"Dad, my guy is a dragon rider, because his sixty-seventh grandfather was a dragon rider."
"Sixty-seventh! That's quite a long way back."
"Yes"
"Let's figure out how long ago that would have been!" (Parents of school-age kids mysteriously think everything is a math problem).We do some figuring ... "Hmm, probably about 1600-1800 years ago."
"Yes, that is a very long time."
"And I wonder HOW MANY sixty-seventh grandfathers a person has. You know how you have 2 grandfathers, and four great-grandfathers? How many sixty-seventh grandfathers do you think you have?"
"I don't know. A hundred?"
(More figuring).
"Nope. Over a billion." (Actually the answer seems to be in the quintillions).
So that got me thinking. Clearly a person can't have that many ancestors. I don't know much about population, but it got me to thinking. Take a smaller number of generations -- say 14. This would take us back to the late 16th century, Elizabethan era. A person still has about 32,000 ancestors at that generation. Well, that's believable. And any individual one of those, assuming each generation doubles, has about 32,000 descendants in the modern day.
That's all believable. But clearly, if you go back far enough, the number of a person's ancestors at some point is about equal to the size of the entire human race. And from there of course, assuming each generation is smaller than the one after it, the pool of ancestors shrinks and shrinks. That point seems, from my superficial reading (Wikipedia of course, I mean, what ELSE, it's 2008 and ... well yeah) seems to be called the identical ancestors point, and be located some where between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago. This seems to be different from the most recent common ancestor, a single ancestor shared by all living humans, who may have lived as little as 2,00o to 5,000 years ago.
Of course, the blindingly simpler lesson from all this, but something one still tends to forget, is that all people alive do share a common ancestor, and hence are all related. The smaller the subgroup, the more recent the common ancestor. Whichever subgroup you look at it, the CA falls within approximately historical times. Who knows, for my background, the CA might be lurking no more than a millennium back.
So it's obvious, as I say, but still forgotten, that the person I argued with yesterday, the blogger whose photo I clicked past because I didn't like his color scheme, the President, the cable guy and I, are probably all descended from some Basque shepherd around 811 A.D. Or, if any of those folks are, say, of African or Chinese descent, then some Egyptian boater, or the mayor of Mohenjo-Daro.
Tower of Babel, indeed ...
I put this proposition to my kids. E was pleased at the idea that all the kids in the world were his cousins. R thought it about in bed, and asked in alarm "Even people I don't LIKE?"
***
The original statement from E about "my guy" (a frequent phrase, meaning one of his characters in one of the various imaginary universes, all generally referred to as "D&Ds"), had to do with his guy's propensity for dragon-riding. This in turn comes from our having seen the movie Eragon, and subsequently to explore the book. I wish I could say this has been a thrilling exploration of a gem of young adult fantasy. I'd really like that to be so. But so far, it hasn't been.
I'm on delicate ground here. The Eragon series are written by Christopher Paolini, who was fifteen when he began writing the first one, and is about twenty-five as he finishes the third, all best-sellers I believe. Some of you know that I've worked at writing for a long time, and have a raggedy novel and lots of odd short stories scattered back over the years, none of them published. I've often been dismissive of authors, especially genre authors in areas like fantasy who succumb to the conventions of their "area" rather than rising above it. It's particularly tempting, and easy-seeming, to snipe jealously at someone who published his first book in his teens, and has continued from success to success. Anyone's writing will be youthful at sixteen or seventeen, and those determined to find fault could easily do so.
I've tried not to approach the books in that spirit. I got over my jealousy of published authors a long time ago. Finishing a book and getting it published is not primarily a matter of talent. Talent is essential if the book is to be a GOOD book, but as Molly Hunter has put it, talent is not enough. Her point was about the personal qualities of the author, but as much as the various traits she explores in her book on the subject, finishing and publishing a book requires sheer, raw tenacity. Christopher Paolini, and the others whose books fill the shelves at Barnes & Noble, clearly had that tenacity -- so my hat, with all sincerity, is off to him. Well done, man! Lots of people want to write books. Fewer succeed, and fewer still in a way that hits thousands of people. My book publishing has all been in the technical space, and I know a little of what it's like to have people you've never met tell you that they have your book and that it made a difference for them.
So when I approach these books now, it's not with the vague bitterness of the disappointed author, but as a concerned parent. Eragon is one example of something I'm seeing, but I'll point to another, that I've mentioned before: Emily Rodda's Deltora series. E brought one of these books home in first grade. Now, a couple years later, we're going through a whole Deltora renaissance.
I find the Deltora books honestly very hard to take. They're the exact opposite of the Droon series, that I've mentioned here before. Droon is very self-consciously goofy, extremely light-hearted bubble-gum fare that is at worst inoffensive, and has some pretty clever bits in it from time to time. Reading Droon to the kids can be boring, but it doesn't make me hurt. Deltora is different.
What's striking in Deltora is the humorless, ugly nature of everything in the stories. Everything is flat and sharp-edged. The names are short and unlovely, many of them one-syllable: the capital city is Del , for example, while much of the country is drained by the filthy River Tor. Monsters have names like Ols, and The Glus. Pirates are named Nak and Milne. The only smiles for anything, in seven books, are "grim" or "tight" ones. Combat and violence, when they occur, are pointlessly graphic, occasionally gruesome:
"Envy, Greed, Hate and Pride turned on him in a frenzy, their jaws frothing, their terrible teeth ripping and tearing at him, shredding his robe to ribbons, slicing into the shriveled gray flesh beneath."
That probably would have been fine up through "tearing at him." What follows adds needless specificity. I could add examples.
Eragon suffers from this as well. In one of the more strained-feeling plot devices, Eragon's dragon, upon hearing of the dark servants in the vicinity, goes half-mad and carries Eragon away into the mountains, where she insists on remaining for a day despite his pleas, long enough for the bad guys to come kill his uncle. He is so unused to riding her that the insides of his legs are rubbed raw. We are made to participate in this injury with Passion-of-the-Christ-like detail: the insides of his pants are "dark with blood", his legs are scabbed over, the wounds are "opening up again." -- none of which advance plot or character at all.
I don't know what to make of this. In the case of Eragon, perhaps just a beginning author learning what to include and what to leave out. With Deltora, the ugliness and infelicity are so pervasive and consistent that they seem deliberate.
Surely people who are writing for our children ought to be able to do better.
Then there's this.
"Out of the wreck rose the Black Rider, tall and threatening, towering above her. With a cry of hatred that stung the very ears like venom he let fall his mace. Her shield was shivered in many pieces, and her arm was broken; she stumbled to her knees. He bent over her like a cloud, and his eyes glittered; he raised his mace to kill."
Too much to ask? Perhaps, I don't know. Sometimes an unfair test is still the right one.
Friday, March 7, 2008
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Concerning Dungeons, Part I
"Dad, I want to tell you some of the stuff my guy has in the dungeon he's building. He has a Wall of Bone, three Walls of Fire, a Wall of Plants. He also has Floors of Bone and Walls of Insects, and Floors of Fire and Floors of Ice, Floors of Souls, Floors of Water, Floors of Webs, Bone Doors, Ice Doors, Plant Doors, Void Doors ... wait, I take that back, no Void Doors. And Bridges! Ice bridges and web bridges."
"Wouldn't the Floor of Fire melt the Wall of Ice?"
"What do you mean? Not if they were far away enough!"
Some silence.
"He also set a lava trap, so that if you're walking across the lava, if you step on the first stone -- on the second -- on a small stone next to right in the middle of the lava, if you step on the extra stone, all the stones suddenly pop into the lava -- they disappear, pop pop pop into the lava."
"So is the dungeon underground?"
"Yes, most of it."
"Why did he build it?"
"Becuase he thought it would be enjoyable to have a dungeon of his own. And his old house was a wreck (as I've told you many times). Now he constructed it so that many people will get out the front door if they come in, but only person will get out the back door and make it through the dungeon."
"Only one person EVER?"
"Out of a party. Only one person out of a party would make it through. BUT, the most dangerous entrance is the cave entrance. My guy put in four beholders in the front cave entrance."
"Do they fight?"
"The beholders? Do they fight with each other? No, they're LAWFUL EVIL! They work together."
Ah, right.
"The first entrance to the dungeon has another beholder, but it's not as powerful as the one in the cave. The third entrance, that one's only defense is that it's very difficult to find. It's camouflaged, and covered in rocks, because I didn't have anything else to put in."
"I take that back. He has four entrances. One of them, as I said, is a large dome. It's very large, and rocky and round, and it has a beholder in it. The second entrance are the caves, and in one part of the caves is a hole that enters the dungeon but it's guarded by four beholders. The fourth one is very very difficult to find, and it just leads straight into the dungeon. And the fourth one, there's this very very large mound of rock, a dome of rock, and stair built into it, and there's a cave, and that place is guarded by ... well, that place is actually a decoy. He just put that place for a decoy. It just turns out to be a dead end. He also put a monster in there, within the rubble, within a cliff face. On the side of one tunnel, if somebody comes in, the rocks start to fall away because the creature inside detected them, and as the rocks fall away, the creature begins to come out. It has human hands and as the hands come out, it bends the fingers, and this crust comes off. It's basically a big blob and it can make anything from the blob. When it first emerges, when every single bit of it emerges, it's covered in this crust and when the crust falls off it turns into this bluish liquid. It's the color of a gelatinous cube. It's basically a huge blob. It can turn into a whole river, it can disguise itself as a river.
"He also set a trap with a purple worm, that if you step into a chamber, the purple worm wakes up, and it waits till you're in the center of the cave, then it burst up through the floor. And it eats the people, if they weren't killed by flying rocks. Well, it eats those too."
"Does he live in the dungeon?"
"Who, the purple worm or my guy?"
"Your guy."
"Yes, he does live in the dungeon. He has this area. There's this area in the dungeon that's like a house. It's like this house except it doesn't have a room like this, it just has a single room, 'cause it has a library. It just has a living room, a bedroom and a library. And it has a magic room."
"How about windows?"
"Um ... no, it doesn't have windows because he doesn't like light. He despises the light.
"He also has a very beautifully designed throne."
***
It's E's birthday, or it was yesterday. Nine years on Earth. Usually we don't celebrate his birthday on The Day -- more often it gets deferred or moved up to the nearest weekend, so the actual day has become blurry. This week we're at the in-laws for Thanksgiving break. The kids are off school (though there was a half-day Monday and young R was very concerned that she was missing it). And I, as usual, am on some bastardized semi-vacation in which I am neither Here nor There, but half-working, half-not. Don't try this at home OR at work.
Anyway, we had his birthday yesterday, on the Day itself, which felt like rediscovering and reburnishing something very old, which had fallen unaccountably into disuse and been resurrected only with pains and serendipity: like an heirloom parsnip (comically squat, incomparably tasty, baked in earthen ovens by the Wichita) or a period instrument (we rediscovered the varnish recipe, which has to be leavened with the ash of Hamburg oak, and tuned it in the Old Way so that a C sharp is really sharp, as Bach and his friends would have heard it). And this rediscovery came with a further air of mystery, as the day itself is more than a day, since he was born after a 38-hour labor.
But none of that rambling mattered because it was his birthday, and after dinner, cake, and a playing of "Happy Birthday" on the penny-whistle by his eight-year old cousin Miss F, there were of course presents.
This was a smaller affair, which I like, because the home birthdays (and we'll have of those too, never fear) generally feature about 8-10 kids, and a good number of dutifully-purchased and not-inexpensive presents that still somehow don't all get used. In this respect Miss R's last birthday was more of a success than Mr E's last. E's 8th birthday, last year, resulted in a lot of games coming into the house. These were generally games of a pretty high quality, but we have been very slow to play them. Battleship Command: Pirates of the Caribbean Edition, for example, has been played about three times, but he doesn't find it too interesting, and hates losing, and I'm not convinced it's a very strong game. The Legend of Landlock is actually a nice little strategy game, and he publisher Gamewright looks like they, well, have some game, but this one was only cracked out recently, to be played by my mother and Miss R. (As it was my mother who got the game for E, she felt she had to make sure it got played). And he also got a copy of Mancala, which I've heard of all he time and never played, and which exists in so many versions I have no hope of linking to the one he actually got.
By contrast, Miss R's sixth birthday, this summer, featured a lot of fairly meaty craft-y things. There was a beading set with perhaps thousands of very small beads and fine thread and a really sharp needle, which I thought must be beyond her except it turns out it's not, at all; a "math Scrabble" game called Smath, which we played a bit recently, and successfully, though she could only do the adding problems; and a stained glass kit where you fill in quite complex shapes with thick go that hardens into translucency. This last one, despite being really porly executed in some ways (the patterns are made of soft, adhesive-backed rubber that you lay down on a plastic sheet before filling in, and the rubber is so flimsy and the molds so thin that it almost impossible to peel from the backing without ripping the molds) was by far the most popular, and only recently got exhausted (we still have goo, just nothing to pour it in).
So, there's a long digression on what sometimes doesn't work well in kid birthdays. But this was small, and all family members, and honestly, his family on my wife's side is exceptionally good with gifts and with celebrations of all kind. So the point is, I should tell you about the loot.
E. was ecstatic. He held the book heavenward like grail, did a dance, hugged me. Later plunged into the book. All good. I had the reviews on the book, of which many, like this sample, were not good. It sounded like the gripers had some justification, but I also knew it wouldn't matter. I wasn't (yet) a snobby rules lawyer when I laid down my first dungeons at twelve and thirteen: no reason he should be at nine.
***
Or this:
(If you're wondering how many hoops I had to jump through to find and digitize my old copies of the Boxed Set, the answer is "none". Per a suggestion from Elliot on an older post, and things I'd found in my own wanderings, I simply zipped over to RPGNow, which sells PDFs of a huge variety of new and old gaming materials. PDFs of the Boxed Set became mine for a mere $5.99, which seems cheap till you try to navigate RPGNow's exquisitely horrible web interface. Despite being signed in, I had to sign in again to see the list of download links for what I'd bought. And it was not one link, but about seven, each one for a separate part of the product, one for the cover, one for each volume, one for the Ready Reference Sheets -- and each link had exactly the same title, AND the last two produced mysterious messages that said I wasn't allowed to download them! You can't beat the prices, but be prepared for a slog. Put that way, I guess some hoop-jumping was involved after all).
Well, that's how it was in my day. When E wandered by and I showed him the old boxed set pages on screen, he glanced at it only briefly, then wandered away. "Is that boring?" I called after him. "Yesssss" he groaned. Ah well.
"Wouldn't the Floor of Fire melt the Wall of Ice?"
"What do you mean? Not if they were far away enough!"
Some silence.
"He also set a lava trap, so that if you're walking across the lava, if you step on the first stone -- on the second -- on a small stone next to right in the middle of the lava, if you step on the extra stone, all the stones suddenly pop into the lava -- they disappear, pop pop pop into the lava."
"So is the dungeon underground?"
"Yes, most of it."
"Why did he build it?"
"Becuase he thought it would be enjoyable to have a dungeon of his own. And his old house was a wreck (as I've told you many times). Now he constructed it so that many people will get out the front door if they come in, but only person will get out the back door and make it through the dungeon."
"Only one person EVER?"
"Out of a party. Only one person out of a party would make it through. BUT, the most dangerous entrance is the cave entrance. My guy put in four beholders in the front cave entrance."
"Do they fight?"
"The beholders? Do they fight with each other? No, they're LAWFUL EVIL! They work together."
Ah, right.
"The first entrance to the dungeon has another beholder, but it's not as powerful as the one in the cave. The third entrance, that one's only defense is that it's very difficult to find. It's camouflaged, and covered in rocks, because I didn't have anything else to put in."
"I take that back. He has four entrances. One of them, as I said, is a large dome. It's very large, and rocky and round, and it has a beholder in it. The second entrance are the caves, and in one part of the caves is a hole that enters the dungeon but it's guarded by four beholders. The fourth one is very very difficult to find, and it just leads straight into the dungeon. And the fourth one, there's this very very large mound of rock, a dome of rock, and stair built into it, and there's a cave, and that place is guarded by ... well, that place is actually a decoy. He just put that place for a decoy. It just turns out to be a dead end. He also put a monster in there, within the rubble, within a cliff face. On the side of one tunnel, if somebody comes in, the rocks start to fall away because the creature inside detected them, and as the rocks fall away, the creature begins to come out. It has human hands and as the hands come out, it bends the fingers, and this crust comes off. It's basically a big blob and it can make anything from the blob. When it first emerges, when every single bit of it emerges, it's covered in this crust and when the crust falls off it turns into this bluish liquid. It's the color of a gelatinous cube. It's basically a huge blob. It can turn into a whole river, it can disguise itself as a river.
"He also set a trap with a purple worm, that if you step into a chamber, the purple worm wakes up, and it waits till you're in the center of the cave, then it burst up through the floor. And it eats the people, if they weren't killed by flying rocks. Well, it eats those too."
"Does he live in the dungeon?"
"Who, the purple worm or my guy?"
"Your guy."
"Yes, he does live in the dungeon. He has this area. There's this area in the dungeon that's like a house. It's like this house except it doesn't have a room like this, it just has a single room, 'cause it has a library. It just has a living room, a bedroom and a library. And it has a magic room."
"How about windows?"
"Um ... no, it doesn't have windows because he doesn't like light. He despises the light.
"He also has a very beautifully designed throne."
***
It's E's birthday, or it was yesterday. Nine years on Earth. Usually we don't celebrate his birthday on The Day -- more often it gets deferred or moved up to the nearest weekend, so the actual day has become blurry. This week we're at the in-laws for Thanksgiving break. The kids are off school (though there was a half-day Monday and young R was very concerned that she was missing it). And I, as usual, am on some bastardized semi-vacation in which I am neither Here nor There, but half-working, half-not. Don't try this at home OR at work.
Anyway, we had his birthday yesterday, on the Day itself, which felt like rediscovering and reburnishing something very old, which had fallen unaccountably into disuse and been resurrected only with pains and serendipity: like an heirloom parsnip (comically squat, incomparably tasty, baked in earthen ovens by the Wichita) or a period instrument (we rediscovered the varnish recipe, which has to be leavened with the ash of Hamburg oak, and tuned it in the Old Way so that a C sharp is really sharp, as Bach and his friends would have heard it). And this rediscovery came with a further air of mystery, as the day itself is more than a day, since he was born after a 38-hour labor.
But none of that rambling mattered because it was his birthday, and after dinner, cake, and a playing of "Happy Birthday" on the penny-whistle by his eight-year old cousin Miss F, there were of course presents.
This was a smaller affair, which I like, because the home birthdays (and we'll have of those too, never fear) generally feature about 8-10 kids, and a good number of dutifully-purchased and not-inexpensive presents that still somehow don't all get used. In this respect Miss R's last birthday was more of a success than Mr E's last. E's 8th birthday, last year, resulted in a lot of games coming into the house. These were generally games of a pretty high quality, but we have been very slow to play them. Battleship Command: Pirates of the Caribbean Edition, for example, has been played about three times, but he doesn't find it too interesting, and hates losing, and I'm not convinced it's a very strong game. The Legend of Landlock is actually a nice little strategy game, and he publisher Gamewright looks like they, well, have some game, but this one was only cracked out recently, to be played by my mother and Miss R. (As it was my mother who got the game for E, she felt she had to make sure it got played). And he also got a copy of Mancala, which I've heard of all he time and never played, and which exists in so many versions I have no hope of linking to the one he actually got.
By contrast, Miss R's sixth birthday, this summer, featured a lot of fairly meaty craft-y things. There was a beading set with perhaps thousands of very small beads and fine thread and a really sharp needle, which I thought must be beyond her except it turns out it's not, at all; a "math Scrabble" game called Smath, which we played a bit recently, and successfully, though she could only do the adding problems; and a stained glass kit where you fill in quite complex shapes with thick go that hardens into translucency. This last one, despite being really porly executed in some ways (the patterns are made of soft, adhesive-backed rubber that you lay down on a plastic sheet before filling in, and the rubber is so flimsy and the molds so thin that it almost impossible to peel from the backing without ripping the molds) was by far the most popular, and only recently got exhausted (we still have goo, just nothing to pour it in).
So, there's a long digression on what sometimes doesn't work well in kid birthdays. But this was small, and all family members, and honestly, his family on my wife's side is exceptionally good with gifts and with celebrations of all kind. So the point is, I should tell you about the loot.
- a pendant of a faceted amethyst, very apropos after last week's lapidary exhibition
- A fat volume containing books 1-4 of Deltora Quest (these honestly are not very good, but a book's a book, even if I'd rather they were reading the Pippi Longstocking my sister-in-law brought: I was all about Pippi at that age ...)
- Two new Bionicle figures (respectively the Jaller and the Nuparu)
- Praying Mantis hand puppet, courtesy of Folkmanis
- And the item that occasioned the lead-in to this post: a new D&D volume, Dungeonscape
E. was ecstatic. He held the book heavenward like grail, did a dance, hugged me. Later plunged into the book. All good. I had the reviews on the book, of which many, like this sample, were not good. It sounded like the gripers had some justification, but I also knew it wouldn't matter. I wasn't (yet) a snobby rules lawyer when I laid down my first dungeons at twelve and thirteen: no reason he should be at nine.
***
"Before it is possible to conduct a campaign of adventures in the mazey dungeons, it is necessary for the referee to sit down with pencil in hand and draw these labyrinths on graph paper. Unquestionably this will require a great deal of time and effort and imagination. The dungeons should look something like the example given below, with numerous levels that sprawl in all directions ..."Ring any bells? The quote is from Gygax and Arneson, Dungeons and Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures, vol 3. (The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures), (Tactical Studies Rules: Lake Geneva 1974), p. 3, if you want the scholarly citation. Or, to those of us who grew up with it, "book three of the boxed set". It was accompanied by diagrams like the following:
Or this:
(If you're wondering how many hoops I had to jump through to find and digitize my old copies of the Boxed Set, the answer is "none". Per a suggestion from Elliot on an older post, and things I'd found in my own wanderings, I simply zipped over to RPGNow, which sells PDFs of a huge variety of new and old gaming materials. PDFs of the Boxed Set became mine for a mere $5.99, which seems cheap till you try to navigate RPGNow's exquisitely horrible web interface. Despite being signed in, I had to sign in again to see the list of download links for what I'd bought. And it was not one link, but about seven, each one for a separate part of the product, one for the cover, one for each volume, one for the Ready Reference Sheets -- and each link had exactly the same title, AND the last two produced mysterious messages that said I wasn't allowed to download them! You can't beat the prices, but be prepared for a slog. Put that way, I guess some hoop-jumping was involved after all).
Well, that's how it was in my day. When E wandered by and I showed him the old boxed set pages on screen, he glanced at it only briefly, then wandered away. "Is that boring?" I called after him. "Yesssss" he groaned. Ah well.
Saturday, September 29, 2007
Out-blogged
Yeah, so ....
Hmm.
Been a while, as they say.
What with giving two talks at the FileMaker DevCon in August, and being like three months behind and an author down in finishing up the new training materials for FileMaker 9 (almost done!), and starting a new life/health/whatever regime that kicks me out of bed at 6 AM to walk sleepily, steadily uphill, and what with three trips in the last month and four more (yep, four!) in the next six weeks, and the kids starting school and E. getting into Cub Scouts ...
So, yeah.
So yeah, here's a really really short, true, story about gamekids. 'Cause that's all I have time for, it's past my middle-aged beddy time.
Two stories, I guess. E. has gotten out the AD&D books again, after a kind of hiatus. He's been studying the Monster Manual closely. This evening he had it outside and we were looking through it as he selected monsters he thought his half-orc barbarian might like to fight. We turned to the page with the ankheg on it. I opined that the ankheg had used to be one of my favorite monsters (thus implying that I actually knew something about it). So E says "Dad, how does the ankheg's acid work?"
Acid? Acid?? OK, that sounded familiar. Clearly it was obvious to E. I read the MM entry. Yep, not one but two kinds of acid attack. Ankheg may have been a favorite of mine, but clearly my son is now the facile one.
In the same vein, we were looking at some of my old painted figures this morning. Some of them are outlandish things I don't really recognize. OK, most of the those are explicitly Lovecraftian critters. But one bizarre creature, with a segmented body, big bug eyes, long snout and crablike claws, I just couldn't place, and said so.
"Dad!" said E. "That's a cave fisher! Here, I'll show you."
And he runs and he fetches my old Monster Manual II, lovingly sheathed in opaque contact paper and never used, and opens to C, and lo, the beast in all its glory ...
That seems to be a torch of some sort, going by there. And I don't appear to be holding it, just now.
Oh, and speaking of blogs that are actually funny or talented? See whether this doesn't just make the sn*t run out of your nose ...
Hmm.
Been a while, as they say.
What with giving two talks at the FileMaker DevCon in August, and being like three months behind and an author down in finishing up the new training materials for FileMaker 9 (almost done!), and starting a new life/health/whatever regime that kicks me out of bed at 6 AM to walk sleepily, steadily uphill, and what with three trips in the last month and four more (yep, four!) in the next six weeks, and the kids starting school and E. getting into Cub Scouts ...
So, yeah.
So yeah, here's a really really short, true, story about gamekids. 'Cause that's all I have time for, it's past my middle-aged beddy time.
Two stories, I guess. E. has gotten out the AD&D books again, after a kind of hiatus. He's been studying the Monster Manual closely. This evening he had it outside and we were looking through it as he selected monsters he thought his half-orc barbarian might like to fight. We turned to the page with the ankheg on it. I opined that the ankheg had used to be one of my favorite monsters (thus implying that I actually knew something about it). So E says "Dad, how does the ankheg's acid work?"
Acid? Acid?? OK, that sounded familiar. Clearly it was obvious to E. I read the MM entry. Yep, not one but two kinds of acid attack. Ankheg may have been a favorite of mine, but clearly my son is now the facile one.
In the same vein, we were looking at some of my old painted figures this morning. Some of them are outlandish things I don't really recognize. OK, most of the those are explicitly Lovecraftian critters. But one bizarre creature, with a segmented body, big bug eyes, long snout and crablike claws, I just couldn't place, and said so.
"Dad!" said E. "That's a cave fisher! Here, I'll show you."
And he runs and he fetches my old Monster Manual II, lovingly sheathed in opaque contact paper and never used, and opens to C, and lo, the beast in all its glory ...
That seems to be a torch of some sort, going by there. And I don't appear to be holding it, just now.
Oh, and speaking of blogs that are actually funny or talented? See whether this doesn't just make the sn*t run out of your nose ...
Thursday, July 26, 2007
Mash-ups part 1
We haven't played too much "standard" D&D of late. Rather, we been doing some genre-hopping, based mostly on the movies the kids have been consuming. We've been playing a lot of things CALLED D&D, which has come to mean "semi-interactive narrated story," and bleeds over into the various kinds of bedtime stories we tell.
Those bedtime stories are worth a mention, because it's where the mash-up concept kicks in. We don't have a TV, but our kids watch plenty of video anyway, it's just packaged up as movies. They have their favorites, and they go through phases. For R, the favorites are things like Dora and Scooby Doo. For E, at the moment, Spy Kids, or at other times, Godzilla or Lord of the Rings.
In any case, I get asked a lot for bedtime stories, and generally I'm asked to set them in the worlds of one or another of these movie universes. At least initially, E. tended to ask for stories that closely paralleled the plot of whatever he'd just watched, or indeed exactly paralleled it absent some small distinctions of character names or whatever. But as time has gone on, tastes have gotten more sophisticated, and variety has become at first tolerated, and now, I think, embraced.
Initially we only had variation within genres. For example R: "Dad, tell me a Scooby Doo story. First we have to figure out what the monster is!" (There is always a monster, and it always has to be a REAL monster, never one of these lame, plastic-mask "and we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for ..."). At first the monsters were prosaic, such as the Giant Scorpion, but more recently I've tested the boundaries of common sense and sanity with the Giant Three-Headed Fire-Breathing Mummy Beetle, the Terror Rug, and of course the Giant Walnut-Eating Doughnut Manhole Cover. (Hint: if you see an innocent looking manhole cover covering an innocent-looking manhole, but there are some telltale walnut shells nearby, run).
This is all still genre-bound. But then I get E, after a binge on YouTube Godzilla clips: "Dad, do a story of Scooby Doo meets Godzilla!" OK, I warn him -- but it'll be a short one. Why? You'll see. Predictable developments ensue. :-)
"Dad, no! They work TOGETHER, and they have to fight Mothra, or some other Godzilla monster! Wait, can Gamera be in it?" OK, this is going to be some work.
Telling stories that just repeat movie plots can be a bit dull, or, when I don't actually KNOW the story, very slow, as someone feeds me the plot bit by bit in whispers as I tell the tale, like an inefficient prompter. But producing genre mash-ups on the fly can truly tax the storytelling engine.
Recently, the thing has been Spy Kids. These, by the way, are pretty decent kid movies, long on captivating details and short on things mean or sophomoric. Pretty entertaining. So we've watched a lot of Spy Kids.
But another thing, for E, has been discovering a book I had lying around (ah, the stuff that lies around), full of concept art and screenshots for Halo. Now I could wax eloquent about Halo, and its make Bungie Studios, for a fair bit of time, but "great first person shooter" sums it up quickly. We're trying to keep our kids off computer games for now. E. grasps that Halo is a game, but (happily) doesn't yet grasp (what do I know, maybe he does??) that a lot of the pictures are taken straight from the game, and occur during play. And boy was I tempted to show him, because it's a great game, but I forbore. Instead I just answered his questions about the various alien races and how they related to each other, and tried to explain why Halo 2 is not as good as Halo, and the problems with sequels in general.
All well.
So it gets to be bedtime of a recent evening. E hops up into bed. I expect I might get pressed for a story, and I do.
"Dad! Tell a Spy Kids Halo story!"
Whoa! Spy Kids / Halo, eh? My hear is in my throat. Carmen and Juni will last about five seconds against the Covenant elites.
But by gum, if I can manage Scooby Doo and Godzilla with a happily ever after, Spy Kids Halo's gotta be within reach. Stay tuned.
Those bedtime stories are worth a mention, because it's where the mash-up concept kicks in. We don't have a TV, but our kids watch plenty of video anyway, it's just packaged up as movies. They have their favorites, and they go through phases. For R, the favorites are things like Dora and Scooby Doo. For E, at the moment, Spy Kids, or at other times, Godzilla or Lord of the Rings.
In any case, I get asked a lot for bedtime stories, and generally I'm asked to set them in the worlds of one or another of these movie universes. At least initially, E. tended to ask for stories that closely paralleled the plot of whatever he'd just watched, or indeed exactly paralleled it absent some small distinctions of character names or whatever. But as time has gone on, tastes have gotten more sophisticated, and variety has become at first tolerated, and now, I think, embraced.
Initially we only had variation within genres. For example R: "Dad, tell me a Scooby Doo story. First we have to figure out what the monster is!" (There is always a monster, and it always has to be a REAL monster, never one of these lame, plastic-mask "and we would have gotten away with it, too, if it hadn't been for ..."). At first the monsters were prosaic, such as the Giant Scorpion, but more recently I've tested the boundaries of common sense and sanity with the Giant Three-Headed Fire-Breathing Mummy Beetle, the Terror Rug, and of course the Giant Walnut-Eating Doughnut Manhole Cover. (Hint: if you see an innocent looking manhole cover covering an innocent-looking manhole, but there are some telltale walnut shells nearby, run).
This is all still genre-bound. But then I get E, after a binge on YouTube Godzilla clips: "Dad, do a story of Scooby Doo meets Godzilla!" OK, I warn him -- but it'll be a short one. Why? You'll see. Predictable developments ensue. :-)
"Dad, no! They work TOGETHER, and they have to fight Mothra, or some other Godzilla monster! Wait, can Gamera be in it?" OK, this is going to be some work.
Telling stories that just repeat movie plots can be a bit dull, or, when I don't actually KNOW the story, very slow, as someone feeds me the plot bit by bit in whispers as I tell the tale, like an inefficient prompter. But producing genre mash-ups on the fly can truly tax the storytelling engine.
Recently, the thing has been Spy Kids. These, by the way, are pretty decent kid movies, long on captivating details and short on things mean or sophomoric. Pretty entertaining. So we've watched a lot of Spy Kids.
But another thing, for E, has been discovering a book I had lying around (ah, the stuff that lies around), full of concept art and screenshots for Halo. Now I could wax eloquent about Halo, and its make Bungie Studios, for a fair bit of time, but "great first person shooter" sums it up quickly. We're trying to keep our kids off computer games for now. E. grasps that Halo is a game, but (happily) doesn't yet grasp (what do I know, maybe he does??) that a lot of the pictures are taken straight from the game, and occur during play. And boy was I tempted to show him, because it's a great game, but I forbore. Instead I just answered his questions about the various alien races and how they related to each other, and tried to explain why Halo 2 is not as good as Halo, and the problems with sequels in general.
All well.
So it gets to be bedtime of a recent evening. E hops up into bed. I expect I might get pressed for a story, and I do.
"Dad! Tell a Spy Kids Halo story!"
Whoa! Spy Kids / Halo, eh? My hear is in my throat. Carmen and Juni will last about five seconds against the Covenant elites.
But by gum, if I can manage Scooby Doo and Godzilla with a happily ever after, Spy Kids Halo's gotta be within reach. Stay tuned.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Store-Bought
So E. had run his first game, and I had had the day of my life. And there we were, still sitting in South Carolina, wanting to play some more and sitting on the module I'd picked up at the store.
Let me say a few words about this module. I've already mentioned the proliferation of materials, and their increased expense, and perhaps increased quality as well. This module, which went for about $21 and bore the name the Barrow of the Forgotten King, looked good in the store: cheaper than the big adventure packs that seemed to require a commitment akin to that of the Peace Corps, better quality than the rows of cheap modules that gleefully advertised themselves as "dungeon crawls." BFK looked solidly in the middle.
So a bit after E. completed his first stint as a GM, we all sat down to take a swing at BFK. I decided to try to work it into the narrative of E's half-orc character and his ever-helpful uncle K. Which means we need to hark back to their last adventure below ground, in the ruins of some nameless castle near Bladesbat Cave. This place proved such a treasury that, in due course, back they went -- their highest aspiration being a bit of treasure,, and their tribe's greatest hope, no doubt, that the larders would soon bulge again with grick staples of every decription: salted, dried, fried, boiled, broiled, stuffed, and thus onward.
The castle ruins proved to have further reaches. Fairly bold by now, they returned to where they had been, then pressed on, into the narrow crack from which had issued the carrion crawler that stunned Thorgun, leading to a dramatic rescue by the outgunned uncle K. This crack wound its way around and through the guts of the mountain. This fit in well, as we had explored two natural caverns in Virginia and North Carolina (a practice I heartily recommend, by the way) on our way southward, so I was able to call on our joint memories of dank walls and the dripping dark. (A staple of every cave tour is the moment, toward the end, where they turn out all the lights, inviting you to "experience total darkness" and imagine the tribulations of the boys who discovered the cave, then lost their light deep inside it. That one, Linwood Caverns I believe, was distinguished by having a stream running OUT of the inside of the hill in which the cave sits, a stream inhabited by fish that don't seem to care whether they're underground or not. Our intrepid first explorers, having dashed their light into some dark crevice, allegedly found their way out by following the water.)
THIS cavern, in any event, threaded its way deep off into the mountain, but our semi-orcish pair were untroubled by this, since their race gives them "darkvision." E. recently expressed some curiosity as to how darkvision actually works. The Player's Handbook described DV dispassionately as the ability to see up to 60 feet in black and white, even in the complete absence of light. On the other hand, The Order of the Stick, a rather adult D&D-based online comic strip that E. frequents, depicts darkvision as two flashlight beams emanating from a character's eyes. I had to inform it was more boring than this.
Boring or not, it was sufficient to allow them to pick their way slowly through the mountain, and to emerge into ever more lighted caves that eventually gave way to a hillside grotto thriving with their less-than-favorite beast -- more carrion crawlers, qyite the nest of them, and Thorgun, still smarting from being stunned the last time out, wanted nothing whatever to do with them.
so they made their way back through the caves, and into the dungeon "proper."
What else to explore? There was still the long hallway with its upset pavings and burrow-holes. The holes were tempting, at least to the orcish, (as I may have mentioned in an earlier posting), but filled, as expected, with prodigious reddish ants. After beating down a few of these creatures, they retreated, abandoning any idea of fully exploring the nest.
There remained only the dark corner, where the ruined hall turned a corner.
Standing at that corner, they could see that the hall rain away, straight as an arrow, beyond the reach of their sight. just at the corner there was an inscription in the wall. They started down the hallway, but after a few hundred yards of walking, lost their nerve. The ancient stonework ran on and on, with out a break or stutter, and they lost all hope it would come to an end. they returned to its beginning and somehow, though neither of them could write, copied the inscription as best they could, intending to bring it back to the Bladesbat shamaness.
The shamaness was named Vishara. She was elderly, and not in a good mood. She scrutinized the copied inscription, and asked whether they'd been near a park. It was pointed out to here that they lived in a bat-inhabited cave, in a dank forest beside a swamp beside a set of mountains known for their dragon races, and had just come back from exploring underground ruins, so no, there had been no park involved anywhere along the way. She pronounced herself baffled as to what the term "Park Highway" might mean, but then prevailed upon Thorgun to try to redraw part of the inscription.
"Dark," it turned out was the word. Dark Highway. And writing this I now remember that I have already written it, because it was at just this point that I recounted the history of the term. Hmm, the same story told twice, in forgetfulness. Well, perhaps that brings me back to where I was before.
The Dark Highway, as you might imagine, was a very ancient road. This one ran away in a straight line, so far as was known, for the human town of Kingsholm. This was my hook into the BFK module, which was set in Kingsholm. But the road, so far as was known, was older than orcs or men. (I can't help channeling here H.P. Lovecraft's overwrought but atmospheric old story The Festival, in which the protagonist returns to a New England town called Kingsport. "Then before me I saw frosty Kingsport outspread in the gloaming ... antiquity hovering on winter-whitened wings over gables and gambrel roofs ... fanlights and small-paned windows gleaming out to join cold Orion and the archaic stars." And then something about a secret "older than Memphis, and mankind" but I digress).
For nebulous reasons based mostly in plot necessity, the Bladesbat head ordered our heroes to go explore the Dark Highway, even reaching Kingsholm if necessary. E, I will admit, was not entirely persuaded of the logic, not even with the knowledge that was "where the adventure was going to happen." Thus burdened from the outset with contrivance, the adventure unfolded.
It did not unfold entirely smoothly. I had read the module a bit, but not enough. Modules, if I can digress, have evolved since the days of the early G1-G3 releases. It's not clear to me they've evolved all that well. The Dragonlance adventures, for example, were heavily script, with, if I recall, fairly elaborate plot flowcharts, sections of narrative the GM was to read verbatim to the players, and sections containing data and facts for GM use. BFK was not as heavily scripted as this, but it still followed an odd division: the first section detailed each encounter from a narrative perspective, but all of the hard facts about an encounter, such as monster stats, were put in a parallel, denser structure in the second half of the module, like a set of large endnotes, so that one had to constantly flip back and forth between the somewhat connected narrative and the supporting data. This only compounded some of the other problems we were to experience.
The first one was unfamiliarity with an existing product. In my line of work (software development, and the management thereof), we refer to this as "integration risk" or "existing system risk". It's one thing to go in and build a brand-new system for someone, from scratch, that needn't link to any other system or product. It may take longer, but it will ideally have a strong conceptual purity, and the designers (us) will have complete facility with the product and its design. On the other hand, if we need to build onto or otherwise use or reuse something someone else built, we first need to learn that system or product. This will take time, and runs the risk that we'll never fully grasp the concept or design, and constantly be encountering small surprises and "oh wait" moments.
No different the task of running and adventure someone else wrote, a task made harder the less one actually reads and prepares! So the Barrow of the Forgotten King was plagued with these little issues from the beginning.
Thorgun and his uncle navigated the length of the Dark Highway, sixty-some miles under the earth. They emerged, after some days walking the dark and subsisting on grick pemmican, in a thicket on the hills over Kingsholm. Pushing through the brush, they came suddenly upon an ancient statue, overgrown (more details from module?). From that vantage, they could see downhill toward a cemetery, and below it the town of Kingsholm. and as they stood wondering what to do, they became aware of a sound from nearby, like nothing so much as digging.
Unfortunately, I had already miscalculated. The module was fairly carefully designed to start in the village and work its way up through the cemetry, finally,perhaps, to the area of the statue. I had managed to start the module at a point well toward its end. Ah well.
And now I need to actually FIND the module to jog my memory further. And so far, no luck. Stay tuned.
Let me say a few words about this module. I've already mentioned the proliferation of materials, and their increased expense, and perhaps increased quality as well. This module, which went for about $21 and bore the name the Barrow of the Forgotten King, looked good in the store: cheaper than the big adventure packs that seemed to require a commitment akin to that of the Peace Corps, better quality than the rows of cheap modules that gleefully advertised themselves as "dungeon crawls." BFK looked solidly in the middle.
So a bit after E. completed his first stint as a GM, we all sat down to take a swing at BFK. I decided to try to work it into the narrative of E's half-orc character and his ever-helpful uncle K. Which means we need to hark back to their last adventure below ground, in the ruins of some nameless castle near Bladesbat Cave. This place proved such a treasury that, in due course, back they went -- their highest aspiration being a bit of treasure,, and their tribe's greatest hope, no doubt, that the larders would soon bulge again with grick staples of every decription: salted, dried, fried, boiled, broiled, stuffed, and thus onward.
The castle ruins proved to have further reaches. Fairly bold by now, they returned to where they had been, then pressed on, into the narrow crack from which had issued the carrion crawler that stunned Thorgun, leading to a dramatic rescue by the outgunned uncle K. This crack wound its way around and through the guts of the mountain. This fit in well, as we had explored two natural caverns in Virginia and North Carolina (a practice I heartily recommend, by the way) on our way southward, so I was able to call on our joint memories of dank walls and the dripping dark. (A staple of every cave tour is the moment, toward the end, where they turn out all the lights, inviting you to "experience total darkness" and imagine the tribulations of the boys who discovered the cave, then lost their light deep inside it. That one, Linwood Caverns I believe, was distinguished by having a stream running OUT of the inside of the hill in which the cave sits, a stream inhabited by fish that don't seem to care whether they're underground or not. Our intrepid first explorers, having dashed their light into some dark crevice, allegedly found their way out by following the water.)
THIS cavern, in any event, threaded its way deep off into the mountain, but our semi-orcish pair were untroubled by this, since their race gives them "darkvision." E. recently expressed some curiosity as to how darkvision actually works. The Player's Handbook described DV dispassionately as the ability to see up to 60 feet in black and white, even in the complete absence of light. On the other hand, The Order of the Stick, a rather adult D&D-based online comic strip that E. frequents, depicts darkvision as two flashlight beams emanating from a character's eyes. I had to inform it was more boring than this.
Boring or not, it was sufficient to allow them to pick their way slowly through the mountain, and to emerge into ever more lighted caves that eventually gave way to a hillside grotto thriving with their less-than-favorite beast -- more carrion crawlers, qyite the nest of them, and Thorgun, still smarting from being stunned the last time out, wanted nothing whatever to do with them.
so they made their way back through the caves, and into the dungeon "proper."
What else to explore? There was still the long hallway with its upset pavings and burrow-holes. The holes were tempting, at least to the orcish, (as I may have mentioned in an earlier posting), but filled, as expected, with prodigious reddish ants. After beating down a few of these creatures, they retreated, abandoning any idea of fully exploring the nest.
There remained only the dark corner, where the ruined hall turned a corner.
Standing at that corner, they could see that the hall rain away, straight as an arrow, beyond the reach of their sight. just at the corner there was an inscription in the wall. They started down the hallway, but after a few hundred yards of walking, lost their nerve. The ancient stonework ran on and on, with out a break or stutter, and they lost all hope it would come to an end. they returned to its beginning and somehow, though neither of them could write, copied the inscription as best they could, intending to bring it back to the Bladesbat shamaness.
The shamaness was named Vishara. She was elderly, and not in a good mood. She scrutinized the copied inscription, and asked whether they'd been near a park. It was pointed out to here that they lived in a bat-inhabited cave, in a dank forest beside a swamp beside a set of mountains known for their dragon races, and had just come back from exploring underground ruins, so no, there had been no park involved anywhere along the way. She pronounced herself baffled as to what the term "Park Highway" might mean, but then prevailed upon Thorgun to try to redraw part of the inscription.
"Dark," it turned out was the word. Dark Highway. And writing this I now remember that I have already written it, because it was at just this point that I recounted the history of the term. Hmm, the same story told twice, in forgetfulness. Well, perhaps that brings me back to where I was before.
The Dark Highway, as you might imagine, was a very ancient road. This one ran away in a straight line, so far as was known, for the human town of Kingsholm. This was my hook into the BFK module, which was set in Kingsholm. But the road, so far as was known, was older than orcs or men. (I can't help channeling here H.P. Lovecraft's overwrought but atmospheric old story The Festival, in which the protagonist returns to a New England town called Kingsport. "Then before me I saw frosty Kingsport outspread in the gloaming ... antiquity hovering on winter-whitened wings over gables and gambrel roofs ... fanlights and small-paned windows gleaming out to join cold Orion and the archaic stars." And then something about a secret "older than Memphis, and mankind" but I digress).
For nebulous reasons based mostly in plot necessity, the Bladesbat head ordered our heroes to go explore the Dark Highway, even reaching Kingsholm if necessary. E, I will admit, was not entirely persuaded of the logic, not even with the knowledge that was "where the adventure was going to happen." Thus burdened from the outset with contrivance, the adventure unfolded.
It did not unfold entirely smoothly. I had read the module a bit, but not enough. Modules, if I can digress, have evolved since the days of the early G1-G3 releases. It's not clear to me they've evolved all that well. The Dragonlance adventures, for example, were heavily script, with, if I recall, fairly elaborate plot flowcharts, sections of narrative the GM was to read verbatim to the players, and sections containing data and facts for GM use. BFK was not as heavily scripted as this, but it still followed an odd division: the first section detailed each encounter from a narrative perspective, but all of the hard facts about an encounter, such as monster stats, were put in a parallel, denser structure in the second half of the module, like a set of large endnotes, so that one had to constantly flip back and forth between the somewhat connected narrative and the supporting data. This only compounded some of the other problems we were to experience.
The first one was unfamiliarity with an existing product. In my line of work (software development, and the management thereof), we refer to this as "integration risk" or "existing system risk". It's one thing to go in and build a brand-new system for someone, from scratch, that needn't link to any other system or product. It may take longer, but it will ideally have a strong conceptual purity, and the designers (us) will have complete facility with the product and its design. On the other hand, if we need to build onto or otherwise use or reuse something someone else built, we first need to learn that system or product. This will take time, and runs the risk that we'll never fully grasp the concept or design, and constantly be encountering small surprises and "oh wait" moments.
No different the task of running and adventure someone else wrote, a task made harder the less one actually reads and prepares! So the Barrow of the Forgotten King was plagued with these little issues from the beginning.
Thorgun and his uncle navigated the length of the Dark Highway, sixty-some miles under the earth. They emerged, after some days walking the dark and subsisting on grick pemmican, in a thicket on the hills over Kingsholm. Pushing through the brush, they came suddenly upon an ancient statue, overgrown (more details from module?). From that vantage, they could see downhill toward a cemetery, and below it the town of Kingsholm. and as they stood wondering what to do, they became aware of a sound from nearby, like nothing so much as digging.
Unfortunately, I had already miscalculated. The module was fairly carefully designed to start in the village and work its way up through the cemetry, finally,perhaps, to the area of the statue. I had managed to start the module at a point well toward its end. Ah well.
And now I need to actually FIND the module to jog my memory further. And so far, no luck. Stay tuned.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Out of Order
One of the things I Do Not Like about Blogger is that it publishes posts in the order in which you began them, not the order in which you finally got enough done to press the Publish button.
As a result, those of you who have seen the Not Fair post might conclude that nothing new has happened. But there is indeed a new post, down below Not Fair, whose only sin is being started early.
Well, at some point I'll determine how to better sway the posting order, but till then I'll put this note out as a signpost to the fact that something has actually changed. The errant post is called The Day of Your Life.
As a result, those of you who have seen the Not Fair post might conclude that nothing new has happened. But there is indeed a new post, down below Not Fair, whose only sin is being started early.
Well, at some point I'll determine how to better sway the posting order, but till then I'll put this note out as a signpost to the fact that something has actually changed. The errant post is called The Day of Your Life.
Thursday, June 28, 2007
Not fair
Some zealous readers press me with charges that it's been a month since I last posted. Not true! I mutter. It can't be, it truly deeply CAN'T.
And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.
(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).
This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.
Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:
I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."
Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.
Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.
Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...
And it isn't. Not technically, not quite a month, not here and now in the Gregorian West. Perhaps I have sinned on Roman terms, or Mayan, but one of our modern months pass by? Not so. A mere 26 days, no more, skinnier than even the skinniest of the twelve. Pish.
(There then followed a long apologetic focusing chiefly on the writer's many burdens, his foolish commitments to other causes, a jumbled and wholly unpersuasive farrago of nightmarish tales concerning book revisions, page proofs, conference papers, technical briefs and the like, all of which he would have us believe he signed on to execute in the space of a few short months. Cry me a river, as an ex-colleague used to say, though he tended to spice it up with a few expletives depending on audience).
This is a way of warning the reader that this post will be ... short, I believe is the current term. In the place of narrative, I offer something even more precious: media. One must stay current, after all.
Firstly, I just offer you a look at what might be considered a well-stocked bookshelf. Certainly nothing of the sort graced my shelves at eight or so:
I'll indulge the fiction, perhaps not absolute, that the image speaks for itself, and move onward. E. for a long time has been interested in how one might make a movie. Periodically he announces he will be a movie maker when he grows. (Just this morning he said to me "Dad, who gets paid when a movie gets made? When you say it cost a lot to make, who got the money?" We then have a discussion of movie economics, in which I can draw on many hours of bonus Lord of the Rings features in which the movie animators describe the one thousand days they worked continuously on Peter Jackson's miniatures). So we've been talking about movie technology, and then just recently we broke down and decided our young ones were no longer too young for Star Wars, which led to a discussion of "older" special effects technology, and how the Hoth walkers are jittery because they are using a form of stop-motion, and somewhere in all of this I decided to put my money where my mouth was and make good my claim that simple stop-motion animation was "not all that hard."
Indeed it isn't, but then, the results aren't all that good, but it gives me an excuse to experiment with YouTube, and another to divert your attention with colors and, in this case, some movement.
Hmm, what's more, I find YouTube seems to have cut off the last little bit! Nothing dramatic, just the jaws gaping ever wider.
Well, I regret the meagerness of this post, but a long bout of proofing and reading copy edits looms sharply in the foreground ...
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