Amberley

( Having Fun in Denver )

And now it's 2am and time for sleep.

In addition to all the fun gaming in Seattle last weekend at Go Play More NW, over dinner there were many interesting things discussed, and people scribbled notes as best they could. I mentioned Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us to Ben Robbins as the best explanation of Web 2.0 I've seen. I also recommend Clay Shirky's 2008 talk on Here Comes Everybody and his excellent book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

For an example of a future where the ability to find interesting things to bring to other people's attention is the only real currency, read Scott Westerfeld's Extras but since it's the fourth book in the series, first read Uglies, Pretties, and Specials. Everything else by Westerfeld is exceptionally good too, but especially his Midnighters Trilogy: The Secret Hour, Touching Darkness, Blue Noon, and his creepily fascinating book about vampires and parasites: Peeps. You'll never look at cats the same way again.

John Harper pointed out Channel 101's 5-minute shows, especially Time Belt and Yacht Rock. I've only watched the first episode of Time Belt, and I'm hooked.

Lots of TV series got recommended around; my contribution was Miracles, a 2002-2003 series which only showed six episodes before the war preempted it. The DVD includes seven unaired episodes as well. Episode 2, "The Friendly Skies", was enough to convince me to buy it.

Also recomended: the 6-episode BBC series Ultraviolet (2000), not to be confused with the more recent movie.

Go Play NW in Seattle last May was lots of fun, so when Chris Bennett asked who was interested in getting together again for a weekend of gaming (in the style of a Garland/Rooney "Let's put on a show!" musical) and John Harper found us a place to play, Go Play More NW was born. How could I resist?

( Fun! )

If I weren't already going to Worldcon this weekend I would totally be going back to Seattle for Dragonflight.

After successfully running six games at Kublacon and five at Go Play NW I've submitted six to Conquest SF, which has moved to the Santa Clara Marriott near Great America this year, labor day weekend (8/29-9/1). Last year I was in Tokyo for Worldcon.

This year I hope to run:

• Fri 7pm Don't Rest Your Head - Don't Lose Your Mind
  
• Sat 9am Dogs in the Vineyard - Last Spring Branch
  
• Sat 3pm Rock N Roll Dreams (using Dogs)
  
• Sut 9am Monsters and Other Childish Things - New Kids, Old Monsters
  
• Sut 3pm Agon - Beast of Kolkoris
  
• Mon 9am Don't Rest Your Head - Don't Sell Your Soul
  

Four hours each. Four players each, except Monsters which can handle six players with three as monsters and three their kids.

( In more detail... )

Come play, it should be fun!

I have a favor to ask of anyone reading this entry. If you know someone who knows someone in the Readington 29 in New Jersey, could you reach out and put them in contact with me, or me with them? Because I'd like to thank them for standing up for what they believed in by giving them each a free book (plus two for the school library, if they'll accept it.)

What am I talking about?

Cory Doctorow just wrote a great YA novel called Little Brother about teens fighting for their rights. It's a fun, terrific book. He makes all his books available free online under Creative Commons, and rather than accept donations from happy readers he's asked they donate copies of Little Brother to teachers and librarians to get copies into their kids' hands.

I practically lived in the local library growing up, and it was my high school calculus teacher letting me play on his TRS-80 (4 KB of RAM, and then the upgrade to 16 KB!) in the math lab that turned me on to computers and set me on the path in life I've enjoyed so much. A lot of my relatives are teachers. So I like Cory's plan very much, and I've donated a few books that way so far. Now I'd like to do more.

Then I read this snippet in the June 2008 issue of Reason:

When officials at New Jersey's Readington Middle School cut the lunch period to 30 minutes, students got upset. Some of them showed their displeasure by paying the $2 cost of their lunches in pennies. Twenty-nine kids received detention for their payments.

More information can be found searching Google for Readington Middle School Lunch but I haven't had time to dig through all those links yet, although I plan to if that's what it takes.

Their school year just ended so they've probably scattered to the winds of summer, but if there's someone out there who'd be willing to accept delivery of 29 copies of Little Brother (plus 2 for the school library, and if there's a town library I'll throw in 2 for it too) and see that they get to the kids, I'm eager to make that happen.

The excellent Olga Nunes, who keeps track of the donation site I linked to above, has found a Readington Middle School contact list, which I'm going to look into next week.

And if you can't help directly but know someone who might, feel free to point them here, or email my LJ account which forwards to me.

And if you can't help or it's not your thing, thanks for reading this far, and I highly recommend both Little Brother and Clay Shirky's latest amazing book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Cory Doctorow's book tour for his excellent new YA novel Little Brother about teen hackers vs. homeland security, is coming to Seattle May 17-20, Berkeley May 21st, and Los Altos and San Francisco May 22nd, along with other dates in other places. He's very interesting in person, even if xkcd may have been kidding about the red cape and goggles.

ETA: And now there's a way to donate copies of Little Brother to teachers and librarians. I've donated six copies, and since I have Amazon Prime, Amazon paid for the shipping. Very pleasing.

Cory Doctorow's Little Brother came out today, and is wonderful. Scott Westerfeld nailed it as "A rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion—as necessary and dangerous as file sharing, free speech, and bottled water on a plane."

There's also an audio book available without DRM, and in a week or so the text will be available free online, under Creative Commons license like all Doctorow's books. But I recommend buying a copy, and then passing it along to a teen you know, or even one you don't.

In other pleasing news, Ursula Vernon's book Nurk: The Strange, Surprising Adventures of a (Somewhat) Brave Shrew is out a month early, and I don't know if Scott Westerfeld has read it, but you should.

Here's a transcript of Clay Shirky's brilliant talk on Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. I also highly recommend his recent book Here Comes Everybody.

The web is to humans what laser pointers are to cats.

"For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives. Just like the laser and the cat, technology is playing a trick on us. We are programmed for scarcity and can’t dial back when something is abundant.”

Brand Robins lost his bookmarks and backup, and asked for 5 bookmarks he should have.

After browsing through my 3000 bookmarks and skipping the gaming-related ones because those will pop up again in some discussion or another, or can be refound via Google readily enough, I came up with:

• Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us
  
• One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) a low-cost, connected laptop for the world's children's education
  
• Shirky: A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy
  
• Phatic Discourse Rant by Rosemary Edghill
  
• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou - Record of a Yokohama Shopping Trip
  

Which sadly leaves no room to mention Troy: The Movie by John M. Ford, or 20 of Shakespeare's sonnets as Haiku.

So Gentle Reader, if you feel like it, in comments or your own journal what five bookmarks would you like to recommend at the start of this new year?

Story-Games asks So, what's the best system for supers?

Ten years ago I would have said Champions faster than a speeding bullet, and I still have very fond memories of using that to run World of the 400 and another long-running campaign before that, but now I'd have to say:

Super Bliss Force Zeta!

Take Ben Lehman's excellent game of love and war, Bliss Stage, except instead of piloting giant dream robots you're superheroes, with your powers fueled by the strength of your relationships with others, good or bad. All supers are teens, and if you want an alien menace you can give it a Strikeforce Morituri vibe.

This is the result of mixing Bliss Stage and Wild Talents playcasts with the animated Teen Titans episode "Switched" where Starfire explains how her powers work off emotion ("To fly just think of boundless joy!") when she swaps bodies with Raven, whose powers require strict control of emotion.

The more people you have an emotional connection to the more powerful you are, and the sooner you burn out.

(I'm planning to run it at Endgame next year; email me if you're interested.)

Having (mostly) organized my comics in a useful manner, I've been meaning to do the same for my (many) books. Here's a detailed description of how one couple solved their 3500 book Library Problem.

I particularly like the part where he decides to write his own catalog software and has to hunt down his books on interface design (yay Edward Tufte!), but then his wife gets him to come to his senses with a Look. Best is the enemy of Better.

Doris Lessing's Nobel Prize lecture on the hunger for books in Zimbabwe could be an ad for the One Laptop Per Child project (which also serve as low-power ebooks and lanterns that can be recharged by hand or cheap solar panels), even if she's never heard of OLPC.

OLPC's "Give One Get One" offer has been extended a month to December 31st, although I ordered on the first day:

"Give One Get One" is the only time we are making the revolutionary XO laptop available to the public. For a donation of just $399 ($200 of which is tax-deductable), you will be giving the gift of education. Additionally, T-Mobile is offering donors one year of complimentary access to T-Mobile HotSpot locations throughout the United States, which can be used from any Wi-Fi-capable device, including the XO laptop.

(Zimbabwe isn't part of the program yet, but the one I donated "will soon be delivered into the hands of a child in Afghanistan, Cambodia, Haiti, Mongolia or Rwanda.")

Here's Nicolas Negroponte's OLPC talk at TED 2006.

There are lots of deserving charities and there's also nothing wrong with spending money on the ones you love instead of helping strangers, but I'm very happy with my choice.

Here's the writeup of Bliss Stage Final Act that I ran in two parts at Endgame recently. Here are the Bliss Stage Final Act PC character sheets modified from the original versions that I ran at the Endgame minicon in October, with a lot more numbers.

And here's where to buy Bliss Stage Ignition Stage although the forthcoming Acceleration Stage should have cleaner rules and more art, if you can bear to wait for it.

While waiting for Brand Robins (or anyone) to write his imaginary Jim Steinman RPG, Rock N Roll Dreams, I was very pleased to run across Graham Walmsley's Meat Loaf LARP, Too Much Rock for One Hand, for 8-13 players in 4 hours, where a biker gang and some high school kids meet under the pale moonlight to drink, love, fight, race bikes, and dream of getting out of their godforsaken town or die for rock n roll or both.

ETA: And here's the Maycon writeup of Too Much Rock for One Hand. Put some Meatloaf or Streets of Fire on the stereo while reading it!

Little Brother, Cory Doctorow's YA novel about teen hackers vs. the DHS, is coming out April 29th. I heard him read the first couple of chapters at Orycon last year and have been eagerly looking forward to it ever since. It's like Wikipedia Brown, complete with useful information for today's teens. Scott Westerfeld calls it "a rousing tale of techno-geek rebellion" and the author of Uglies/Pretties/Specials/Extras should know! I've ordered my copy.

Everyone should watch Larry Lessig's brilliant and funny talk at TED:

He gets the audience to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. bringing together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the ASCAP cartel to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you've ever seen.

Anyone can "take sounds and images from the culture around us and use it to say things differently. Tools of creativity become tools of speech. It is a literacy for a generation."

So once again I ran three games at Endgame's minicon last Saturday in Oakland, and once again I had a lot of fun doing so. This time I ran:

• Dogs in the Vineyard with yet another permutation of caelano's Spanish Fork.


• During the lunch break I ran the 15 minute DitV demo for someone who wasn't in the morning game.


• Zombies in the Vineyard "Corporate Zombies" as a trust-building company camping trip in Yosemite goes horribly awry.


• Ben "Polaris" Lehman's strange and excellent game of giant robots and love, Bliss Stage "Final Mission" for the first time ever, which I've done a writeup of as "One Kiss Kills"

If anyone local wants to try Bliss Stage, drop me a line. Good for 1-6 players, but 3-4 is probably best. I'm happy to teach the system.

I hope I get a chance to run games at Orycon November 16-18 in Portland.

A few years back I decided to store my comics so I could access them easily, without playing towers of hanoi with decaying stacks of boxes. After some research here's what I settled on:

( Read more... )

Go Play NW in Seattle was lots of fun and will be even better next year, and the eight hour wait in the Seattle airport for Alaska Airlines to get its act together was made more bearable by having a fellow gamer to chat with and Mary Renault's excellent The Bull From The Sea to finish.

But even better, Ben Lehman, who wrote the wonderful RPG Polaris, about a faerie tale apocalypse of chivalric tragedy, is now taking Preorders for Bliss Stage, his new game where troubled teens pilot giant robots of weaponized love through dreamtime to fight alien invaders. Sign me up!