Tablesaw

Con Game Announcement.

Mon, 07 Jul 2008 16:46:39 GMT

This one isn't filtered, and it's not supposed to be. With NPLers about to leave for Con starting tomorrow, I thought I'd let the cat out of the bag. The game I'm brining for after-hours play at Con is:

Remote Control

That's right, TV pop culture, and the assorted wackiness appropriate for MTV's best game show. With some of the craziness of this month, I got behind on my planning, but everything's falling into place now, and I put my name in on the after-hour game schedules.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to test out some questions on the filtered group.

Feed Me.

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 10:56:52 GMT

I haven't been saying much.

June was probably the worst month I've seen in a while. There's hope, but things aren't getting better just yet.

Consider this an ongoing request for y'all to poke and prod me into up-cheering actions.

STFU, Pass It On.

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:12:57 GMT

I occasionally visit The Volokh Conspiracy to get libertarian commentary on law and the Constitution, usually when there are important things going on like District of Columbia v. Heller. (Incidentally, congratulations to the Bush administration for convincing me of the need for an individual right to bear arms. Before the marked erosion of personal freedoms in the last eight years, I hadn't really worried about the United States becoming a tyranny that could only be opposed through violent resistance. Now I do.)

I don't visit them for idiocy about SF:

This 2001 National Science Foundation surveyshows that 31% of men say they read science fiction books or magazines - a number statistically indistinguishable from the 28% of women who claim to do so.

The NSF's results are so contrary to conventional wisdom that I wonder if there's something wrong with the methodology.

. . . .

I wonder if the study simply suffers from random error (i.e. - even a methodologically sound poll will sometimes get an unrepresentative sample just by random chance).

With a typical libertarian bent, Somin appeals to market forces for absolution:

If there were a large unment demand for feminist SF or other types of science fiction that may be of special interest to women, publishers and writers would have a strong incentive to meet it. The portrayal of women in science fiction has been debated for at least forty years, and publishers are certainly aware of the issue, and would act on it if they smelled profit.

Because markets are always instantly responsive to the demands and never subject to internal biases. We certainly wouldn't want to look at the actual experience of someone in the market:

I wanted to increase the number of female writers I was getting submissions from, so I started courting them. For a while, I didn't do any more than court here and there and felt that was enough. Then I realized that the issues that had a more 50/50 blend of men/women sold better.

But no, it's probably just that the survey was wrong.

There's so much writing on this subject already, but it seems particularly relevant given the dustup with Eclipse One and Two. Both posts by coffeeandink, the first is a write-up of a Wiscon panel, and the second is a link roundup among several interesting link roundups.

ThuNYTX: 10:30.

(Comments have been reopened. I must have turned them off by mistake.)

Stop the Meme.

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 20:15:00 GMT

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

Just . . . no.

There are reasons, but I had more important things to do this morning than type them out. Figure out what's wrong with it on your own.

WedNYTX: 6:30.

Etc.

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 14:19:05 GMT

It shames me how easily I forget how much people mean to me.

Once Again

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 10:25:59 GMT

I have underestimated the effect of blood-sugar levels on my general mood.

TueNYTX: 4:30.

An Unfortunate Trend.

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 06:44:08 GMT

Whenever ojouchan and twilightsyren bring me to their favorite place for the first time, it is ass.

Ground Control, you are FAIL.

Why Did Nobody Tell Me?

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 07:24:19 GMT

Recently, there was a ruling that it's okay to resell promo CDs, no matter what's stamped on them. This made blips all over the place, and hooray for music and all that.

What I don't think got covered as much as it should is that the brief for the defense (not the record company) started with a citation to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

I. INTRODUCTION
Bill Weasley: To a goblin, the rightful and true master of any object is the maker, not the purchaser. All goblin-made objects are, in goblin eyes, rightfully theirs.
Harry Potter: But if it was bought—
Bill Weasley: —then they would consider it rented by the one who had paid the money. They have, however, great difficulty with the idea of goblin-made objects passing from wizard to wizard. …
They consider our habit of keeping goblin-made objects, passing them from wizard to wizard without further payment, little more than theft.
—J.K. Rowling, HARRY POTTER AND THE DEATHLY HALLOWS 517 (2007).

This case poses a simple question: does the secondhand sale of a music CD bearing a "promotional use only" legend infringe copyright law? Like the goblins in J.K. Rowling’s "Harry Potter" books, plaintiff and counter-defendant UMG Recordings, Inc. ("UMG") maintains that the eternal owner of the object is the maker, rather than the purchaser, at least where these "promo CDs" are concerned. That view, however, is no more the law under the Copyright Act than it is in the fictional world of Harry Potter.

—From Legal Pad

And it's really scary how on point Rowling's writing was for the case.

In other news, the Valley was hot, Get Smart was funny, sushi was tasty, and isako was sonorous.

~~And if anyone out there happens to have Peeved's remix of RiddleTM's "Ode to Voldemort," would you let me know? It isn't on his Myspace page anymore.~~ Got it.

FriNYTX: 16:45, 2 errors; FriLATX: 10:30; FriSunX: 11:15.

All and Sundried

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 05:54:03 GMT

Today, I had a skin tag removed from my back. While I was there, I asked the physician's assistant about my hives. He said, "Yup, those are hives." Which is a good confirmation. One of my greatest fears is that my nonfears will prove to be unfounded.

I did offer an option for what might be triggering the allergy, I'd been thinking sun and stress, since they tend to correspond to those things. He suggested it may also be dry skin, which would go some way to explain why they tend to appear on my hands and elbows.

Looks like I'll be needing some lotion soon.

ThuNYTX: 6.

For Future Reference.

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:10:58 GMT

We have established a parenting rule:

All exposure to Disney princesses must be balanced with equal exposure to Xena: Warrior Princess.

WedNYTX: 5; WedLATX: 5:15.

Sudden Hike.

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 21:48:11 GMT

I've been getting increasingly bugged by driving to one place for no other reason. So when ojouchan says she needs a ride, it's generally a signal that I'm going hiking. Since I was taking her into the center of the valley, it didn't seem right to then double back and do the Santa Monica Mountains. Instead, I geocached my way north through the valley to O'Melveny Park. Since I spent a lot of time caching (and because it was very, very hot, I only did about a mile and a half, but it was beautiful up there. I'll have to get back in the morning some time.

Sadly, I didn't have a good record with the caching: 6/13. I'm pretty sure that two of them weren't there, one was being watched too closely, and another two I didn't go for because I coyote kept circling them. The other two were probably just me being dense. Still, I was hoping to hit one hundred fifty today, instead I'm one shy.

TueNYTX: 4. Solved without trying to guess the theme, because the tie-together clue was too long.

Catching Up.

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 19:01:59 GMT

It was about three months ago that ojouchan and I went to San Vicente Mountain, but I finally have the documentation online:

Google Map (KMZ) (I'm having a little trouble with the geocaches, but there are only two of them, so it should be fine.

Pictures:

Video:

Shopping for Exercise.

Sat, 14 Jun 2008 01:32:45 GMT

I needed to buy some gifts today, so I went walking. My destination was the Target in West Hollywood. When I told ojouchan she warned me that it was a long lonely walk, but I quite enjoyed it. Of course, I was careful to go west on Hollywood, not Santa Monica, which gets a bit bleak between Highland and La Brea.

I did a quick map revealing that I walked around five miles. THis map includes a little bit of my noodling in shops, so if you look very carefully and know the area, you'll be able to tell where I was shopping.

Now for bed, so I can be awake when Ojou gets home. Yes, she's going to be home that late.

Can You See Me?

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 14:05:58 GMT

As promised, I set up a filter for planning my NPL con game. To see if you're on it, click this link:

Con Game Filter

People who were left off were generally people who I thought might see the game at the con. This generally means that if I know you through some puzzling context (including the Mystery Hunt and other things), you're not on the filter. If you won't be going to the NPL con, then let me know and I can add you in.

Also, since I just offered to run this at the Nerd SoCal Game Day, the RPGers I expect may be there are also off the filter.

ThuNYTX: 6:30; ThuLATX: 11:30.

Endgamex

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 19:52:34 GMT

Back to actual games. After my shopping, I headed over to my first game.

Sunday, 10:00. Election Day (Mike Olson). Getting up at ten in the morning on the third day of a con can be rough (hello, NPL business meeting!), so there are typically a lot of dead games. The makeup of this game ended up being pretty eclectic. I'd preregistered, and I think only one other person (maybe two) signed up on the day of. But our party got bulked up by two GMs, who had nobody show up for their games. And a little bit after we started, we got added another player who'd come for a game run by one of the GMs folded into our game. (One GM and one player apparently weren't enough for the game he'd planned, so we welcomed her into our game.

Election Day was an adventure run in Spirit of the Sword, a fantasy hack of Spirit of the Century. Century is a pretty awesome game designed for pulp adventures. The mechanics are pretty simple, and they are designed to have players do awesome things with relative ease. (Compare that to players trying to duplicate Legolas's moves using AD&D 3.5.)

The key to Century, though, is something called aspects. For your character, these are the things that make your characters characters. The things that are special about them, their strengths and weaknesses, the things they always have to run back into the burning building to save. Other parts of the games have aspects too, your enemies, your environment, etc. And the game then reduces down to the cool parts of you character interacting with the cool parts of your enemies and the scene, and the rest of the rules are really just a formality.

Spirit of the Sword, as I said, is a hack on this system. Century is set in the early twentieth century, with an emphasis on the Western world (or a Western perspective on "exotic" or "oriental" locales). Sword has a detailed fantasy setting and several changes to skills and such to make it appropriate to the new world. It also comes with a magic system, that I got a taste of. (Olson has been posting his information on the hack on his website.)

Anyway, the game started with an overview of the world and the characters. I chose Yves, the "Spellcasting Thief" Olson posted PDF files of the character sheets, but the links are broken right now. (I still have my copy with me, though.) In addition to the technical sheet, we also got a page with our characters' backgrounds broken into five phases: Origins, Calling, Goals, People, and Adventure. That last one was left blank, and we started our game by having each player devise and then roleplay their character's latest escapade. For Yves, I said that she infiltrate the "Pepperers' Guild" and stole a huge box of very fine pepper. After our adventure, we added two aspects to the five already given us; Yves ended up with:

Member of the Thieves' Guild
Spell and Shadow
"I've got an angle."
Flashing Eyes
Squirrel the Fence [that's a seller of stolen goods named "Squirrel"]
Box of hot, hot pepper
When the going gets tough, the tough hide in the dark

The adventures were a nice way to get started with the game. It demonstrated how the mechanics worked, and let us show off our characters. After everyone was finished, we got into the adventure.

It was essentially an escort mission. This ragtag bunch of adventurers had been hired to protect a huge cartload of money in the most dangerous part of town for complicated political reasons that need not be described here. We would, of course, be ambushed and then forced to recover the lost money. At the end, there was a giant monster.

Unfortunately, there really wasn't a place for a thief in this mission, especially after I'd taken Yves to a place where she was really more into hiding and taking things in the dark than guarding something with a whole bunch of people. Sure, she knew how to cast magic missile, but she was much more apt to cast Darkness isntead.

When the first battle was joined, Yves hid, and . . . then I was stuck. I couldn't really tell what the character would do. Attacking didn't feel right; I'd hidden nearly perfectly. Leaving that safety seemed against character. What I was really itching to do was betray the party—after all, I was a thief who was pretty much invisible at the moment and I had a huge sack of other people's money on my back. My instinct was just to run off and see what happened. Why I didn't was a little complicated.

For one thing, the adventure didn't really seem laid out that way. Having one character disappear with the loot would send things going a little crazy. Still, with most of the other people at the table, I probably would've felt safe doing it. However, one player— the one who'd come to play a different game—made thigns different. She hadn't played a tabletop RPG before, a fact that I'd picked up on pretty early and that she confirmed afterward. So, I just didn't feel right changing the game so drastically when she was still getting used to things. And she was having a great time, dominating the swordplay of the main battle. I felt better with her driving the adventure than with me doing it, so I laid off. I kept looking for a hook to get Yves into the story, but it didn't really gel.

Olson addressed this and other things in his own writeup. Overall, the adventure felt a bit more traditional than I expceted, but that might simply be because the size of the group and the number of enemies in the ambush meant that a lot of time was dedicated to fighting one group of guys (while, you know, Yves hid in the dark). Still, things worked out pretty well, and I know I would've enjoyed the fighting more if I'd been some sort of battle-oriented mage or something.

Still More Shopping. My last stop in the dealer room. At about this time, ojouchan called, and she was lonely. I felt absolutely terrible for leaving without her. I'd asked her the night before whether she wanted to come, but she demurred because she thought she might have to do some work. Then, when I left I woke her up to kiss her goodbye and asked if she wanted to come. Or I thought I did. It turns out, she didn't really wake up until a few minutes after I'd left. Feelign like an idiot, I picked up two games for her, a Killer Bunnies expansion (which turned out to be unplayable—making me feel even idioter) and Gloom, which we haven't played yet but which looks like a lot of fun.

And then, I finally remembered that I still needed dice. But this time, I actually did, I picked up two sets of black "baby dice," which were cheap and generally very nice (though the numbers on the icosahedron are a bit hard to read. And quickly it was off to my next game.

Sunday 3:00. The Council of Elders Has Convened . . . (Alejandro Jose Gervasio Duarte). This was a playtest of a game Alex is working on called Unwritten. (There's a development blog, but it's kind of hard to follow and doesn't give much concrete information on the game itself.) I'd describe it as a mix between In a Wicked Age and Shock. Since the game is still being designed, everything I say here is, of course, subject to change. In fact, Alex was making changes over the course of the weekend. Still, this is what the game was like when i played it.

First, players work to create a few "prompts" that are the seeds of the story, much like the an oracle in IAWA. Then one player frames a scene with or about their character, picking a prompt for inspiration. This player also picks a question off of his character sheet. These questions reflect a Hero's Journey–like character arc, and each one is designed to make the player either learn more about their character or change something about their character they already knew.

After one player (the primary player) sets the scene, the other players begin narrating everything that happens other than the primary character's protagonist. The goal for these players is to drive the scene to conflict. More specifically, it's to offer the primary player a conflict that they find particularly interesting. When the player has accepted a conflict, dice are rolled to determine the what happens in the scene, what happens in the story, and what happens to the character. The resolution of the conflict is then narrated, and the character sheet is modified, and story prompts are added or changed.

We based our story off of the rough guideline Alex had provided in the description of the game:

The council of elders has convened. They have decided to send out a task force to enforce the new law. You are that task force. You will be armed with a council wizard, a guardian, a spokesman, and a silent agent. The new law: complete submission.

We were legendary heroes resurrected to quash a resistance, though we did not know the nature of it. We represented the archetypal RPG party—mage, fighter, cleric, and rogue—though we differing views of the present conflict.

We didn't get through a full game (or even a half game). The system is a bit finicky, and it takes a little while to get used to. In a previous game, Alex said he'd been able to get things going much faster, and it may simply be that the amount of time the game takes grows drastically as the number of new players rises. Still, I enjoyed the game. It did a great job of spurring dramatic changes in the world and in the characters using a pretty spare set of rules. I'm going to be keeping an eye on this one as it gets closer to production.

Dinner. I ate dinner with the same co-supperers as I had the previous two evenings. Colin was in a bit of a hurry, so we ate at the lobby restaurant of the next-door hotel. It turned out that it's a decent place to get a meal, without the crowd of the con hotel.

Sunday, Eightish. Inspectres Pickup Game (joshroby). There was only one game that looked interesting to me on Sunday night, Colin's Spirit of the Force. Many others agreed, which meant that the game was full, but also that there were a lot of people looking for a game. joshroby decided that he was too tired to play Inspectres, but he was coherent enough to run it. So a bunch of us gathered for another game.

In our first case, we had to help a child that had been transformed into a huge tentacle creature at the Beverly Hills City Hall. Plotwise, it was relatively straightforward. Our second case involved a mysterious something at a residential development, cultists, and a glowing door through space and time. But the highlight of the night happened in the first case and was unrelated to the plot. Alex (the GM of the Unwritten game) had left the game momentarily to take a phone call. When he returned, he decided that his character, who had been driving to town hall on his own, had gotten lost. So he started calling the other characters on our company cell phones (cell phones that were disastrously malfunctional). Despite having really nothing to do with the case, he called each character in turn for wacky hijinks. And with each call, he got farther and farther away from Bevery Hills. (I think he was close to San Diego by the time he turned around.)

Wrap-Up. After the game was over, many people left. I stuck around to talk with James about IAWA. We discussed how the problems that had plagued Friday's game could have been avoided. Then we went in to kibbitz on the end of Colin's Spirit of the Force before most of his players left. Morgan told us the fantastic details of his own Spirit of the Century games, the post-apocalyptic Spirit of the Shattered Earth. With so much Century hacking, Colin joked about running the most inconceivable variation and seeing who would want to play: Spirit of the Tax Code and Spirit of My Little Pony. Sadly, these two options may be too viable, as I later demonstrated.

And that's it, and I think it's enough. The next one's during Labor Day weekend. I currently plan on going, but I'm probably going to hold off on deciding. That's a big weekend for people doing stuff.

Stupid Arm.

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:52:20 GMT

Went in for a physical, and I got a tetanus shot and blood drawn. My left arm hates life right now. My blood pressure is 112/71, which is apparently very good.

WedNYTX: 5; WedLATX: 5:15.

The Other Woman

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 10:58:33 GMT

Heard anything about the Green Party this year? Probably something about Nader running again, a while back, right? Paid any attention recently? At the moment, the candidate leading in delegates is this person:

Clinton is not the only woman running for president in 2008. Former Panther Elaine Brown was in the running before splitting with Green Party over Radical politics. Mckinney is still running, currently beating Nader for the nominee by 130+ votes, tho completely ignored. No one has mentioned the gender dynamics of the media attention to Nader’s Green Party bid vs. its complete inattention to McKinney's.

—"I'm Back—Women Who Ran For President," WOC PhD.

It's a good but long article about the history of American women (not just white women) running for president. It includes a long section about how framing the primary as "race vs. gender" hurt both candidates and deprived the Democratic party of ways of strengthening its positions.

Work, Work, Work.

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 15:55:11 GMT

Work has been quiet for a while, but there was a lot to do last night. I do still need to finish writing about Gamex too.

And after my last hike, I need to get started exercising again. I don't know if I'm going to do bike or a short run today. It'll depend on how my legs feel.

On the NPL website, I officially committed to bringing a "non-Jeopardy after-hours gameshow" to the Denver Convention. I haven't said what it is, but some of you know. I now have a month to put everything together, and I'm probably going to need help with it, so I want the filter to be opt-out instead of opt in. I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to manage it.

TueNYTX: 6:45; TueLATX: 5.

Back in the Action.

Sun, 08 Jun 2008 06:00:53 GMT

In terms of exercise, May just kind of got away from me. There was preparing for my vacation, then there was my vacation, then there was my cold, and by then, I'd completely gotten out of the exercise habit. I'd also let the house get pretty bad.

Yesterday, I did some cleaning, particularly the laundry that had been piling up for a very long time. Then today, I thought I'd get some hiking in.

I had to drive Jonaya to work, so I figured I'd make the most of the trip. I was in Van Nuys, so I stopped by the Barnes and Nobel by my old house where I used a Christmas gift card to purchase three seasons of Samurai Jack during a buy-two-get-one-free sale. After that, I headed up to San Vicente Mountain to do some geocaching along Dirt Mulholland. I took the wrong gate out, though, and took a walk south along the West Mandeville Fire Road. It wasn't particularly notable; the greenery has started to turn brown, the air was hazy and it was hot, but it was nice to get out and move again. I had planned on doing about three miles, but in my typical style, I did about five and a half instead.

When I came home, I showered, had some food, then fell back to sleep for five hours. It's been a good weekend.

Au Revoir

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:38:00 GMT

Farewell, hahathor. We've loved having you in LA.

FriNYTX: 13:30, two errors; FriLATX: 17:15. Comments pending.

Why There Are No Cookies.

Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:21:51 GMT

A little while back, there was a flurry of talk about "cookies" for allies against sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. I know The Angry Black Woman wrote about it. I know there was a panel at Wiscon. I know at least one person who found herself in a rough spot after having some difficulty with the metaphor. It is a weird metaphor; I don't think it quite fits the situation. It relies on a very particularly view of a child, where a cookie is a big reward, not an adult view where we can buy our own cookies and give them out at work just because they were lying around the house and totally about to go stale.

Anyway, here's a quote from Influence on the subject:

Social scientists have determined that we accept inner responsibility for a behavior when we think we have chosen to perform it in the absence of strong outside pressure. A large reward is one such external pressure. It may get us to perform certain actions, but it won't get us to accept inner responsibility for the acts. [Footnote: In fact, large material rewards may even reduce or "undermine" our inner responsibility for an act, causing a subsequent reluctance to perform it when the reward is no longer present . . . .] Consequently, we won't feel committed to them. The same is true of a strong threat; it may motivate immediate compliance, but it is unlikely to produce long-term commitment.

All this has important implications for rearing children. It suggests that we should never heavily bribe or threaten our children to do the things we want them to believe in. Such pressures will probably produce temporary compliance with out wishes. However, if we want more than just that, if we want them to continue to believe in the correctness of what they have done, if we want them to continue perform the desired behavior when we are not present to apply those outside pressures, then we must somehow arrange for them to accept inner responsibility.

And that's why we don't give out cookies for good behavior, and why we don't promise accolades or other major rewards to allies. It also explains a bit why apologies after fandom pile-ons are so hollow (though the situation as a whole is much different).

ThuNYTX: 7:30; ThyLATX: 9:30.

Requiem for a Heavyweight.

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 12:51:29 GMT

I'm going to tell a story about politics.

A while ago, Hillary Clinton decided she would be president. Then, she decided how she was going to become president. It was a brilliant plan.

Republicans had won the last two elections relying on core values: strength, power, experience, security. Of course, they'd then gone and screwed everything up. Clinton would claim those values for her own, and the voters in the "center" who had responded to those values presented by Republicans would shift to support those values presented by Democrats. Clinton would be unhindered by the need to play to an overly religious base and by the failure of Republicans to fulfill their promises of safety in recent years.

Clinton maneuvered her voting record into position, raised lots of money, and secured early support of key Democratic leaders. Entering the primary season, Clinton was the "presumptive nominee." It was a position that meshed with the values she was going to present to America. She was going to enter on top, stay on top, and use the momentum of each victory to power her drive to the White House. With the same kind of evangelical zeal that characterized Bush's campaigns, Clinton would enter the race with the confidence and support to know she was going to win. She was the overdog not just of the primary, but of the election.

Then, Barack Obama won Iowa.

That wasn't supposed to happen. One of the reasons Clinton relied on the story that had previously been dominated by Republicans was that it seemed like the best one. The Democratic Party had been trying to create a new message to counter it for a while, fruitlessly. Yet suddenly, here was a candidate who had a message that was seriously resonating with voters.

Clinton didn't waver from her overdog strategy. And how could she, really? You can't switch from overdog to underdog, even when you're behind. You're just the overdog who's behind (temporarily of course, a minor setback). And Obama used that to his advantage, because it meant that even when he was in the lead, he could still be the underdog.

As the underdog, Obama had a classic American story to fulfill. And his role as underdog was increasingly the role of America. Democrats looked at the world and saw American supremacy slipping away. America was falling behind in the global economy, in world leadership, in environmental stewardship. But in identifying with the identifying with the underdog, the situation wasn't a decline, it was the low moment when the underdog turns things around. America would triumph from a disadvantageous position—just like Obama!

Clinton's strategy continued to work the way it was supposed to. She brought in the rank-and-file voters who were dedicated to Democratic issues but who had been responding to Republican rhetoric. But there was a risk to adopting the overdog technique—it's history as Bush's strategy. Democratic talking heads and progressive bloggers became increasingly uncomfortable with a tone that reminded them of the attitude and actions of their sworn enemy for so many years. They could no longer see the pragmatism of deploying it against the Republicans, because they felt too deeply the pain of it having been deployed against them.

What Clinton as overdog had been offering to them was a power fantasy. It was what they thought they wanted, to be the ones on top, to cruise effortlessly over their opponents, to feel the thrill of certainty, of destiny. But with Obama as a viable underdog, they had a better story. Instead of skipping to the end and enjoying power, they could play out a story more similar to their own. After all, they were underdogs and had been for several years. They wanted to be feel themselves lifted up from where they were to where they wanted to be. And once the underdog actually became the favorite, the overdog had nothing to offer. By supporting Obama and vilifying Clinton, they could play out the story they'd really been dreaming of, they one they'd been talking and writing about for the last eight years—serving the overdog his comeuppance.

Of course, the overdog they'd been talking about all that time had been Bush. But when it comes to the stories we don't realize we're telling, one overdog is as good as another. And as things wore on and on and on, the contest between Clinton and Obama didn't just seem analogous to Bush versus the Democrats. It began to resemble a specific moment. The worst moment. The most painful political moment in recent Democratic Party history.

Picture it: One candidate has a lead among voters, albeit a slim one. The other candidate has an arrogance and a willingness to rely on political favors. The matter seems destined to be decided not by votes, but by an unelected cadre beholden to political insiders.

For many Democrats, the last few weeks of the primary have replayed November of 2000. And Clinton has been playing the role George W. Bush. And the Democrats, filled with screaming rage, have demanded that Clinton do now what they feel Bush should have done then—step aside, let the true victor get to work.

It was a brilliant plan.

It should've worked. It would've worked.

Clinton would have barreled over her less-experienced candidates. The pundits and bloggers would have fallen in line despite brief misgivings. The Republicans would have had no message left. You can see that alternate timeline in the position that Clinton's supporters have maintained throughout the campaign—Trust her experience, be pragmatic, reap the benefits.

And for what it was, her campaign was perfect. She came into the fight as the heavyweight, she hit hard and mercilessly, she never got pinned to the ropes, she never got knocked down.

But the overdog can beat everyone but the underdog, and that's who she was destined to fight.

WedNYTX: 5:15.

Steal Away Jordan

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:37:42 GMT

(I'm still going to post about Sunday at Gamex, but this post got overtaken by one game that I bought that day but didn't play. I figured I might as well just give it its own entry, then write up the games I played in a later entry.)

I got up early and headed to the hotel again for my 10 a.m. game. In the time before it started, I headed to the dealer room. I wanted to pick up Steal Away Jordan. I'd meant to pick it up the day before, but I didn't have enough cash on me. I decided to buy the two books that I felt were the most likely to sell out by the next day. I figured that an RPG about slavery would be a slower mover than the indie-darling games about pulp adventures and television.

Steal Away Jordan by Julia Bond Ellingboe made a bit of a splash at last year's Gencon because, well, it's an RPG about slavery. It made people uncomfortable and defensive and excited and curious. I know that I was interested, but ultimately, I didn't feel attracted to the game. It was supposed to generate slave narratives and neo–slave narratives, and while I imagined it did that well, I wasn't interested in role-playing them.

But I kept following it. I'd occasionally check up on the Stone Baby Games blog ,and I'd listen to Ellingboe talk about the game on various RPG-related podcasts. I first started getting interested again when she posted about adopting American Black folklore into the game to create "more folktale than straight slave narrative." That certainly sounded more appealing to me. I mean, I roleplay the myths and folklore of other non-American cultures all the time, and I know I don't know as much about Black folklore as I'd like to.

The real point of understanding came during a podcast (I think it was the Independent Insurgency, but I could be wrong) where Ellingboe talked directly about the connection between slave narratives as African-American folklore, and the protagonists of them as heroes. Superheroes even. In a terrible time, they didn't merely survive (a notable feat of itself). They learned to read and write; they escaped or bought their lives back; they became influential activists. The game started to make sense.

I'd read slave narratives in high school and college, and they were always presented in the same way: as political tracts. They were symbolic; they were arguments directed exclusively to white Americans at the time. We didn't read them to understand the lives and culture of African-Americans, we read them to understand how they affected the political landscape of white abolitionists, white slaveholders, and the white people in the middle. That was the aspect of the "slave-narrative game" that turned me off. I didn't really want to role-play a story that was a political tract, or play in a game that was, by extension, a political-tract-building machine.

I'm not alone in my misreading of slave narratives. In addition to explaining her perspective that "we all own the stories of slaves who survived against all odds," Ellingboe described her refined pitch in an article in See Page XX:

I opened by asking, "When you think of slave narratives, what comes to mind." A young man, a Morehouse student, sheepishly raised his hand. "Suffering, punishment, pain?." He said. Another student offered similarly dismal words.

"No one thinks, 'hero'?" I asked. The students replied with blank stares. I'll show 'em! I thought.

Still, it was really foolish of me to get stuck in that thinking. Over a century later, why persist in seeing these stories directed exclusively at white America? And I'd read neo–slave narratives too, the ones that Ellingboe referenced more directly. Beloved certainly isn't presented as a political tract; neither is I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem. And I loved those stories. Why couldn't I reconcile them with traditional slave narratives? Maybe the pain, punishment, and politics I associated with the traditional stories was seeping into the newer ones. Or maybe it was keeping them apart. Besides, these contemporary stories were about characters, not events or symbols. Why didn't the game focus on that?

Oh right, because it's an RPG; the characters are our job. All the game is supposed to do is give me a wide berth to let us create the characters that we will find compelling. And while the talk about the game often focused on the things that the player can't control (the GM assigns a name and a "worth" to each player's character), those things pale in comparison to what the player can control: a characters identity, hopes, dreams.

When I finally got past everything and started thinking about what slave narratives meant as, you know, narratives—a part of living history, a part of culture, a part of reality, a part of myth and folklore—well, damn, that's exciting.

Put another way, roleplaying Frederick Douglass as a symbol in a story carefully presented to the white power structure of the nineteenth century: not compelling to me. Roleplaying Frederick Douglass as the supergenius powerhouse who bests the man trying to whip him in a physical struggle lasting two hours: awesome.

And now that I read that passage for the first time since college, I'm thinking how precisely Steal Away Jordan models the conflict between Douglass and Covey. Not just the way Douglass rises as a hero, it also succinctly emphasizes the way characters draw from community (the other theme in the See Page XX article).

When ojouchan saw I brought it home, she was excited. She'd been excited about it from the moment I mentioned it last year, back when I still didn't get the game. Now, we're both excited, but for now she's right when she says we'll never be able to get our friends to play it. I mean, right now we can't even organize a group to be daring pirates, brave superheroes, or gorillas in biplanes. The slave narrative is still a tougher sell. But I know we'll get around to it eventually. And until then, I'll have that book around to remind me of how much I want to.

TueNYTX: 6:15.

Hey, Fandom Folks!

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 17:34:53 GMT

I know there's a bunch reading. If you're not into gaming, you may not be aware of Penny Arcade. But today, Penny Arcade became aware of Anita Blake.

TV[B]

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:48:12 GMT

The Venture Bros. came back with a vengeance last night with "Shadowman 9: In the Cradle of Destiny." It's still available on the Adult Swim website, and I imagine it will be for a little while at least. I'm watching it again right now, and it's still awesome. Possibly a bit intimidating for newcomers, but I've got DVDs to lend out. Possibly after ojouchan rewatches season 2.

The season finale of House was also awesome. The most recent episode of Battlestar Glactica was terrible.