Movies October 2009

Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs
Fun! Funny fun! The animation wasn't Disney/Pixar too, which I liked. I like to see different animation succeed.

Spaced, Disc 1
Early Simon Pegg is rough. Didn't like Spaced much.

Where the Wild Things Are
Jonez and Eggers made the movie a thing that the book isn't. Many people's responses to the story are based on that. The movie deals with child-like emotions, but not in a child-friendly way. I liked it, but I'm still unclear about whether I enjoyed it. The hard-edged jostling of children, the monstrous part of childhood, comes through. That was hard to live through the first time... I'm not keen on being reminded of it.

30 Rock, Season 2, Disc 1
More big laffs.

Come Drink With Me
What sounds like a moody European art flick is actually a moody Chinese kung fu flick. It was ok.

The 36th Chamber of Shaolin
The training scenes were fantastic! They're going into my D&D game somewhere.

Web 3.0 is conceived

Cnet reports that ICANN has approved non-Latin character domain names.

Till now, the United States has ruled the Internet so thoroughly, it barely occurs to us that there's a not-United States on the Web. If you wanted on the Web, you needed to learn English or one of the more popular European languages.

Starting pretty much immediately, we will see that change. Also please note, there are somewhat more Chinese people than there are United Statesians. They will put up more Web sites than we will.

Before now, we've been the store. Now, we'll be one of the shelves.

Furthermore, this is an ALL NEW domain name land grab open for entrepreneurial types in Russia and China. All the Cyrillic sex puns are open for business.

For a little while, it will produce walled garden life for monolingual users, but that won't last. This Babel-esque turn will spawn new translation services, new keyboard applications, new businesses that most of us haven't even thought of yet, but a dozen people are already working on. A new Internet.

Cheating at Internet

I have written things this week, and been unhappy with them, and so shelved them to work on later, a typical ploy.

But simmering doesn't become a daily schedule. I've wound up back-dating things two days later, still dissatisfied. This is not how you do daily content, it's how you lie to historians. Back to work today, now with less ambition!

The repopularization of RPGs pt 2

Fourth edition D&D has been correctly identified as inspired by MMOs. This is a good idea on paper, but that inspiration was a doomed choice by Wizards' game designers. It would be better to capitalize on what tabletop is good at (i.e., interaction), and minimize what it is bad at (fiddly mechanics). Instead, they chose to create a game that largely removes judgment calls, yet apes a complex game form, while reducing the complexity.

Thus you get neither the full human involvement of tabletop games, nor the full complexity of MMOs. The worst of both worlds.

The only way this makes sense is if 4th edition is preparation for a 5th edition, a game where people sit around face to face with computers doing the complex mechanical parts. This mythical 5th edition D&D would play to the strengths of both forms of games simultaneously, and could herald a resurgence of tabletop RPGs.

This is not a new idea, but the technology has never been so tantalizingly real. Before, it's just been imaginable as a good idea. Now, we can do it.

Laptops seemed to embody this promise, but in practice the form factor has been too clunky.

The Surface would be excellent for this, except:
1) It's not even available to the public.
2) It's wildly expensive.
3) The surface of a Surface is small. It's like trying to play D&D on one of those sit-down cocktail Ms. Pac Man machines.

Those are all surmountable in 10 years or so. Problem number 4 is not:

4) A single character sheet contains far too much information to display on the play surface itself.

For most tabletop RPGs, the character sheet is the most-used, and I'll go so far as to say, most important reference tool in the game. This concept has come over pretty much unchanged to computer RPGs, where the game takes you to a separate screen/tab/what-have-you to present your character's capabilities.

The amount and detail of information is so dense, there's no way to put that on the same computer interface everyone else is trying to use. You need a dedicated "screen" for every player.

This is what the Apple tablet is for, and what the iPhone can do right now. It's theoretically inexpensive enough that every player could have one. Someone will write an app that keeps track of fiddly things for you. (Character sheet apps are available now.) All the tablets/iPhones logged into the same session could talk to each other. And human interaction returns to its proper role as arbiter of information.

This will require another revision of the rules, however, because 4th edition rules will be naively simple for all that processing power. And with the useful complexity shuffled behind the technological curtain, it will be more open for new and younger players.

Roleplaying games are coming back. It will never be a popular fad again like in Gygaxian times of yore, but only because it will never be a fad again.

The repopularization of RPGs pt 1

This video has been making the rounds of geekdom lately. It's a rough demo of D&D playable on the Microsoft Surface. It's popular with good reason, because it is the nascent future of tabletop RPGs.

D&D is nowhere near as cool as it was 20 years ago (much less 30 years ago), but it still has millions of players worldwide. World of Warcraft touts their 11 million subscribers. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that many people also play D&D once a month.

Eleven million people is a decent customer base, and professional hobbyists have programmed extremely complex programs (Campaign Cartographer and Fantasy Grounds to name two) which cater to them.

People talk about the wonderful social aspects of MMOs, but building and maintaining a friendship in an MMO is like building a ship in a bottle -- a lot of delicate work done through a desperately small opening.

The very best social platform is F2F. In games, you can only do this with a LAN party, a LARP, or around a table. LAN parties and LARPs are very resource intensive. They go away after a certain stage in life. Tabletop games remain viable regardless of age, station, or income.

The part of games that MMOs do best is automating tedious, precise mechanics. Players have complained about the difficulty of running 3rd edition D&D, but even that is checkers compared to the multiple thousandths-of-a-percentage mechanics a single home computer adjudicates running WoW.

More on this tomorrow.

Two Gen Con stories

When Gen Con was still in Milwaukee, the local Christian evangelists took to the streets to save souls through signs and pointed questions and pestering. I never scorned them -- they're brothers in Christ, even if they're from a branch of the family I don't talk to much. But as a gamer, I could see their tactics were poor.

I felt bad just ignoring them, so I would acknowledge them when I passed, which was usually the opening they wanted.

Except I don't need re-saving. I was exactly the person they didn't want to talk to. Yet somehow, that never seemed acceptable to them. I got into some strange conversations with evangelicals looking for something to convert rather than someone to love.
Story 1
A guy with long, stringy hair a beard, a baseball cap. Pictures and scripture painted on his truck. A sign condemning sinners stands in the street, next to the sidewalk. It was the day before the con started; all of us were still getting warmed up. A friend and I were walking back from Kinko's to the convention center.

"Do you know what you have to do to be saved?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
"What is it?"
"Don't you know?" I asked him, confused.
"I do, I want to know if you do."
"What do you say it is?" (Jesus judo ends theological arguments way faster.)
"Don't you know?"
"Yeah, but I want to know what you say."

We did that routine two more times before he revealed,

"Read the Bible every day!"
"That's not it," I said. "You have to believe in Jesus to be saved. That's what the Bible says."

He was indignant. My friend was already half a block ahead of me, so I left to catch up. I saw the dude later in the convention, but I crossed the street because I didn't want to talk to him again.

Story 2
As I walked by a man with a sign and a Christian t-shirt, I said hello.

He asked me if I knew what would happen to me if I died that night. A classic hard-sell evangelical opener, one I've never used myself, because it's such a theological crotch kick.

I actually had somewhere to be, and was with friends again, so I didn't stop to talk. We had this whole conversation while I was on the move.

"Yes," I said, walking by him. "I'll go to Heaven."

"Well let me ask you something else," he said as I walked on, looking back. "Will you go to Heaven if you commit suicide?"

This is the Catholic test. If you think Catholics aren't real, true Christians, you can sometimes lure the confused (I mean, open) ones into a conversation this way.

"Yes." I said louder, because I was farther down the block now.

That's right!" he shouted.

"I know!" I shouted back.

New NPR shows

Thanks to a successful fall fund-raising drive, NPR will be featuring some brand new shows this winter:

• I Concur
• Quiet Sorts
  
• Movies on Radio
• Apply Liberally
• On Further Consideration (spin-off)
• Listening to the Listeners
• One Would Think That
• Barely Distinguishable Accents
• Pun With Sounds
• Marketplacebo (spin-off)
  
• Sincere Pretensions

Art Shop 2009!

Hey speaking of hats and entrepreneurship, Art Shop is coming up in five or six weeks.



I'll be selling monsters and hats and tetris magnets and some weirdo stocking stuffers. Stop by for FREE high fives!

Adventures in junking: Watch the birdie

My new favorite hobby is walking the dog on trash day. I always find something interesting in other people's garbage. Occasionally, it's interesting enough to bring home.

About a month ago someone left an Apple IIcPlus and a Macintosh SE on the sidewalk. I know! I sold them on Craigslist for $10 a piece, and found out later that I way undercharged for the IIcPlus.

A couple days ago, I was almost done with a walk and had found nothing worth bringing home. I was feeling a little sad about it when I wandered by a TV and a blender box. I wish I knew what to do with old TVs, because people junk them regularly in my neighborhood.

While Autumn nosed over that, I looked in the blender box, wondering if there was actually a blender in it. There wasn't.

It was incongruously full of mid-20th century cameras!



Here's a Brownie Hawkeye:



Here's an Argoflex Seventy-Five:


Here's a Kodak Duaflex III. (It has its original flash and instruction manual.):



Here's a bunch of plastic shoe inserts that were also in the box:



According to Internet, there's a community of photographers who use these to do Through the Viewfinder (TtV) photography, hooking up their digital cameras to take pictures through the viewfinders of these old cameras. I've clicked through a few galleries in Flickr, and I love that people are doing this! Hooray for people!

These cameras are not super-duper rare or expensive. But they might bring a few bucks. Plus, they're neat. If you know someone who might like to have one of these for a reasonable price, email me, k?

Haunted House

Two months ago I was killing time in a grocery store for some reason, looking through the magazine rack. One of the things I leafed through was a "Halloween crafts" special from some home decorating magazine.

Now I'm no mom or anything, but I saw a project inside that was cool, easy, and best of all, could be made from junk. It was like a snippet from Quickthinking Magazine.

Two nights ago, I finally got around to finishing. Here's the finished project in our front windows -- Ghosts! Super-cheap, fun ghosts!


They're made of milk jugs and white Christmas lights. Draw on faces with a Sharpie, and you're all done.

Happy Ghost close up: