Few words, fewer thoughts

I didn't even know they existed: custom action figures

Wed, 09 May 2012 19:25:08 GMT

Words do not fail me, but they all amount to whiskey-tango-foxtrot:

Custom dolls, including the tanning mom from New Jersey (a news story I had managed to miss, and I was soooo glad).

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P.S. On other viewing news

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:33:50 GMT

Don't spoil the season finale of Castle for me. Haven't seen it yet. Maybe Thursday or Friday.

(Yes, from earlier hints from Stana Katic that 'shippers will love it, I assume that Castle and Beckett get together, and Andrew Marlowe has said that cards will be laid on the table and secrets revealed, but I don't know whether they split apart after getting together or they split up and rejoin, and in the grand storytelling tradition, I assume the episode will answer some relationship questions and open a whole bunch of new ones about something else...because there has to be a reason for people to tune in next season, if the show gets renewed.

(And isn't the network being exceedingly cagey about not officially saying who is renewed? I know a number of websites are claiming that Castle is a lock, but there's still the example of Gilligan's Island and the various Hooterville comedies to dampen the spirits of those who watch it.[1])

[1] I recall reading in Russell Johnson's book about the shock they felt on learning that Gilligan's Island had been canceled. And I recall reading that CBS decided on a change of direction, so the various Hooterville comedies (Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and I think Beverly Hillbillies) all got canceled while they still had good ratings. Of course, that's just in my memory and I can't be bothered right now to look up whether it's true or not—but this is the kind of thing that Wikipedia is extremely good at getting right.

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Avengers was...good.

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:14:07 GMT

Look, I was mostly a DC fanboy. And I've had my issues with Joss Whedon in the past. But I've seen most of the five movie prologue (I missed Iron Man 2) so I'm pretty up-to-speed on the mythology needed.

And my non-comics-reading wife thought it was so good, she'd see it again. My 12-year-old son quotes from it (it is quite quotable), and for what it is (a big group action flick) it's even pretty good. It does okay with the comic-book-style logic for the plotting.

Everyone gets their Moment of Awesome to establish that they're just that good. Black Widow takes three guys out while she's tied in a chair. It's a minor plot point that Stark has the little thing in his chest, so they talk about that and it doesn't seem too forced. Mark Ruffalo does a very nice Bruce Banner/Hulk, and, though the trailers make it look like Tony Stark has all the best lines, I'd say everybody gets some.

Things I missed: So, why does Hawkeye use a bow? I mean, he's hellacious good at it, and I'd even buy it if he also used his pistol occasionally.

Given that everybody on the team seems to have special or magical tech, I'd have given the Black Widow her sting. Be a little nicer than the two 9 mm pistols she's using.

I missed who the big bad in the end credits guest-shot was--as in, I have two possible ideas of who that might be. The dialog leads me to one, but I'm not sure of it. So I might be wrong.

But--and maybe this is my SF background--I kept thinking, "You know, you've already got a power source that lets a man fly at nearly supersonic speeds and with no obvious fuel source. I'd back-engineer that sucker instead of worrying about the cube-that-you-call-a-tesseract."

(Oddly enough, I'd give the Hulk a pass. Just a brain thing, I think.)

The trailer at the beginning made me less excited to see the last Nolan/Batman movie. Go figure; I guess I'm just contrary.

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Charles Stross on ebooks and DRM

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:20:22 GMT

As you might know, MacMillan today announced that they were going DRM-free for ebooks.

MacMillan was already thinking about it, but Charles Stross was invited to add his thoughts. He has put them up on his blog: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2012/04/more-on-drm-and-ebooks.html

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I'm nervous about this

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:04:15 GMT

Meat-friends can skip this; I've told them the basics.

My wife's uncle killed himself last week. We found out on Wednesday. I guess he'd shot himself on Monday, after his longterm partner died of MS on Sunday.

The backstory is kind of complicated, and maybe I'll get into it later, but essentially, he was estranged from the rest of the family. The mother of his partner didn't like him—had stopped them from marrying the first time—and was going to kick him out (it was her house, and she was letting her daughter live there). Anyway, he's dead, and his ex-wife and children are in Calgary, so we're going to clean out the house of his possessions.

Apparently, in Ontario, all suicides have to be investigated, but his has now and the body has been released. (Another uncle is taking the ashes after he's cremated.) So we're going to clean out the house. We have to do it quickly, to get his stuff, his interloper's stuff even though he's been there for over a decade, out so the mother (who's got to be in her eighties) can dispose of her daughter's stuff properly. Or something; I don't imagine we'll be allowed to do this without supervision of some kind.

And it's an odd, eerie thing. As I've said to others, creepy and voyeuristic: I don't want to peek at the life of a sixty-something year old man and his lover. I met him maybe half a dozen times before he separated himself from the family. The meetings were almost all after he had his own problems with drinking and depression. I have no attachment to him, but I'm doing this for others, absent, who loved him and still love him. His ex-wife has never stopped loving him, even after he divorced her and left.

So I'm going to go wade in his life, what's left of it. This might be uplifting but I suspect it will be depressing.

I have never had to do this: When my mother died, I was too young; when my grandmother died, I was one of dozens of grandchildren, so it didn't fall to me.

Practice, I suppose. Because some day I'm going to have to do this for someone I did care about.

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Two new HPS adventures to be published

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 16:51:42 GMT

John Dunn, the man behind Melior Via, said nice things about my HPS campaign. (I guess James isn't going to write up that last session. Oh, well, you have my description.) Now, he got waylaid by actual contracts and work, but he is going to release the other two adventures for the students' Freshman Year. They're plotted and mostly written:

For the moment, the rest of the Freshman story arc has already finished principle writing (Adventures #3). After that, sales numbers are going to dictate where we go with HPS.

So, you heard that: Sales numbers! If you want him to produce more (granted, you don't have to like the schedule), you have to buy these. Five bucks or so in PDF, over at RPGNow or DriveThru or whatever the kids are calling it these days.

You can buy them for Mutants & Masterminds, too. (If it's for ICONS, it will say ICONS in the product description.) And I might take a stab at converting some of the characters to Marvel Heroic Roleplaying as I experiment with how that one works.

Current HPS products:

Hope Prep Freshman Handbook
Hope Prep #0 Orientation
Hope Prep #1 The Substitute
Hope Prep #2 Halloween Ball
HPS Freshman Character Pack (from whence Glimm and Sari both sprang)
HPS Alien Character Pack (which I never got around to introducing, because it just came out)

Given that I have now spent months thinking about it, I might be offering a chapbook discussing High School Superhero Campaigns and how to adapt existing adventures for one, probably with a list of existing adventures I have thought about. Don't ask for a decision until June; got to get this Real Work in the can first. And I know I'd have to be careful not to tread on Hero High, so that would be a consideration.

Anyway—when they're available, go buy HPS stuff. Keep John Dunn producing more.

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GM Notes: The RetConQuest

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 16:14:24 GMT

The index of our ICONS adventures | James' write-up

Preamble (Heavy on the Amble)

You know how some series end with a slice of what's made it so good all along, and you can just imagine them going on forever without you? The HPS stories didn't end that way. I wanted it to feel by God finished (but open): if we went back to it, good, and if we didn't, it still felt done.

And I had a copy of Steve Kenson's adventure The RetConQuest. Other restrictions: Only one night. And I put out a call to the players, so that if they had something they wanted to see, it was going to happen. (Only half of the players responded, and of them only Rumspringa's player had a request: The guardian angel should find someone to guard. Didn't matter who.)

The only problem is that The RetConQuest takes place in an alternate timeline, so really, we'd be missing out on the interpersonal stuff that makes the campaign fun, but I decided to do it anyway.

So in a campaign that's all about the interpersonal problems of being teens in a skewed version of our world, I did a big saving-the-world adventure to end it.

Spoilers from here on in. There are lots of changes from Kenson's original adventure to make it fit and fit in an evening, and I'm not going to tell you what the changes are! You have to go buy the adventure! Nyah nyah nyah!

As usual, corrections cheerfully accepted because I might not remember something correctly. I don't have much of the dialogue recorded, but it was fun, with exchanges between Hari and Rumspringa, and Sari pointing out how her violence was sanctioned. (Oh, and here's a cut.) ( Read more... )

Not a bad ending, actually.

Things left unsaid

The green ghost guy was Master Tulka. Players referred to him as Obi-Wan. :)

I think the whole series ran pretty well. Certainly we left it in a place where I'd be willing to take them on as sophomores after a lapse of some time. Considering that I was intrigued by the setting but dubious at the beginning, I think that's a pretty big leap.

Also, the adventures taught me lots about how to convert from PDF into Epub format, so I could have them easy-to-read on my phone. (It takes about an hour, and I never did graphics, so I don't know anything about that. I printed graphics off so I could show them at the table.)

The whole thing left me wanting to GM on a regular basis again. Probably superheroes: that seems to be the way my mind works, as opposed to fantasy (really, I can take or leave the whole D&D structure; it's pretty generic and holds little interest for me) or SF. (Though Law And The Multiverse has me thinking about a twist on The Hunger Games...)

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Okay, last HPS adventure...what should it be?

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 01:54:13 GMT

Wednesday will be the last Hope Prep adventure. Someone else wants to run for a while, and while we might get back to HPS, there's usually some cool thing that our players want to try out. So this is the end of HPS, at least for now.

I'm having the players suggest what they want to happen in it, and ultimately that will determine the direction it takes.

Still...

Ideas and suggestions gratefully accepted for the framework or story. Something that ends the year would be nice, I think, but isn't essential.

Hmm. I know in grade 6 they had a movie for my daughter and the other members of the safety patrol. Maybe HPS does the same thing. All the members of the safety patrol are there--and maybe a return villain. Depends on what the other players want.

The index of our ICONS adventures

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Types of demons (fictional)

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 14:22:23 GMT

In both roleplaying and fiction, I occasionally have to refer to the organization of demons. This hierarchy is one that's imposed from without ("Oh, that's a Corrupter," someone will say sagely, "very tough.") so maybe I should write down ideas. The demons themselves may have totally different ideas.

This post represents gropings. I'll go back and edit as things occur to me.

( Read more... )

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HPS Ideas

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 18:52:36 GMT

Tv crew following someone around, either for a reality show, a documentary, or some kind of game show (well, that would be a reality show).

Idea which might have been useful in the Halloween Ball adventure if I had thought of it: a ghost of a student who died at the school and who can only manifest on a particular day, the day she or he died. It happened in, say, 1963. She or he was dating someone. The next date will be the 50th anniversary, and the students have to either fake the appearance of the loved partner so that the student can go on to eternal rest, or actually get the partner, an HPS dropout, to the school for the anniversary.

The index of our ICONS adventures

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An interim Hope Prep adventure

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:48:39 GMT

Inspired by a comment by Scott Sanford over in james_davis_nicoll's blog.

( Read more... )

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Last night's gaming... (First Crush)

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:43:49 GMT

The index of our ICONS adventures | James' writeup for this session

Was good. For no particular reason, I set it on February 2, but no groundhogs showed up. I thought the session went very well, though for personal reasons I had to cut short an anecdote from James about anime and groundhogs.

This is long; we'd better have a cut. ( Read more... )

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Adventure structure in the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 13:54:16 GMT

I wrote this in a private post as a part of something else, then extracted it.

I have been reading the PDF of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying Game, and some of these things might read clumsily and be brilliant in play. So far, it seems very fiddly with lots of stuff to do and keep track of: three types of damage! Plot points! XP! Doom Pool! Opportunities!

Again, in play it might not be so much. But it's overwhelming to read.

The game suggests a structure for adventures (which it calls "Events"). It organizes each adventure into one or more Acts; an Act consists of Action scenes and Transition scenes. There has to be at least one of each, for mechanical reasons: the time when most characters can recover is the Transition scene. This is the scene in the jet, getting to the Savage Land, or researching in the lab of the Baxter Building, or whatever. Now, given that you can inflict (emotional) damage in a non-combat scene, I'm curious about how you ensure a Transition scene...but I digress.

Anyway, they don't say it in such a blunt form, but it's something like this:
<event>
  <act>
    <setting scope="act">Where are we?</setting>
    <hook>How do we get them involved in the action?</hook>
    <buildup>How do the heroes get there?<buildup>
    <scene type="action">
      <threat>What's the threat? (Electro, tsunami, etc.</threat>
      <threatgoal>What's it's goal—that will affect its responses</threatgoal>
      <herogoal>What should the heroes achieve in this scene?<herogoal>
    </scene>
    <scene type="{action,transition}">
     <threat>What's the threat? (Electro, tsunami, etc.)</threat>
      <threatgoal>What's it's goal</threatgoal>
      <herogoal>What should the heroes achieve in this scene?<herogoal>
    </scene>
[...]
  </act>
[... ]
<event>

It suggests 2-4 scenes in an act. A transition scene should be there, and it shouldn't be the first scene. Though I notice the buildup is a kind of transition scene, though a stripped-down one, and usually dealt with in a sentence or two for each player. ("You get time off from your job to do this. You take the Quinjet.")

It also suggests that, unless you have very particular things to add (a meeting with a shady informant, who is later revealed to be someone important, for instance), transition scenes can be slotted in on the fly.

I think I'm falling back into the less planning thing for adventures, but the idea of establishing goals for scenes is not a bad one.

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Thoughts on Taylor Swift's "You Belong With Me"

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 15:57:24 GMT

So I had the iPod on random and this one showed up. (The songs for the whole family are mixed together. I've gotten rid of the wizard rock, the ecclesiastical music, and the heavy metal but lots remains that isn't necessarily mine.) And when I first heard it, I thought, "Oh, a nice twist having the girl be the one with the unrequited love," though even then I figured the relationship was going nowhere. If The Guy hasn't noticed the singer yet, he's probably not attracted to her. Maybe he's shallow and wants bigger breasts or something. Or maybe they show their affection in totally different ways and both of them have been offering to each other without picking up on it. Anyway.

What I noticed is that this is a creepy stalker kind of song, redeemed only by the fact that we generally don't think of young women that way. Swap it around, change the text slightly (I think besides the pronouns, only the bit about the high heels needs to change significantly--make "short skirts" into "tight shirts" and change the pronouns and you have most of it) and that's one sad little song.

Which reminds me of Holly Lisle's test, which is that if you can imagine a middle-aged white guy doing it and it's not creepy, then it's okay to have your other-than-MAWG character doing it. Which is not a bad test, actually.

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One thing that irked me about John Carter

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 16:38:40 GMT

and this is really quite inconsequential but it bothered me.

At one point, they have subtitle. And those subtitles included the word "alright."

You should know that I am always against alright. Even if it's a legitimate contraction for "all right" as always is for "all ways," I'm still against it. Another way I'm becoming hidebound.

(Oh, John Carter wasn't brilliant but it was by no means as bad as some critics said. I saw it in 2D in a theater and it was fine. It wasn't as fun as, say, Raiders of the Lost Ark but it was trying, and it was doing a better job than several other movies I could probably think of.

(Biggest problems to my mind? It was too faithful to the source material. Many of those ideas have gone on to become tropes and then cliches, and need to be fiddled with. It also meant that it tried to cram too much into its running time, and that meant that lots of stuff got short shrift. You kind of have to have some vague remembrance of the book to figure out why she falls in love with him, or what Jeddak means. Though the 12-year-old boys I took didn't seem to have a problem with that: I got no questions, anyway.)

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Officially back

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 13:24:13 GMT

...and much to do, so more comments later.

But general question: if vampires existed, what do you think their relationship to humans would be? On the one hand, food source and prey; on the other hand, reproductive pool and the origins of each of them.

There's probably room for a story in which they worship us. Oh, they still kill us, but we can go to the Great Beyond Which Is Denied Them. (Heh. That's what happened to the vampires: they all got the religion and killed themselves.) And conversion into vampires is saved for the people who are not worthy of transcendence. (In the fiction, it's the opposite: vampires are corrupters, and apparently delight in despoiling innocence, hence the conversion of Lucy and Mina...which makes me wonder what the lives of the Three Sisters in Dracula's castle must have been like before he turned them. And such a complicated relationship they would have had to Dracula.)

Why, yes, I did just see the episode of Buffy entitled Buffy Vs. Dracula; why? Oh, the pink pills...I like those.

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Well, that's lovely: spam with my name

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 14:50:18 GMT

Went on vacation last week, had a tiny bit of internet access through my iPhone (wireless hotspots). And while I was in the air yesterday, apparently a whole bunch of emails went out to people with my address attached.

So: if you get an email apparently from jhmcmullen and a yahoo address, and containing a link, just delete it.

Since I wasn't online much, I don't think it was actually me--I think it was either a problem at Yahoo or someone using my name, but I don't have the delivery-failed messages to check (and I don't know why they didn't hang around). It's easy to use someone's name, but I can't discount the possibility that I did something stupid with the web browsing on the iPhone and didn't realize it.

Apologies to those who are affected by this.

My apologies to anyone

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Discount Armageddon: not a review

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:11:13 GMT

I'm about 2/3 of the way through Discount Armageddon and we're pretty much on target for girl meets boy and hates him though he's hot, girl works with boy and they get it on, girl and boy realize it was a mistake and break it off.

I hope there's something redeeming about this subplot (as Carrie Vaughn managed in After the Golden Age) because I'm not particularly fond of it here. So far. Even the Aeslin mice can't save this if there isn't. Other things could save it--it's not dire yet--but it's not special.

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Assorted Observations

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 16:51:14 GMT

Discount Armageddon by Seanan McGuire sounds fun. And it harps on a couple of things about kick-ass female monster slayers that have been bugging me—or at least the Big Idea from the author does.
I feel like the word "pococurante" should have more traction. Let's put it out there, people! Either as an adjective or a noun; I'm rather pococurante about the whole matter.
Can diffidence be overrated? Discuss, in a casual laid-back manner.
I don't often look at it, but Cesco's current discussion of his first week on Sally Forth contains some gems and even some hopeful (for him) commentary: http://mediumlarge.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/my-first-week-of-sally-forth-day-four/#comments

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The enemy of love....

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 20:36:00 GMT

It occurs to me that I don't miss any of the comic strips I was reading online. Oh, I sometimes make the effort and read eight or ten XKCD comics in a row, but I don't miss them.

I think it's connected to being frighteningly busy.

But, you know, I haven't followed Questionable Content or OOTS for quite a while. Sinfest I only see when I check my reading page on Dreamwidth for PostSecret, on Mondays. The rest...no, I don't see them. I don't mind them: I haven't got a hate on for them or anything. But I don't seek them out.

The enemy of love is indifference, someone said. Yup.

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So clearly I don't follow much of Will Shetterly

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 18:17:14 GMT

There was a sequel to Cats Have No Lord?

I mean, I stopped paying attention shortly after the whole Captain Confederacy thing, but really, I didn't realize I'd spent a couple of decades that out of it. But I guess I did.

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Prologues: A rant

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:45:34 GMT

(Well, actually, I hope this won't be a rant, but there is that chance....)

Generally when I let my guard down and look at an epic fantasy novel (usually in a series, but it doesn't have to be), there is a prologue. And now I have a thing, which is that under most circumstances I don't read it until after I read the book. ( Read more... )

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Elitist or not?

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 18:23:46 GMT

I'm trying to decide whether Tom Lehrer was something of an elitist or not. The hints he gives are in the context of jokes, and it mihgt be easier to say that he had strong opionions on what was right and proper.

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Woot! (Okay, a small woot)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 17:46:47 GMT

This availability of electronic audio of back catalogues means that I can regain the lost Tom Lehrer songs that I listened to in my youth. (Of course, they were old even then.)

I guess I'll start with The Very Best of Tom Lehrer, which has most of the stuff I remember from An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer, and later I'll get That Was The Year That Was because the porn song is not, sadly, considered among his very best (nor, for that matter, is the Vatican Rag).

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Quote of the day

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:44:56 GMT

"The funny thing about research is that most of the time, readers will never know how much the writer has done . . . but they’ll absolutely know it if the writer doesn’t do the work." &emdash; C.T. Adams and Cathy Clamp

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