• Discussing solo combat in RPGs with the Courts patrons. www.koboldquarterly.com/k/article2696.php #

The Zoom Quilt II collaborative art project is a bit of Flash-work done by over thirty different artists. This animation takes the viewer deeper and deeper inside the painting to see surreal landscape that includes everything from tentacled horrors to cheese-eating mice. You can find it at http://zoomquilt2.madmindworx.com/zoomquilt2.swf.

Venture: The Gathering
From the mind of Andy: Venture Brothers Magic: The Gathering cards. Richard Garfield, eat your heart out. More can be found at http://community.livejournal.com/venturebrothers/432084.html.


All We Here Is Radio Ga Ga
The Vigilant Citizen has exposed pop singer Lady Ga Ga for what she truly is: a puppet for the Illuminati.

View series to date here. Updated archive soon.

"Every construct we've built in American life is falling apart. Why? Because of personal greed and ambition. Capitalism without regulation can't protect us against personal greed...."
--Jim Carrey, The Guy Who Made $108,385,533 for Starring in Ace Ventura II, When Nature Calls

Famine in Far-Go was my favorite Gamma World module. I ran across the following video which reminded me of that fine TSR product.


MST3K - Chicken Of Tomorrow

Riz | MySpace Video

I Love This Guy
Originally posted by Jeff Rients over at Jeff's Game, this old guy is my new idol.

Creative Ecology
The Morae River: an exploration of the Morae River's ecosystems and the beings that inhabit them is a website at which one man makes up his own continent and the lifeforms that populate it.

May Be Worth Getting
Batman/Doc Savage Special #1. Despite having sworn off comic buying, I will definitely have to check this out.

• Thinking about cookies. bit.ly/405qe2 #

When a US studio snaps up remake rights to a foreign film, it’s often hard to picture the elements that made the original special in the first place surviving the translation into the Hollywood style. The piece might depend on cultural specifics that won’t work with American characters. It might succeed on the basis of a delicately sustained tone that seems impossible to capture a second time. The impending Hollywood version of Let the Right One In comes to mind. For similar reasons I've always been glad that the long-bruited American version of The Killer never made it out of development.

Overheard [HK, Felix Chong and Alan Mak] is, on the other hand, the kind of movie Hollywood should be remaking. It’s a plot-driven thriller with a fresh premise that could occur in any country with a stock market. The film makes diverting hay of its basic concept but doesn’t knock it out of the park, leaving room for the hypothetical remake writer to improve on the original.

Three underpaid cops from an electronic surveillance division enter a slippery slope of danger and corruption when they decide to cash in on the insider trading scheme they’ve been assigned to listen in on. Lau Ching Wan downshifts his charisma into a lower key as a passive guy secretly seeing getting another chance with his supervisor’s estranged wife. Daniel Wu is a young officer pressured by his rich fiancee’s father to increase his earning potential. The truly memorable performance comes from Louis Koo, who deglamorizes to play a disaffected working-class schlub facing a family medical crisis.

Of structural interest is the way that the film shifts through different cop sub-genres for each of its three acts. It starts as a stylish techno-procedural, becomes a noirish guilt spiral in the middle, and then rounds its final turns in typically doom-laden HK fashion.

Ragged in spots and perhaps failing to wring maximum juice from its original core idea, it’s still worth a gander if you like the actors or are a diehard Hong Kong cinema fan. Like most HK movies you can safely assume that it will show up as an import DVD in fairly short order.



I caught this at the gala opening of the Reel Asian Film Festival, which meant that it was proceeded by a punishing twenty minutes of welcoming speeches. Yikes!

Last night, I watched the Civilian Conservation Corps episode of PBS's The American Experience. I've been interested in the CCC ever since I found out that my sole maternal uncle was a member. It was so good, I almost became a New Dealer. Now where's my "I Hate Von Mises to Pieces" t-shirt.

• A 1933 Time Magazine article introducing the newly-formed CCC, "Rizzo Goes to Work"

• Legacy of the CCC —The CCC Legacy Project outlines the Corps’ lasting contributions

• John A. Salmond’s cornerstone biography of the CCC, The Civilian Conservation Corps:
A New Deal Case Study from the National Park Service website

• Daily Life in the CCC—former CCC enrollee Paul Mathews recalls life in his
Pennsylvania camp

• National Park Service book chapter, A Day in the CCC

• Order your CCC t-shirt today

• CCC at the Digital Library of Georgia

• CCC at the Digital Library of Georgia

• CCC Links at Roadside Georgia

Going over to a girl's apartment tonight for coffee and conversation.

Should be fun. I should do this more often.

London food critic Jay Rayner’s The Man Who Ate the World: In Search of the Perfect Dinner is part foodie text and part travelogue. Rayner travels to major centers of food and money, not always in that order, to sample the highest of high-end restaurants. He heads to Vegas, Moscow, Dubai, Tokyo, New York, Paris, and his home town, London.

Fans of the exquisitely turned, often caustic descriptive phrase will find much to savor here. For the first half of the book, Rayner delivers everything I want in travel writing: he assures me that places I won’t be going to are also places I would never want to go to. This does not apply to New York or London, which I’ve been to and like. Otherwise unable to successfully portray Paris as a hellish wasteland, he manfully attempts to render it unendurable with a high-end imitation of Morgan Spurlock in Super Size Me.

For a surprising number of the over-the-top restaurant experiences, he similarly describes the meals as ones I do not want to eat, which is definitely an added bonus. Only a couple of the spots he describes induced out-of-reach fantasies of jetting about the world dropping four figures for a meal.

If you want this to be a gaming resource, you could do worse than to use the astounding details of Moscow, Dubai and to a lesser extent Tokyo and Vegas as background detail for a high-rolling espionage campaign. That Russian restaurant with the sturgeon swimming underneath its glass floors surely has to become the setting for a Feng Shui shoot-out.

This book is not to be confused with the equally wonderful The Man Who Ate Everything, by Vogue food writer Jeffrey Steingarten which was recommended to me by (name drop alert) Jack Vance, back when we spoke about the Dying Earth roleplaying game. That book is an experiential tour through the science and gastronomy of various ingredients, including a smatter of restaurant talk and plenty of dedicated kitchen experimentation.

I just heard a soundbyte of some newsguy trying to blame Nidal Malik Hasan's actions on the Army's hostility toward Muslims. He said that he has been told by Muslim soldiers that they felt "harassed," "under pressure," and "made to feel like they aren't welcome."

Um.... That's the way everyone is made to feel when they join the military.

The ABCs of Awesome/Cool, as swiped from Michael May's Adventureblog and Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness

A is for Astronaut


B is for Bandoliers


C is for Crewcut


D is for Dim Mak


E is for Eazy


F is for Fez


G is for Gordon


H is for Hovercraft


I is for Inquisition


J is for Jambiya


K is for Khazars


L is for Laser


M is for Minions


N is for Nebelwerfer


O is for Orange Crush


P is for Pith Helmet


Q is for Quint


R is for Robot


S is for Smokejumpers


T is for Trenchcoat


U is for U2


V is for Vancleef


W is for Wolverines!


X is for Xenophon


Y is for Yeti

• Podcast - RPG Countdown (06 November 2009) ow.ly/AMcb Top Selling products (hat tip to @GatorGames) #
• My wife is performing alchemy; she's making gum ammoniac at home from scratch. #

In a late-breaking comment it took me a while to spot, Sergio M asks:

What are the sources for your model of story analysis? Is it your personal creation? Where you inspired by any books or whatever? Which?

None of the major concepts are original to me, although I find myself wanting to change their frame of reference as I look further into these issues. It’s an evolving process.

Provenance of story terminology is tough to pin down sometimes.This is particularly an issue with procedural/adventure/serial/adventure fiction, which we are mostly emulating in RPGs. Most writing texts and workshops skew toward the standalone and literary side of things.Terms and concepts of use to working creators percolate out from writer’s rooms into DVD commentaries and out into the blogosphere. Perhaps someday an intrepid scholar will track the origins of such bedrock terms as “laying pipe” for exposition or “backstory” for a character’s past. Like roleplaying practice, it is in large degree an oral tradition which is codified haphazardly and in retrospect, and is subject to ongoing innovation and revision. The movie and TV industries have a several generation head start on us in the generation of useful story-making techniques and the jargon to go with them.

The pass/fail cycle is a well established term for adventure plotting, and not unique to me. Inconveniently, it’s used in other fields as well, and if you Google the term, you get one of my blog posts.I’m now leaning toward hope/fear as more useful for RPG-focused story analysis; that is my variation.

For scene analysis, I draw on a work written for actors, Michael Shurtleff’s Audition. Its analytical techniques were then broken out by acting teachers to be more broadly applicable than its original remit suggested. The book itself focuses on how you break a scene for a dynamic, killer audition. A mutated Shurtleff approach was all the rage in the York University (Toronto) theater department when I was taking a Fine Arts Studies degree there in the mid-80s.

The terms petitioner and granter, for the participants in a dramatic scene, are used by the legendary film editor Walter Murch, as interviewed by Michael Ondaatje in The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film. He doesn’t claim them as unique to himself, but for all I know they're his variation on a familiar concept.

So I'm reading the Complete Annotated Sherlock Holmes, a two-volume set that I purchased for the wife many years ago. This is the first time I've read any of the real Holmes mysteries. I'm reading them in chronological order by the calendar, not by the date of publication, so that may be why I really didn't care for the first two short stories, The Gloria Scott and the Musgrave Ritual, which were written about six years after A Study in Scarlet. The first short story's only mystery has to do with decrypting a short message; the last half of the story is the entirety of an overly-long letter, once found. The Musgrave Ritual is a geometry lesson disguised as a short story.

But now I'm in the first actual novel, A Study in Scarlet, which has Holmes catching the culprit and suddenly we've got sixteen or so pages about adventures along the Mormon Trail written in third person (whereas the rest of the novel is in first person). It's very strange and for several moments I thought the printer had mistakenly bound a signature from the Book of Mormon into this Complete Holmes book.

While the first part of Scarlet is filled with annotations (in at least one part we have to skip over a full 11 by 17 spread of annotations to allow them to catch up to the story), the Mormon section is nearly devoid of notes.

Now this is strange, because although I have not read Scarlet before, I have read Neil Gaiman's A Study in Emerald. I think I like Gaiman's psuedo-Doyle writing style in Emerald better than that which he parodies.

Friends of ours let us know about an interesting series of videos on YouTube. It's called "Ikea Heights", a sinister and over-the-top soap-opera filmed in a Ikea store making use of the shopping displays as their sets.

The big joke of the series is that the actors in the "Ikea Heights" story don't know they are in a real Ikea store (the one in Burbank California), and they use some of the quirky bits like the fact that the sinks don't work in the various sets (the store displays) as part of the story-line. Confused staff and other shoppers blunder in and out of the guerrilla video-shooting (which does NOT seem to be with Ikea's permission) to provide some of the surreal feeling you get while watching these episodes.

::B::

A friend of mine needs to describe the sound of a Lee-Enfield. Any suggestions?

All comments appreciated.

An odd little dragon, the crimson drake, makes it's appearance on KQ.com today, with art by Hugo Solis AKA butterfrog. Take a bow, little dragon. After two weeks of 4E and 3E horrors, ghosts, and deadly mycolids, maybe it's time for a somewhat more traditional beast.

Mini-dragons: worthy foe or tasty snack?

• RT @GearKnight Jim Rash was the first Game Master that Gary Gygax knew of... bit.ly/26gVWG #

View series to date here. Updated archive soon.