Huge Guts

Since I last (really) posted here, some things have happened.  I –

-Quit smoking.

-Made a thesis.

-Became a Master in Comparative Media Studies.

-Moved (back) to LA.

-Visited Singapore for the GCA and met the Singaporean counterparts of the lab. Embarrassed myself in front of Ian Livingstone.

-Came back to LA and snuck around Indiecade, meeting a number of fantastic folks and catching up with my thesis advisor, Doris Rusch. Embarrassed myself in front of Brenda Brathwaite*.

-Made a terrible soup and learned that you cannot blend cabbage.

I’ve been working on a few things: mostly in the table-top realm, because it’s seriously gratifying in a way that digital design hasn’t been — the loop between me and the players is very close, and unlike with digital design, I’m working directly with the tools.  Too many barriers in general, making it easy to drop off (viz this site). I’ll try to figure out a way to post them, but for now,

Map of a D&D Round from Ray's Campaign

*This trend of embarrassing myself in front of Game Designers I Respect is something of a tradition, at this point. I’m not at a games conference until I demonstrate my amazing ability to put a size 12 shoe into my mouth.

Bit of a busy year that was.

Made a thesis.

Now I’m working on one of these.

chamomile kudzu, ???? — 10/08/08

you were sweet and toothless and i never got to see you cleaned up and i’m very sorry that you only got to hang out with my parents for a few weeks because they are incredibly sweet folks, good at scratchies and inclined to drizzle a little bacon fat on your kibble occasionally.

and new-cat-who-is-apparently-called-Boston-Blackie, i don’t blame you, even though you are the pugnacious, territorial type, and the day you got fixed you were so nasty that none of the other cats wanted to hang out in the case, and so you chased Chamomile and prince william out. Ok, i am kind of saying you were at least an efficient cause, but that hardly means you are actually responsible. You are a cat, responsibility is the mental category least applicable to the way you think. you do, however, owe me some serious goddamn nuzzles at this point.

“Nestor slew the bear. Shortly thereafter, several starving cubs came around the corner crying for their mother. Awkward . . .”

my cleric isn’t very clerical, but he does some things very well. The game itself is mostly focused on choices about gear, it autoplays through an adventure over a period of time. It was apparently designed 1) for marketing 2) to expose people to the terminology and systems, which is an unusual kind of outreach, but one that’s probably necessary for something like Dungeons & Dragons. Since I began running a game at our lab, the most commonly asked question (after “Can I join?”) is “So how do you play, exactly?”, which is actually terrifying difficult to answer, since it can be framed as analogous to so many other things: MMOs, improvisational theatre, a very exciting boardgame match, writing collaborative fiction…

Anyways, while there’s no multiplayer mode, you can buff friends while they are on adventures, and since I keep getting whupped on by spiders and jerky guards, I could use some backup.

Facebook Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures

“In 1576 the king of Denmark gave Tycho Brahe feudal powers over a small island named Hven, lying the sound just north of Copenhagen. Here Tycho erected a remarkable castle-observatory, in which lived and worked for the next two decades”

- Johns, The Nature of the Book

now if this doesn’t give you ideas for a Harvest Moon // Zelda crossover, you have no imagination.

today is a day of innuendos, subtle and not;

but this is really quick, i’m exhausted today, and all i really wanted to do was point to some news stories that made me happy; not because their content is positive, but because they are good stories about a debate in scientific industries revolving around different models of genetic expression, heritability, and epidemiology.

Nicholas Wade at the NY Times
Jonah Lehrer of The Frontal Cortex
Razib of Gene Expression

i ganked these from andrew sullivan, to whom i also wrote an email about the enormously chaotic incident possibly involving some Anons and Sarah Palin’s (personal/gubernatorial?) email address*.

*link down but it was up earlier, and may be back later? or maybe everyone who runs wikileaks is dead already?

my friend anna anthropy, who is totes rad, had a game written up on RPS, which some of you read. And some of the people I work with may have heard me talk to Eitan about the point that Kieron Gillen makes in his review, about how level design and challenge ramping work in this funny way that bears no resemblance to the power dynamics of BDSM (and, for that matter, all Master/Slave relationships, as Hegel so sagely addressed in the Phenomenology of Spirit).

Anyways, I bounce this out because I just wanted to say for the record that this game is awesome, her new western story-shooter Calamity Annie is also awesome, and that we need The Gamer’s Quarter back.

*The game is actually called “Mighty Jill Off”. At some point, i confused this game with darkwave band Jack Off Jill. that is…understandable, i think, since I can wrap all of these topics together in the form of the goth women i used to LARP with.

The Speaking Lesson

a short story i’ve had to write as an assignment for a class. i haven’t written in years, and i’m pretty this is pretty bad even for a writing assignment, but i’m happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
-This Is Just To Say
by William Carlos Williams

A burglar who broke into a home just east of Fresno rubbed food seasoning over the body of one of two men as they slept in their rooms and then used an 8-inch sausage to whack the other man on the face and head before running out of the house, Fresno County sheriff’s deputies said Saturday.

– The Fresno Bee