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Stuff involving Me and Books

I’m going to have to start containing myself on the freebies. Between stripped books and advance copies, working at a bookstore has the potential for accumulating truly stupid amounts of printed material, and so far I’m not doing too well at resisting temptation.

I’ve been working at chewing through my reading backlog, though; I’m making an effort to read for at least half an hour every day, which is a nice way to break up the massive stretches of writing.

Yesterday I finished En Garde, which is an ancient swashbuckling RPG from GDW — indeed, so ancient that I hesitate to call it an RPG. It’s more of a dueling wargame onto which has been built a swashbuckling simulation. It is, however, truly a wonderful game — chock full of that robustness that modern game designers are always trying to get back to when they try to get retro. It hurls together swashbuckling cliches from a dozen different sources; how can you not love a game where you can choose between serving in the Royal North Highland Border Regiment and the Gascon Regiment? It handles fencing, gentleman’s clubs, mistresses, regimental politics, mass combat, and court intrigue in a little handbook smaller than any modern game product of which I am aware. (It really makes me want to run a swashbuckling LARP, but that is not an idea to entertain just now.)

Last night at Kepler’s we had in some of the folks from MoveOn.org to talk about their new book, 50 Ways to Love Your Country. It was an interesting crowd. Mostly older folks, which I suppose is to be expected from the graying leftism of the Peninsula. We tend to get a relatively older crowd anyway; Candace Bushnell was the only author I’ve seen get significant numbers of younger folks, though I think David Sedaris had a relatively youthful crowd. More interestingly, the crowd was probably about 80 percent women. I’m not sure what to make of that. I hypothesize that my own experience with leftist activism suggests that a lot of leftist groups tend to greet newcomers with an armload of uninspiring grunt work, which I’ve seen turn off a bunch of guys who really just wanted to be the guy on the barricades with the big-ass flag*, but not so many of the women. I can’t really back that up, though.

Entertainingly, no sooner had the event wrapped up than the attendees got up and starting helping fold chairs. That’s never happened at any other event.

Finally, I got a raise! Successful completion of the training period earns you an extra pittance — I think it’s something like 3 percent. It ain’t gonna make me rich, but it’s better than a kick in the head.

*Yeah, including me. In my case, I was really turned off by the Amway model of political action; I wanted to do something, not recruit more recruiters.

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The fateful lightning of my terrible swift sword

Today I embarked upon a new activity in the bookstore, one which fills my authorial bowels with a strange sympathetic dread.

Pulls. Such an innocuous word.

Periodically, a well-run bookstore has to go around pulling off the shelves books which aren’t selling, in order to return them to the publisher for credit. As a bookseller, this is a grand thing. It’s good for the bottom line; it clears up room to shelve some of the massive stacks of overstock we have; it generally makes my life easier. And yet, I feel sort of uneasy pulling. The realities of the book trade being what they are, I know I’m basically consigning the book, and its author’s hopes of fame and earning out, to obscurity. It’s kind of sad looking up a book that we have nine copies of and taking all nine back to the loading dock.

With the hardcovers and trade paperbacks, it’s not so bad. You can pretend that they all get sent to a farm upstate where they can run and play with the other books (which, as I think about it, isn’t a bad way to think of Ingram’s Oregon warehouse). It’s the mass-market paperbacks that break your heart.

They don’t get sent anywhere. They just get their front covers torn off and mailed back, as if some sort of bookstore mafioso decided an editor needed to be taught a lesson. The rest of the book goes in the dumpster, unless some ghoulish bookseller decides to snag a few decapitated books (What?).

I took comfort in listening to a trio of highly literate high schoolers discussing their next book purchases and their college applications, however. I like it when people too young to drink tackle grand literature; it makes me feel there is hope for the world yet. I conclude, however, that I am indeed getting old, because I think the current cohort of teenagers has just abominable taste. I mean, really; white pumps on a seventeen-year-old?

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Book Review: Sirio

Sirio is the autobiography of Sirio Maccioni, proprietor of the famously exclusive Le Cirque in New York. It begins with his childhood as an orphan in Tuscany during World War II and chronicles his ascent through the ranks of the restaurant industry over five decades and four countries.

I like nice restaurants, and I have a soft spot for a good Horatio Alger story, so I thought it would be a fun read. And I really enjoyed the first half of the book. His tribulations as a busboy and waiter in the postwar restaurant scene, at the verge of the nouvelle cuisine, are interesting social history and a ripping yarn besides. A brush with the forbidden ortolan and chasing down a cruise ship in a Cuban police boat are fun grace notes to the series of ever more responsible jobs that are the hallmark of the up-from-poverty narrative.

Around halfway through, however, with the closing of the famous Colony, where Sirio had been maitre d’, and the opening of Le Cirque, his own venture, the snap begins to fade. In a way, there’s nowhere left to go but down, and the youthful exuberance and relentless progress fades into an endless series of battles with the New York Times restaurant reviewers and his own chefs.

You can’t edit a man’s life, of course, but I would have loved more pages on the scrappy waiter and fewer on the beleaguered restaurateur.

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Friday night and patent leather Manolos

Well, it was an interesting old day down at Kepler’s Books. We had Candace Bushnell, the author of Sex and the City, reading in the store today. It was the largest event I’ve worked during yet, which I suppose is a good dry run to the David Sedaris event on Sunday that everyone is terrified of (God knows what will happen if we get Clinton).

The Bushnell audience was an interesting bunch; not our usual clientele. Lots of pink. Lots of high schoolers who I suspect were trying for a sophisticated and sexy look, but, well, yeah. Some things a sixteen-year-old just can’t do. A fair number of dumpy, testy-looking women, which I’m not sure how to interpret.

And as the owner observed, everybody was on their cell phone.

Bushnell herself was an interesting character, though I suspect she’s a better writer than a reader. Her voice sounds at least fifteen to twenty years younger than she must be, given that she was writing magazine articles in the eighties. She had some entertaining anecdotes about people having sex in cedar closets, but her Argentinean accent is poor.

I had a pair of customers in a row who I feel were iconic of something: first, the perky Jewish blonde teenager in a pink tank top who bought Bushnell’s book with a hundred-dollar bill, and second, the exotic henna-fingered brunette teenager in a gray tank top who tried to buy a Sedaris book with a credit card that was declined and had no other means of paying.

Then, alas, the low point of the evening. I had to sell someone one of the Acorna books. With the frickin’ sacred temple cats. There is no God.

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Experience Points and Plot

I have a thesis about one of the reasons that earned experience points are so persistent in roleplaying games.

Experience points provide an irreducible floor of plot.

As is traditional in RPG theory, I’m using an idiosyncratic and non-intuitive definition of “plot”. What I mean by “plot”, in this connection, is the occurrence of events which cause a lasting change of state in the characters or setting. Put more simply, plot is when something happens that matters.

Ideally, in every session of an RPG, there would be plot. PCs would advance toward short-term or long-term goals, gather information or assets necessary to advancing toward goals, move along a character arc, etc. However, we’ve all had sessions where nothing happened. Maybe there was some beating on orcs, but nothing really happened. Nothing changed, in the characters or the world they live in.

Experience systems, however, guarantee that the PCs will be changed by every session, regardless of that session’s content. Whatever else happens (or doesn’t), you get XP, and now maybe you can get that new ability you’ve been saving up for. They turn otherwise narratively vacant sessions into training montages.

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Saturday night in the barrio

It’s been observed by folks who know the area that Jen and I basically live in the barrio. I think all our neighbors aside from the family in the other half of the duplex are Mexican or Central American, which is pretty typical of large swathes of Redwood City. As I’ve noted before, I think it’s kind of cool living in a town with ample opportunities to eat a taco with brains or tongue. (Not that I do, but I like having the option. As I think about it, I think that’s part of why I wanted to come back to the Bay Area; it’s an excellent part of the world to be in if you like having options that you have no particular desire to pursue.)

I think we’re the edge of something; on our side of the street and to the west, it’s mostly single-family homes. On the other side of our street, it’s mostly mid-grade apartment complexes (I was about to say low-grade, but then I realized they’re not really any more decrepit than the place I managed when we first moved to California. My standards have drifted upwards).

Ordinarily, there’s no special flavor to the neighborhood other than the flock of pushcart ice cream vendors and the guy who sells things resembling the love children of a Cheeto, a pork rind, and a pretzel off the front end of a bicycle. As the weather warms, however, a certain community feel emerges.

Tonight, while I was walking to the local 7-11 for some milk, I discovered that one of the local youngsters (I say this because I’m pretty sure he was younger than me; anywhere from 15 to 25 would have been possible) has converted his garage into a streetside pimp lounge. Mood lighting, frathouse-grade couch, warm colorful fabrics draped over everything — the whole nine yards. And it’s a garage that opens to the street. He and his friends were just lounging around, one of them freestyling to a beat they had running.

Across the street, some kids were doing doughnuts on a motorized Big Wheel; meanwhile, some of the grownups in the same complex were doing the same thing.

I like this neighborhood.

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Review: Bluewater Grill

888 El Camino Real
Menlo Park, CA 94025

Bluewater Grill is a nice-looking seafood place along the route by which I take Jen to work, and on several occasions we’ve said, “We should go there sometime”. Well, tonight we finally got around to it. And this is not your grandfather’s seafood restaurant.

Oh, wait. Yes it is.

The food wasn’t bad, mind you. It was just … unexciting. The free bread was an uninspired sourdough. It was warm, which was nice, but the crust was unexciting and chewy and the crumb was uniform and bland.

We ordered wine and appetizers to start with; Jen had a glass of Pinot Grigio and a cup of clam chowder, and I had a glass of Riesling and a bay shrimp cocktail. The waitress warned us that the Riesling was sweet, but I like sweet wines (what can I say? I’m a wuss). Jen’s wine was good, and the clam chowder was tasty but very rich. My shrimp cocktail was also good, though I probably would have eased up on the cocktail sauce a little. I’m not sure what to think about my Riesling. I now understand what they mean by wines having “apple notes”, because my wine tasted like cider. This was OK — I like cider — but it was a little weird. Still, so far so good.

In passing, I want to note that there was a massive box of Old Bay on our table.

For the entree, I ordered grilled catfish, and Jen ordered scallop and shrimp skewers. We both got sliced tomatoes and sauteed spinach as sides, because we are people on a diet, not professional food critics. And here is where Bluewater Grill didn’t come through for us.

The spinach was OK, but swimming in oil, which made it a little unctuous for my taste. The tomatoes were quite good; firm and sweet and huge. Should you go, I recommend the sliced tomato side. Alas, my catfish was profoundly bland. It was cooked well — tender and moist. Just deeply uninteresting. You would never know it was grilled. Jen’s skewers, meanwhile, were similarly bland. It took a while to find any evidence of grilling on the scallops, and the pieces of seafood were spaced on the skewer with unappealing squares of bacon, charred at the edge and underdone at the center. Judging from the look of the food, they used the exact same seasoning on the catfish, the scallops, and the shrimp. That just doesn’t seem right.

We also had to ask three times for water, which was annoying.

In the end, Bluewater Grill seems to have good-quality ingredients, but not a lot of ingenuity in putting them together. If I were to go again, I’d focus on dishes where the flavor of the seafood itself is paramount. The shrimp cocktail was good, and I’d bet the raw bar might be tasty too. More assertive fish like salmon might also fare better with their chef.

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Democracy and Spain (or, Throwing the Bastards Out)

OK, so in the last couple days I’ve seen a lot of chest-beating about how the recent Spanish election is the worst setback to the effort against terrorism since … well, pretty much anything. This troubles me.

I agree that it’s definitely a bad thing if al-Qaeda gains encouragement from a perceived victory and perceived influence over world affairs. And there’s certainly a case to be made that Zapatero’s policies announced so far aren’t helping.

However, a lot of the rhetoric comes perilously close to saying that in the aftermath of a terrorist attack, it is wrong (or at least an act of moral cowardice) to vote against the incumbent. And that bugs the crap out of me. It smells of “you can have any color you want, as long as it’s black”. I’m not fully versed in Spanish politics, but I can think of several reasons I would be displeased with the PP if I were a Spaniard, none of which have to do with rolling over in hopes al-Qaeda would leave us alone.

Voters are fickle and aggravating. They do weird things, and they do stupid things. But it’s theirs to do. The right result in an election is the one which earned the most support; any other attitude leads to stances usually associated with the bad guys in this particular fight. Save the moral judgements for the policies that come after. Call Zapatero worse than a Frenchman if you want. But we’ve got to respect the right to throw the bastards out.

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Lessons in Game Design: Deter behavior by making it unfun

I was part of a team that ran a LARP this weekend. There were certain types of action that we thought were undesirable for the style of game we were trying for, so we just didn’t provide a way to do them. This works in a board game, but when a roleplayer wants to do something that the rules do not provide for, it is frustrating and no one knows quite what to do.

What I wish we had done is provided a way to resolve the activity in question, but in as un-fun a way as possible. Players often want to do impossible things, but dull things usually get a pass. This was why my Vampire LARP, back in the day, used Mind’s Eye Theatre despite its many flaws: combat was so dragged-out and unpleasant that it was an effective deterrent for combat in any situation that didn’t absolutely demand it. It was, however, available when necessary.

I see two ways to go about designing a prohibitively unfun system.  First, you could make it baroque and awful, as in the Mind’s Eye Theatre example above.  Second, you could make it trivial and boring: e.g., “flip a coin; whoever wins, wins” or, in some cases, “go sit out the next half-hour of the game and then the GM will make a call.”  (Which I guess is sort of like the MET option but with less bookkeeping.)

I suspect baroqueness might be the right choice for activities that would be seem thematically appropriate (and thus characters might reasonably have relevant abilities) but undesirable for the particular game, and triviality the way to go for actions that lie further outside the game’s focus.

No doubt when I try this in the future I’ll find the downside of the approach, but right now it looks pretty solid.

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Fanboys and scientific realism

I’ve talked with a number of fanboyish sorts through the years whose comments on realism and consistency suggest to me that they wanted, with a deep and abiding passion, to be able to believe that their favorite media properties did, or could (somewhere in an infinite cosmos), really exist. On some level, their enjoyment of the material demanded that possibility of its reality. For scientifically-educated consumers, that usually means demanding scientific plausibility.

This instinct is one reason why books like The Physics of Star Trek — which explains in detail how Paramount’s accreted technobabble is not, in fact, incompatible with modern understandings of physics — are successful. They help bolster the theoretical possibility of genre media.

There’s a certain indifference to metaphor there, as if a narrative that isn’t literally possible is just a lie, and a not particularly competent one.

It reminds me somewhat of the accounts I’ve heard of fiction during classical Islam, when prohibitions against lying demanded that every story be qualified with a formula like “so it is said” or “but Allah alone knows the truth”. The story is then framed as a tale that might be the truth, even if it’s clearly fictional.

It also puts me in mind of the thesis among some science fiction readers that proper science fiction is a blueprint for the future, and any SF book which fails in this mission by contradicting established fact is just useless.

So what’s going on there? I suspect that for at least some advocates for literal realism, the notion of fictional realms as not merely fantasies, but alternate realities, is crucial to their enjoyment. It’s a sort of amplified escapism; they want to believe that there exists another place in spacetime where they might live different, possibly better lives. They may not be able to go there, separated from the fictional realm by centuries of time or by dimensional boundaries separating alternate universes, but the supposed existence of the alternative is comforting. A mere fantasy lacks the same power.

I think it’s akin to preferring to daydream about winning the lottery rather than daydreaming about learning how to throw fireballs — fantasies as hypotheticals, rather than as entertainments.

Originally published on LiveJournal