Truffula Fruits

8:28AM - The Horror ... The Horror ...

Since savageplanet is only just returning to San Diego this morning, we had only three players available last night for our weekly game night. Although krenolds and I have been talking about busting out the Feng Shui Roleplaying Game (especially after seeing Kung Fu Panda this weekend), Keri was more in the mood for something she was already familiar with. After doodlestan arrived, we settled on Arkham Horror.

If you've never played Arkham Horror, here's the pocket summary: You're an ordinary person in the city of Arkham trying to stop a Great Old One (from the Cthulhu Mythos) from destroying the city (or at least devouring everyone who lives there). You do so by tracking down the extradimensional gates that open all over the city, then sealing them off. In the meantime, though, you encounter monsters from the mythos (everything from Mi-Go to cultists), and try to keep from going insane.

Arkham Horror falls into the category of what I consider "psuedo-RPGs" from Fantasy Flight Games (Descent, Last Night on Earth, and Talisman are in this category as well): games that utilize character "sheets," covering skills, possessions, and possibly even character advancement, often with counters and cards, to keep track of your progress during the game. All that's really lacking are rules for social interaction.

But I'm not planning to talk about the differences between D&D and games like these. I want to talk about last night's game.


People who have known me for a while know that I can be something of a gaming pessimist.  I recognize that some games have a "snowball" effect where, if you fall behind, you're doomed, and playing the game becomes more about just getting through the turns, and less about trying to accomplish something. And, with a game like Arkham Horror, where you watch the Great Old One getting closer and closer to manifesting, and your character losing Sanity, Stamina, and/or his equipment, it's very easy to look over the game board and decide "We're going to lose."

The saving grace, though, is that you're not playing competitively; you're working with the other players to stop the Great Old One from destroying the city. So, even if your character is doing badly, you're encouraged to keep trying, because the other players are depending on your help to get through. And, more to the point, when you get to the endgame, you can make a startling amount of progress--provided you've planned ahead, of course--and win at the last moment.

Like I said, I'm really talking about last night.

Our Great Old One du jour was Shub-Niggurath (the Black Goat of the Woods With a Thousand Young, by way of explanation), and his attack mode was to force the characters to make Sneak checks at successively bigger penalties. Every time you failed, you lost one of your character' s "monster trophies" (your pile of defeated monsters). You also suffered a -5 penalty on your Fight checks when attacking ol' Shubby--and physical weapons (weapons with the "physical" keyword) actually added nothing to your Fight check. My character, relying on his Thompson submachine gun, wasn't going to be a match for the Black Goat--but Stan's character had a spare magic weapon, which made my character actually effective, and not just a meat shield for the other characters.

Still, we went into the fight knowing that we were badly outmatched; Stan and Keri's characters both had only one monster trophy each, meaning they could survive one round of defeat before they were out of the game. But, surprisingly, we survived pretty well--for the first several rounds of combat. But then we were at the point where our Sneak checks were virtually impossible--then actually impossible--to make, and we were losing monster trophies. First Keri's character got punted out of the game. Then, Stan's character and mine had one round to live--and to deal three more points of damage to Shub-Niggurath.

Normally, that wouldn't be a big deal; we were both rolling five or six dice per attack, meaning we should average about two to three hits each attack. But we had had more than our share of bad rolls, so, if one of us failed, the onus would be on the other. Stan had the better shot--but it was my turn. If the dice failed me, Stan would have to finish off the Black Goat by himself--and, of the two of us, he had had the worse luck with the dice.

And then I rolled this:


I love it when a plan comes together.

JD

9:20AM - Miller Time

The as-yet-unnamed 4E campaign has pulled a Barney Miller. It has taken on a tone and content rather different than envisioned in the pilot.

As mentioned previously, I began the game by asking the players to envision two distinct outcomes of their possible character arcs. As several sessions of play went by, devoted to learning the combat system, I got a hankering to introduce some of this promised characterization into the mix. Presented with PC casualties of the playtesting process (I still have no idea how I assigned such high damage values to those creatures, honest) I decided to tie in their free resurrections to story arcs proposed by a couple of the other players. The paladin’s destiny may be as savior of his people from their undead overlords—or as an anti-savior who becomes like the creatures he’s sworn to fight. The wizard/ranger quests for arcane knowledge, which may consume her if plumbed without moral guidance. So the wizard got a legendary book, which she was able to use to bring back the rogue and fighter from the dead in unorthodox fashion. These two now register as undead and have acquired a minor allergy to radiant damage. The group now quests to lift the taint of undeath from their comrades.

In the meantime, the characters have taken a swerve toward the picaresque. Told that they can only resolve the undeath issue by confronting their destinies, the characters have elected to find a short cut. The paladin is proving himself other than an typically jerky paladin—he’s an atypical jerky paladin, prone to panicked exclamations and more interested in his burgeoning livestock business than his legendary fate.

In part the back-to-the-dungeon vibe has prompted the group to nostalgically embrace the comic irresponsibility of D&D games of yore. The early focus on combats and learning the rules has also permitted the group to drift back to its preference for playing their characters as amusingly inept.

When an unexpected dynamic arises in play, I say accept the dynamic. So for the moment at least, the accent will be on misadventure. We’ll see if the characters come out the other side of this older and wiser, eventually shifting back to epic mode, or if the campaign is headed permanently into Vancian territory.

12:28AM - Mantis update: spotlight on Booie

I caught Booie in the act of shedding his skin this afternoon.  He's a little blurry in this picture, because he's swinging back and forth trying to wriggle out of his old skin.  His old-skin feet are attached to the ceiling of his container.  Eagle-eyed readers will note that it seems he has at least eight legs.  The three disappearing out the top of the photo are his old-skin legs, the four sticking out from his sides are his new-skin legs.  You can see his old tail-skin curling up like a new-year's-eve party favor as he struggles to get his body out of the confines of his old skin.  At bottom, his head is a blur as he swings himself to and fro.  His front paws are in the "praying" position.

10:54PM - 7.23.08

9:04AM - 7.22.08

8:20AM - My Tech Fu Is Strong!

Last week, krenolds sent me a link to a Lifehacker article about making the most of your Xbox 360. In essence, the article mentioned a bunch of hacks that let you move some of the media functionality of your PC over to your Xbox. Considering that our stereo system is attached the television in our living room--and our Xbox is attached to that TV--it made a lot of sense for us to give it a shot.

And it worked. We can now play music from any of our three PCs through our living room stereo.

Of course, it had some hurdles. For one thing, each of the PCs on our network has its own firewall, which has to be "persuaded" to allow Windows Media Player to communicate with the other machines on the network--which includes the Xbox. And, of course, Windows Media Player has to be told specifically which other machines on the network it can share files with. And it has to be WMP 11. And the Xbox 360 has to be told which media source to use--which means it has to be able to see the media sources in the first place.

After a few false starts, I got it working, and Keri and I were able to listen to our media libraries in the living room.

Now, you think I'd be happy with that, but I just had to explore another aspect of that article: Getting our Xbox 360 to access my laptop's Media Center so that we can play "Watch Now" selections from our Netflix subscription.

This is a bit more tricky, because it involves installing a 3rd-party "extender" application (that enables your Xbox to access your Netflix account). This application then "clones" your Netflix "Watch Now" settings so that you can use your Xbox the same way you use Windows Media Center. The hurdles here included actually downloading the "Watch Now" software (which I'd avoided because it requires that Internet Explorer be your default browser), making Internet Explorer my default browser (which was less of a technological challenge than a giant step backward from Mozilla Firefox), and then getting the videos to play on the Xbox.

And that's actually where I'm stuck. The option to clone the settings from the PC to the Xbox never appeared, and it seems like the problem is that the Xbox can't actually see the PC on the network ... again. Not sure why, but that's today's project.

Wish me luck. (Or, you know, if you've done this before, feel free to volunteer advice.)

[UPDATE] Got it working! Huzzah!

JD

10:50AM - TV Round Up

Roger Ebert, already sidelined by illness, and his co-host Richard Roeper are departing the At the Movies review show after failing to come to contract terms with its owner, Disney. Ebert had already been withholding rights to the trademarked “Two Thumbs Up” from them for several months. Disney has announced plans to replace Roeper and permanent fill-in Michael Phillips with two younger critics, Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. Lyons is a second generation critic; Mankiewicz descends from a storied clan of Hollywood writers. As they pursue a younger demographic, the suits at Disney are no doubt secretly thinking that the new guys will enthusiastically recommend all the crap blockbusters and ignore those stupid small and subtitled films that only cineastes care about. Critics have a way of growing into the job, though—as Roeper has over the years. He started as positively cringeworthy, but expanded his horizons, becoming especially loose and confident during Ebert’s convalescence. Phillips I’ve never warmed too, though. He’s a tougher critic than either Ebert or Roeper, who actually tend to support any halfway decent popcorn flick. Phillips’ higher bar would be a positive if only he backed up his headmasterish judgments with argument or example. Without having seen the new guys, I hold out hope that they’ll eventually disappoint the suits and do more than cheerlead for the publicity machine.

Roeper and Phillips, possibly in conjunction with Ebert, are shopping a new show to interested parties.

---

In police procedural news, Chris Noth is leaving Law and Order: Criminal Intent. This time he seems to be departing the L&O franchise voluntarily. Replacing him in the swapped-off lead role is Jeff Goldblum, who was very cool in the short-lived cop show Raines. Now he and alternate lead Vincent D’Onofrio can engage in an epic weird-off. I look forward to the battle of the off-kilter line readings.

---

And finally, the second season of Mad Men starts this Sunday on AMC. Now that The Wire is off the air, this is unquestionably the best series on American TV. Like The Sopranos and Deadwood, it gets much of its charge from its portrayal of an exotic milieu—in this case, New York ad agencies in the alien era of the early sixties. What distinguishes it from those shows is the slippery, elusive structures of its individual episodes. It abandons the classic model of establish A story, establish B story, develop A and B stories, wrap up B story, wrap up A story to weave surprising narratives that reveal themselves only in retrospect as part of a cohesive whole. If you haven't gone there yet, rent the first season pronto and queue up the second on your recording device of choice.

2:49AM - Mantis update

click to embiggen.


Look at these beasts! The brown behemoth in the first picture, that's li'l ol' Ceiling, now about three and a half inches long and chomping down hungrily on his first adult cricket.

The 3-inch green monster in picture 2 is Snacks, and this photo has caught him in a rare aggressive pose. Moments before taking this picture, I had put his first adult cricket into his house. Snacks immediately went ballistic -- he curled his tail up like a scorpion and "put up his dukes" as you see in the picture. He took several rage-filled swipes at the cricket but could not land a blow -- the cricket kept hiding behind sticks and leaves. This made Snacks absolutely apoplectic -- he stood in this position for several minutes, hunt-and-kill chemicals flooding through his brain, claws in a rictus of preparation, even after the cricket had moved on to less dangerous areas of the 4x2" container Snacks lives in. Snacks was so predatory that when I put my hand in his container to try to move the cricket back into his line of vision he attacked me! I've never actually been attacked by a mantis before, normally the most aggressive they get is that they climb up on my hand to try to get out of their container. But Snacks lashed out at me as though I were a soft, juicy cricket smaller than himself and I felt what Jackson Publick would no-doubt call The Grip Of The Mantis! Now, Snacks is, as I say, only three inches long and a stick-like insect, so I was never really in any danger, but for a split second I knew how it felt to be a cricket. (We have since made up.)

The pint-sized 1.5-inch pipsqueak in picture 3 is our old pal Booie, still the runt and still bringing up the rear. Booie just recently made the jump from fruit-flies to baby crickets, and is something of a picky eater. The other two will go pouncing after whatever I put inside their containers, but Booie will let a baby cricket hop happily around his container for days before deciding to go ahead and eat it. I'm thinking that perhaps he's secretly a vegetarian.

More mantisy goodness below the fold.

9:25AM - The Art of Whispering

In the pet peeve department ...

Having seen two movies in the theater this weekend--Kung Fu Panda and Dark Knight--I was reminded again twice over of a sad fact of human development:

11:43AM - the Kitten Motto

~"If you don't know what something is... bite it.
   If it doesn't bite back... it's yours... pee on it."~

8:11AM - Perhaps an Apology is in Order?

An appeals court has ruled that the FCC acted "arbitrarily and capriciously" in fining the people involved in Janet Jackson's infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl halftime show back in 2004.

You remember that, right? You're probably still in therapy over it. Your children wake up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced that Janet Jackson's nipple clamp is in the closet, just waiting to get them when the lights went out. And things have still been awkward between you and your wife/girlfriend since the time she caught you looking up photos of the incident on the Internet.

No?

That's right, because for all the furor over the incident--and the slew of fines and penalties the FCC labeled against so many other "shock" broadcasts in the ensuing months--nobody really cares.

At best, it was an accident: Timberlake had no idea that was going to happen when he tugged on Janet's corset. At worst, it was Timberlake behaving like a boor and trying to embarrass her on live national television. Either way, nobody was irrevocably scarred over the incident--except maybe Janet Jackson--so nobody had any real moral platform on which to stand when complaining that they or their children saw, not a nipple, but a nipple clamp, for 9/16ths of a second.

So, in addition to dropping the fines, I think the FCC should formally apologize--to Janet Jackson in particular, who was the only party in all of this who had a right to be outraged.

But I guess I'm a dreamer.

JD

8:05AM - 7.21.08

4:18AM - Venture Bros: Tears of a Sea-cow

Pity Dr. Dugong. No matter how lame his backstory, or how inadequate his one-robot security system, he still apparently has had enough success with his study of "gentle sea-creatures" to build himself a Stromberg-like undersea fortress. Does he deserve the fate he is given here, a point-blank blast in the face from The Monarch's not-at-all-phallic over-sized electronic bazooka thing?

( Read more... )

9:20AM - The Birds

View series to date here.

9:55PM - The World Is A Mess And I Just Need To Rule It

An Open Letter To rollick and febrile,

Dear You Two,

Given that

----I have JUST NOW TODAY discovered Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, and

Given that

-----I could only watch part one in three sessions, since my laptop doesn't like to stay on-line for long, and thus I got to savor the first act by getting it in bits, not even realizing there were MORE acts out there on line, and

Given that

-----I checked my f-list and now you two have got me all worried about how the whole thing ends,

Well,

I've decided to ONLY watch acts 1 and 2.

And write my OWN ending (yay fanfic!) and LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER!!




(Also: I need an icon that says "The Hammer is my penis.")

5:18PM - The Tower of Gygax

It's been a busy month, compounded by a recent trip to the east coast. One of the things that has been keeping me busy is the Tower of Gygax - an event I'm coordinating at GenCon Indy 2008, one of many events honoring the memory of Gary Gygax. The goal is to have a continuous game of AD&D (first edition, the one with the efreet on the DMG and the jewel thieves on the PHB) running at GenCon - 80 hours straight. ( Read more... )

10:48AM - i'm a sewing nerd. SO?!

I'm really excited about our new machine that we'll be getting to sell soon.  

For any of you vintage Bernina owners, the model number is the 830.  It does have ALOT to live up to.  However the list of features has me thinking that won't be an issue.  

You can watch the big unvieling of it at www.bernina8series.com , Monday night at 7pm.  I think you have to sign up for it ahead of time to watch the web cast.  We're having a store party to watch with popcorn and punch.  I don't know when we'll be getting any in the store.  Bernina still has the same factory with the same assembly lines with PEOPLE on them that they've always had, and they have just started changing out the parts of the assembly line to produce them.  I don't know what HP is saying on that little clip on the link I just gave you cause I haven't listened to it.  I just know he's very Swiss.  The soonest we'll have one in the store will probably be October.  I hope I'm wrong, but that seems to be a better guess than some of the others.

At any rate, it will be fun to have something new to play with.

In other work news, the manager at my Hancock's has been lying to customers about our products to sell his.  So has one of his new store managers.  Everytime I go to work I feel like I'm suiting up for battle with them.  I really really hate that.

Anways...  I bought some cook patterns at a thrift store for .50 each and am making crazy tunics and probably a romper.  hahaha! 

8:37AM - 7.20.08

3:34AM - Further thoughts on The Dark Knight

Well, as good as it is, it's better on a second viewing. I went on a double-date with a screenwriter pal and our wives. Screenwriter joked, "I liked the first three movies, but the last two I thought were a little too much." By which he meant, there is enough plot in The Dark Knight to fuel five summer blockbusters.  No one could possibly walk out of this movie and complain they hadn't gotten their money's worth. It seems like every fifteen minutes or so there is one blockbuster sequence or other that would have been the climax to any other movie, but The Dark Knight just keeps going and going and going, more surprises up its sleeve, more betrayals and double-crosses, more reveals and reversals. It makes The Departed look somnolent, it makes Heat look like a comic book and it makes Tim Burton's Batman look like Leslie Martinson's Batman.

10:21PM - You Can Never Escape

Today, I assembled 500 points worth of chaos marines. Just now, I went to the GW web site and figured out how much more I'd like to spend.

(I started with berzerker and chaos marine boxed sets; the 500 point army isn't all that great. Ideally, I'd swap out some of the standard issue chaos marines for havocs or maybe even terminators.)

You never quit playing 40k. You just take long, extended breaks.