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Monkey and Spider

I occasionally have the impulse to write short children’s stories based on the narratives that emerge when I play with my son, like the eternal war of Monkey and Spider that we have going on. But today reminded me that that’s not necessarily a wise plan, because toddlers have only a passing acquaintance with civilized, or even humane, behavior.

He got dressed up in his cape and crown and wand (I tried to argue that it was a scepter, but no dice) this afternoon, and was King 2YO. King 2YO is the most terrifying tyrant I’ve ever heard of. The only punishment in his realm is having a limb sawed off, personally carried out by the monarch with a hand saw while he sings a little song of “Saw Saw Saw”. You hit Snow White? (Long story.) That’s a sawing. You’re the guy who sawed that other guy? That’s a sawing.

The cherry on top, though, is that King 2YO likes to tour his court with a chest full of his various treasures (doubloons, goblets, loose jewels, etc.), asks the courtiers what they think of his treasure, and then invites each courtier to eat a randomly selected piece of said treasure. I mean, that’s world-class crazed tyranny.

Under the circumstances, I think I prefer being the bearded spider struggling to devour an infinite supply of monkeys before they eat me, my beard, or my eggs (possibly all three).

That one’s probably not a great children’s story either.

Originally published on Google Plus
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Le fraise sans merci

I often get bogged down in the process of game design shortly before playtesting. In part, this is often because I get bogged down in revisions and edits. However, often I simply get daunted by the process of making the components.

I’m mainly talking here about board and card games; to playtest an RPG, you generally need to write some adventures, but what the heck, no one ever playtests RPGs anymore anyway. But at some point when developing a board or card game, you have to actually make boards and cards.

Aside from the physical making — index or business cards get you a long way in game prototyping — I often need to make up a whole lot of relatively arbitrary game tokens. If I’m writing a game about the secret politics of a restaurant kitchen after all the humans have gone home, I’m going to have to stat up a lot of creatures with Influence, Ruthlessness, and Deliciousness. And how do I know what a rutabaga’s Deliciousness is relative to a chanterelle? Presumably less, but how much less? How about a parsnip? Is a strawberry more or less ruthless than a ripe Camembert?

Worse, I know that the vast majority of these I will get wrong, because the main problem of early-phase playtesting is getting the asset distributions sufficiently right that you can figure out whether the core mechanics are worth saving. The task of spending a ton of time producing components that will probably survive only a single playtest is a daunting one, and one that often confounds me for a long time.

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The trials of homeownership (selected highlights)

So we got our property tax assessment, and it sort of encapsulates what’s happened to Bay Area real estate over my lifetime. When the previous owners bought this house twenty-odd years ago, the assessed value of the house was divided more or less evenly between the value of the land and the value of the improvements to the land, weighted slightly toward the land side. (It’s a big lot.) Since then, the improvements have increased about 60% in value, which is actually somewhat less than keeping place with inflation. (Makes sense, I guess; stuff gets old.) The value of the land, meanwhile, went up 425%.

I came home the other night to a pronounced smell of gas in the house. All our pilot lights were on, and I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from, but I had run into a PG&E guy that morning who asked if I had smelled gas. So I called PG&E, but it turns out that their customer service is terrible after hours. Then I tried the non-emergency services number for Mountain View, and they advised me to get out of the house and sent out the fire department. So after a few minutes three fire trucks roll up, and a half dozen firefighters are looking around for where the gas smell is coming from. (Apparently it was a slow night.) Eventually they conclude that the smell ebbs and flows depending on where you’re standing, and does not appear to be coming from the house, and smells more like sewer gas anyway. So that’s that. Poor Finn was traumatized; he fears trucks and strangers, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen him quivering with anxiety like that before.

Over the last couple of days, our floor furnace has been misbehaving; the pilot has gone out a couple of times, but Jen has been able to relight it. Then this morning there was a faint gas smell, but the pilot was on, so I figured we were probably OK. Then a few minutes ago there was a loud THUD noise, like someone dropping something heavy. Jen and I both went to see what the other one had done to cause it, and we found a burnt-hair smell over the floor furnace, and the furnace was actually fully on now. “I told you I smelled gas”, says Jen. I think if this keeps up we should probably call someone.

This actually makes an old memory of mine make sense; I was sitting at my childhood kitchen counter when a gas leak blew out* the back wall of our kitchen, but the memory is much less violent than I would have assumed a gas explosion would be. I remember my mom jumping back in startlement (she was cooking at the time), but my actual memory of the event itself is…pretty much a loud THUMP. So there you go.

*”Blew out” maybe overstates the case. But there was a hole in the wall afterward.

Originally published on LiveJournal

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Book Review: Checkpoint by Nicholson Baker

Checkpoint is an absolutely terrible book. Baker more or less writes by pouring out raw id onto the page, which in the past has made for entertaining if rather pervy prose. However, Checkpoint is a 2004-era Bush assassination fantasy rendered as a dialogue between two old friends, one of whom has apparently gone off the deep end and decided to kill the president. While Baker accomplishes his usual feat of expressing clearly and accurately the things that people think but would never, ever say, in Checkpoint that insight doesn’t lead us anywhere.

In large part this is, I think, because after the two characters have between them expressed the key dilemma of an assassination fantasy — the target deserves to die, but it would be Wrong to kill them — there’s not really anywhere to go. It’s basically the dramatic equivalent of a long blog thread on “Bush: Worst President Ever?” It would, I think, have been much more interesting if Baker had written a book about someone actually killing the president. There’s interesting conflict in killing the president, but not so much in wanting to kill the president, and only slightly more in admitting that you want to kill the president.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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Impression: Hunan Chili: OK

102 Castro Street
Mountain View

I’ve relocated again, and now I’m working on Castro Street, where restaurants are like optimistic lemmings, cheerfully poinging toward swift oblivion. Thus, more reviews which will likely soon be moot. (Incidentally, KoKo Express has now been replaced by Toust. I never went.)

Anyway, I had a yen for Chinese today at lunch, and I got the broccoli beef lunch special at Hunan Chili*. Because I got it to go, I missed out on the soup and ice cream. However, it did come with an egg roll and steamed rice.

The egg roll was really unremarkable. I have nothing bad to say about it, but I wouldn’t have missed it. Similarly, they make a perfectly serviceable heap of steamed rice. The broccoli beef, meanwhile, was OK. The beef was fine — not rubbery or chewy, but I’m not rhapsodic over its quality. The broccoli was maybe a tad overdone. The sauce had that sort of dark taste that suggests a little much soy sauce for my taste. Overall, I wouldn’t refuse to eat there again, but I won’t be in a hurry to return.

*I had a typo here that said Human Chili. I really hope never to write that review.

(Editor’s Note: Hunan Chili survived until 2013, so I guess I didn’t give it enough credit.)

Originally published on Tournedos

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Privatization woes

I was listening a bit ago to a piece on NPR about the privatization of Ghana Telecom, which is being protested by folks who think that Vodafone isn’t paying enough. This seems to be a frequent problem when state-controlled industries are privatized — consider, for example, Russia’s oligarch problem.

Now, it may be that simple corruption, or its lemon-socialist cousin, “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” adequately explains this phenomenon. But I also wonder if there may be a problem of an inadequate market. It’s not easy to assemble the resources to bid on a large national company, and many of these sales have a handful of potential buyers at best.

Perhaps worse, however, is that there often seems to be no reserve price in privatization sales; the government commits to sell, and then goes looking for buyers.  And as every negotiator knows, a party that has to make a deal is going to get absolutely worked over.

It also reminds me of a hypothesis I developed a while back.  One hears bandied about (though less so in these post-Washington-Consensus days, largely because no one seems to want to nationalize industries anymore)(Ed. Note 2021: OK, more so in these post-post-Washington-Consensus days) the principle that nations with leftist tendencies suffer from a dearth of private investment because capital shuns the risk of nationalization. I wonder if there may be a parallel phenomenon where nations with rightist tendencies suffer from a dearth of infrastructure because the electorate shuns the risk of privatization.

This was, for example, what I thought when I heard about the high-speed rail plan proposed for California; I think it’s a good idea on the merits, but I think it’s highly likely that we would wind up spending ninety hojillion dollars on the thing and then Sacramento would sell it to private investors for eighty-five cents and a meatball hoagie.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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That was creepy

Last night, someone knocked on our door. I’d been sort of expecting this, because there’s a vacant unit in the complex, and the management always puts their “RENT” sign on our shutters, so people decide to come talk to us, and then Finn has a conniption and we have to calm him down. However, I did not expect people to come knocking at ten at night.

So I open the door, and there stands a sort of portly middle-aged guy with a mustache and a just slightly lazy eye. He says “What room is Elizabeth in? ‘Cause I think she’s in a situation that she doesn’t want to be in.”

“I…don’t know.”

“Yeah you do.”

“No, I really don’t.”

“Don’t play games. You know. She lives in the complex back there.”

Now, I think maybe I’ve met Elizabeth in the parking lot, but I’m not sure which of the other tenants she is, and I certainly don’t know which unit she’s in, and I’m not really comfortable unleashing this guy on her.

“Look, I just live here. I don’t know the other tenants.”

“Oh.” He seems slightly taken aback. “You’re not the owner?”

“No, I just rent this unit. I don’t know where Elizabeth lives.”

“Well, she’s drunk, and this guy drove her home, and I … followed them back here, and I waited five minutes, and he hasn’t come out yet, and I just want to go check on her, and if she’s OK, then I’m out of here.” He pauses. “She’s a friend. We work together.”

…OK, so now we’re out of mysterious hostile creepy and into stalker creepy.

“Sorry, I don’t know which unit she’s in.”

This is a little bit of a lie. I suspect it was Elizabeth who came home about an hour ago and felt bad because we disciplined Finn for barking at her. She parked next to our car, and that spot belongs to unit 3. However, I have no reason to help this guy, and a general “don’t be complicit in the creepy” reason not to.

“Do you mind if I go around back?”

I kinda do, but it’s not really my business, and I’m not sure what I could say.

“Go ahead, if it’s open.”

I guess it was, because I didn’t hear from him again. I feel sorry for Elizabeth, though, and complicit in the ew.

Originally published at LiveJournal
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Thoughts on the GSL

A friend alerted me to the publication of the license that WotC is replacing the OGL with for D&D4e, and I have a couple thoughts about it, this being almost specifically my bag.

To begin, however, the obligatory disclaimer. I am not your lawyer; the following is not intended to be legal advice. If you need legal advice, you need to talk to someone who knows the law and, more importantly, knows the details of your situation. That person cannot be me, because I am not licensed to practice law anywhere, let alone where you live. (And, indeed, I am posting this mostly to get the subject out of my brain so I can focus on making that whole licensing thing happen.) Treating this post as anything more significant than food for thought would be very, very foolish.

So.

First off, an observation. From a craftsmanship point of view, the GSL is vastly superior to the OGL, which was a crap license I would have enjoyed taking apart in court.  (Editor’s Note: ten years of litigation experience later, I now believe the OGL is a crap license that would be tedious and awful to take apart in court.)   I am more impressed with WotC Legal than I used to be.

Second, I’ve seen the “it’s a license, not a contract” shtick that you see in open software circles trotted out with regard to the GSL. I think this is untrue. It might have been true of the OGL (though frankly, the fact that the OGL made a point of establishing offer, acceptance, and consideration (which, for the nonlawyers, are the basic elements of contract formation) makes me doubt this), but the fact that you actually have to send in a Statement of Acceptance suggests to me that WotC intends this to be a contract.

The purpose of open gaming licenses makes this, I think, inevitable. The GPL can afford to characterize itself as a license rather than an agreement between parties because it regulates, for the most part, the literal appropriation of code. When you copy a significant quantity of code written by someone else, you’ve probably infringed copyright unless you have some sort of authorization. Thus, if you want to argue that you never agreed to the GPL and that it doesn’t bind you, that’s fine, but now you have a copyright infringement problem.

Open gaming licenses, conversely, mostly regulate the production of compatible game products, which may not literally copy any text, and which might be argued not even to be derivative in the legal sense. If you want to argue that you are not bound by the OGL, it is less clear — and much more dependent on your particular product — whether you have a copyright infringement problem or not. We have, as far as I can find, no court decisions interpreting the scope of copyright in roleplaying games to guide us. Industry custom adopts a broad interpretation of what “derivative work” means, but that may be a historical accident. If an open gaming license is a contract, however, its terms can be enforced regardless of what copyright law may say.

This, then, brings me to my central observation about the GSL. I’ve seen a fair amount of discussion of the rather narrow range of uses of D&D material authorized under the GSL, and whether WotC actually has the right under copyright law to forbid you from using those phrases and concepts (e.g., “level”) in your own work. This is an interesting question, and I have my own opinions, but I think it’s ultimately the wrong question.

The best way to look at the GSL and the SRD, I think, is that the SRD and its permitted uses is not what you get in the GSL contract. It’s what you give. The GSL, at bottom, looks to me like a promise to limit your use of D&D terminology to a certain set of uses in exchange for the other benefits of the contract. Those benefits are, principally, twofold. First, you get a covenant not to sue — essentially, WotC agrees that if you make D&D supplements in a specific way, they approve, and you have nothing to fear from them. Second, you get a trademark license; you get to tell the world that this thing you’ve made is D&D-compatible. (People always forget about trademark. It’s really a much better way of getting a lot of things done.)

If the SRD seems to offer a narrower range of options, then, than simple fair use might offer you, that doesn’t mean that WotC is screwing its licensees. That narrower range is what you pay for coming in from the cold of legal ambiguity and possible lawsuits.

Originally published on LiveJournal
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OBAMA IZ A ISLAMOMUSLIM!!!!1!!!

It’s not a particularly stunning insight, but I don’t recall seeing it elsewhere on the Internet, so I thought I’d throw out a theory of mine.

It seems like a lot of people are baffled by the legs that the Muslim Obama rumor has, and so we see a lot of talk about neuroscience and racism and GOP mind control and so on. I, however, have always assumed that people believe the rumor when they hear it because they’re confusing Obama with Keith Ellison. Both of them are Democratic* African-American members of Congress from the Midwest who first took their seats during the second Bush term (Obama in 2004, and Ellison in 2006). Ellison, however, actually is Muslim, actually did use a Koran** during his swearing-in ceremony, and the right wing media had a cow about it. It would not surprise me if many people, upon being told that Obama is a Muslim, have a vague memory of the Ellison controversy (some black Congressman a couple years back or something) and assume that Obama’s Muslimness was something they already knew about.

*Ellison actually belongs to the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party, which I think is awesome. It sounds like a poorly translated Maoist group.

**He used Jefferson’s Koran. I also think this is awesome.

Originally published on LiveJournal

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How many pantheons does one world need?

Mainstream D&D has rarely if ever interrogated the distinction between alignments as ways people behave and alignments as cosmological factions.  In the Implicit Empire, each alignment gets its own set of deities, extraplanar beings, etc., etc. Now, “filling out the grid” can be very creatively fruitful; I wrote about this in my Designer’s Notes article for GURPS Deadlands: Varmints. However, it’s possible to go over the top on this kind of thing (demodands, anyone?) It seems like you could pull some interesting world design out of assigning cosmological significance to only a few of the alignments.

The obvious implications are worlds where Good struggles against Evil, and law and chaos are basically stylistic, or worlds where Law struggles against Chaos, etc. However, you don’t need to set up a bipolar world. Consider some other possibilities:

Good/Lawful Evil/Chaotic Evil: This is arguably implicit in the baseline world set up by the original 1e books; the good races and supernatural beings seem to be able to come together to oppose evil, while demons and devils are at constant war when not trying to conquer the Prime Material. The neutral alignments, meanwhile, have minimal supernatural backup until later books when TSR started filling in the grid.

Lawful Good/Chaos/Evil: This would be good for a world where Good is constantly hampered in its battle against Evil by its inability to pull the stick out of its rear and make common cause with Chaotic rabble.

Chaotic Good/Lawful Evil: Some friends and I played a game of Lexicon called Vespers, about a world riven by struggle between the Brilliance, a chaotic good faction, and the Shadow, its lawful evil counterpart.  So groups usually near the center of their alliances, like paladins and demons, were divided between the cosmological factions, not really comfortable anywhere.  Slaadi and elves, fighting side by side.   It was a really interesting world design challenge.

Adapted from a post originally published on LiveJournal