A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

01:06 pm - Gameshelf Players google group

Earlier this week I created a new Google Group called "The Gameshelf Players", which I plan to use for announcements and discussion relevant to folks interested in appearing on future episodes of my show.

Now's a peachy time to join, if you'd like, since I am presenting composing my first post to that group about the talent I'll need for the upcoming episode. I plan on continuing to use LJ for talent-trolling, but I reckon that the group (with its attached mailing list) will be a better place to have any resulting discussion.

http://groups.google.com/group/gameshelf-players

02:34 pm - Unplugged

I've more or less stopped following the news. A couple of weeks ago I unsubscribed from NPR's daily five-minute news-summary podcast, after four years of listening, and that basically severed me from the world of regular general-interest updates. Through the internet, and through internet-enabled friends, I find that most things I care about will filter their way to me through other channels quickly enough, while things I don't care about stop competing for my attention.

The danger here lay in shutting myself away from serendipitous discovery. You benefit from information that, while of no obvious value at first, nonetheless takes up residence in your brain, mingles with with other whims and fancies for a while, and eventually dope-slaps you with a freshly synthesized new Idea one day, while you're walking down the street. I live for this phenomenon, and I don't want to endanger its frequency in my own head by narrowing the flow of my information intake.

But I'm willing to wager that the time and attention I'll save avoiding non-genre news outweighs the risk that I'll miss any gems buried in the garbage heaps of trite infojunk. So long as I'm careful to stay plugged in, and keep my list of active info-channels well groomed, I think I'll be OK.

02:43 pm - Gameshelf Casting call: "Action Castle"

Howdy, Gameshelf Players and other friends,

I'm looking for some folks who would be willing to play the extremely silly tabletop game "Action Castle" on-camera for the next episode of the Gameshelf. It's a one-shot party game that spoofs circa-1980 text adventure games, where the GM plays the text parser, and all the players take turns "typing in" commands to make the hero stumble through the map in an attempt to rescue the princess.

It's quite unlikely you've even heard of this game before, and so much the better. It's a one-shot deal, and the rules can be digested in a minute. The footage of the gameplay is going to fit into a segment of larger episode about how interactive fiction is perceived within gaming culture.

No shooting date or location is set yet, but I'd like to have this happen on this side of the Yuletide gravity well. The time commitment is relatively light - I'd estimate four hours on the day of the shoot, with no rehearsal necessary. If this sounds fun to you, please let me know. Thanks!

07:39 pm - Thoughts on "Put This On", and web video length

Excerpt from a recent letter from me to the Gameshelf crew:

If I may offer an aside, take a look at this:
http://putthison.com/post/231001982/episode-1-denim

It's an example of something I've been looking for for a while - a television-quality, web-based series on some nonfiction topic that isn't straight-up comedy (or games), but uses comedy to ease the topic along. In this case, it's a show about men's clothing. Seeing it makes me very happy.

The fundraising and sponsorship stuff evidenced is quite interesting, but it's the format that has me really on the edge of my seat. I watched the whole thing, and felt full - smarter _and_ entertained - and only ten minutes had gone by. And indeed, I'm not sure I would have sat and ate through the whole thing if the timer at the start had read, say, 30:00 rather than 10:00.

This show, and my experience of approaching it as audience, is the first hard evidence I've encountered for an argument I haven't properly had with myself: whether Gameshelf episodes should be shorter - a _lot_ shorter. I never really revisited the question of show length, even though I started considering the Gameshelf more of an internet-based TV show than a literal watch-it-on-a-television TV show. Seeing an excellent show like "Put This On", which aims way higher than typical YouTube fare, and yet still keeps to a YouTube-friendly length, is a strong argument in the make-it-shorter column.

06:49 pm - A Serious Man

Saw and enjoyed A Serious Man today. It's a puzzling film that I recommend. Spoilery, thoughts below cut.

( A dybbuk, a nebbish, and Shroedinger's Cat. )

01:39 pm - RETWEET

Please enjoy this limerick by 530nm330hz.

There once was a man who would balk
Whenever we asked him to talk.
We thought it was queer,
'Til he said, "My idea
Is to hide that I come from New York."

11:54 am - The Big Broadcast of 1938

The first act was ingenious, wonderful, and perfectly paced. derspatchel has such an affinity for both creating and delivering radio comedy that one is tempted to conclude he was born 70 years too late. The music from Emperor Norton's Stationary Marching Band was hot, and fit in perfectly as a buffer between the vocal performances. I would have happily sat through another two hours of any material, had it maintained the pace of the first.

Unfortunately, acts II and III - the headline acts, really, involving the War of the Worlds adaptation - needed some seriously fierce editing. I know it's easy for me to say, down here in the audience, but I think it would have been possible to compress them into a single act, or at least into two significantly shorter ones.

Now, there were many strong moments (the scene at the site of the first cylinder landing was particularly memorable, with excellent sound engineering from both Foleys and performers), and the use of the Martian Chorus and the Crazy Sound Dood to represent the Invaders was just wonderful. But: there were many scenes that should have been cut, compressed, or combined, not just to bring the three-hour running time down (not counting intermissions), but to better emphasize the cool stuff.

I would have dropped stuff like the mayor's monologue and at least one of the professor's monologues, and ground more out of the three(!) lengthy doomed-news-reporter sequences. I envision the latter two reporter scenes overlapping or interleaving quite nicely, though I realize that's my film-editing experience talking, and that it would be harder to do on-stage.

I would even consider completely removing all the scenes involving the North End mobsters' club. The moll's introduction would then occur when the professor meets her, letting her mob connections (as well as the mobsters themselves) become revealed as a plot twist later on. I would have found the mobsters' motivations stronger if those characters all showed up as a late-game surprise, fighting side-by-side with the army but also trying to get at each others' backs from the get-go.

But, all this is just me sitting in my comfy chair making sniffing noises about how the great and talented me would have done things, when the fact of the matter is that the PMRP has outdone itself once again with a hell of a show, no matter how much tighter it could stand to be. I'm proud to be able to say I worked with them when they were getting started years ago, and prouder still that they just keep getting better.

11:37 am - Embittered Movie Reviews: "Metro Polis"

I literally sat up in bed pre-dawn last Saturday morning with the idea to make this, and I found the time put it together last night. Enjoy.

12:17 pm - Klingon propaganda video

This is nice:



Interesting pattern develops here, if this is a viral for the next J.J. Abrams Trek film (which it almost surely is, since it looks too polished, and its credit roll is too absent, to be a fan video). It follows the same precedent for superhero-story reboots set by the Nolans' Batman films: in the first installment, pit the hero against a canonical but somewhat lame villain. This keeps the focus on how you've revitalized the hero - or, in Trek's case, the heroic ensemble. If that goes over well, then you can sustain fan-glee by rolling out the arch-nemesis for part two.

rikchik points out to me that the latter-day Dr. Who TV series follows this pattern as well. The first Eccleson episode had him shining as he dealt with the obscure-but-canonical Autons, and they waited a few episodes before the ol' Daleks showed up to steal his spotlight away.

Edit Oh, the glyphs at the end are totally a URL passed through a simple latin1-to-klingon-character cipher. I am too lazy to figure it out though.

Edit 2 OK, fine: it goes here. (Ripped from an IO9 comment. whee...)

07:44 pm - Wedding

Before I start talking about some other damn thing: warmest congratulations to my dear friends Jess (dictator555) and Nate-of-no-real-social-media-presence on getting married yesterday evening. I was pleased and honored to be in attendance for the relaxed and friendly ceremony out in Western Mass, which turned into kind of a con (of the fannish variety)... eventually nobody was left except a gaggle of gamer geeks staying up late, and many of us slept over. (The venue had a B&B conveniently attached.)

I just realized that this now means more than half of the seven players from the Diplomacy episode have gotten married since we filmed the game in early June. Wow. And they call that game divisive?

01:56 pm - Evidence of bad karma bringage-upon

Sequence of events on Friday:

• Helped take care of some paperworky PITA at the bank, feeling good about myself.
• Succeeded in swapping stinky new headphones for better ones at the Apple Store.

• While crossing the street, gave an exaggerated, sneering "I'm walking here!" shrug to cars blowing through a red light at Porter Square. I did not see until after they passed that they were part of a funeral procession.

• Missed, by minutes, a UPS delivery I'd been waiting weeks for.
• Made things worse by calling and asking for a redelivery; with silent tittering they invited me to come pick it up at the depot under the bridge, not mentioning that the Friday-night line would be hours long.
• Burned up several minutes of one-hour Zipcar reservation trying to figure out how to make the car start via random button-mashing, because it's some newfangled keyless thingo. Had to give up and call Zipcar and ask them how to do it.
• Arrived, saw line, returned empty-handed.
• Was told by UPS that now that I'd exercised my pick-up option, they didn't wanna deliver it after all, so I'll have to rent another Zipcar for gord knows how long on Monday.

Moral: do not shake your fist in the wake of the dead, or they will inconvenience your consumerist lifestyle for days. Clearly.

11:42 pm - Diplomacy - deleted scenes

Some bonus silliness for you.

10:20 am - Time Machine via WiFi (Airport Extreme)

This is how I finally got Time Machine to work over WiFi:

1. I plugged my big-ass[1] third-party hard drive into the USB port of the Airport Extreme base station that I had purchased the day before.


2. I let my desktop Mac, connected to the house LAN via Ethernet, discover the base station automatically (it shows up under the "Shared" section in any Finder window's left sidebar). Via the Finder, I connected to the airport and mounted the drive.


3. I told the desktop Mac's Time Machine System Preferences to use this mounted drive as its disk, and let 'er rip. Hours later, I had a working, browsable Time Machine history on that machine. Hooray!


4. I set up my laptop beside the base station, connected to it directly with an Ethernet cable, and turned off the laptop's Airport access in order to ensure that it would use only Ethernet for the time being.


5. I repeated steps two and three with the laptop, mounting the backup drive via the network and letting the laptop spend a few hours making its initial backup. And then it worked too. Hooray!


6. I turned the laptop's Airport back on and unplugged it from Ethernet, so it's back to how it usually is. Time Machine continues to work as nicely as you please, both in making its hourly incremental backups, and in browsing them through the Time Machine application.

classicaljunkie

12:56 am - Alea iacta est

Earlier today, ran into a reference to Julius Caesar's The die is cast, and its meaning in context. Here we are crossing the river, and while I have stacked up the odds in my favor to the best of my ability, from here on out its all down to ol' dame fortuna. Roll 'em.

As someone who loves the mechanisms and the history of cards and dice, this should really be one of my favorite quotations, right? But the fact is, for the time being anyway, I get vaguely irritated when I hear it. For most of my life, I thought the metaphor had a completely different referent: one of my well-meaning teachers, at some point early on, introduced me to this phrase, and taught that Caesar was comparing his crossing to metal-casting. ("Die" as in "tool and die", see.) And that made enough sense at the time - Caesar, in this version, was saying that the blow had been struck, the metal had been cut, shaped, and cooled, and there was no unbending it now. I had no reason to question this interpretation.

And indeed, I don't think that I did reëxamine it until, honestly, only a year or two ago, when it occurred to me that he was talking about rolling dice - as if he had just committed all his units in a tense war game! Luckily, the web had been invented and distributed in the intervening years, so it took only a moment for me to confirm that I was correct. It floored me. Not only was that a cooler version - because, you know, games and all - but it makes a so much more compelling story. Caesar at the height of his ambition, making the move that would forever seal his place in the tale of human history, and his pull-quote utterance is his admission of uncertainty despite it all. That's awesome.

So yeah, running into the quote now makes me itchy, annoyed that I was mis-taught something that strikes me as so relevant, and yet probably wouldn't have had a huge impact on my life had I learned it correctly. Whew.

10:20 am - Cut tags and time machines

Thanks for all the feedback re: cut tags on (non-LJ) blogs! I've instituted them on Gameshelf and am cautiously optimistic that the site's bounce rate has decreased as a result. It's still pretty crappy even so, but there's other fixes I've got in mind for that.

Bounce rate, in Google Analytics-ese, represents the percentage of people who stay on a site for five seconds or less - in other words, they load the site, say "meh", and move along. Some bounce is inevitable: there are regular readers who don't use RSS and visit the site between updates, and there are folks who breeze in from search engines and decide that we're not what they were looking for. Based on research, I'd like to get our bounce rate down to 50 percent. It's been hovering around 80-85 percent, which suggests that we're losing a lot of potential audience that should be more interested in us, but the site looks so boring that they have no reason to stay...

11:19 am - Dear smartypantsweb

What's the purpose of having jumps ("Click for more...") on long blog articles?

I'm not talking about sites that break stories across 10 short pages so that they can expose you to 10 times as many ads. I mean the click-once-to-read-the-entire-post style that I very often see on popular blogs. Random example: Andrew Sullivan puts a "Continue Reading [topic]..." link at the bottom of posts which reach past a certain vertical length, maybe one out of every four of the posts on the front page.

I can guess some reasons, but what reasons does the conventional wisdom hold? (Yes, I'm wondering if we should institute something like this for the Gameshelf.)

01:03 pm - Please don't tell me to rewrite Volity for another platform.

Or rather, go ahead, but I'll just tell you the same thing I tell everyone else, when they say "Hey, you should make Volity for $SOME_NEW_THING" (most recently, this has been Google Wave). "No," says I, "you should make it. It's an open protocol. Knock yourself out."

My attitude towards Volity today is something like borderline hostility. I consider it an aspect of what William Gibson has called "the great clomping foot of nerdism", the kind that is always more interested in taking things apart and exhaustively cataloguing the components than it is in creating wonderful new stuff. Obsessed with categorization and taxonomies, of finding the common root to all things, and then trying to capture that in code, or at least in sprawling wikis. And then, when it's "done", wondering why nobody except for one's fellow robed adepts show any interest at all in it.

It's the video-game equivalent of spending more time writing and trimming an enormous, detailed "world bible" than in creating any stories set in that world. Or of tabletop-game "systems" like Icehouse or Piecepack, which despite their aspirations never sold to anyone other than hardcore game geeks (hi).

If you want to make a video game, go make it. The tools, community and resources to help you do so are all there for you. And yet, if you're a certain kind of geek, the temptation will exist to instead treat your game idea as the top level of a stack: the real prize, you're sure, lay in generalizing all the lower levels, paring and refactoring them into some sort of Ur-Game technology that will solve gaming, somehow, and lead inevitably to lifelong fortune and glory.

My advice is: don't go there, because I know you have great ideas and you're a ninja and everything, but that is folly. Please just make your game instead. I guarantee that you'll be happier with it, and you'll make more fans that way, too. If you're new to making games, the fans might not come, but you'll be so thrilled at what you made - even though it sucks - that you'll do it again, and again, and it will keep getting better. And eventually you'll really be onto something.

02:36 pm - What my parents are dealing with

My parents have been in a most unfortunate legal battle over the last year or two with a gentleman to whom they sold their Fairfield, Maine apartment building earlier this decade. He did this as part of a property-buying spree, using money which he didn't actually have, and a few years later the inevitable occurred, just like you've been hearing all over.

They don't want the building back - they would much rather retire from the property-management business - but they also don't want to have the house, which they still live in, default over to whichever entity would end up with it upon foreclosure. So they're fighting for it anyway.

Talking with me on the phone today, my mom said she'd heard that if you do an internet search for the guy's name, you see the message "landlord from hell", or something, and maybe I could look, and print it out and mail it to them? (My parents don't cotton to computers.) I quickly confirmed that, yes, the number-one Google hit on the guy is this horrified essay, which we can call the There's poop in the tub! document - sadly, the story is about my parents' building. Mom's mentioned the flea incident before. (Thankfully, they didn't get outside of that one filthy apartment, but jeez.)

Also in the top ten hits for the guy's name are this story about a different building, and this jawdropping forum thread where, halfway through, sockpuppets defending the guy and his partner start piling on. First, they pretend to be an earlier poster who has changed her mind, declaring the subjects to be paragons of humanity. When that proved ineffective (since the original poster was still following the thread and able to say wtf at this), they settled on anonymous sniping, blaming the victims for being so stupid and careless. There is an entertaining interlude before it wraps up where someone suggests calling a local TV news desk about it, and then a puppet says, "O hai! I'm from the TV! Plz stop calling me kthx"

So, yeah, dealing with these two folks is my parents' full-time occupation right now.

11:55 am - An experiment in coordinated assault

If you're bored at work today, please consider suggesting the Diplomacy show (http://gameshelf.jmac.org/2009/09/episode-7---diplomacy.html) as a link du jour to Boing Boing (http://www.boingboing.net/suggest.html).

(Yes, cross-posting from twitter / facebook. I don't do this every day! I thank you for your patience, as well as any flogging of my links you can spare.)

11:35 am - Wobbling back to (the rest of my) life

The thing about the Diplomacy show was that it had the weight of a thesis, for me. Even though so many other people were instrumental to its production, the invisible (I hope!) work of editing took up the vast majority of the raw labor involved, and that was all performed by Y.T. . So now that it's done, I wanna take a vacation. But instead, I have my day job waiting for me! For now I must settle for the celebratory dinner at a favorite restaurant that classicaljunkie treated me to a couple of nights ago.

It's hard, though. I want to spend some time removed, and recharging. I spent a little too much time yesterday obsessively reloading my stats pages on blip.tv, YouTube and BGG, and bouncing with delight each time I got five more views. Fun, but pointless. It's been a while.