presumed responsible for the actions of their command. Jordan was found guilty on only one count, that of disobeying a direct order not to discuss the investigation of the case—which he did by claiming to the press of being made a scapegoat, and by email campaign seeking support in the investigation.

Perhaps he was a scapegoat; as noted, the officers directly in charge of individual interrogations have proven implausibly scarce. I doubt he was, but I can’t prove it. Certainly, he was guilty of discussing the case. But I find the military court’s notion of punishable offense sickening. Torture detainees? No problemo. Ignore criminal behavior in your underlings? Fine. Lie on record to investigators, prosecutors, the court itself? We’ll let it slide. The only sin, as far as the military court is concerned, is in letting things go public. If nobody talks, everything stays quiet, and the military needn’t look bad. Only making the military look bad can never be forgiven. Squeal to the press, and you are dead to la famiglia.

Edgar Allen Poe wrote a tale of horror in which asylum inmates had overthrown their keepers and now practiced horrible tortures on the doctors. The horror lay in the ironic difficulty a visitor found of distinguishing their methods from those of 18th century psychiatry. Here we have a military justice system run by and for the political interests of its senior officers, using methods immortalized by organized crime. Claims of security are no longer sufficient; the corruption of our supposed security institutions—military and civilian—is a greater threat than the enemies they fight. The whole system must be cracked open, the corruption exposed, the guilty jailed. And it must be done over and over and over again until we can’t find any more. Only then can we hope some inkling of the fear of god—or, better, the American public—has reached our leaders, who supposedly work for us.

Posted by at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The central question for a mage asking build advice is: fire or frost? Arcane has its adherents—mages anxious that their spells not be resisted in PvP and mages who can’t control their threat any other way—but, because the arcane tree can’t compete for damage output, and damage is a major part of a mage’s utility, most mages opt for fire or frost. So which do you want?

Short answer: fire for solo play and PvP, frost for group PvE.

This is largely a function of damage. Burst damage from fire is enormous; frost can’t possibly compete for raw dps. PvP is all about burst damage, and even in solo PvE you’re generally better off with the quick kill. In a group, however, massive damage output will grab aggro, leading to your sudden demise. When going balls-out for damage is not a viable option, the fringe benefits of frost look a lot more appealing:

1. Superior aggro control. Not only does frost generate less dps, and thus less threat, but damage output is more even, avoiding the hideous threat spikes of a fire crit. And if you’re a naughty mage and grab aggro anyway, Ice Block can save your sorry butt.
2. What frost loses in dps it gains in superior dpm, vital for long boss fights.
3. Runners are controlled, because spamming Frostbolt applies a continuing chill effect.

You might feel this answer is too simplistic. You’d be right. The fire/frost rule of thumb needs some important qualifications.

First, frost doesn’t really come into its own until level 30 or so, when you can assemble the Ice Shards-Frostbite-Shatter combination that forms the backbone of frost builds. Until then, you’ll probably want fire talents regardless of your ultimate intentions. Second, frost allows a very specialized build designed for rapid grinding of xp, combining chill effects with AoEs to kill dozens of mobs at once. Unfortunately, the build is lousy for anything else, but if all you care about is reaching level 60-70-80 as soon as possible, AoE frost farming is the way to go.

Posted by at 4:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I had to drink lots of water after my kidney stone, trying to find out how much more I could consume on a daily basis before my tissues rose up in bloated rebellion. The doctor wanted me to drink as much as possible, but warned against drinking so much that I got disgusted and quit. The point was to drink as much as possible every day, so my new water habit had to remain (barely) within tolerable limits.

After my intestinal problems, I am now on a similar assignment for fiber, probing the limits of my tolerance for fiber-rich foods. I’m eating a bit more fruits and vegetables, but not a lot more; I ate fruit before, and I still don’t like vegetables. I’ve switched from white bread to whole wheat, which can be good but often high in saturated fats, and even to a “double bran” wheat loaf, which is low in fats but merely edible.

The kind of the fiber-rich diet, however, is All-Bran cereal. It’s amazing stuff. One half cup contains 50% of your daily needs, more than a dose of Metamucil. It fails to work as breakfast cereal; it turns to wet cardboard the instant milk touches it. Instead, I take it in big pinches for my breakfast, along with a big mug of sugary tea or a very sweet, very milky, very weak coffee. A big mug is necessary, because the stuff is awful. It looks and feels like gerbil food. It tastes like gerbil food, too, with just enough sugar to let you choke it down. High-fructose corn syrup is the second ingredient, which means the cereal saves my intestines at the expense of my pancreas.

To its credit, the packaging doesn’t even insult you by denying the fact that you’re eating something basically unpleasant and medicinal. Nowhere do the words “delicious” or “yummy” appear on the box; “tasty” appears only once, in tiny, low-contrast print, at the very bottom. The back of the box gets right down to a list of suggestions for making it more tolerable: try adding fruit, it suggests, or baking it into muffins. (A tacit acknowledgement that All-Bran is incompatible with milk.) Dress up your food by slipping it into salads or somewhere else you might not notice it. I found myself wondering why they didn’t add “try to make a game out of it—measure how much bran you eat, and try to beat your last record!”

To be fair, it does the job. If my dinner the night before was too rich, or too spicy, or eaten too late, or otherwise upsetting to the tum-tum, a half cup of All-Bran takes care of it, making me feel better well before getting to actual pooping. It works on both constipation and diarrhea. Even better, it handles mild and severe cases with equal facility; typically, treatments strong enough for severe cases of whatever hurl you too far in the opposite direction when applied to a mild case. The gastroenterologist warned me to stay hydrated, because bran without enough water will plug you right up, but as long as you stay hydrated (and I do, after that kidney stone), bran seems to be an intestinal cure-all. None too tasty, perhaps, but still more palatable than Pepto-Bismol and probably a lot better for you in regular use.

If anything, it works too well. I’ve noticed that my body seems to have grown dependent. On mornings after dinners when I have not eaten rich, spicy, late, or excessive foods—which is most mornings—I may be more in the mood for a bagel with a bit of peanut butter and jam, or a competing cereal, or a dab of leftovers. These foods never caused me trouble before. Suddenly, I find myself with an ishy feeling after breakfasting on harmless food, as if my gut is rejecting anything but the bran it loves and my sensory organs despise.

I worry I may need to launch a third regimen, to find out how little bran I can live with.

Posted by at 2:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I’m suffering a minor age crisis, triggered by this blog. I couldn’t think of anything interesting to write, so I referred to a small text file where I keep essay ideas for just such a dry spell. I was about an hour into it before realizing I’d already used that idea, and failed to remove it from my to-do list.

So I thought a bit more, got another idea, and started again. A paragraph later, I got suspicious.

Thank heaven for archives. My suspicions were correct: I handled that idea already, too, albeit in 2005.

I want this page to be interesting, and I’ve learned from Dave Barry—whose work I once adored—that recycling the same topic doesn’t remain interesting for long. My memory is still functional, but it’s become merely normal, which feels like a big step down from my childhood, when I could remember long passages of text or dialogue just by paying attention. Obviously, I pay attention to my own writing, yet I can’t be certain any more even whether I’ve used a subject—not without “cheating” and looking back through the archives.

Blogging is largely an activity for the young. Old geezers passed the line where learning was easy and novelty was appealing for its own sake before the internet began coming into its own; for them, becoming net-familiar takes a deliberate effort. (Often I feel I was on the cusp at the time. I get how it works, but I sometimes wonder why it’s so choked with useless crud, and what the appeal of turning out all that crud is.) But apparently, blogging is an activity for the young for another reason: youth remembers better than I what remains to be said.

Or, possibly, doesn’t care whether it repeats itself. In light of conversations I’ve overheard at the mall, I’ll hang onto that hope.

Posted by at 7:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I promised a more thorough description of the latest Civilization addition—Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword—once I had made a more thorough examination of it. I’ve had my look, and I’m surprised by how little I have to add. Apparently, a once-over was enough to see it all.

First, a correction. The new scenarios are not generally usable as mods. Only three are: “Next War,” “Gods of Old,” and “Final Frontier.” Of these three, only the third is radically new; the others are barely distinguishable from the existing Civ4 line. “Next War” is a near future scenario, merely adding a few more units and techs to the end of the tree (on top of what the expansion adds to the default rules), nothing to change your strategies. “Gods of Old” takes inspiration from Mesopotamia, adding distinguishing features to religion: each temple provides a god-specific benefit as well as a morale boost. Unfortunately, this doesn’t change your strategy, either, since expanded temple powers simply reinforces the desirability of having as many religions as possible in your empire. (The scenario implies that you should be working to wipe out rival religions. Lies.) The space scenario in “Final Frontier” is very fresh and interesting while it lasts, largely because the engine departs so radically from the basic Civ model. Unfortunately, it is too small to remain interesting for long. The tech tree is small, and largely devoid of compelling crossovers between military and socio-economic advances. Star systems are sparse, and leave no choice of just where to settle. Terraforming is almost removed from the game, appearing only as anachronistic “warp lanes” (roads/railroads) and “space stations” that extend your boundaries to include asteroidal resources. This revival of the outpost model of resource harvesting from Civ3 could be very refreshing, moving the military focus from conquering stars (cities) to occupying unsettled territory, but, sadly, the resource list is too small, and the computer opponents do not pursue them aggressively, in any case. Five out of the nine available resources merely speed production of certain units by 20%, rather than enabling unit classes. “Final Frontier” is a real eye-catcher, and plays well, especially as a two-hour quickie on a smallish map. Its only fault is a lack of the kind of scale that made Civilization such a hit.

Of the remaining scenarios, three make heavy use of triggered events to make Civ jump through hoops it was never meant to jump. “Defense” requires you to buy defenses between ever-deadlier waves of attackers with gold earned by scouring the map for goody huts even as your sparse units try to hold onto your base city. “Afterworld” removes cities entirely, pitting a five-unit squad against a zombie-infested complex of rooms and corridors. The fan-made “Fall From Heaven” gives you a single city on the only patch of decent ground in an icy waste. Your armies might hold the line, but victory lies in the use of three heroes to destroy barbarian cities and recover a weapon capable of slaying the evil god of winter. As artifacts of game design, these are amazing, twisting the Civ engine beyond recognition. As actual games with play value…meh.

“Broken Star,” “Charlemagne,” and “Crossroads of the World” are more traditional scenarios, asking you to grow and conquer from kingdoms built by someone else in various historical and speculative settings. “Next War” really belongs in this category, too; the new units are not remarkable enough to warrant labeling as a mod. All highlight some new feature of the expansion. None are any more interesting than a default game using those features.

So much for the scenarios. Once you’ve looked them over—and there’s no need to do it twice—you’ll return to the basic package. What’s in it to warrant an expansion?

Not a whole lot. A couple new leaders. A couple new wonders. A rule tweak here and there. Another two map types. Random events of negligible significance. Two new ideas bear examination: corporations and espionage.

Espionage is now meaningful, which is nifty. Spying is a function of income; you pay for espionage missions with cash, and the cost of missions depends heavily on your investment in espionage relative to your victim, said investment coming from your trade meters, right along with your science and cultural output. Even without paying for specific missions of sabotage and insurgency, however, superiority in espionage points earns rewards: tracking rivals’ demographics and scientific progress, viewing access to their city displays, and even immunity to their spies, if your advantage grows large enough. Even if you don’t want these things, your enemies will, so you’ll want to invest at least a little in counterespionage. A few buildings—the courthouse, jail, security center, and a few wonders—generate espionage points on their own, which can save your budget. So can specialists, but I’ve always preferred to turn whatever specialists I can support to other functions.

Corporations allow you to put your spare resources—your second, third and beyond—to use, without trading them away (and without a trading partner!). Like missionaries, corporate executives spread corporations between cities; each city with a corporation enjoys its benefits. One corp turns excess minerals into a production boost. Others turn excess grain and seafood into actual, population-expanding food, or gems and minerals into culture points. But before you get too excited, hang on: there’s a price, or rather, several. First, you have to reach a fairly high tech level just to be allowed to build a corporation. Second, you must sacrifice a great leader to found a corporation, although you can build corporate “missionaries” thereafter, and each corporation demands a certain type of leader, so if you want to found Sid’s Sushi but have no great merchant, you’re out of luck. Third, corporations compete for resources to one anothers’ exclusion; a city with Civilized Jewelers cannot also host Mining, Inc., since they both use gold and silver. Fourth, most importantly, and contrary to all sense, a corporation sucks money out of each hosting city’s trade production, as much as twenty gold per turn. Multiply that by ten or twenty cities, and you’re on the fast track to bankruptcy. The cash price largely negates the benefits of a corporation: increased production gets funneled into the wealth project, and increased food just supports more merchants desperately trying to cover the trade gap. This final handicap discourages players from using corporations at all, and a weapon unused is a useless weapon. Corporations could have been exciting. Instead, they’re a white elephant, a luxury for players who have already won to prove the completeness of the victory. Two corporations could, in theory be worth the price, turning relatively useless grain and coal into vital end-game oil (ethanol) and aluminum, respectively. But frankly, if you reach the end game without claiming some territory with natural oil and aluminum deposits, you suck.

My strongest feelings concern what isn’t in Beyond the Sword: a full editor. I’m glad that Civ4 returned to Civ2’s approach to editing, allowing you to enter a cheat menu from the game and rearrange the map to your heart’s content. Civ3 did not have this feature, or even the ability to lay cities and units; it had a glorified map editor, and was rightly castigated for it. But it’s one step forward, one step back. While Civ4 returned the ability to place units and cities, it removed the power to edit other features of the game. Players wishing to create mods of their own cannot readily change the tech tree, or rename wonders for a more space-age feel, or tweak the combat strength of musketeers for a swashbuckling mod, or change the food production of flood plains for a scenario that takes place entirely along the Nile, as they could in Civ2 and Civ3. These things can be done, as the awe-inspiring “Rhye’s and Fall” fan scenario proves, but Rhye didn’t create his magnum opus with a built-in editor; he did it by hand, from outside the game, using programming techniques few of us can employ.

This is inexcusable, given that Civ2 and Civ3 had editors capable of changing rules as well as the map, and that some very good scenarios came from fans using that capability. The internet has given financial incentive to sharing editors, because fans can readily share their creation, adding legs to successful titles with their labors of love (for which the company pays not a dime). Firaxis could have a dozen Rhyes if they brought back the universal editor available with Civ2, a whole new expansion disk for peanuts. The Civ community would remain more excited, for longer, over the product. I could fix the new corporations to my liking, and rebuild my Civ2 Caveman scenario.

But no, no editor for you today. Is the expansion worth your money?

If you’re a Civ addict, yes. The space scenario alone is worth half the price; the less creative scenarios will hold your interest long enough to justify the cost, too, despite the fact that you need only see them once, or maybe twice. Real fans should be fascinated by the more tortured uses of the basic engine, even if they don’t work as games. Once you return to the basic game, the new espionage feature is something to tinker with, and some rules tweaks are all to the better. For non-addicts, the expansion is a definite no. The changes are compelling to the fans, the players who get right down into the guts of the game and look to squeeze out every advantage. Players who tinkered briefly with the original game won’t even notice those same changes. Nor will you see any real change until the boys at Firaxis put out a proper editor—at which point, the sky will be the limit.

Posted by at 5:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Now that I’m driving myself to and from my Sunday night games, I’ve had occasion to catch a bit of late-night news radio. The parts that I’ve picked up have been about lessons for Iraq some British officer feels the US should have learned from his personal experiences in Bosnia and a looming writers’ strike in Hollywood. The former just feels like blithering, but I got curious about the scriptwriters, so I asked Eileene about it. She knows more than I care to learn about the business of Hollywood, so she’s a good resource. Between the radio show and her explanations, this is what I’ve managed to piece together.

The argument is over money, specifically over whether the scriptwriters should enjoy royalties on new media outlets that threaten to cut into traditional revenue sources—DVD sales of television series, for example, in an age when the TV shows themselves are losing ad revenue. Contracts can vary considerably, so hasty generalizations can be dangerous, but typically, scriptwriters don’t get royalties at all; they get a chunk of money up front for their scripts, and that’s the end of it.

This model exists largely because script appears very early in the production process, well before the hiring of actors and director, before the laying out of budget specifics, and before the assembling of the studio’s resources. A lot can happen between script and final shipping of the film to cancel the show. The risk of a script never reaching the screen is enormous; a large majority of scripts die before filming despite getting the green light. In light of this risk, the writers have collectively decided to take the money while they can, instead of holding out for a percentage of the gross, which could be enormous, but probably will never exist at all. Fair enough.

But this means that the risk is shifted onto the studios. The pay for a script takes this into account. Because the film is unlikely to be made, the script is unlikely to earn the studio any money. The studio therefore pays the writer a smaller share of what the script could potentially be worth, retaining for itself what the writer might deserve for a blockbuster script, instead paying a flat fee that, presumably, compensates the writer for his expected contribution. (And if not, why the hell did he accept the contract?) His contribution to a blockbuster film might amount to ten million dollars, that is, his script might result in a movie that makes ten million dollars more than another script would. But if the chance of the film becoming that kind of blockbuster is only one in ten thousand, the writer’s expected contribution is one ten thousandth of that, that is, a thousand dollars.

Perhaps scriptwriters want royalties because an increasing share of the profit for shows are likely to come from long-term showing as reruns and DVDs and the potential for web releases, writers want a share of these revenues. Also fair enough.

The rub lies in the writers’ insistence that they should get royalties without any consideration on their part. If a writer wants to argue that he deserves a share of the gross for a successful film, I would agree. However, as things stand, the writer is already receiving, up front, money that reflects his expected contribution to profits. If a writer wants a cut of the pie when his script becomes a blockbuster, he ought to be willing to relinquish some portion of his current pay for a script, the portion designed to compensate for the potentiality of blockbuster status.

The issue is clouded by the generally low pay and low status of writers in Hollywood. Eileene tells me the writers are undervalued; perhaps they are. I, for one, recognize the difference script quality makes to a movie, typically as much difference as a director or starring actor makes, in my mind. Even successful writers don’t enjoy anywhere near the income of successful actors, and they certainly don’t enjoy as many of the perks of celebrity. But if writers are undervalued, it is due to the laws of supply and demand. Hollywood is choked with wannabe writers, more than the studios need—or, to put it another way, not enough studios exist to go around. In a just world, writers might deserve to be paid more, but in a free market economy, they deserve to be paid what they can get. If the writers don’t enjoy a large share of the profits for a film or television show, it’s largely because their colleagues are willing to work cheap. If they’re willing to work cheap, the writers cannot properly claim to be paid unfairly.

Ultimately, of course, the strike, or threat of a strike, will establish whether they are being paid fairly. The only real remedy to low wages is to lower the supply of workers. If the writers collectively are willing to work for expected income X, but not for Y, the studios will need to cough it up or do without the writer’s guild. I expect that the studios, ultimately, will cough it up, but that’s their decision—if they don’t cough it up, but hire scabs instead, the writers value themselves too highly. What I fail to understand is the framing of royalties as a moral question, that somehow writers are being cheated by not receiving royalties. If the royalties are that valuable, writers should be willing to take a hit to their up-front pay for a piece of that action. And they’re not.

Posted by at 3:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

(Apoligies for this being late; we had some trouble with the site on Friday, so I'm posting this now.)

Our current RPG campaign is drawing to a close, perhaps in another three months’ time. That means we’re already thinking about what we’ll be doing next, especially the GM, who has a lot of planning to do before the first die hits the table. We’ve settled on a relatively low-powered space opera, one that occasionally bows to modern science instead of treating technology as a magic wand.

Later, once the ground rules are set, ascendancy passes to the improvisational acting. A couple of my fellow players feel that we can’t reach this stage soon enough, that discussing technology is both boring and a waste of effort. In their minds, the story remains the same with different costumes, and technology doesn’t truly dictate the shape of anything meaningful, in our fictional world or the real one.

Of course, they’re deeply wrong on both counts, though hand-waving can conceal just how absurd the proposition is. Yes, empires rise and fall, but British hegemony in 19th century Europe, built on steam, coal, and iron, was very different in human terms as well as power-political ones from the German hegemony of the 20th century, built on electricity, oil, and steel. The human condition was fundamentally changed by the plow, the printing press, and the assembly line.

Fiction, of course, has the luxury of pretending that, as the French would have it, the more things change, the more they stay the same. But only so far. When Mr. Spock offers some screwball rubber physics explanation to Captain Kirk about why the aliens on this planet look and act like humans from classical Greece, he sounds stupid, especially if he said something flatly contradictory in the last episode. Our characters, and the space opera world they inhabit, would look equally stupid if it were possible to travel faster than light one week, but not the next. So we need to think about the science of our space opera ahead of time.

Most of the burden falls to Dave, who will occupy the GM’s seat, and therefore must create a setting where his desired (and partially hidden) plotlines can survive, but I’m helping where I can. The trick lies in choosing which scientific/technical limitations to break, and Larry Niven showed us how to make those decisions in his outstanding essay “The Theory and Practice of Teleportation.”

I’ve mentioned that essay before. In it, Niven explores the ramifications of teleportation under various constraints: what if teleportation requires a sending unit, but no receiving unit? A receiver but no sender? Both receiver and sender? What if teleporting long distances is expensive, but teleporting short distances cheap? What if the cost is constant at any distance, and expensive? Constant and cheap? What if the cost varies with the mass of the teleported body? What if teleporting to a different height changes the temperature of the teleporting body, to conserve the potential kinetic energy (k=mgh)? Different constraints give different socioeconomic results.

The same is true with space travel. Our RPG earth has interplanetary travel, and settlements on the moon, Mars, and in the asteroid belet. It also has an alien empire, which recently discovered us. They FTL travel, and they won’t share. Our solar system has suddenly become the third world of a much larger universe, complete with patronizing foreign “investors” and an unwanted colony draining Jupiter of its hydrogen.

Just how much our heroes can do to change the situation and rescue humanity from exploitation depends heavily on further assumptions about space travel, and their implications. We have space travel, but is it cheap enough to compete with alien trade ships, even within our own solar system? If we had the secret of FTL travel, could we implement it, or would we lack necessary support industries, like Yanomami tribesmen given blueprints for a helicopter? The aliens want things we have, but can they be interested in something other than our (irreplaceable) raw materials? While our heroes operate their tramp freighter and look for opportunity, they’ll be competing with human bulk freighters. In which trades can they compete effectively? The answer will determine where they could reasonably go. If, for example, per-cargo-ton fuel costs to get out of the gravity well of earth are prohibitive for small craft, we won’t be going to earth, which cuts off a lot of potential adventures. For that matter, how cheap is the fuel to get out of any gravity well? If it’s cheap, we can haul all kinds of cargos; if it’s expensive, only high-value cargoes are worth it. Cheap cargoes get ignored, but expensive cargoes means piracy. The existence of space pirates is important to characters in an adventure RPG. How easy is it to hit a jump point at the right velocity? The answer has huge implications for the viability of a plan to grab something (say, the secrets of cheap matter transmutation) and run. This in turn affects what character designs would be interesting to play; a character designed to snatch something and run is a lot less interesting in a world where that tactic won’t work.

So two words of warning to any players out there who decide that the “boring” parts (e.g., physics, economics, politics) of your adventure world aren’t important: They are. If you care about your character’s effectiveness in your fictional world, or about whether your schemes will work, the time to consider these questions is right up front, when the GM is hashing them out. Think about what you want to be able to do, and help him by telling him so. Only with a bit of forethought can those choices be viable.

Posted by at 3:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My sister-in-law has invited us to this year’s Renaissance Festival. This places me on the horns of a dilemma. On the one hand, I want to be sociable, and especially to continue getting to know her fiancé. On the other hand, the last time we attended the Ren Faire, it was abysmally bad.

Ren faires are conceived as a kind of re-enactment of Elizabethan England, with theater in the round, street theater, period costumes, period crafts, period food, whatever they can find someone to provide for the re-enactment. Unfortunately, historical accuracy is hard to come by in the modern world of mass production and the quick buck, so ren faires are subject to a certain minimum level of crap, including:

1. People playing dress-up without the slightest care for which period—if any—it comes from. The goth crowd is particularly guilty of this, but the die-hard D&D enthusiasts offer their own violations. Apparently, the rationale is that, since velvet and swords both existed in Elizabethan times, Elizabethans must have dressed like vampires and Vikings.
2. Souvenirs from the wrong era. The same melted-face crockery mugs and pewter wizard statues (complete with plastic “crystals”) that get schlepped to every two-bit craft show within driving distance do not magically become Renaissance-era because the words “ye olde” are painted on the storefront. Sword-makers always do a brisk business, including samurai swords and blades with chrome plating.
3. Just plain crap. Worse than the ahistorical crafts are the raw junk: sandwich board planks cut into shield-like shapes and decorated with neon green spray paint, for example, or cheap, ugly marionette birds mass-produced from kits.
4. Foods unknown to Elizabethans. Yes, Henry VIII is famed for a portrait with turkey drumstick, but I doubt he had Kansas City barbecue sauce on it. Ye Olde Italian Sausages and Gyros often make an appearance.

The business being what it is, it’s impossible to make a faire for purists. They’re expensive to put on, and organizers have to compromise their integrity for the extra cash Ye Olde dragon statuettes bring in. Most the visitors wouldn’t know Elizabethan from Dark Ages from early Victorian if you gave them a hint, and wouldn’t care if they did, so the ticket sales lost to discriminating visitors are more than made up for by the Disney-esque souvenir stall system. It’s hard, too, for organizers to draw a firm line. How can they bar (paying) visitors in grossly inappropriate costumes while allowing the masses to enter wearing t-shirts?

Still, there’s bad and there’s bad. A Robin Hood with good teeth is no sin; a Robin Hood swinging a cutlass mildly irksome; a Robin Hood who quotes Bart Simpson is right out. Silly-looking period hats are welcome; baseball-style caps labeled “I saw the Ren Faire!” best left at the souvenir stand near the exit gate; velvet-lined top hats for the goths who drop by destroy the mood. Some faires have six or seven shops selling just plain crap; others have dozens. In a good faire, the visitors practice gross anachronism; in a bad one, the staff does.

When last we attended this ren faire, it was bad. The shops weren’t even trying to fake a Renaissance look, and the street theater was like an imitation of that cheesy “Xena, Warrior Princess” show. A clumsy imitation, at that. Actors who couldn’t find real gigs held sword fights sprinkled with purple prose. Bad purple prose, the kind that doesn’t wink at itself. The women didn’t want to be left out, so they got to fence, too. In their lacy Louis XIV dresses. A lucky few got to wear sex club skintight black leather and high-heeled boots, the preferred footwear for fencing on muddy ground. Sometimes, the performers would switch sides for variety, in a sort of theater of betrayal that would make the WWF blush. The format of the fencing didn’t make any sense, either; at one point, one guy parried five overhead chops (delivered with rapiers) at once, all aimed by a remarkable coincidence at the same point. I say “parried,” but in fact, he held his sword up first, and then the damsels carefully tapped it in concert two seconds later. The fencing and jousting demonstrations came from people who hadn’t learned how to fence or joust, or even to fake it properly. We weren’t paying for a show; we were financing geeks who wanted to play dress-up, performing more for one another than for the audience.

So…yeah. The faire sucked a few years ago, and I doubt it will be any better this time around. Once a faire has lost its pride, it has a hard time attracting people who can restore it, because they still have theirs. If it weren’t for the demands of family cohesion, I might be able to keep mine.

Posted by at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

An online conversation beginning with Karl Rove drifted (as online conversations do). At one point, it became a quarrel over namecalling—specifically whether the names were justified. Curious whether any of the participants knew the definitions, I looked up the clinical definition and symptoms of sociopathy, with an eye to how they applied to politicians generally, to the current Republican leadership as a class, and especially to the president himself.

I did not find one universally accepted definition and list of symptoms, but many—all sharing a great deal of ground. I quote here from The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV, currently DSM-IV-TR):

[Sociopathy is] a pervasive pattern of disregard for and violation of the rights of others occurring since age 15, as indicated by three (or more) of the following:

• failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest
• deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal profit or pleasure
• impulsivity or failure to plan ahead
• irritability and aggressiveness, as indicated by repeated physical fights or assaults
• reckless disregard for safety of self or others
• consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeated failure to sustain steady work or honor financial obligations
• lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another

Symptoms included frequently in other lists include arrogance, a sense of entitlement, an inability to recognize personal failures, a parasitic lifestyle marked by financial dependence on others, and superficial charm.

Wow. Just...wow.

I spent a while today trying to grind an editorial out of this, only to find I couldn’t do it justice. The clinical definition is far more powerful than a rant could ever be.

Posted by at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

When Eileene and I came out of the theater after watching Stardust, my opening comment was that it made me think of The Princess Bride. I thought the comparison insightful, but Eileene quickly disabused me of the notion. Apparently a lot of people have had the same thought. The really odd part is that different viewers are struck by similarities of an entirely different nature.

The gross similarities are there: swashbuckling fantasy, consciously framed as a fairy tale, complete with grandfatherly narrator. A clean-cut youth engaged in a three-cornered struggle for his true love. Dei ex machina materialize when necessary to assure he triumphs. Supporting characters are far more interesting than the protagonists. But the similarities lie in presentation, the film as a production, as much as they do in the plot elements. One blogger likens the films for the difficulty of marketing the movies, as reflected in their awkward trailers. Is it an action-adventure? A children’s matinee? A satire of the fairy tale? Because the movie itself can’t quite settle on a serious or silly tone, it’s hard for the audience to know what it’s getting, or for the ads to tell them. (A problem shared by the 1999 version of The Mummy.) Another blogger discusses the benefits and problems of using ten-dollar actors to fill bit parts, as both movies do.

What made me see The Princess Bride in Stardust was their relationship to the respective books. Stardust began as a comic book, which was translated to a book before becoming a screenplay. The book version was the first that I encountered, for both Stardust and The Princess Bride, so I was conscious of the compromises made to bring the material to the screen.

I adored the book version of The Princess Bride. While it was a satire, and was—gratingly—punctuated by yammering about the fictitious author S. Morgenstern’s original satirical content, it could be read as an unabashed romantic adventure, and so I read it. Repeatedly. I could recite my favorite passages at length. I was hurt when almost none of those passages actually made it into the movie: Inigo’s childhood, Fezzik’s childhood, the descent into the Zoo of Death. I was equally upset to see other scenes turned wholly farcical, with no attempt at retaining the original tone. The duel on the Cliffs of Insanity, with gymnastic swings and cartoon music in place of proper fencing was, for me, a travesty, like watching JarJar Binks was for the Star Wars fans who expected to relive their childhood delight at the original Star Wars. I can understand why the movie did these things; there simply wasn’t time for what were, technically, side stories, and capturing the internal narrative essential to the drama of the swordplay would have been impossible. Nonetheless, I remain embittered toward the movie in a way that mystifies my geeky friends, all of whom love the movie. (Some have read the book since, but none read the book first.)

Stardust grapples with the same problems, and resolves them in much the same way, slipping into easy gags when maintaining a more earnest, more engaging tone becomes too difficult. It drops scenes of less immediate importance to the plot, but essential to establishing a tone, and loses a degree of audience engagement. Sometimes these cut corners made me roll my eyes; other times, they improved on the book, which, to me, was a little too long and a little too slow. Cutting to the chase was, at times, a positive improvement. In this sense, Stardust the movie is superior to The Princess Bride movie; it improved on its source. But I think that’s more a measure of the quality of the respective sources.

In the final analysis, the film version of Stardust was good, but a long way from perfect, and bears small signs of parts left out. Michelle Pfeiffer is effective as the witch, Lamia, as is Mark Strong as the wicked Prince Septimus. DeNiro takes his role too far, but the audience around me seemed to enjoy it. The portrayal of witches’ treacherous sisterhood (literal and figurative) is interesting, as is the equally treacherous system of succession for the throne. Billy and Bernard (male and female) raise a smile. Victoria and Humphrey, snobs of young Tristan’s home village, are just right. About the only actors to come up lacking were the hero and heroine. Once you’re past the popcorn-crunching fun, though, there’s not much under the hood. Readers who loved the book should enter the theater with modest expectations, lest they find something missing, as I did Inigo’s past.

Posted by at 4:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work –

I am the grass.
Let me work.
--Carl Sandburg, “Grass”

I liked Sandburg’s poem the moment I read it. It was powerful enough to reach a self-absorbed twelve-year-old, and has only gotten better as I learned more about the battles. Sandburg, of course, did not choose them for their recognition value, but for their awful, bloody stupidity, the ruinous tactics by which they were fought or the pointless purposes they sought to serve, with each battle in the poem worse than the previous.

Austerlitz was a brilliant victory, although it could not be sustained in the long run, a victim of Napoleon’s determination to continue his perpetual conquest. Waterloo was lost before it began, fought only for Napoleon’s vanity, an attempt to rebuild his empire from a citizenry whose skilled veterans were dead from earlier battles, against opponents who had finally learned to defeat him. Gettysburg had strategic wisdom, but its purpose was lost and the army destroyed in the rank obstinacy of Pickett’s Charge at its close. Ypres was the opening of a war nobody wanted, ending in the trench stalemate after horrific casualties. Verdun was the worst of all, combining strategic and tactical stupidity, German soldiers marching in slow ranks into unrelenting machine gun fire long after earlier battles had proved the attempt suicide, an attempt justified as war by attrition—that is, by killing as many soldiers as possible, as long as one’s own supply outlasts the enemy’s. 400,000 Germans died in a month, along with a comparable number of Allied soldiers. The Allies, blind to the lesson, would duplicate Germany’s folly at the Somme even before Verdun was wholly finished.

Knowing the details of these battles, and especially of Verdun and the Somme, makes Sandburg’s bitterness toward war obvious. But I have never satisfied in my mind just how Sandburg felt about the grass of his poem, representative of time and the larger, natural world. There is much ambiguity in the poem.

The grass eases our pain, hiding the dead from sight, returning them to the fertile earth, transforming twisted bodies into greenery. This is not wholly a blessing. As the grass works, as time passes, it eases our pain by making us forget. “What place is this? Where are we now?” And once we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat it. Sandburg could not predict the specifics, but he anticipated the casualties of Stalingrad and the eastern front of the next war. We did not learn from Waterloo, or from Gettysburg; we would not learn from Verdun. The grass works. It heals our collective wound, yes, but it could fairly be said to hide the evidence, as well.

Grass survives. No matter how horrible the human carnage, grass, and by extension, the world around us, continues on. Sandburg did not know of nuclear weapons when he wrote in 1918, since which time the extinction of humanity, and the grass with it, has become a distinct possibility. In 1918, it seemed reasonable that grass should live on, no matter how brutal our own carnage. Churn the fields of France into an ocean of mud and unexploded shells, and the grass will return. Even if the earth becomes a radioactive lump, the planets will continue in their orbits; the stars will continue to shine. There is a sort of hope in this, if a rather bleak sort. Grass survives us. It doesn’t care. And if it doesn’t care, it cannot be said to seek to comfort us at all as it works. It merely feeds on our corpses; the comfort is incidental. The last two lines can be read as the stern demand of a contractor employed to do the dirty job of fixing up our mess, and probably should be read that way. But there is a whisper, too, of the old gods behind it: “Step aside, mortal. I will do as I will. These dead are no longer yours, but mine. Your sacrifice is accepted.”

Naturally, the ambiguities of the poem are part of its genius, because the situation itself is ambiguous. We do forget the horrors of war, for good or ill. Our affairs are insignificant to a vast, uncaring universe, which comfort or disturb you. But, like it or not, that’s how things are. Some day, the current war will end, even as shapeless and ill-defined as it is. We will bury our dead. We will let the grass work. And we will forget.

Posted by at 3:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We picked up Civ4: Beyond the Sword a couple days ago. This is the newest expansion for Civilization IV, and I’ve been going through it like a kid in a candy shop. This is because they put considerable effort into making the scenarios different, often very, very different.

Expansions, naturally enough, always include a little more of everything. In Civ’s case, this is more units, more leaders, more nations, more wonders. Ho hum. Only rabid Hellenophiles will care whether you can conquer the world as Pericles as well as Alexander, and the inclusion of a wonder that didn’t make the cut for the original game isn’t going to change anything. New rule sets are the treasure, because figuring out working strategies for a different balance of rules is the most interesting part of the game, and this expansion pays in spades.

Generally, radically new scenarios don’t work very well, so I play them long enough to discover they’re broken, and stop. But all the scenarios I’ve tried so far are at least workable. Just as important, you can use many of the scenarios as mods, which you could not do with the Warlords scenarios. Because you can play fresh games with the new rules, you can replay scenarios, or tweak them to your taste, instead of winning once and never returning. In my case, that means I can test new rule sets without chaining myself to vast, grinding 100-city showdowns on huge maps; I can explore different tech trees and units without taking three hours per turn or twiddling eight hundred infantry divisions. Massive games are there, if that’s your cup of tea, but you don’t have to play them massive. Nor do you have to play tiny games tiny. Or on featureless terrain. Or from the same starting position every time.

Two scenarios go so far into experimental territory that they no longer resemble Civ. One of these is a space-faring setting, with solar systems replacing cities. Rather than working the surrounding tiles, your citizens work space available on the various planets, and planets can be upgraded independently. The strategic resources lie almost entirely outside your planetary reach, so the designers revived the Civ3 device of outposts, sacrificing a worker to create a space station from which strategic resources can be shipped. The military and development techs are sharply divided in the tree, almost independent; it is possible to become socially advanced with a crappy navy, or vice versa. A second scenario plays more like a dungeon crawl, calling on you to direct a squad of supersoldiers through a complex infested with crazed mutants. There’s no production or technology at all, but you can upgrade your soldiers with gear. Ultimately, these two radical experiments will probably prove inferior to games designed specifically for these themes, but it’s amazing to see the Civ engine work this way at all.

To date, I’ve only looked at three of the mods. The next one I’ll explore is a fantasy version pitting you as much against the environment as against your rivals; the winter god threatens your lands with encroaching glaciers, and you must recover a legendary sword to slay him before your land goes barren. Wild, huh? Some other interesting offerings I’ve seen so far: random events, qualitatively different religions, and the inclusion of an espionage counter in your budget. The random events are a nice touch. Unlike the rightly detested random events in Civ1, which arbitrarily struck with small penalties, these events take a page from the critically acclaimed Galactic Civilizations, giving you a choice of responses to both good and bad events. Do you excavate a recent archaeological find for the scientific boost, or leave it pristine as a cultural landmark? Do you pay a chunk of your treasury to earthquake victims, or suffer a morale hit for leaving them to fend for themselves?

The much-anticipated corporations haven’t proven very interesting. To found a corporation, you must have spare resources appropriate to the company, which is easy. But you must also generate and sacrifice an appropriate leader, which is difficult and expensive. So far, I’ve preferred to use my leaders for their existing purposes, instead of founding a corporation for a little extra cash.

This is just an enticing sampler; a proper review will have to wait until I’ve seen much more of the game. What I’ve seen so far suggests that will take a while. If the measure of an expansion is how much it adds to explore, Beyond the Sword is a success; if the measure is whether all these new features add to game play once the novelty passes, the jury is still out.
.

Posted by at 3:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We’re in a summer heat wave—the dog days of summer. When I was a kid, I always figured these were called the “dog days” because dogs looked like I felt; panting, beaten down, and generally miserable. Only later did I learn the phrase comes from astronomy: “dog” refers to Sirius, the dog star, so named for lying in the constellation of Canis Major, the big dog.

Or so I’m told. The association to Canis Major never made much sense. One problem is that Sirius isn’t visible at this time of year; it’s too close to the sun. Canis Major belongs to the winter group of the sky, constellations that you see on winter nights, because the sun is on the opposite side of the celestial sphere. By definition, the sun is up during the day; whichever stars the sun is near at that time of year are also up during the day, when you can’t see them. In the summer, Sirius is one of the stars made invisible by the glare of the sun. And why Sirius particularly? If medieval astronomers—who were often indistinguishable from astrologers—wanted to name this season for stars where the sun is, why not choose Gemini, Cancer, or Leo? Again, by definition, the zodiac consists of the twelve constellations in the ecliptic plane—the circle through which the sun seems to pass in the course of a year. These should be the crab days of summer, or the lion days a bit later.

Stars are on my mind because I’m brushing up on my stargazing. We’ll have an opportunity for real stargazing on our Arizona trip, and I want to be sure I have something to point out. This could be a challenge, given few distinguishing landmarks of the autumn sky and my own failing memory.

By accident of our position in the galaxy, prominent stars and constellations are relatively sparse in autumn. There is nothing like Orion or the Big Dipper, which everyone knows. Hercules and Pegasus in particular are nondescript squares, easily lost against the background. Pisces is an irregular loop and zig-zag. I used to know my constellations pretty well, thanks to a children’s astronomy program in my home town, but precisely because there’s more to see in winter than in autumn, our lessons began with the winter group and ended with the autumn group. Of course the last thing memorized is the one least well retained. So I have to study if I’m going to point anything out besides the north circumpolar group, the stars that are always visible at our latitude because they congregate around the north pole, fixed above the horizon.

Poring over star charts to relearn the celestial geography reminds me how different everything looks in the sky, in comparison to how it all looks on a map. Books—even large, unwieldy books—shrink everything to fit on the page. What looks like a dense, easily identified cluster on paper can be quite scattered when you go looking for the real thing. Shapes as well as sizes change; like maps, star charts distort the curved surface of the projected sphere of the heavens into a flat one. It can be hard to get your bearings. If you’re unlucky enough to lose one star behind a scrap of cloud, forget it. You can get similarly lost if you misidentify a planet as a star. Planets are relatively bright, and they move around, so they’re never seen on star charts, and misreading one is an easy mistake. Books eliminate a lot of background noise, minor stars that belong to no constellation’s construction. That’s no problem for Orion, but a big problem when looking for Pegasus, marked out by four dim stars barely distinguishable from their neighbors. Books indicate star brightness by the size of the spot; bigger spots for brighter stars. Trust me: t’s much harder to distinguish stars by brightness than ink spots by size. And, of course, the sky does not include bright connecting lines to mark out the constellations.

So preparation is a fair amount of work, but there are rewards. Away from the dimming blanket of city lights, the stars are quite beautiful, whether or not you know their names. Yes, even the autumn stars. Knowing the names makes you feel smart, and can impress your girl/boy-friend, especially a geek-chick like mine. If you can recall the mythology around the figures, telling the stories late into the night can be romantic. But best of all, at least in my imagination right now, is that we’ll be in the desert on an autumn evening, when it’s chilly enough to wear a jacket. God, I could use a chilly evening right about now.

Posted by at 5:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Dedicated to being a responsible citizen, I try to keep tabs on where the major figures of both parties stand. Frankly, my 2008 vote is pretty much cast already, keeping on top of issues is nonetheless important. My single vote wouldn’t matter in any case. Even persuading my immediate circle of friends to vote as I do wouldn’t go far. But participating in a broader discussion (as I do here), reminding people I’ve never met of salient facts, encouraging like-minded voters in the echo chamber of Well political forums, and generally staying vocal can have an impact. As inimical as it is to healthy democracy, we remain motivated in part by a strong herd instinct. The time to pick a direction and start pushing is now, before the stampede is irreversible.

So I try to stay aware. This is not always easy. Major debates always seem to end up scheduled on our occasional nights out, and the news media, even when they live up to the principles of investigative reporting, tend to stick to the most recent events in the top two or three stories to date, rather than the fundamental causes. Plenty of candidates are still out there, too, shaping the national discussion; following all of them is a task.

That’s why I appreciate the site expertvoter.org. It lays out a grid, one row per candidate, one column for each of nine issues. Clicking on a square plays a short YouTube video featuring that candidate speaking on that issue. The coverage isn’t perfect; some videos are prepared speeches while others are less polished responses in a debate. One of Edwards pays less attention to his statement than to a reporter asking a question he won’t answer, which makes him look bad, while most of Huckabee’s entries feature him speaking only to the camera, without the nuisance of questions at all. (Questions of any kind would quickly make him look bad.) The grid has many gaps, which is itself telling: the candidate can’t be found addressing the issue at all, at least not in front of a camera. Still, it’s a dense yet accessible packaging of information, and a useful starting point for measuring the candidates.

This is the second time I’ve seen YouTube used to good effect in our nation’s political discourse. Like the CNN-sponsored Democratic debates on questions collected through YouTube, we should enjoy it while it lasts. As long as we can distinguish between honest amateur efforts like this and party propaganda, we should treasure attempts to use the internet to make politics accessible. But if sites like this become too successful, too influential, too useful to the general public, it will be drowned in an avalanche of party-sponsored imitators, carefully selected and spun to resemble a fair treatment, and secretive about its sponsors. I’d like to think we can continue to make the distinction between news and editorials, or even outright lies, but the continued success of Fox news attests to the contrary.

And, while I’m thinking of it, this link is built upon a shameless factoid, but emotionally satisfying, nonetheless.

Posted by at 2:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The August issue of Harper’s featured a lovely, partisan attack on Giuliani as its lead story, portraying him as the essence of all that’s wrong with the Republican party today: authoritarianism, corruption, and a violent refusal to acknowledge failures, sold to the public with the ever-popular packaging of fear and hate. The article rakes Giuliani over the coals for his handling of 9/11; after delivering his reassuring speech, he proceeded to handle the actual clean-up by sacrificing worker safety in order to do it all on the cheap, and especially for quick photo ops before passing the real work onto Bloomberg. The article skewers Giuliani for his quick dash to the lecture circuit, trumpeting the happy accident of being mayor when the attack struck without actually doing any mayoring, and for even ducking out of anti-terrorism panels—for which he received a salary, but whose meetings he did not attend—when public service began to interfere with cashing in on the misfortunes of others. The article also reminds us of Giuliani’s style of government, confrontational, secretive, and divisive, including many examples to show how a Giuliani presidency would be an expansion of what we’re getting now from Bush. As Giuliani himself once said, in finest Orwellian fashion: “Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do. You have free speech so I can be heard.”

The article does not, however, raise what to me is the perfect emblem of Giuliani’s performance as mayor. In 1998, demonstrators marched on city hall as part of the AIDS vigil. Unlike his successor, Giuliani does not believe in meeting with the public. Nor was he satisfied with simply ignoring them. The demonstrators were herded into a small area fenced off by concrete barricades, well out of reach of anyone else approaching city hall that day. The demonstrators were then filmed, singly and up close, by cameras ostensibly intended to record police behavior, but later used to identify and harass the demonstrators. Giuliani had snipers posted, just in case a crowd mourning for AIDS victims had to be mowed down from the roof of city hall.

Snipers.

Giuliani also used tanks to evict squatters from Harlem, but at least the squatters were breaking the law. The marchers’ only offence was to make Giuliani look bad—or rather, remind us that Giuliani had made himself look bad. The message was clear: anyone criticizing government, and especially the person in government, could expect to be harassed by every means necessary, including death threats.

Any presidential campaign that can’t make political hay out of that doesn’t deserve to win. I envision a television ad that depicts a generic feel-good sort of political rally with far fewer picket signs than you would see at a real rally. The camera settles on a smiling young speaker calling for more action, and telescopes back as the speaker continues, eventually reaching a view through telescopic crosshairs as the speaker reaches complaints about an uncaring government. Switch to a side view of a sniper in official-looking Kevlar vest and helmet, chewing as he peers calmly through the scope. Snap to black. Fade in the statement: “In 1998, Rudy Giuliani employed rooftop snipers to silence a peaceful public demonstration.” The impact should match that of the “daisy” ad that torpedoed Goldwater in 1964.

I’m an amateur; presumably professionals could do better. But really, the ad almost writes itself. It’s vicious, negative, and reduces political campaigning on both sides to a question of who you fear most: terrorists, or your own proto-fascist leaders? But if, god help us, Giuliani wins the Republican nomination, it will be way past time to play nice. Certainly he won’t, and neither will his party.

Posted by at 4:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The UA newsgroup recently touched on the question of how to encourage proactivity in players. This is a recurrent question, and I’ve got some ideas on how to do it. One poster graciously encouraged me to post them on the official website, but there’s no appropriate category, so…here they are, instead. I can call people’s attention here if I have to. Many of these suggestions come from my own experiments in a Mage game. I was dealing with players used to political games, where friends where hard to find, and enemies quick to capitalize on mistakes. It had made my players cautious, when I wanted a game of teenaged mages in Nebraska exploring their powers to the full. I had to train them to greater activity, and some of my techniques worked. What follows is advice for the GM looking for more proactivity from his players.

Unknown Armies draws on source material that depicts desperate, dangerous, even flatly self-destructive acts. People risk everything for their obsessions, often dirty little obsessions in the tradition of Chinatown and Reservoir Dogs. Naturally, GMs want their players to duplicate this kind of behavior; it makes for a great narrative. Equally naturally, players have other ideas.

In games of mystery, politics, and conspiracy, the players face powerful disincentives to action. Players become conditioned to inactivity, and chances are good that you, the GM, had a hand in that conditioning. (As the UA tagline says: You did it!) Even when players understand in principle that they must be their own salvation, or look forward to dancing on the edge of catastrophe, it’s hard to overcome that conditioning. If you want your players to rise to the kind of vicious mayhem UA embraces, you may have to recognize and break the Pavlovian response, starting with some cherished notions of your own.

1. Confusion

Your players do not know—cannot know—the ground rules as well as you do. A GM automatically knows a lot about how things work, because he’s the one making them work that way. How likely is a bribe to work? How big a bribe does it have to be, and how big can it be before scaring someone about being in over his head? What are the telltales that someone is a straight shooter, or a lying sack of shit? When a PC gets an inexplicable creepy feeling from a statue, is that a signal to investigate and dispose of a menace, or to stay as far away from the statue as possible?

In a game circling about mysteries, keeping information from the players is natural. But if you want proactive players, you have to give them enough information to act on. That’s probably way more information than you’re comfortable with. Bite the bullet and hand out some solid info. Ideally, the PCs will get it after some work, because experienced players can be suspicious of easy info when they know conspiracies are around, but pass the information by whatever means work, including mystic visions out of the blue if necessary. (It works for Stephen King; it works for J. K. Rowling; it will work for you.) Make that information reliable, too, and keep it reliable until your players learn to trust it enough to build their own plans. Later, you can start corrupting your sources, but never so far that players start second-guessing every datum into uselessness.

Magic and other weird powers go a long way to heightening your players’ sense that they don’t have enough information to work with. In a world where history itself can be changed with a major charge, it’s hard to know whether that cooling corpse was killed by an ordinary gun or by a spell that materializes a bullet with the same barrel markings as a bullet fired from some innocent’s pistol. Anything can happen, and once your players lock onto the wrong conclusion, they’ll be loathe to give it up, no matter how much evidence you provide to correct them. Once you decide to give the players info, try to hand all the salient bits right up front, so they can make proper sense of them.

Give your players everything they need to know to get a viable plan started. This includes the rules, and background information on important NPCs. If your players want to run a campaign of maneuvering one of their own into apotheosis, give them the entirety of the Godwalking chapter, and lots of useful rumors, besides. Keeping players in the dark about weird powers is appropriate to a low-powered campaign about discovering that the Occult Underground exists; it is inappropriate for a campaign about competing within the Occult Underground. If your players want to create a bizarre cult, give them credit for having done their homework on people who are likely to join, or object. If your players want operate as part of TNI, let them know the personalities of the organization as well as the functional bits. Your PCs have surely met them from time to time. If your players don’t know enough to seize the initiative, they’ll hang back until they do.

One trick I found useful is to allow players to be right about some things no matter what they conclude. Let’s say your PCs encounter a duke who encourages them to smash mail boxes in order to solve their current problem. They might agree, or they might decide he’s trying to get them in trouble, or they might decide he’s using them in a ritual of his own, or any number of things. They’ll discuss the possibilities right there at the table where you can hear it. Whatever they choose, they’re right! If they have several guesses and decide to test them, the one you like best is right! And the test proves it! Obviously, you can’t do this every time; some events are central to your plot, and it’s handy let some decisions go wrong to keep up the illusion of an objective universe. But with smaller questions between now and discovering the ultimate truth at the campaign’s end, you can get away with a lot. Players will generate their own uncertainty, and may well overlook—or even better, explain away—small inconsistencies, though you should be prepared for some fancy footwork from time to time. If this approach frightens you, start small, and see how it works. You’ll be surprised. Keep it up for a while, and your players will start feeling more confident in their decisions, and become more willing to put their next plan into action. Proactivity is underway.

Is this technique cheating? Yes, but in a good way. You are creating stories where unreasonable things are often true. When reason is unreliable, there’s no way to know what makes sense. Agent Mulder isn’t right every time he comes up with some half-assed explanation because he’s clever and well-informed; his theories match the facts because the script-writer put the right theory in his head by fiat. You’re doing the same thing, although you have to do it from the other end. The players control the protagonists’ ideas, so you’re changing reality to match by fiat. As long as nobody catches you, it’s perfectly fine.

2. Exposure

On the other side of the coin, NPCs enjoy an advantage your players never will; they are controlled by someone who knows nearly everything that’s going on: you. You know which names are significant, which events are part of a larger whole, and at least some of that knowledge inevitably bleeds into the NPCs, in ways it shouldn’t. Your players are capable of staggering leaps of intuition, but they are also capable of leaping to horrendously bad conclusions, and it’s never clear which is which until it’s too late. The NPCs are capable of staggering leaps of intuition, and they’re always right.

This was one of the biggest problems I faced with my Mage game. We rotate responsibility for GMing, and one of the GMs habitually allows NPCs to key in on the most significant words in a conversation, and to grill the PCs immediately. Of course the NPCs always knew everything we were up to, and would respond effectively, while we remained in the dark. The players (including me) rapidly became reluctant to talk to anyone; the danger of exposure was greater than the promise of useful information.

Put your NPCs into a PC’s shoes. Remember the last time you were a player, and knew that something was up, but hadn’t the slightest idea what to do about it? That’s where the NPCs should be when it comes to your players’ plans. When your players concoct some scheme, their foils don’t know it. Even if they catch the PCs doing something, the meaning of the something isn’t clear to the NPCs. Remember the last time you caught a villain in the act, and still couldn’t tell what he was really up to? That’s where your NPCs should be. Remember the last time you were a player and said the wrong thing to the wrong person, or slapped your head as a fellow player let a name slip? That’s where your PCs should be. Even better, let the NPCs look worried, and ask the PCs not to repeat what he just said, because he could get in trouble if the wrong people (i.e., the PCs) found out.

Letting NPCs betray their own ignorance is a powerful tool. When my teen mages accidentally created a crop circle in Mr. Dieterle’s farm, he didn’t immediately launch a penetrating investigation, starting with them; he just griped to anyone who would listen about losing crop revenue to some damn prank. When my teen mages made their car disappear during a police chase, the local sheriff gossiped to them about how the idiots over in Wilmot county lost track of a miscreant, and how it made everyone look bad. The players took the hint and asked for the whole story, learning what the cops knew and didn’t know—which wasn’t much—so the PCs could get on with their plans.

The UA approach of treating adepts as enemies almost by reflex makes narrative sense, but it’s a great way to convince your characters that there’s no point in dealing with other people. I find it better to treat the vast majority of NPCs as flatly unconcerned with PC activity. They’ve got their own stuff going on; if they stopped to poke around every oddity, they’d never get anywhere, and if they interfered with every other adept on principle, there’d be a lot more conflict, and hence a lot fewer adepts in the world. Another adept is as much an opportunity as a threat. Of course, there is room for betrayal—once, so make it count. Also, if your players insist on walking up to the big nasty and telling him everything they know, he’ll make them regret it. But take the default level of hostility to be low.

3. Consequences

We’ve all heard stories of idiot players and self-destruction, but to my experience this is not the rule in games of mystery, politics, and conspiracy. Idiocy is possible for anyone in a momentary lapse of attention, but the true loose cannons migrate to games were indiscretions are winked at, which is just as well. Players who enjoy themes of secrets and betrayal tend to play it safe, turtling until they can be sure of their next move and its consequences. This is entirely sensible, but it’s also toxic to UA and similar games.

GMs, in their eagerness to set a dark and dangerous tone, like to depict bad things, ideally bad things happening as a direct result of player choices. There’s a delicious irony in watching the protagonists hoist on their own petard; we see it in the UA source material. But those characters don’t enter into the story knowing it will go wrong; your players do, especially if it happens in every narrative arc, instead of all at once in the campaign’s climax. Pull this trick too often, and your players will quickly learn that activity leads to swift and cruel consequences. They may already be carrying this baggage from some other campaign.

I am in no way advocating letting your players get away with anything they want! In a game about what you’re willing to do for power, consequences are vital. But, if you want your players to be the proactive agents of the campaign, and not merely taking action only when there is no other choice, those actions need to pay off, and regularly. The worse the consequences of failure, or the greater the chance of failure, the better the rewards for success must be.

Remember that your players can’t always know where the boundaries of reasonable methods lie. Listen to their plans as they’re being discussed. If their ideas are reasonable, cut some slack even if they’re also dead wrong. When the players do something that could get them in trouble should the wrong person hear about it, don’t immediately presume the wrong person hears about it. In fact, presume he doesn’t, unless there’s no way around it. If your PCs kill someone too casually, don’t presume the victim’s friends will come out of the woodwork seeking vengeance; punish the PCs with a news story about a brutal killing and the grieving family. When you signal that a mistake has been made, do it in a way that won’t stop the players from trying again.

Conversely, when you let the players get away with something, signal that. A party sitting back at base biting their fingernails over whether their plan worked is one thing. A party that learns second-hand the next day that it did will pat themselves on the back and start work on their next plan.

4. GM-Player Relations

Most games place the initiative in the hands of NPCs: bad people are doing bad things, and it’s up to the PCs to stop them. The players investigate and throw whatever monkey wrenches they can, often killing the GM’s favorite villain in the process. That works just fine. Everyone understands that the whole point of all the GM’s hard work is for it to be wrecked in a dramatic and satisfying fashion. If you want the players to take the lead, however, the roles are reversed. Now it’s their plan that somebody’s going to muck with, and that somebody is you. Make it clear to everyone that your job is to threaten their plan, and that those threats are meant to be dispatched just as surely as the evil high priest’s plan to summon the Old Gods is meant to be disrupted, and you can avoid some bad blood.

It is easier to destroy than to create, especially since you can be far more careless with your characters than the players can with theirs. If an NPC dies or suffers other losses, you can just make another. The players have to survive from one act to another, and identify far more strongly with their alter-egos. Kamikaze attacks are less viable for them. If you must employ NPCs willing to embrace their own ruin in order to stop the PCs, you have to compensate for that edge. NPC ignorance is a good way to do this.

5. Laziness

Some players are just reactive by nature, and not by conditioning. Accepting a patrons mission of the week is a lot easier than coming up with your own ideas. If your entire group is composed of these, there’s not much you can do about it.

Chances are good, though, that at least one of your players is willing to show some enterprise if you ask for the players to create their own goal at the start of the campaign. Cherish that player, and pay careful attention to what he needs to feel secure in taking the initiative.

6. Communication

Unless your players are reactive by nature, almost all of these techniques to encourage them to open up will work much faster, and much better, if you share them explicitly. (The one exception is the technique of retroactively changing the story to match player guesswork, for obvious reasons.) Tell your players you intend to reward activity over inactivity. Tell your players they should choose their own campaign goal, and that you’ll create a campaign that lets them pursue it. Tell your players that you will not allow NPCs to jump all over the slightest misstep. If your players know what’s coming, they can consciously work to let go of temporary safety and trust your implied promise to let them succeed.

And keep those promises! Keep them as long as it takes for your players to feel safe enough to stick their necks out. In time, you can raise the stakes, but be careful never to push so hard that the players retreat to reactivity again. Before changing the rules, let the players know. Either tell them directly, or speak to them through various NPCs they can trust, warning the PCs that this guy is seriously bad news before slapping them with a master villain who will break them for the slightest misstep.

In short, if you want your players to be more proactive, empower them to be more proactive. Build a world where they can get away with stuff, and especially small mistakes, and make sure the players know it. Don’t worry too much about maintaining a sense that disaster is just around the corner; your players will provide that themselves, without the slightest provocation. If you stick consistently to this approach, the same Pavlovian response that once made your players so cautious will work to make them confident, instead.

Posted by at 8:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Stan took his Xbox360 back today, so let me make this comment before I forget. We borrowed the platform so Eileene could try out the new Overlord game. I’d seen ads and comments on it, and expected something in the vein of Dungeon Keeper, the management sim that put you in the role of evil overlord creating a deadly underground maze of monsters and traps to do in the inevitable party of fantasy heroes who would come to kill you and take your treasure. At the time, playing a game from the evil perspective was a clever and entertaining twist.

Overlord borrows that same idea, but instead of a management sim, all we got was a bog-standard linear killing game, the kind that accounts for about 95% of the console market. Walk forward until you see an enemy. Batter it down by pushing your attack key as quickly as possible; for variety, you are occasionally allowed to use a superweapon. Then smash every crate/barrel/flowerpot/chest in sight, just in case there’s some stray loot in them. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sure, Overlord casts you as the conquering evil overlord instead of the teenage protector, and your own attacks are supplemented by a band of goblins, but it’s the same damn game: kill everything, smash the furniture, take the powerups. Apparently, evil kingdoms are best built personally, by hand, one cottage at a time.

What really caught my attention was the fact that you aren’t even the protagonist of the game! Seriously. Your army of evil consists of yourself, a band of goblins, an advisor who calls your attention to various game features, and a jester of no immediately apparent value, who remains in the tower where you save games. Nominally, you are the leader. But, if you pay attention, it’s the advisor who is calling the shots. “Look, master! A family having a picnic! Let’s go and knock over their potato salad!” So you go and knock over their potato salad. “Master, if you are in need of additional health, you can sacrifice your minions in this blood well.” Sure enough, you need some health, so you sacrifice some minions. “Master, this statue is a powerful artifact. If we take it to the castle, it will increase your evil power tenfold!” So you gather up your goblins and tell them to carry the statue back to the castle. “I wonder what this machinery operates?” So you gather up your goblins and tell them to operate this machinery. No matter how low your advisor grovels, it’s still he who calls the shots! You’re just his favored henchman, middle management for the evil kingdom you’ll build together. And if you stray too far, he’ll cut in and correct you: “Master, you could walk all the way home, but this shortcut will save your boot leather.”

Eileene has played farther into the game than I have, and swears that the game eventually gives you some free will. No doubt she’s right, but I couldn’t generate enough interest to keep going. It was pretty clear who was really calling the shots, similar to the way Dick Cheney lets Bush confirm whatever appointments the vice president vets for him, and lets him read the speeches as long as he doesn’t try answering questions directly. If you do a really good job as overlord, your goblin advisor might let you sit on the throne, but the power? Ah, the power lies behind the throne, where you’ll never see it.

Posted by at 4:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)