Avram's journal

Not-so fondly Fahrenheit

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 02:53:53 GMT

Me: Eleven degrees!
Chris: No shit, really?
Me: (checks WeatherDock more closely) Twenty-three; feels like eleven.
Chris: When I was twenty-three, I felt like eleven.

Gamers everywhere

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:51:41 GMT

Our apartment building has a recurrent problem with leaks. As one of my neighbors joked, leaks are how we meet each other.

Tonight we discovered a leak in our bedroom, and I went upstairs to tell the guy above us about it. Turned out his bedroom ceiling was leaking, too, so we both went up another level to some neighbor I hadn’t met before. I knocked on the door, and then again, louder. Between the knocks I could hear someone talking from inside: “If you roll a seven, you get to decide who the robber attacks.” So when the door opened I introduced myself with “Sorry to interrupt your Settlers of Catan game, but…”.

Crisis at Games Club!

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 22:01:57 GMT

Nobody brought Dominion! Nobody brought Race for the Galaxy! What were we going to do?!

Wasabi
When I got there most of the attendees were already starting a game of Agricola, which I don’t really like. There was one other excluded player, so we grabbed mnemex’s copy of Wasabi and gave it a spin. And it was fun!

The first thing we noticed, unpacking the game, was that Wasabi has great physical bits. The board, tiles, and action cards all have bright, attractive artwork, and the tiles are on nice, thick stock; the screens that hide your recipes from the other players are done up to look like restaurant menus; and there are even little soy-sauce bowls to hold the wooden wasabi cubes.

The game itself has each player trying to complete recipes by placing ingredient tiles down on the board (which looks like a sushi mat). If you’ve got a straight line of ingredients that matches one of your recipes, you score it, and put a point marker on it. If all of the ingredients are in the same order as shown on the recipe card, you’ve completed it “with style”, and you get some wasabi cubes (bonus points). Recipes vary in length (number of ingredients), from two to five, with longer recipes being worth more points, and shorter ones being easier to complete.

Completing a recipe also allows you to pick up an action card, which can be played later to let you do something interesting: Spicy lets you lay down two ingredients in one turn, Stack lets you a tile on an existing tile, Chop lets you pick up a tile that had been laid down earlier, Swap lets you exchange the contents of two adjacent squares, and Wasabi lets you freeze up a four-square section of the board (and earns you a wasabi cube). This means that having a 2-length recipe around that you can complete easily can earn you the action card that you need to finish one of your longer recipes.

The game can end in one of two ways: If the board fills up, the game ends, and the player with the most points wins. (Empty squares blocked by Wasabi cards count towards filling the board, and I won a game by blocking off two big empty regions when I was ahead.) Or, if one player completes ten recipes, the game ends and that player wins regardless of points. However, you can only complete recipes for which you have unused scoring markers of the appropriate length, and you get four 2-lengths, three 3-lengths, two 4-lengths, and one 5-length, so you can’t just dash out ten 2-length recipes for a quick victory.

We played three games, with two, three, and four players, and the four-person game was the toughest, with a really tight endgame where one player managed to score a last-minute recipe against everyone else’s expectations and pull off a surprise victory. Still, it felt like there was a large and frustrating element of luck to it.

I’m seeing a few variant ideas on the Boardgame Geek discussion boards:

Any player can remove a Wasabi card from the board on their turn, at the cost of one wasabi cube.
Any player may pay two wasabi cubes to pick up an action card at the end of their turn.
Any player who plays the Wasabi card has to eat a spoonful of actual wasabi!

Ingenious
Ingenious is a club classic, one of those games we find interesting enough that you can almost always find people to play it, but not so interesting that we play it when there are better options. We played two 4-person games, but for the second one we played in teams, which I’d never done before. This was good, but a little frustrating.

King-Con

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 03:28:39 GMT

I heard about King-Con just a few days ago, through Becky Cloonan’s blog. A comics convention within walking distance of my apartment, how could I not go?

It was a small con, even smaller (I think) than the first MoCCA Art Festival, but the vendors managed to fill up the lower level of the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Act-I-Vate crew had a table, of course, since a lot of them have studio space in the area. I held back from buying a lot of stuff, since money’s tight, and I’ve still got books from MoCCA 2008 that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I limited myself to a (half-price!) copy of Joel Priddy’s new book, The Gift of the Magi.

One nice feature of the dealer space was a row of benches along one wall, which gave me a place to sit down, pull out my sketchbook, and do these:

That guy in the lower right? Neal Adams.

/////////

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 01:41:00 GMT

Has anyone written erotic fanfic in which Saul Hudson of Guns N’ Roses, Kordell Stewart the NFL quarterback, Kelly Wolfe the wrestler, Jeff Plewman the bandaged Canadian musician, and the mutant turtle who stole Shredder’s swords all have sex with each other?

(I could also have included Sister Agony of the Sisters of Sin, but she’s female.)

Bird is the word!

avram@grumer.org — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 06:06:25 GMT

Google Books has confirmed for me something I recall noticing — that Orson Scott Card’s 1995 novel Alvin Journeyman takes place in a world populated by owls:

Page 35: Becca hooted.
Page 38: The boy hooted.
Page 57: Alvin hooted derisively.
Page 138: […] but Horace hooted […] It was Vilante’s turn to hoot with laughter.
Page 192: The lanky one hooted and several others chuckled.
Page 195: Measure hooted with laughter.
Page 199: Marty Laws, the county attorney, hooted at the joke.
Page 210 Alvin hooted.
Page 215 “Only so’s you can lick it out after!” hooted Mike Fink.
Page 218: He hooted twice, high, as if he were some kind of steam whistle, and Holly hooted back and laughed.
Page 316: The bailiff rummaged through the handbag, then suddenly hooted and jumped back.
Page 360: Measure hooted once — after the door was closed.
Page 366: He looked at Margaret with all the meaning he could put in his face, and everybody hooted and clapped.

There are also a couple of people not giving hoots, on pages 73 and 337.

This was the book that put me off Card’s writing permanently. I’m not the only one; this was also the first Alvin Maker book not to get a Hugo nomination (and it’s not as if the competition was particularly strong that year), and none have gotten one since. In fact, as far as I can tell by skimming through Locus’s records with bleary eyes at 2 AM, Card’s last Hugo nomination in any category was in in 1992, around the same time that news of his anti-gay bigotry was starting to spread through the SF fan community (I first saw photocopies of the linked essay handed around as photocopies at the 1991 Worldcon in Chicago).

Foreshadowings of senility

avram@grumer.org — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 21:37:34 GMT

First foreshadowing: Yesterday, on the way to a NYRSF meeting, discovering that I neglected to put my current book (A Betrayal in Winter by Daniel Abraham) in my shoulder bag. I make do on the subway trip with a copy of The Onion from a sidewalk stand.

Second foreshadowing: Just a few minutes ago, realizing that actually A Betrayal in Winter has been sitting in the pocket of my cargo shorts, where a sketchbook usually rides, since Tuesday night.

I'm back

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 01:35:05 GMT

I have successfully raised my computer from the dead.

Seems it was just the hard drive. I swapped out the old, dead 100 GB drive for the 320 GB drive I had sitting around. There were a lot of screws involved, and I had to zip out to the hardware store at one point to get a better #00 Phillips-head screwdriver than the one I was using, but aside from that things went pretty well. Oh, and Migration Assistant bogged down while porting my Applications folder across, so I had to finish that up by hand.

So I’m back, with 200+ GB of free hard drive space that I don’t know what to do with.

Back from Tekserve

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:27:48 GMT

So I hauled my laptop to Tekserve (saving NYC Mac-owners' asses since 1987), and the helpful guy at the repairs counter was successful in getting my machine to boot off a network volume. He ran some diagnostic tools (fsck?) and concluded that my hard drive is horked. He was unable to figure out why I couldn't boot from an install DVD; that's apparently something that happens sometimes when a hard drive goes bad, or it may mean my DVD drive went bad too in a display of component solidarity. But it doesn't seem to be the logic board, which is what I'd been fearing.

This is actually good news! It just so happens that I've got this old replacement hard drive that I ordered last year when I started running low on drive space. When I saw how much of a pain in the ass it was to swap drives out in this model, I just deleted a bunch of unnecessary files instead, and wound up never installing it, but it's still sitting right here a few feet behind me.

It also just so happens that I've got a replacement DVD drive sitting in our study, as well. I ordered this three years back, after some books fell on my laptop and I thought my DVD drive was damaged. (Damn, there's some decent drawing on that page. I need to get back up to that skill level.)

Since I'm doing all my repairs myself, Tekserve didn't charge me anything for the twenty minutes or so of staff time I took up. (The Coke machine still isn't working, though.)

The next step is figuring out a way to print out the PDF I've got on my desktop (and therefore on my backup drive) that tells me how to open up my machine. Then, I need a large, clean, flat surface. There's a special tool -- something like a dental pick -- I'm supposed to use to disengage catches above the DVD slot, and nobody sells it, but I think I can improvise something out of a paper clip.

Computer fuckage

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:32:00 GMT

Typing this from Chris's computer (Windows Vista, MSIE -- oh, the pain!) because my laptop is fucked.

Last night I was getting a barred circle on startup, an error message I'd never even heard of before, and I thought it was well and truly, deeply, permanently fucked, to the point of needing to buy a new one (which I can't even come close to affording right now), or at least a new motherboard (which I can't afford either). It was refusing to boot off a Leopard install disk.

This morning, after zapping the PRAM, I'm getting the question-mark-folder icon, which I at least recognize. I managed to get it to eject the Leopard disk, so I figure it's only moderately fucked, and I'm getting ready for another go at it. With any luck, a full hard drive wipe and reinstall, followed by restoring from my (fortunately recent) backup will put things right.

But I dunno. I've been fighting with this thing since Tuesday night. This isn't the first wipe-and-restore. So we'll see.

Update: Nope, it's hosed. Won't boot from the system install DVD. This will probably take a visit to an actual professional to even try and fix, and I just don't have the money to spare. Fuck. I don't suppose anyone's got a 15" PowerBook G4 that they were planning to throw out...?

Back from Worldcon

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 03:56:27 GMT

Back from Worldcon. Had a great time. I’ll try to scan in the sketch-blogging tomorrow; probably link to it from Making Light.

Two RPG ideas

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 04:19:58 GMT

Rope in Fate

Watching the latter part of Hitchock’s Rope, it seems to me that you could run that whole long psychological and investigative cat-and-mouse game in Fate, with most of the movie consisting of Investigation, Empathy, and Deceit rolls, trying to assess and declare aspects, leading up to a big Will conflict at the end.

Also, that scene at the end where Jimmy Stewart’s character summons the cops by firing a gun out the window? Hope there wasn’t anyone standing where the bullets came down.

An encumbrance mechanic

An idea for D&D-like games: Give each player an (empty) Altoids tin, or some other small container. This is a holder for the items their character is carrying. For small items (scrolls, flasks of potion, daggers) use scraps of paper or business card. For larger items, use pieces of wood or Lego or other substantial items. You’ve got to write the names of the items they represent on these objects, so if you don’t want to write on your Lego blocks, use something else.

If you’ve got several different sizes of small box, give the larger ones to the players with stronger characters. If all you’ve got is the same size box, give the weaker players null items (Lego blocks with nothing written on them) to represent a smaller carrying capacity.

Scott Pilgrim RPG?

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:09:41 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 03:33:23 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 05:14:01 GMT

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"

avram@grumer.org — Thu, 07 May 2009 08:58:53 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 02 May 2009 20:03:27 GMT

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"

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 06:08:32 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 07:38:56 GMT

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"

avram@grumer.org — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 21:01:20 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:13:38 GMT

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

Fixing stuff

avram@grumer.org — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 03:24:56 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:40:01 GMT

Workout

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:05:01 GMT

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

avram@grumer.org — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 08:43:09 GMT

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.