Avram's journal

Scott Pilgrim RPG?

2009-07-08T19:09:41Z

Shortly before going to bed last night, I saw a thread on Story-Games about cobbling together an RPG based on Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim comics.

Result: Last night, I dreamed that I was reading the sixth Scott Pilgrim book, and there was a bit where one character says of another, “She decided not to show up since she’s already got two minor consequences.”

Though now that I’ve run the idea through my mostly-awake brain, I suppose Teenagers from Outer Space would make a good starting point. On the other hand, the video game aspects of the books would work pretty well with a leveling-up system like d20 or Microlite20.

Dominion: Intrigue

2009-07-01T03:33:23Z

I just played a few games of Dominion on BrettspielWelt, and saw some cards I hadn’t seen before:

Upgrade: +1 Card, +1 Action. Trash one card from your hand to gain a card costing exactly one more. Cost 5.
Nobles: Either +2 Actions or +3 Cards, your choice. Also, worth 2 Victory Points at game end. 6 cost. (The interface for this one on BSW is a bit weird. You have to click on the card image in the play area of the window.)

From this, I assume the expansion set is out, or close to it. BoardgameGeek says the new set is called Dominion: Intrigue, and it can be played as a stand-alone, without the original. It’s got a full set of Treasure and Victory cards, 25 new kinds of Kingdom cards, and rules for playing with up to eight players.

I see on the BoardgameGeek forms that there were copies at Origins, so I expect mnemex has already picked one up. There’s some discussion of the new cards here, and here are descriptions of 11 of the cards, but I don’t see a comprehensive list with full descriptions.

MoCCA

2009-06-08T05:14:01Z

MoCCA Art Fest was this weekend, NYC’s top event for indie comics. I’ve been going every year since the first one, but I totally forgot to do a list like this last year.

Books

Octopus Pie volumes 2 and 3, by Meredith Gran.
Templar, Arizona volumes 2 and 3, by Charlie “Spike” Trotman.
Piracy is Liberation book 001: Information Wants to be Free by Mattias Elftorp.
Never Learn Anything From History, a collection by Kate Beaton.
The Mourning Star vol 2, by Kazimir Strzepek.
Pretty Little Book by Lucy Knisley.

Floppies

Inbound issues #1 and 2, a Boston-based anthology magazine by the Boston Comics Roundtable.
252-Z: Law of Monsters by Carter Allen.
The Spring 2009 issue of InkStains, the anthology magazine published by the School of Visual Arts comics department.
Las Aventuras de ¡Quixote!, by Pat Woodruff. This was also on the SVA table.
Papercutter issues #1 and 2, a comics anthology from Tugboat Press of Portland, Oregon.
Yeah, It Is by Leslie Anne MacKenzie Stein. I’m actually not sure whether to categorize this as a floppy or a book, since it’s got an ISBN. I think my dividing line is the binding — this is saddle-stiched, so it’s a floppy.
Pixu #2, an anthology comic by Becky Cloonan, Fábio Moon, Gabriel Bá, and Vasilis Lolos.

Minis

Comic-Strip Movies #4: Bury Me Not, by Luisa Felix, who has a pretty good hard-sell technique. Good thing the comic was only 50¢.
Jobnik Manifesto, a little freebie from Miriam Libicki.
Harvest is When I Need You Most, Only What You Take With You, and And Don’t Forget the Droids, a trio of adorable Star Wars-related anthology minis edited and designed by Shelli Paroline.
Sordid City Softcore, by Charles Schneeflock Snow.
Geraniums and Bacon #5, by Cathy Leamy, who was next to Charles Snow, and laughed at my jokes.

This year was the first in the new venue, the 69th Regiment Armory on 26th and Lex, which has one big internal space, much more convenient than the three smaller spaces at the Puck Building (no link because their website has annoying automatic sound). A bit warm, though. Ran into, jeez, practically everybody, which highlights the superiority of one big space for socializing and networking.

Two or three different people asked me if I had done any comics lately, which has me pissed off at myself for having done practically no comics at all in like twenty years. I clearly in some way emit the aura of someone who ought to be making comics.

Getting rid of target="_blank"

2009-05-07T08:58:53Z

OK, found a way to keep links from opening new windows in Safari. Here it is:

Step 1: Install GreaseKit. (GreaseKit is the Safari port of Greasemonkey, a Firefox add-on that lets you run arbitrary JavaScript code to modify web pages as they download.)

Step 2: Install _blank Must Die, a userscript that strips the target="_blank" attributes out of link tags.

Step 3: Quit and relaunch Safari.

Step 4: Sigh with relief when Twitter links no longer spawn new windows.

Note for Firefox users: That userscript in Step 2 ought to work for you as well, but you don’t need to bother, since you’ve got some useful features baked right into your browser, no add-ons required.

Microsoft Internet Explorer users, I dunno. If you guys cared about your web experience, you wouldn’t be using MSIE.

Update: Just discovered that the GreaseKit _blank Must Die hack will mess up Google Calendar. The fix is to disable the hack for Google, like so:

In Safari, from the GreaseKit menu, choose “Manage Scripts…”
In the Manage Scripts dialog, select “_blank Must Die” from the list on the left of the box. (Don’t turn the check-box off, just click the name “_blank Must Die” to select it.)
See the “Exclude” box? Click the “Add” button next to it.
In that new line that was just created in the Exclude box, type:
*.google.com/*
Close the Manage Scripts box. Maybe you need to quit and restart Safari, too.

Dreamwidth

2009-05-02T20:03:27Z

I’ve just got an account on Dreamwidth:
http://avram.dreamwidth.org/

I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it, but I wanted to grab my name.

Zvi has been doing a good job of preaching the Dreamwidth gospel:

"The Physics Engine"

2009-04-08T06:08:32Z

Everyone who plays RPGs oughta go read Dylan Horrocks’s short comics story, “The Physics Engine”. I’m especially thinking of jimhenley and bruceb here.

Keeping track of comics

2009-03-20T07:38:56Z

Looking over the Hugo noms, I’m a bit grumpy over the “Best Graphic Story” category. Two out of the six nominees are other-media tie-ins (Serenity and The Dresden Files), which, well, given the relative sizes of the book, TV/movie, and comics fan bases, I can’t help but suspect that those two were nominated not so much for their quality as for the popularity of their franchises.

Still, I can’t really complain, since I didn’t bother to fill out the nomination form. I’ve fallen woefully out of touch with the current SF scene (I’m currently in the middle of Gene Wolfe’s latest, but before that I was reading Tom Disch’s Camp Concentration from ~~1982~~ 1967). I am pretty good at keeping up with what’s going on in the indie comics (even if I don’t buy very much) and webcomics scenes, though, so I figure I should make an effort this year to keep track of my reading for next year’s awards. So here’s what I can remember of what I’ve bought recently:

Angora Napkin by Troy Little.
Scott Pilgrim vs the Universe (aka Scott Pilgrim vol 5) by Brian Lee O’Malley.
Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil by Jeff Smith. This came out in floppies last year, but I just got the paperback collection.
In the Flesh by Koren Shadmi, a collection of shorts stories.
RASL: The Drift by Jeff Smith. Again, the collection just came out in January, but the floppies came out last year.
Platinum Grit vol 1 by Trudy Cooper and Danny Murphy. Yet another case where I don’t know if it’ll be eligible. The webcomic’s been up for years, and there used to be a self-published (through Lulu.com) dead-tree edition, but this collection just shipped this month, and I think it’s the first time all this material is available under one cover.
Update: And on Friday, I picked up North World vol 2 by Lars Brown, which is also a webcomic.

I also just bought Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole last week, but it came out in 2008.

Oh, and anyone reading this who lives in Brooklyn, specifically Prospect Heights or northern Park Slope? Let me recommend Bergen Street Comics, Brooklyn’s latest high-class comics shop. Like Rocketship, it makes space for weekly floppies but is mostly there to sell books. And Bergen offers a loyalty program ($20 store credit for each $100 spent), which I don’t think Rocketship does.

Reading "An Evil Guest"

2009-03-14T21:01:20Z

I started An Evil Guest, Gene Wolfe’s latest, on the way to Games Club yesterday. (Oh, lost a lot of games of Race for the Galaxy and Dominion.) Here are things I’m noticing as I go; page references are from the first Tor hardcover:

Oz referece

Gideon Chase is described several times as a wizard. In Chapter 1, the president wants to hire him to gather some intelligence (brains). In Chapter 2 (page 26), we’re told about a couple of his earlier clients. One was a rich woman who hired him to do something for her son, the son wound up being more brave (courage). The other was an oil company (an artificial person needing oil) worried about the nationalization of oil resources in the country that was its source; Chase did something, and now the country and company love each other (in other words, he gave the company heart).

Cory Doctorow reference

On page 41, Gideon is bringing Cassie to a mountaintop in Canada. Gideon tells Cassie why he’s using this mountain:

”[…] All mountains are stone. Most have no life. This one is alive. […] It is alive and sentient. It can speak, though it rarely does. It has a wife who lives in one of its many caves. She is — a laundress. Let’s leave it at that. […]”

In Cory Doctorow’s Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, the main character’s father is a sentient mountain near Kapuskasing, Ontario. His mother is a laundry machine in one of the mountain’s caves.

Lovecraft reference

On page 53, we learn that Cassie Casey lives in Kingsport. There’s a Kingsport in Tennessee, but that’s probably too far to get to Canada and back in one night, even in Gideon’s car which can go 140 mph. So it’s probably HP Lovecraft’s fictional Kingsport, Massachusetts.

The burning issues of our day

2009-03-04T01:13:38Z

What would happen to Frankenstein’s Monster during a Romero-style zombie plague?

Fixing stuff

2009-03-02T03:24:56Z

This was a pretty tech-heavy weekend.

On Saturday, I came back from a dim sum expedition to find that my copy of MacOS X 10.5.6 (Leopard) had arrived, and was helpfully hanging off my apartment doorknob. (I’d feared that I would just find a delivery slip telling me to go pick it up at the post office on Monday.) I backup my hard drive, installed the new OS, and it’s working fine. Seems to be a bit zippier than Tiger, which has me thinking I might be able to limp along with this machine for another few years if I get a bigger hard drive. My only complaint so far is that I can’t get Visor working, even after downloading the Leopard version. (Quicksilver, on the other hand, is working better than before.)

Today, in the evening, my Linksys wi-fi hotpoint/router suddenly stopped working. All the little indicator lights were off. I unplugged, then re-plugged, the power cable, which brought it back up, but it turned itself off again within a few minutes. Five or six repeats of this performance convinced me that it wasn’t going to get any better. Fortunately, Target was still open, so I bought a replacement device, Belkin this time. BTW, Belkin’s routers come with easy-to-use config software that actually runs on a Mac!

Update: Rebooting fixed whatever was jinxing Visor. And, for anyone out there who wants to change the font colors in Terminal (and Visor), use TerminalColors if you’re running Tiger, TerminalColours for Leopard.

Omnivore's Hundred

2009-02-18T20:40:01Z

Workout

2008-12-30T00:05:01Z

Was just seized by a sudden urge to do some weight-lifting. So, a workout writeup:

Weight: Didn’t check

1 set of 10 Dumbbell Curls with 12-lb dumbbells. Did both arms at once.
1 set of 10 Dumbbell Shoulder Presses with 12-lb dumbbells. I did these standing up, and my form was off on the first two — I had the dumbbell handles facing forward-to-back, rather than to the sides.
1 set of 10 Triceps Extensions with a 12-lb dumbbell. I was leaning back in the chair for the first two, thought to myself that was wrong, and straightened up, but now I see that the guy in the illustration is also leaning back.

Leak

2008-12-23T08:43:09Z

Of course it's 3 AM when our ceiling starts leaking. Of course our upstairs neighbor isn't home. Of course the super isn't answering his cellphone.

William Shatner, in the Conservatory, with a Guitar Solo

2008-12-16T20:40:56Z

You could make a great character- or scenario-generation system for a role-playing game by just picking one item from each category on the Periodic Table of Awesoments. I’m thinking some kind of Primetime Adventures game where you’re running a bad ’70s action TV show. “OK, So I’m Mister T with a Rocket and a Battle Axe, in Space, fighting Alien Ghosts with my pet Cobra! And I have to incorporate product placement bits for Beef Jerky and Beer.”

Or the world’s strangest Clue variant.

(via BoingBoing)

Whel of Ranma

2008-12-13T11:01:26Z

Looking through some old Alarums & Excrusions zines, I found the following in a comment I wrote back in May 2002:

Actually, I’ve got some ideas about running a Ranma-like game, and they require some different mechanics. […] At the core is a token mechanic, where each character has disads that he can trigger (or that can be triggered by other characters). Triggering your own disads gains you a token (I’d probably use poker chips) in the GM agrees that your PC was actually disadvantaged, or it was funny. Triggering someone else’s disad requires you to give that player a token. Some special powers might also require paying a token to use for advantage. This mechanic simulates the stupidity of the Ranma characters — they often fail to do simple, rational things because they lack the tokens to pay for them.

The Aspects mechanic from Fate and Wheel of Fate would work well for this.

I could swear I saw a martial-arts Wheel of Fate game out there somewhere on the web a few weeks ago, but Google hasn’t found it for me.

Swift completion

2008-12-09T03:00:42Z

Ordered a bunch of stuff from Amazon early last week, to take advantage of their Black Friday-through-Tuesday sale. Got a few DVDs I’d been wanting at five or six bucks a pop, a couple books I’d been faunching over, and a Hanukah present for my nephew. As they usually do, Amazon broke the shipment up into four boxes.

Yesterday, the postman rings a few times, and I buzz him in and get a package. bugsybanana and I wind up spending the whole day indoors, so we don’t check the mail till Sunday, when she finds one of those we-tried-to-deliver-a-package-but-you-were-out slips. There’s no mail delivery on Sunday, and only one delivery other days, so the postman must have dragged the two packages out here, handed me one (the heavier one, as it turns out, though neither was particular large or heavy), and then dragged the other back to the depot.

Today I wait around till 3 PM, just in case yet another box turns up. Spend an hour walking to the post office, getting my package, walking back.

There’s a UPS slip waiting for me.

The empires of the future are the empires of the mind

2008-10-31T02:42:12Z

Race for the Galaxy: The Gathering Storm is here! I mean, literally, I just picked up a copy at the Complete Strategist this afternoon.

What’s in the box?

Pieces for a fifth player — turquoise action cards (seven regular plus the two extras for a two-person game) and 12 points worth of victory chips.
Four new starter worlds, bringing the total to nine, including:
- Damaged Alien Factory, an alien production world that requires you to discard a card to produce.
- Doomed World, which is worth -1 victory points, but you can discard it to settle a non-military, non-alien world for free.
A new version of the Gambling World card to replace the old one, I guess with a new table to reflect the new card distribution. I think they’ll have to do this for each expansion.
A third copy of the Contact Specialist development.
18 more new world and development cards of various types, including:
- Improved Logistics, a development which lets the owner settle a second world in the Settle phase.
- Imperium Worlds, a 6-cost development which lets you draw a card in the Produce phase for each military world in your tableau.
- Space Mercenaries, a development that lets you discard up to two cards from your hand for +1 temporary military strength per card.
Goal chips, which give you extra victory points for being the first to meet some goal, or having the most of something.
A set of components for solitaire play! This playmat, chips, and pair of custom dice let you automate the actions of an abstract robot player, against which you can play the two-player version of the game.
A bunch of blanks for designing your own cards, including a contest blank you can send in with your best card idea for possible inclusion in a future expansion. Sadly, the printed deadline is this Saturday. Since the set just shipped this week, I expect they’ll somehow publicize an extension.
Rules for a “drafting” variant, where players (after seeing what their starter worlds will be) divvy up the deck to each create a personal deck to draw from.

This review on BoardGameGeek has photos of most of the new stuff, and describes the solitaire game. I’ll be bringing my copy to the party on Friday, and up to cthulhia’s on the weekend. (I’ll leave the solitaire stuff at home, though.)

Political knowledge quiz

2008-10-21T22:34:13Z

You Should Be Allowed to Vote

You got 15/15 questions correct.
Generally speaking, you're very well informed.

If you vote this election, you'll know exactly who (and what) you'll be voting for.
You're likely to have strong opinions, and you have the facts to back them up.

Should You Be Allowed to Vote?

I feel a bit ambivalent about this quiz. On the one hand, I aced it, so hey, ego massage. And yeah, I do think it’s a citizen’s responsibility to actually know something about the issues. (Not that this quiz actually asks about any issues. But if you don’t know what the three branches of government are, that’s probably not the only hole in your knowledge.)

On the other hand, people who argue that others shouldn’t be “allowed” to vote are not friends of democracy. Back in the ’60s, Republicans in Arizona had an organized campaign (Operation Eagle Eye) going to suppress the black vote by having poll watchers hang out at stations in mostly-black districts asking endless complicated questions of voters, causing the lines to back up and many to give up and go home. Former Supreme Court justice William Rehnquist was one such poll watcher.

The year 2000 wasn’t that long ago. The company hired by the state of Florida to scrub illegitimate voters from the rolls was over-zealous and scrubbed several thousand legitimate voters as well, mostly black voters, in numbers easily large enough to have changed the outcome of the election.

Truly, truly, truly outrageous

2008-10-17T02:47:39Z

Arg, no thanks to John Gruber, I spent some time this afternoon perusing Eric Raymond’s blog. No, he hasn’t gotten any better.

I was amused to see a few election-related posts — all dating from that brief period around the end of August and early September when McCain’s numbers looked good — gloating about how Obama’s campaign is doomed, doomed. Not a single election-related post later than Sep 18th, though.

Not that Raymond is a Republican, he hastens to remind us. But, like most guys in the lowbrow right-wing branch of the libertarian movement, he’s motivated primarily by ressentiment towards liberals, rather than a love of actual liberty.

(No, not all libertarians are like that. Honest, I know some good ones. The bad ones just tend to stick out more in my mind. Maybe that’s my own ressentiment towards right-wingers speaking.)

But far worse was “The Post-Racial Hall of Mirrors”, where he starts off talking about how he had to drive through a Delaware slum, and was revolted by all the black people around him. Not because of their skin color, he assures us, but because they were so fat and sloppy. How he deals with hanging out at SF cons, I dunno. He goes on to explain that he can’t possibly be a racist, because his belief that blacks have lower IQs is based on real science, and besides, he used to bang this hot black chick.

I take Raymond as a warning — that being a smart guy doesn’t keep you from being an idiot. I can easily imagine myself having turned into the same kind of idiot that he is, given different life experiences.

This could actually work

2008-10-09T04:03:26Z

Your challenge is to write crossover fanfiction combining The Bible and James Bond. The story should use tentacle rape as a plot device!

Generated by the Terrible Crossover Fanfiction Idea Generator

Weird subway signage

2008-09-18T03:38:16Z

Just noticed this today on the subway:

Isn’t that weird? The Os are sideways, all of them. The N in lean is slightly shaved off on the right edge; compare it to the N in not. And the letters in lean don’t seem to have the same baseline.

What the hell is up with that? I thought it was some kind of pranked-up fake sign at first, but all of the Do not lean on door signs were like that.

Self-portrait meme

2008-09-18T03:28:09Z

Take a picture of yourself right now. Don’t change your clothes. Don’t fix your hair. Just take a picture. Post that picture with no editing. (Except maybe to get the image size down to something reasonable. Don’t go posting an eight megapixel image.) Include these instructions.

Recess

2008-09-07T05:43:17Z

I’ve been hankering for more gaming in my life, so when I heard that NerdNYC was having a gaming get-together within walking distance of my home, I couldn’t miss out. (Though I didn’t actually walk, since it was raining.)

I played one game of Jungle Speed, a tense twitch game that relies on fast pattern-recognition skills. I’ve played it before at GC. I came maddeningly close to winning at one point, then fell way behind.

Then I got into a couple of games of Incan Gold, a quick, simple game with a treasure-hunter theme (and step-pyramid art, though I don’t think the Incans were pyramid builders). Players explore a tunnels as a group, with each player having the opportunity, at the end of each turn, to either press on or return to camp. Returning secures your existing treasure, and might let you scoop up more on the way out, but bars you from further gains in that tunnel. Pressing on gives you the opportunity for further treasure, but risks losing it to a random hazard card. There’s a strong chicken aspect to the game. It supports up to eight players, and I think it’s better with larger groups.

For role-playing, I signed up for what is probably cadhla’s ideal dream game: The PCs were all Disney characters, living in Kingdom Hearts-style linked worlds, when the zombie apocalypse hit. (bugsybanana says that for it to be truly Cadhla’s perfect game, it would have to smell of pumpkin spice.) We started out holed up in Scrooge McDuck’s money pit, and wound up heading to the setting of Aladdin to get the genie’s lamp and end the plague. I played Huey Duck; the other PCs were Scar from The Lion King, Mulan and Mushu, Sally from The nightmare before Christmas, Clayton from Tarzan, and Gonzo from The Muppet Show.

The really odd thing about this game was the resolution mechanic, which involved pulling a piece from a Jenga tower to do anything dangerous or interesting. If the tower collapsed, your character died. This only happened once, near the end of the session, but for a good half the game the tower was really intimidatingly skeletal, and we all eyed it warily as we weighed our options.

It also occurred to me that you could use this mechanic for a really tasteless game in which the PCs are firemen trying to evacuate the WTC on 9/11.

Ginger and crayons

2008-08-23T02:46:49Z

A few days ago I dreamed that I, and several other people, had superpowers, but to activate them we needed to eat crystallized ginger. I’ve still got some crystallized ginger candy that I bought at Fairway last year, and just ate a piece, but no superpowers. (Hm. It also tastes a lot stronger in real life than it did in the dream.)

I also recently dreamed that Crayola had a crayon color named after the French and Indian War. I remember thinking, as I woke, that the really odd thing was that this crayon was purple instead of green. See, I figured, green could make sense, as a combination of French Ultramarine (the most valuable pigment of Renaissance Europe; a reward was offered for anyone who could come up with a cheap synthetic version) and Indian Yellow (a pigment made illegal because its manufacture required the mistreatment of cows). Later I remembered that there’s also an Indian Red, which Crayola makes in crayon form, though they changed the name to Chestnut almost a decade ago.

Unexpected Twitter conjunction

2008-08-20T02:31:15Z