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I back a lot of RPG Kickstarters, and a keep a list of the highest-funded and most-backed RPG Kickstarters on my RPG Kickstarter Tips page. You may or may not be interested in these, but what sort of world-brain neuron would I be if I didn't bring them to your attention? My mentioning them is not a solictation or endorsement, although I quite adore Golden Sky Stories. Golden Sky Stories continues to do well, with its gentle themes of magical creatures helping people in nonviolent ways: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nekoewen/golden-sky-stories-heartwarming-role-playing . GSS should be out by October and I definitely plan on running it at Big Bad Con where I'm running five games (not all GSS). I will resist the urge to mix it with Transhuman to tell the heartwarming tale of future Japan in which a decomissioned wardroid and an abandoned spooky house are helped by raccoon dog tricksters. Eclipse Phase (available free via Creative Commons) is doing a kickstarter for Transhuman, their player guide, at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/507486226/transhuman-the-eclipse-phase-players-guide/ . "Eclipse Phase characters in detail: AGIs, asyncs, infomorphs, uplifts, infugees, and indentures. .... insanity, death and memory loss, psychosurgery, nanofabrication, and reputation are explored. ... rules for creating your own morphs ... section on exotic and specialized morphs, such as flexbots, swarmanoids, aquatic morphs, and using bots, vehicles, habitats, and other non-traditional constructs as morphs."Habitat PCs! Which reminds me, have you read Susan Palwick's novel Shelter? It has an AI House, and memory loss, and sadness. OVA: The Anime Role-Playing Game doubled its goal on day one, and has a bonus if you back both it and Golden Sky Stories at $10. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1655572033/ova-the-anime-role-playing-gameAnd just in the interest of completeness I mention Torchbearer, which is Mouse Guard adapted to do old-school dungeon crawls (by humans, dwarves, elves, and bait), in which the presence or absence of a 10 foot pole can spell life or death. I'm not that fond of the Burning Wheel system that underlies it, but it appears many people are: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/burningwheel/torchbearerAnd there's Exalted 3rd edition, which at least seems to be avoiding gratuitous crotch shots this time.
A friend asked for web comic recommendations, so I thought I would post my suggestions to LJ as well in case others would find them useful. There are thousands of online comics, and tastes vary, so these may or may not suit you. I've omitted some that depend heavily on knowledge of D&D for their amusement value, like Order of the Stick, Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, Rusty & Co, and Goblins. Many of these have been running a long time, so the beginning art can be pretty rough. If the characters and story are good I'm happy to watch the art improve over the years.
- XKCD I imagine you already know about.
- Busted Wonder is short but beautiful.
- Fleep is short but really fun.
- Gunnerkrigg Court
- Digger by Ursula Vernon won a Hugo for best Graphic Story in 2012. Now complete, and available free online or in 6 printed volumes from Sofawolf Press.
- Finder by Carla Speed McNeil is the best SF comic, with amazing world building. (Also available in two omnibus volumes from Dark Horse Comics.)
- Questionable Content is "indie romantic comedy with robots, music, and coffee", and the only one I read daily besides XKCD. The rest I prefer to read in longer bursts.
- A Miracle of Science. He's a detective. She's the planet Mars. They fight crimes against science.
- Girl Genius won the Hugo for best Graphic Story 3 years running until they withdrew their name from consideration. Action packed steampunk mad science.
- Selkie, a comic about adoption.
- Grrl Power is perhaps not as good as the ones above, but is really fun. Superheroines in their downtime. Cheesecake may be NSFW.
- Dresden Codakis very strange, and I like it.
- Minus is strange, but the ones I like I like very much.
There are entire websites devoted to people voting on which webcomics they like, A search for "best webcomics" gets 8 million hits. http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/34_best_webcomics_geeks has a nice selection. I do not recommend starting to read any of the above late at night if you have to be up at a reasonable time the next morning. "ah, has a creature ever perfected the art of denial a finely as a human?" -- Reynardine, Gunnerkrigg Court #579, Tom Siddell Also, you should search Youtube for "Monster Roll" with sushi chefs vs Kaiju. Or just click https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slXxYnm2WJk
The annual Endgame Oakland boardgame auction took place Saturday 4/21 from 11am to precisely 4pm, when the last game was sold (Battlecry, for $10). There were maybe 1/2 to 2/3 as many games as last year, and nearly everything sold except for some that had unreasonably high opening bids. I counted 90 attendees at the start, and 105 bidding numbers. 50-60 were left by the end. It was good to see Aaron again; he flew in to conduct the auction and provide commentary on the games. ( the tale of the tape...Collapse )
I don't see many movies in the theater these days, but did see Chronicle (2012), about which I have a theory. ( Read more...Collapse )I was only a little disappointed that there was no after credits hijinx. It would have been too much to expect Nick Fury to show up to offer a job.
My comment on Steven Long's thoughts on fantasy book size trends and superhero novels: Ebooks actually seem to be trending towards shorter lengths, and spearheading a resurgence in novellas and even short stories. Dean Wesley Smith and J.A. Konrath have a lot of interesting things to say in that regard. I'd say forget the gatekeepers, e-publish, and move on to the next novel, and the next. As for good superhero novels, Austin Grossman's Soon I Will Be Invincible stands like a titan above the rest, but I'm also quite fond of Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps (with a great use of a subtle power, and one of the best villain names ever), Mike Stackpole's In Hero Years... I'm Dead on Kindle, and James Maxey's Nobody Gets the Girl, which I see has a sequel on the Kindle. I for one welcome a return to shorter fantasy novels.
In 2011 I read 67 books (and 181 other things like manga, graphic novels, and RPGs). My to-be-read stack remains absurdly large, but here's what I'm anticipating most in 2012: Last year's list of anticipated books. What are you looking forward to that's coming out this year, gentle readers? ETA: Added new Tim Powers.
Tue, Dec. 13th, 2011, 06:16 pm
Big Bad Con
OK, so this is two months old. Can I blame it on the Russian elections? Big Bad Con was October 7-9 at the Oakland Airport Hilton. Even though it was only its first year, Big Bad Con was the best-organized game con I've ever been to. ( How could this be, you ask...Collapse )I'm definitely going back next year. Oh, and how did my Monsterhearts games go? I think this quote from Colin J about his vampire nicely captures it: "If eating your brother and then having a threesome by his corpse is wrong then I don't want to be right!"
I'm planning to run Carpenter Kids (OW 121) in a Dresden Files RPG haunted house adventure at the Endgame Minicon, and if that goes well I have other ideas for them too ("Our Sumer Vacation", "Adventures in Mollysaving"), so I'm very interested in feedback on these rough drafts ( Spoilers through Small Favor...Collapse )I'm happy to hear feedback by comment or email!
When I'm traveling and internet and wifi access is uncertain, I've found very useful Virgin Mobile USA's Broadband2Go: An $80 cellmodem that plugs into a USB port, available from BestBuy or Amazon.com, which lets you buy Internet service on an as-needed basis with no monthly requirement. It costs: $10 for 10 days, 100 MB $20 for 30 days, 500 MB $50 for 30 days, unlimited (but slows down after 2.5GB) You can check your usage on their web site, and if you dial in and it's been used up, it connects to the web site and you can renew it again. It takes Windows to configure it, but after that works just fine on Linux. (It may be possible to configure it entirely on Linux, but I have a small XP partition on my laptop for just such ocassions.) I haven't tried it on Mac. On Ubuntu Linux 11.04 I added the following to my /etc/wvdial.conf file:
[Dialer Defaults]
Init1 = ATZ
Init2 = ATQ0 V1 E1 S0=0 &C1 &D2 +FCLASS=0
Modem Type = Analog Modem
Baud = 460800
New PPPD = yes
Modem = /dev/ttyUSB3
Stupid Mode = 1
ISDN = 0
Phone = #777
Password = Internet
Username = Internet
And to connect I plug it into a USB port and do sudo wvdial. I found it very nice when I was traveling and didn't want to worry about hunting down wifi or paying absurd hotel wifi charges. And when I'm not traveling, it costs nothing. So that may or may not be useful knowledge for you, but now you know, and knowing is half the battle! The other half is red and blue lasers.
People contemplating how to name their Google+ circles may find this quote handy:
"The Nordic language recognizes four orders of foreignness. The first is the otherlander, or utlanning, the stranger that we recognize as being a human of our world, but of another city or country. The second is the framling. This is the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another world. The third is the raman, the stranger that we recognize as human, but of another species. The fourth is the true alien, the varelse, which includes all the animals, for with them no conversation is possible. They live, but we cannot guess what purposes or causes make them act. They might be intelligent, they might be self-aware, but we cannot know it. Djur, the dire beast that comes in the night with slavering jaws." -- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead, p38 |
