Hidden Gems

Well, hidden from me, up until now, anyway.


I somehow missed the Veronica Mars TV series while it was originally on the air, but heard so much about it that I've picked it up through Netflix. I haven't finished it yet (I'm most of the way through the first season), but what I've seen so far is excellent. It's well plotted, well acted, and creates an engaging over arcing mystery even though individual episodes still hold up well on their own, for the most part. Unfortunately, the Netflix reviews suggest that the second and third seasons were disappointing compared to the first, but I'll need a break after binging on this one for the last couple of weeks anyway. The one thing that bothers me is how Veronica constantly tweaks local law enforcement without being taken away from her father's care. It just stands to reason that when someone takes as many chances as she does, it should catch up with her sooner or later. There's also a character thing bothering me about one of the supporting characters that I'm going to wait out and see if it's eventually explained before commenting on it. Highly recommended.

The British series "Jekyll" was also a pleasant surprise. This is a powerful modern take on "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde". I don't even remember how I found it, though I think I spotted it in a catalog of British TV series DVDs. It was written by one of the people behind recent seasons of Doctor Who, Steven Moffatt. The writing is sharp, scary where it should be and occasionally funny to break the tension, but the strongest reason to rent this one is James Nesbitt as the lead character. You can really believe this one actor is two entirely different people in the blink of an eye. I won't spoil it by telling you anything more, other than that there are several differences from prior versions, and every one of them is there for an entertaining reason. If you like horror as much as I do, rent this one as soon as you can.

Compassion

I was just reading an article on beliefnet.com about a study done in 2000 regarding the effects of meditation on emotional health, and came across a telling observation made by the Dalai Lama in the course of that study. He'd noticed that in the Tibetan language, the word for compassion means compassion for yourself as well as other people, but in English it only means compassion for other people. He said "You're missing a very important word."

That's quite an insight. Here in the United States, we don't have the exposure to other languages that people do in many other parts of the world, so we seldom see that type of observation. It's fascinating that there are words or phrases in almost every language for which there is no direct translation in another, and those linguistic holes often tell you something about one of the cultures or the other, if not both. What does this particular omission tell us about our culture?

How often do you show compassion for yourself? I've spent a lot of time in my life mentally beating myself up over one mistake or another, sometimes years after the original mistake. It's one thing to learn from your mistakes, and another thing entirely to repeatedly and unnecessarily punish yourself for those mistakes. Any pain beyond that necessary for the lesson is pointless additional suffering. Learning to forgive yourself is a good start to learning to forgive others, so this is a concept well worth incorporating into your life.

Mohammed the Friendly Bear

For those who haven't heard about it, a British teacher working in the Sudan brought a teddy bear into a class of seven year old children and allowed the children to vote on what to name it. She intended to use the bear as the focus for a series of projects for the kids, asking them to do things like take it home for the day and write about what they did with it, for example. Some of the children were Christians, but as I understand it, most of them were Muslims. She asked the children for a selection of possible names for the bear, and they ultimately voted to name the bear Mohammed. It's a significant point that the Muslim children selected the name. The teacher didn't even choose the list of choices.

Some local Muslim adults protested when they heard about it, as using the name Mohammed for an animal could be perceived as insulting to the Muslim faith. The teacher has been charged with the crimes of insulting religion and inciting hatred. She could've been sentenced to 40 lashes, a year in prison, or a fine. She was sentenced to 15 days in prison and will be deported. Crowds of Muslims armed with clubs and knives reportedly showed up trying to find the prison in which she was being kept so they could kill her.

So let me make sure I've got this right. The teacher allowed a predominantly Muslim group of children to give a toy a potentially offensive name (assuming that she was even aware that naming an animal Mohammed could be offensive). The local people who went looking for her intended nothing less than premeditated murder. Who is insulting religion and inciting hatred?

I've tried to see this through Muslim eyes as best I can, and it still doesn't make sense to me. I understand that insulting Mohammed is one of the most blasphemous things that a person can do in the eyes of a Muslim, but isn't there any consideration of the intent of the person doing it? There's a world of difference between a person being accidentally offensive and a person intentionally insulting the local culture's most highly regarded values.

As I understand it, Muslim groups in various countries have come forward to show that not all Muslims believe this treatment of the teacher has been fair. Good! This shows us that most Muslims are decent, compassionate people, and those who were trying to kill this teacher are a misguided minority. When Muslims in Sudan are trying to kill someone over what appears to nothing more than an error made entirely in ignorance, is it any wonder that many people in the West have trouble seeing Muslims in a positive light?

Black Friday Magic

In what's become something of a tradition, one of my friends hosted an all day session of the Magic: The Gathering card game on Black Friday, since none of us wanted to brave the jungles of retail. I spent some time this past week making sure I had a decent mix of decks (old vs. new, previously successful decks vs. experiments, etc.) to use for the occasion, so I didn't get a lot done other than that and work during that time.

I've finally figured out how to solve my "too many decks" problem by focusing on a few at a time in a rotation system, and must've done a good job of choosing my deck mix, as I won a lot this past Friday, especially with my newest decks. For the benefit of those who play the game, you'll understand that getting a 23/23 creature into play (and keeping it there) is a lot of fun. I've puzzled out a few new things about how the game works, and I'm starting to see results from that.

I have two problems associated with my recent Magic obsession. One problem is that I have ideas for new decks (associated with my new ideas about the game) that I can't actually implement right now. I own the cards to implement them, but I've packed away most of my Magic cards (except for working decks and new cards) preparatory to eventually moving, and it'd be a royal pain to dig them out. I've written some notes to remind myself of those ideas later, but they're still lurking around in the back of my mind, taking up head space because I can't follow through on them.

This leads into problem number two, which is that my RPG writing has slowed because my mind has been elsewhere. Now that the Black Friday session has been played, maybe I can fix that, since it's unlikely I'll play much Magic until the new year. I did spend some time on the characters for my newest In Nomine scenario during this long weekend, though it felt more like paperwork than creativity. Hopefully I'll have more positive things to talk about by next week.

Rolling Right Along

I was able to get out to our storage unit and retrieve copies of my earlier convention scenarios more easily than I'd planned, which is a Good Thing. I should be able to finish "Fear Itself" very soon as a result.

"Too Much is Never Enough" for Don't Rest Your Head has been progressing nicely. I've had a few of those enjoyable moments in the last week, when I realized that things I hadn't intended to connect had come together in unanticipated and beautiful ways. This is usually a sign that I'm on the right track. I get the sense that this one's going to run like my Sorcerer games, which have gone well, on the whole. The main difference is going to be that surreal element. The rule book intentionally leaves the setting quite undefined, while still giving me a certain feel to shoot for, and I'd like to get it right.

I just received my copy of GURPS Martial Arts, which should come into play for the next installment of GURPS Cabal. I haven't had time to even look at the table of contents yet, but it looks like my next three projects are all making significant progress in the same week.

Current RPG Projects

I've made some progress on writing projects this weekend. I'm probably going to use the title "Fear Itself" for my newest In Nomine scenario, which is now finished except for the player character write-ups. I'm going to use characters who were NPCs in a prior scenario as the player characters for this one, so I'll have to wait until I can dig that scenario out of storage to finish up. Player character write-ups are fun for me, so that part's easy, once I get to it.

In the meantime, I'm moving on to the next project. I had a couple of options here. I'd like to have the next installment of my GURPS Cabal series ready for 2008, but I'd also like to do more indie stuff, since the prep time is usually much shorter. I had some ideas for a scenario for the indie game "Don't Rest Your Head", so I decided to do that one before anything else.

My working title is "Too Much is Never Enough", which essentially sums up the attitude of three of the four player characters (the fourth is veering into excess, but hasn't quite arrived there yet). I'm well into the character write-ups as a starting point for this one, and have some idea as to where I'm going in terms of plot, though I suspect this will play a lot differently every time, depending on the players' approach. GM prep time should be minimal for DRYH, so I should be able to finish this scenario before the end of the year without too much trouble.

I'm torn on what to do after that, and will probably just roll with my mood at the time. GURPS Cabal is likely, since I'll need it for DexCon 2008, but the other option is to be daring and write something to run at conventions using my own Fluid system. Fluid would be extremely low prep, but it'd be hard to draw players with it, and I'm not sure I'm ready to put it out there to the public yet without further refinement. I'll try it at PoliCon, if anything.

So looking ahead to 2008, I'll need to finish "Fear Itself" and "Too Much is Never Enough", plus write the next installment of GURPS Cabal to be ready, and I won't need a description for the Cabal scenario until March or so. I need to get back into the writing habit if I want to keep that schedule.

Another Shot of Fluid

My home roleplaying group assembled to play this past Sunday, and my expectation was that at the end of the session, we'd vote on whether to return to GURPS Firefly, continue developing Fluid Firefly, or do something else entirely. I was fully ready to proceed with any of those options. The group's decision was one that wasn't even on the chart.

The consensus of the group was to continue with Fluid as a system, and with Firefly as a setting, but reboot the campaign and start with an entirely new cast of characters. I truly hadn't seen that one coming. And so instead of playing that session, we spent the time creating a new cast of characters with (hopefully) better conceived personal relationships. Now I'm really curious about what the next session will bring.

The upside of this for me is that I keep the group's help in further developing Fluid as an enjoyable system to use for the campaign. It's a validation that the players liked the system enough to date to choose it when other options were on the table. It's a good sign.

On the downside, my GURPS GMing skills are bound to slide a bit from lack of practice, and I'll need them for the next convention season. But I suppose I could always run some kind of GURPS mini-campaign in the spring to get back up to speed.

Ethics for the New Millenium

Yes, it's been awhile again between posts. The excrement impacted upon the rotary oscillating device at work, and I was busy for a while.

In all of that, however, I managed to read a particularly good book, "Ethics for the New Millennium" by the Dalai Lama. In this book, the Dalai Lama makes a case that it's more than a Good Idea for human beings to get along; it's essential to our survival as a species. It all made so much sense to me. Highly recommended reading for anyone interested in the importance of human beings learning to get along and how they can do it. I'd cheerfully lend my copy to anyone who asks. The world just might be an incrementally better place each time someone reads this book.

I'm currently reading "Dalai Lama: Man, Monk, Mystic", which is supposed to be a biography, and reads more like a history of Tibet once you get past his childhood. I'd been hoping for a non-Buddhist's take on who he is as a human being, even though the book is officially authorized, but the books he's written himself tell me more about who he is than this one does. Informative, and I enjoyed reading it, but wouldn't recommend it unless you have a special interest.

I'm not sure what I'm going to read next, but I don't think it'll be about the Dalai Lama or written by him. :-)

Magic: The Obsession, Wedding Anniversary, and Other Stuff

The actual name of the game is Magic: The Gathering, but periodically it becomes an obsession for me, and this was one of those times. For those who may not know, this is a collectible card game representing a wizards' duel with cards in the same manner that chess represents two warring kings and their armies. The difference is that with Magic, you get to custom design your own army.

My wife has observed that I spend far more time in deck building than playing the game, and that's true. I used to buy a bunch of cards every time the newest expansion came out, then spend huge amounts of time making new decks and integrating the new cards into my existing decks. Then I realized that there weren't very many new cards making the cut into the existing decks, so I decreased the number of cards I was buying and decided that I would only integrate new cards into existing decks after each block of three expansions rather than after every expansion.

Even that has proven too unwieldy to continue, as I've spent far too much time this past week integrating new cards into a collection that's grown to over fifty working decks (not to mention the cards that haven't made it into decks for one reason or another). Considering that I usually play only about two dozen games a year with friends, it all seems ridiculous, and yet I don't want to stop buying a certain amount of new cards because building new decks with the new cards is half of the fun for me.

And so I've decided to change the new card integration process yet again. Without boring you with all of the details, it comes down to that I'll update the existing decks when I play with them, rather than when expansions come out. I'll set up a system to rotate through all existing decks so I won't spend so damn much time on this process in one shot.

I've recently finished the book "Broken Music", an autobiography from Sting. Considering that he's a songwriter known for his literate lyrics, it's not surprising that he does a fair job writing prose as well. I was hoping for some insights into the inner workings of the Police, which I didn't really get. Sting doesn't appear to have any more of a personal relationship with Andy Summers than you or I might have with any co-worker at the office, though he does speak highly of him as a professional. His personal and musical relationships with Stewart Copeland get some discussion, but there wasn't any information there that you couldn't have gotten from interviews from the Police era. What is interesting is that you learn more about what makes him tick as a human being. He grew up in some rough conditions, which might surprise those with a more highbrow impression of him. You can take the boy out of the neighborhood, but there's always some of the neighborhood in the boy afterward, and it comes through at times. The book is worth reading, even if you aren't a particular fan. If you are a fan, don't expect anything deep regarding the Police, but you can expect a better understanding of what makes their leader tick.

I also recently finished "Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman. I'd recommend it if you liked American Gods, though it's not as strong or as sprawling. It's a more personal story.

I'm currently reading "Ethics for the New Millenium" by the Dalai Lama. Inspiring stuff. Reading this, you can't help but see the logic of his approach and wonder why human beings have such a hard time getting along when we essentially agree about the things that really matter. Even before reading this book, I've never understood the common human tendency to insist on dictating to others how they should live their lives. I'm not that far into this book yet, and might have more to say about it after I finish.

I'm still overindulging with Netflix, and we've picked up a DVD collection of 50 classic horor films, so it's been movie week. More on that another time.

I've had the last week off, and my wife had Thursday and Friday to spend with me. We usually take vacation time for the week of our wedding anniversary. We felt as though we should do something special for it, but the fact is that neither of us could think of anything special that we really wanted to do, so for the most part we just rested and watched movies at home. We didn't even buy gifts for each other, though we did buy a new ring for her while we were on a day trip. It's been a relaxing week for me, but the work week calls, and I have no choice but to answer.

We're usually well stocked with Christmas and birthday gifts by now (we have a lot of fall and winter birthdays in the family), but that's not the case this year at all. For some reason, the effort put into preparation to move seems to have taken all of that kind of energy and left us disinclined to focus on that area of life. We didn't even do any special preparation for Halloween, which is normally a favorite holiday with us. We're not going to have any choice but to try to catch up in the next month or so, so it's probably going to be a busy November.

I usually get a lot of writing done during the vacation this time of year, but that wasn't the case this time, primarily due to the Magic obsession. It was my choice, so I can't complain. I hope to get back into writing mode along with my usual routine this upcoming week.

Don't Rest Your Head

Don Corcoran guest-GM'd a session of Don't Rest Your Head for my local RPG group on Friday night. I'd bought a copy at GenCon and read it through, but this was my first experience actually playing it.

I'd been a little concerned that we'd spend a lot of time in character creation and not enough time actually playing the game, but that turned out not to be a problem. Don did a great job taking character ideas presented by each of us and tweaking them to make them more setting-appropriate and help us interact in more interesting ways. I have to admit that my own character worked well enough in terms of the setting, but it might have helped if I'd had a more specific goal. It might've been a better character for a long term game than for a single session. Mike H's character was similar in that respect. I don't think we got more than a glimpse of where he could've gone with that character over time.

We started with bits introducing each individual character, occasionally drifting into each other's stories. It reminded me of some Sorcerer sessions I've played. It works well enough as long as all of the individual stories hold the interest of the players who aren't doing anything during that time. Don used the device of having players play the occasional NPC, which keeps everybody involved and brings a bit more color to the NPCs than if the GM played all of them.

The true highlight of the session was actually because of colorful NPCs. Dana and the other Scott played a couple of street corner drug dealers who had us all on the floor laughing. I think I'll have to find an excuse to throw a couple of similar dealers into the Firefly campaign somewhere. :-)

In terms of the actual PCs, Jason gets the award for best start to his story by teleporting into a children's birthday party while on fire. That's hard to match, never mind top.

Don ultimately brought all of the PCs together at an all night diner, where we were collectively attacked by surreal beasties after building up to it by our finding a couple of corpses apparently left behind by said beasties. This ending reminded me of how Call of Cthulhu has lost a lot of power for me because I can recognize most of the commonly used opposition from the smallest hints. In this session, I had no idea what our enemies might be capable of, and in a horror game that makes all the difference.

The game mechanics were clear and simple, yet flavorful, and everyone understood how things were supposed to work very quickly. I plan to run Don't Rest Your Head at a convention sometime if I can come up with enough interesting characters to do a good job of it. It might actually be easier for me to come up with a group with interesting interactions than a single character.

So thanks again to Don for GMing a quality session for us. I look forward to seeing the horror game of his own design that he was telling us about after this session.