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

04:05 pm - I've been playing games

So, a lot's been going on. Good things!

I've been playing a lot of role-playing games lately. I hosted a game of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach a couple of weekends ago, and yesterday I helped classicaljunkie host a play-through of The Immortal Murders to celebrate her birthday. In both cases I found that I'm capable of playing storytelling RPGs, but also found it a draining activity rather than an energizing one. However, I'm not sure how much of that was due to the act of playing and how much was from the additional stress of hosting.

I prefer narrating to literal role-playing, and it was interesting to discover the difference between the two. (Roach, a tabletop game, allows both styles. Immortal Murders is more like a LARP, so either you're role-playing or you're not playing at all.) With both styles, though, I felt on-edge and tense the whole time my character was on the scene, like I need to be ready to jump in at any moment. After only a couple of hours of this, I was pretty exhausted. Compare to a board game, with its regular cycle of high and low periods that I can ride for many hours (if the game is compelling enough). It could be that I'm just not playing right.

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The Gameshelf shoot went great, even though I'm currently having a frustrating time importing the footage. I didn't think to clean the tape heads of the borrowed SCAT cameras - which many people use - before using them. As a result, the tapes have some schmutz on them, and every time Final Cut encounters such a blotch, it throws up its hands (as well as a modal dialog box) and saves the import-so-far to a file. There's nothing to do at this point except fast forward the tape a bit and pick it up from there, hoping that nothing juicy got skipped over. It also results in lots of smaller files to comb through versus a few long ones. This makes an already time-consumig task even longer. But I'll get through it.

This will be a fanatstic episode, but I think it's destined to be an anomaly among Gameshelfs... a "special" that I wanted to do specifically because it's so radically different than anything we've done so far, and it seemed like exactly what I personally needed to tackle in order to get into the show again. After this, we have to start getting disciplined about the show's format, enough so that planning, shooting and editing the episodes can maybe happen with some goddamn regularity for once. I have come to the conclusion the the show will never be really popular if it only comes out a couple times a year (if that).

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I hope to open the jmac.org video store this week, where I will sell DVDs of The Gameshelf and Jmac's Arcade. I have high hopes for this. Even a handful of sales would help cover my materials costs of recent Gameshelf-related adventures. It would also serve as a huge encouragement to me to produce more of both, and in theory would also serve to promote the shows to a wider audience. The presence of the DVDs will probably get me to promote the shows more aggressively, at any rate. We'll see.

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I'm rather buried in Appleseed work. I lost the subcontractor I was working with just as I picked up a new small job in May, leaving me with four tasks all on my own plate. This is too many. I've been dealing with these best as I can, and this includes starting the process of bringing in new help. I am hopeful about this.

I love running the business. For all my crazy project ideas it's still the only enterprise of mine that brings in revenues, so I shouldn't shy away from the idea of letting it grow. Honestly, a large part of me is reluctant to invest much energy into growing Appleseed beyond just-me. This is the part that considers it my "day job", with a scoff. It's the same part that fuels my eagerness to work on my nuttier entrepreneurial projects, which I spent most of last year and the start of this year chasing at full throttle, and it's not used to being told to shut up for a bit.

I owe myself another period of reckoning. 2007's four-pillar system worked well and it's time to take stock and see what I really want to be doing now. The answer, I suspect, will be different from last year, or the year before that. I can only hope that the answer will fit better than it has in the past.

07:11 pm - Game stuff I wanna do soon

Since starting to reclaim some life-space due to paring away extraneous projects and applying some long-overdue organization to what's left, I've been feeling the urge to move my game-playing life in new directions.

Here is some stuff I wanna do soon. Not really making plans yet, but I reserve the right to link back to this post later. If you're totally into any of these ideas (or wish to tell me how wrong I am), feel free to make your interest known!

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After listening to podcasts about them for years, I am hell-bent on trying one of the latter-day crop of storytelling RPGs. Finally picked up a copy of The Shab Al-Hiri Roach, and decree that it shall be the one I finally try first. I appreciate both its tone (which sounds like it plays out something like an R-rated Toon game[1]) and the fact that it has gamey framing elements like cards, scoring, and a win condition.

Role-playing games that are basically audience-free improv theater, or grown-up versions of "Let's Pretend" (and I mean that in the best possible way) do not appeal to me, and that discounts a wide swath of the otherwise really cool-sounding games I keep hearing about. Even though you can lose a game of Roach by an unlucky card draw, I still appreciate just having something to aim for.

[1] Really, I want to say "It sounds like Monty Python at its best and bleakest", but, sadly, "Monty Python" is such a loaded term, especially when we're talking about RPGs. It unavoidably invokes the image of some Cheeto-stained wretches sitting around a table barking "Bring me a shrubbery!" and giggling. No, that is not the game I am trying to describe.

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I wanna host a Race for the Galaxy tournament, maybe in the brief slice of time between classicaljunkie's spring and summer semesters (rather soon). She and I are both absolutely apeshit-bonkers for this game, and so are lots of our local friends. I think everyone I know who loves games loves this game, except for, like, misuba. (What the hell, dude.) UPDATE: ok, ok, several of you don't like Race! I still name it a overall rare phenomenon in my game-playing social circle.

I have never hosted a tournament of anything before. I've barely even played in any. I am not entirely sure what a "bye" is, that's how ignorant I am on the concept. So this is a novelty-driven desire, too. (Which I can sell for two cards, plus applicable trade-phase bonuses. HA HA HA.)

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One of the Gameshelf eps I wanna shoot this year is "The Diplomacy show", an idea I've been kicking around since the Gameshelf started. Both taskboy3000 and I now live in nice roomy houses, and I need something to kick-start my excitement about working on this show again, so now's the time.

The idea is that we shoot a complete, face-to-face game of Diplomacy, but direct and edit it like a reality show. There'll be cameras rolling continuously in the map room, and camcorders following people around during the discussion phase. Players must dress in costume appropriate to the Major Power they represent.

I recognize that this will be... logistically tricky. I've written my crew about it, and await their opinion. I've also written Wizards of the Coast asking if they'd like to get on this action.

04:08 pm - GTD / Gameshelf / Priorities

Got back on the pseudo-GTD wagon a couple of days ago, opening up OmniFocus for the first time in ages and performing my "weekly" review of its task database. I was in no mood to show the least bit of clemency toward any project that no longer excited me. Most of them went into the shredder, and most of the rest got marked as "completed". When I was done, I only had a couple of projects left, out of the several dozen I'd started with.

First thing the next morning, I emptied my head into OmniFocus's inbox, sorted it all out, and got to work on the first tasks. I knew the system was working because by 4PM that day, and for the first time in a long while, I felt I deserved a beer. So I had one.

In a delightful surprise twist, among the mouldering projects I killed lay my intent to read the actual Geting Things Done book, and absorbing some other media relating to the system. Confident in my take-aways from prior exposure to GTD and its proponents, I don't need that stuff anymore. I've learned to use OmniFocus to relieve myself of the burden of trying to keep everything I'm supposed to do in-memory - even though I'm probably using only a thin slice of the app's full functionality.

I feel really good about this, and hope to stay on the horse longer this time. Not moving house should prove a good first step...

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I've been thinking about what to do with The Gameshelf - the show, that is. Speaking of shredding things, I've decided to kick my existing Episode 7 concept to the curb. I can point my finger at a lot of reasons I wasn't getting it done, but after a whole year it's clear to me that I'm just not energized about that episode's idea any more. Right now I need to focus on just getting excited about doing the show again at all. If I can win at that, I can return to this idea later. (And all the footage that goes with it...)

Been rapping with taskboy3000 about it, this past week. It's time to push the show in a new direction, as suggested by the blog's evolution and some insightful words I've received from critics over the last year.

The show's current tagline, "Strange Games for Happy People", represents my original vision of focusing the show around reviews of "unusual" games - board or video games that mainstream culture doesn't know about. I'm now thinking of (begging your pardon) re-branding the show as "game history, comparison, and critique". Not so sure about that middle word; was thinking of a meaning like "comparative studies", there. Maybe "context", instead?

At any rate, of the emergent strengths of The Gameshelf has been how we take several games, usually from completely different media and time periods, and hold them up for study and commentary, while demonstrating how they are all related, and share common roots. I really enjoy doing that, and I don't think anyone does it like we've been doing it.

Joe and I now have a couple of solid ideas for episodes we could do this year, both of which would realize some show-related concepts we've been kicking around for a long time. In both cases, various circumstances indicate that now's the right time to bust them out. I'm really excited about this, and I've started getting some balls rolling. Wish me luck.

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Also, this.