Total ramblings of a nutbar

I  just got fanmail.  Or, at least, a moderately reasonable facsimilie thereof.

Excuse me as I run around in circles screaming like a little girl.

So, part of the point of Amagi is to try out different ways of commercialising such a thing while still providing the actual content freely.  Partly because, hey, I'd like a few bucks to come from the site - but also because I'd like to play "idea tester" for people that might be wandering along in my vicinity, and I want to have a clean idea-set for when I'm ready to drop a few other things that are cooking here (Perfect Century / Cog Wars, most notably).

Now, I'm deeply hesitant to just try things higgledy-piggledy; that doesn't serve any of those ends.  But I am futzing around with ideas internally, for the not-terribly distant future - say, around a month or so.

I will note I have no intention of trying all of these.  These are the "possibles" I'm poking about at.

1. Advertising
I'm doing this already.  When traffic is up, people buy.  When it's down, RCM sits solid in it's slot.  I'd be willing to kill advertising slots for some other monetised use of space, though - especially if it's a topical one; as it is, I reject a good 90% of the proposed ads for being utterly irrelevant or just plain offensive.

2. Tip Jar
Exactly that, a "you can give me money" button.  Not sure what I think of this one.  Somehow, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  But I'm not sure why; I don't have a clear objection.

3. Patronage, of a sort.
One of the possibilities I have thought of is ripping out the current ads, and selling that ad space myself over much longer terms (like, by the month) and only to totally on-topic companies and sites.  That is, the qualifier would be "If I can't honestly write an article saying how much you rock, I won't advertise you.  If I can, not only will I carry that ad for a significant period, but I will write that article while I'm at it.".  So, on the site, there would be a short list of patrons (let's say six at most), each with a groovy button.  The button would go to my referral of the patron, and would contain a whole bunch of links to their stuff.  I'm not sure if possible patrons would find that idea distasteful, or if visitors would think I was shilling too severely, however; I'm personally cool with it, but I'm not other people.

4. Merch.
Coffee cup, T-Shirt, all that stuff.  All these are neat options, but I want to keep the site very minimal and sparse; I'm not sure they'd sell anything like enough to be worth cluttering up the space.

5. Link-Print Archives
This is a "very probably" one.  Basically, I think that every [interval of time], I'll snap off a goodly chunk of the articles, make a 6 x 9 PDF of them, and strip the individual articles off the site (except the 'fillable forms'; those would stay up).  The Archive PDF would then get it's own article, still free and click-here-to-download, but it would come with a "BUY THIS IN PRINT" link, right inside, taking you straight to Lulu.

Anyhow.  Your reactions to those ideas are deeply desirable - including gut feelings just as much as reasoned treatises.

Amagi: Always, With The Questing

I've got an intrigue-maker and a screwed-up-town maker.  Clearly, a quick Classic Adventure maker was required.  So, uh, here it is! 

Toronto was cool. I learned a lot. Also, I won a drink ticket during the grad student/professor dance-off. Go me!

Camping was awesome. There was much geeking. Gas was cheaper than expected. Also, I will never take flush toilets for granted again.

I gorged on sashimi last night. I am full of fleshy goodness.

How is Monday evening for the key campaign setting creation? (I'd do it Sunday or Saturday, but there are some conflicts with my brother or my girl.)

ETA: Wizards released a Warforged as PC race writeup. Squee!

Also, as we haven't started the campaign yet, I'm taking a look at some of the stuff that Wizards is releasing (like the Artificer and the Warforged). My current default response is "no", but only 'til I get a good read of it. Then we'll see if it's open for players to snag.

Yeah, I'm playing 4e soon.   Star Pact Warlock, Half-elf.  Str 10, Dex 10, Con 18, Int 12, Wis 10, Cha 18, off point-build.

Infernal pact tempts me, though.  It tempts me plenty.  Arftificer tempts me still more, now that the playtest on it is out, but I suspect the DM would throttle me.

Gotta say, the whole "creating content" bit I normally do?  Still dead cold on 4e.  We'll see if that changes after some real play.  Seems to have changed it for some folks.

Camping was AWESOME. There was fresh-caught fish (and thus successful fishing), lots of sun, amazing company and conversation, and just general awesomeness. Also, there was much discussion of D&D 4, which I now own the PHB to.

I'm now back in town, and very glad to be so. I'm also impatiently looking for excuses to go camping again.

In completely unrelated news, two friends of mine have had birthdays recently. Cheers to both!

Also, I learned that WOW can be run on Ubuntu. This makes me excited.

There are a lot of things running through my mind right now that I don't like thinking about. I dislike anger. I mean, REAL anger. Not like anger like "GODDAMN IT WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU ARE SOLD OUT OF LIMITED EDITIONS OF BATTLEFIELD BAD COMPANY??" (<-- which they weren't. Game = AWESOME.)

No no. I mean the kind of anger that is me doing my best to yell and scream at someone for taking away something or someone or someplace that matters to you. The kind of anger you do your best to choke down and swallow like a half cup of cod-liver oil. Just so you all know, if your a friend of mine if you really need me to do it I will. Tonight was a good example. Those of you who didn't seem worth my time to talk to, just know that it was not your fault.. not really... well sort of.. DAMMIT I'M NOT GETTING INTO THIS NOW.

I will leave it at this; if you want to talk with me, you know where to find me; here and on facebook most likely. You at all concerned and want to get something off your chest, please do so. I am all freakin ears right now. I wanted to talk about other shit right now though. So amma gonna do that now.

So I am jonesing to start a new tabletop game. I have no idea what so far. Mousy is open to suggestions, but I wanted to put the word out here first and see what you all would be down with me putting you through.. I MEAN RUNNING FOR YOU.

Here is a list of stuff I am not adverse to running.

Old School Mage
Old School D&D 3.0 edition. (None of this 4th edition crap for me yet, thank you very much.)
New School Vampire
New School Werewolf
New School Changeling (Just need to buy the damn book first...)
Shadowrun 4th Ed (Willing to give that one another go...)
Deadlands Reloaded (Just need the damn savage worlds main book first)
Aeon. (Not Trinity, AEON. I seriously still have the old book they published before the lawsuit.)

So whats the word kiddies? What ya all down for?

( No. I'm not name-calling. The coward I speak of is myself. )

It's funny, I was reading A Brief History of Anxiety: Yours & Mine by Patricia Pearson and I really enjoyed it. Her take on the anxiety epidemic in North America is that it is mostly a cultural phenomenon. I often wonder if that's the case. Maybe we're just stretched too thin, or encouraged to put too much emphasis on the self. Perhaps we spend too much time on introspection. Anyhow, I highly recommend you read it. It's interesting and well-written.

Amagi: What Comes After "Yes".

This is probably pretty basic to a lot of you...  But hey, nothing like reviewing the basics.

 
"The Big Read (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/) reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - ok only 1/2 the series as I can't seem to ever get my ha
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Have read parts; also plan on reading other major religious texts someday
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - 
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -I might have read it I don't remember
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - 
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - 
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker- read this one way back when I was still a wee young innocent thing in gr. 3.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - I wore this book out.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -

This is not the World of Darkness as you know it. Your characters are mortals, untouched by the shadowed world that we've all played in. As far as they're aware. They've had their up's and down's, like anyone, and they may have had their own tragedies, but they're untainted.

You, as a player, need to take everything that you know about playing a vampire and throw it out the window.

That's not to say that that won't change, that's not to say that something won't happen, I didn't say that it isn't the World of Darkness, just not the one that we know inside and out. There will be twists and turns, surprises and leaps..

This ain't your momma's vampire game...


-------

Your head aches, throbbing.. your mouth is dry and you feel like crap. It's dark, you try to move, then realize that you're tied up. On a hard, cold floor. You twist around, trying to get loose, and are rewarded with a kick to your stomach.

"Ah, you're waking up now. Good. Once your companions finish waking up, we'll begin."

You hear moans and sounds coming from all around you, as other people begin to stir, you don't know how many, you don't know where, but close, very close.

Waiting for a few minutes, you remember how you came to be here.

You remember feeling like someone was watching you, off and on for the past few days, and then, one night, the scariest person that you've ever seen was standing in front of you, 'it' grinned, a maw full of fangs, and then you felt an arm come around you and a cloth was pressed over your face, you struggled, but couldn't fight, they were so strong, and then you were gone.. and now you're here.

Waiting. What's coming?

----------

Well, the muse, she found me.

I need a minumim of 20 players to run this game, once I hit 20, I'll post more stuffies.

Facebook Group: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=51208500283

Actually, not so idle.... But I thought I'd actually post something and the post Winterlive (http://winterlive.livejournal.com/429783.html) made about this seemed to work well enough.
And yeah, I'm too lazy/tired to do proper html. Blame my 2 hrs of sleep.

"The Big Read (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/) reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

( Read more... )

There's probably more books I would want to read if I took a look at the synopsis (synopses?), but I'm too tired to bother doing that right now....
I looked up some of them though.
And there's lots of books that I like that are or have been huge influences on me (some by the authors mentioned, some not) that aren't on the list. Maybe sometime I'll talk about them.
If I ever get around to it.


But for now I think I'll sleep. G'night.

Back from camping!

Camping, good.  Being back, also good.

Much to do, now.

that there are days when $25 pizza dinner is justifiable (why the fuck is pizza so expensive anyhow?)

that you just can't stop watching your favourite scenes from your favourite show because its so emotional that it punches you in the head

that sleep deprivation is no excuse for any manner of tawdry comments that may slip out

that having a massive girl crush on another girl in no way implies that you're gay--just having a girl crush

that no office is perfect and without office politics, even one as near-awesome as mine

that having chosen the road not taken and not regretting it does not make me a bad person or even a lazy one...

that having to care for two cats is alternately fun and supremely annoying

that being woken up every day by one of the said cats was funny and cute at first and now is just annoying

that waiting for the pizza to arrive is intolerable

and finally,

that cliffhangers are supposed to happen at the end of the season and having to wait for the Journey's End, series 4 finale of Doctor Who is killing me. IS IT SATURDAY YET???

 

 So *S* I hope everyone had a good Canada day.

Ours was fun on this end of the screen.  Got to sleep in, did some running around done then headed over to Robo robs for a BBQ.  He had a sun free zone set up for me which was really sweet, we went to the park and played Badminton hehe fun on its own until you have six people (plus seth who tried to keep up and sometimes even made a rather good shot.  Helps when we had no net)  and two birdies going then it becomes a hoot.

Have to admit I had a blast with that and would really enjoy doing it again.  We dove for the birdie and apparently I became a ballet dancer from time to time the way I would try and get the shot.

we had good food, good company and I will have some pictures up on my face book soon.  All in all a good night!

It's no secret, I have been awaiting this movie for about a year. The little robot with a personality has been captivating hearts since it's first teaser trailer came out. How could he not? What's not to love about the little guy?

I'm not going lapse into plot summary here, lest I spoil the movie for anyone. I don't want to do that to anyone who might be reading this. I can say that the robots - though they never really speak - carry the movie and that they all have distinct personalities. The movie itself addresses our rampant consumerism - it's no secret. Wall-E has been left behind on Earth to clean up the mess that the human race didn't feel like cleaning up. In the beginning of the movie it appears that he is the only one left - all the other Wall-E models having broken down long ago. So we watch this little robot going about the seemingly fruitless daily task of trying to clean up the mess that's been left behind.

While the movie is mostly entertaining and light-hearted, there is obvious discomfort as the audience watches him roll through the bleak urban landscape filled with trash and debris. All of this changes, of course, when he meets Eve. The pretty and modern i-Robot styled love interest. In the end, though, I think that the movie is about far more than the two main characters. This movie evokes a kind of sentimental yearning for a world that is not riddled with its current crises. Wall-E loves old musical and has become a collector of objects that seem to embody human culture: lighters, a rubix cube, lightbulbs and Christmas lights. His home contains an odd mish-mash of objects that are designed to evoke a sense of sentimentality in the audience.

I think, more than anything, Wall-E is a love story from ourselves to ourselves as we try to grapple with the realities of the future that we face. We can cloak it under the guise of environmentalism, and to an extent that's what the movie pushes. What it's important to keep in mind, though, is that environmentalism seems to largely come from a sense of self-preservation. We've begun to realize that as we destroy entire ecosystems that we have put ourselves at risk as well. Well - we've known it for a while, but I think we've finally come to terms with it.

I also think that Wall-E praises the human cultural diversity that we are slowly losing. The flabby, pasty, consumerist people aboard the ship are a testament to that. All dressed exactly the same, drinking their "food" through straws in super-sized paper cups.

I do find some shocking hypocrisy in the marketing strategy around the movie. Wall-E is one of the most aggressively marketed and merchandised movies to come out yet and when their spokesperson was asked if it was an intentional commentary on North American consumerism he just looked blankly at the interviewer. I find it faintly amusing that this was overlooked and also somewhat depressing.

I - uh... Okay this is a Disney movie that I'm analyzing. I'm not going to bore you guys with anymore commentary on it.

Bottom line. I enjoyed the movie. I cried a little too. Go see it - just don't buy the merchandise. Lol.

Before I put Lineage away in favor of all those things that get in the way like work, children, relationships and life, I had almost finished it. Most of what was left to do was descriptive stuff I believe.

I've been thinking of dusting it off and trying to finish it. Beyond that, I was thinking that I'd like to playtest it before I finalize anything in it. So I was thinking of holding a playtest in the near future. Something smallish. I thought I'd throw it out there to see who is interested.

So... If you're interested in playtesting Lineage let me know.

This morning, I was in the middle of an IM conversation with my friend Nate (elementera) that turned into a kind of interview about RCM. I've pasted it here, so you can all read it (edited to weed out all our profane hijinks, of course).

( Read more... )

They are all backcombed, waxed, palm rolled, tip rolled and beaded. They look awesome and they probably will for the next couple of days or so before they start to shrink and look kind of crappy for a while.

These babies took 16 hours of wrist, neck and back cramping work for myself, Crash and three of my friends. Oh my god! If you ever decide to get dreads, please make sure your hair isn't longer than 8 inches. Seriously. Cut it before you do them. You will save your friends a lot of sweat and icky pain and yourself alot of anxiety that your friends will up and quit on you. And also alot of icky pain.

Anyhow, they look awesome. Photos later. :)