The 2017 Self-Examination Roundup
Here’s a one-part diary, one-part itinerary, one-part aspirational documentation of what I did this past year as best I can explain it and we’ll see how well we go as we go with it. This wrapup is at least in part to look at what I did, but also to try and get a handle on my own feeling of yawning lack of accomplishment. If you didn’t do a lot this year and you get overwhelmed by lists, please don’t read this because it might make you upset. On the other hand if you want a wrapup of the kind of things I do and try to do… well, hey, checkit out.
Continue Reading →Why Pop Culture?
This year I’ve made a weekly feature of talking – in whole or in part – about something I can nebulously file as ‘media.’ So far that’s been focused on TV and movies, but there’s also been a web show.
I asked myself why I’m doing it – and it started out pretty simply. I wanted to make it weekly just to make sure if I had three or four things to say about a piece, or I wanted to talk about TV shows and media, I needed to space them out. The original purpose of this slot was to make sure I didn’t just go on long tears about TV shows as I netflix binged them and kept me from just making them all shoot-from-the-hip affairs. This formula worked out well and yet, even when I had a lot to say about a series, I could still at least spread it out and maybe do, say, a Theme Week.
At the same time, the question has been going on in my head of: Why do this stuff? Why do I talk about and think about TV shows like this? I started out by mocking Blacklist for its own internal lack of consistency, and how that was at odds with its attempts to present itself as a series about a Secret. Then I looked at ideas that informed the characters of Leverage in an attempt to encourage people to check out that series.
Why bring the tools of critical analysis to bear on this media that is, in many cases, designed to be meaningless? Is it a waste of time or effort? Is it a disservice? And am I just asking this question as a way to throw shade on the friends, often friends involved in doing their own analysese, who try to shut down conversations like this, as if their lack of interest in what I’m doing is, itself, a reason I should stop doing it?
First of all, to answer the first point, media people like is incredibly worthy of critical engagement. There’s this illusion that Things that Matter exist in a different space to Things That People Enjoy, and it just so happens that this tends to be seen as a way to separate Serious People from Not Serious People. This is a huge problem, really: People are left with the idea that ‘worth analysis’ and ‘enjoyable’ are literally at odds with one another. I believe in a world of play – where what we like doing is worth doing, and therefore, the things we like doing are given meaning by dint of being what we like doing.
Second, it’s kind of unhealthy to think that the stuff you like is above being considered. There’s this double standard where people want their things to be above or beyond criticism, want to act as if anyone critical of it can’t possibly know what they’re doing. I love Transformers, but I know it’s dumb. That it’s dumb though doesn’t mean it’s not full of all the same things as other media. It has messages, it has ideology, it has base assumptions. What’s more, we all have stories of ideas and philosophies we framed that we live in our day to day that we can trace back to media, even media that we consumed just for fun.
This year I wrote a – reasonably popular – twitter thread titled DRAGONBALL IS DUMB, and talked about a problem of the scaling in the storytelling. This then got popular enough that I got to watch the exact same argument being made at me, repeatedly, and sometimes including people who retweeted me, which I feel mortified by because the people who retweet me shouldn’t have to suffer this sort of nonsense.
A recurrent theme in the criticisms was:
- You’re wrong and your criticism doesn’t matter
- You’re right and your criticism doesn’t matter
Now look I know I made the twitter thread as a goof. It featured a graph joke for crying out loud… and my starting point was Dragonball is Dumb. And it seemed everyone agreed with me, but really didn’t like that I said that.
I mean, yeah, that’s the internet.
I’m basically against gatekeepering on both sides. I think these things matter and are worth analysing, and that may mean sometimes I point out that the thing You Love is silly or has silly stuff in it. I may point out a silly thing in Dragonball, and just maybe you’re not the Hot Take Squad you think you are when you try and make the same completely pointless unrelated argument about it afterwards.
Also, I like doing it. Especially because when I do these things, so often I find a really sweet optimism in most of the stuff I bother to look at. Examining a character deeply can be engaging and illuminating. It can show us things about ourselves, or what we notice or remember or value.
I do feel I need a term for it like Game Pile for convenient tagging, though. Still gotta work on that.
Anyway, the articles in this series I wrote this year I was most proud of are Iron Fist Week, The two parts on Miraculous, This Exists: BOB, and the stunning retrospective on MASK.
Decemberween: Zandra!
Okay, so you remember those Amerimanga covers I sometimes make as a joke? Turns out that someone took those jokes to suggest they were My Thing, and that meant she, very kindly, this year for my birthday, made me a manga cover –
-which I have wasted time making look like an actual book, because it’s the afternoon and I’m not good at managing my life. This image then led to people who followed her asking why it’s not a real book. this then led to her, as a lark, making a light novel. This then led to her selling that light novel, and people liking it and people asking for more and –
hey.
Zandra’s a light novel author now.
It is very, very hard to not be jealous, I’m not gunna lie.
Zandra is enthusiastic, creative and energetic. She seeks to do things that make people happy and promote a kinder world that is more conducive to people being able to make good choices about what’s good for them. You should check out Zandra’s work.
MTG: Jund Vomit Part 4
Ho nelly has this been a project! My desire to make a robust Jund deck for 1v1 commander, and to keep my individual articles about it reasonably sized has resulted in this beefy deck building process, but I hope it’s been interesting and useful to follow along. Now we just need to resolve one of the fundamental problems in my 1v1 Commander deck…
Step 5: That Whole Commander Thing
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the commander is literally not core to the way this deck works. There’s no commander in Jund who enters the battlefield and reanimates anything; there’s no commander who dumps a chunk of your library in your graveyard; there’s no commander who fits our theme. Which means our commander wants to be a card that we always want to draw and have a purpose.
Decemberween: Sav Ferguson
Yes, Christmas is passed, but that doesn’t mean we’re done with Decemberween. C’mon. Decemberween is a spirit, Decemberween lasts all the way to July.
Also, one thing this exercise has shown me is how few people I like and respect keep good online portfolios or presences. How many of us treat our twitter page like it’s our dang home page? That’s weird. Anyway, SAV FERGUSON!
Sav is a game developer, writer, radio presenter, and – albeit I believe amateurly – philosopher, who I met I think three times before finally, at GaymerX AUS 2017, we finally had a moment where I could finally remember who the hell I was talking to, because my memory is garbage.
A few weeks later, a Event in Games happened, and it hit close to my knuckles – and I angrily spat about how the people talking about it had no idea about the experience, because it was something I lived, and nobody I knew was talking about it from that perspective…
And Sav popped up and said ‘yeah, I know what I’m talking about.’
And then we talked about it and dissected the discourse going on around us.
Now I want you to understand how hard that particular exchange is for guys. Because I had just effectively challenged him – heck to you, you don’t know what you’re talking about – and he very legitimately shot back, saying that actually yes I hecking do. We could have just clashed against each other and stopped – but Sav’s more mature than that, and we were able to find our common ground and talk about a deeply troubling thing. I was impressed, genuinely so, especially in the middle of a time when everyone around both of us was shouting about a thing that upset us.
The most recent game release from Sav is That Boy Is A Monstr, a game about being queer and dating on a website. Check it out.
Game Pile: 2017 In Review
This year saw the resuscitation of the Game Pile, perhaps directly tied to my efforts to be taken seriously in games journalism again and the sudden cessation of my work on a honours thesis. In that time, I put out an article, meaning that despite starting mid-year, there have been 24 other game articles – 26 if you include this and the Dark Souls 2 diary.
This year I’ve played a lot of games, games from my game pile, marking off things from my extensive underplayed Steam library – which has been great for a feeling of accomplishment. Still, the Christmas sales are still ongoing, and the odds are good games I’ve referenced in the pile have been going on sale – so which do I think now, with months later, of games I liked? Did my opinion change any?
Christmas Morning, 2017
For Context: As with my Thanksgiving Day audio, a few years ago I learned that there are elderly people who write Thanksgiving day letters to unparented/unfamilied queer youth who feel alone and isolated during the holidays. This is my attempt to contribute to this genre. I apologise if it is too short or too long – this is something I do rarely.
It is very possible you might find this embarassing or cringey. You are not obligated to listen to this at all but I hope it gives you some comfort during the holidays.
Audio Download
Decemberween: Fox
Awww, yeah, yeah, yeah. Duh.
Of course I’m going to spend some time this month talking about Fox.
Fox Lee, my partner, is an artist, designer, writer and web developer. She manages our websites, writes ad copy, edits rulebooks and creates entire games on her own. Fox has made a free otome game, which is great, and I recommend you go try it.
This year, we released a game called Cafe Romantica, and I want to underscore of this 120-card, big card game, I did so little of the total product it is dizzying. Fox did the art, the backgrounds, the card faces, the wording structure and wrote the rulebook – even up to the night before the game launched.
Fox is great. Fox works hard, Fox holds work to a high standard, and Fox is often sharply contrasted with my positions – where I’ll work hard to get a product finished, she’ll hold things back to make sure they get done right. I love Fox, and you should check out her great work so you can send us money for how great she is.
Obviously I had to put this one up here, today, on Christmas Eve – because Fox sharing her life with me is the greatest gift I’ve ever received.
Story Pile: Transformers: The Movie
To some people, the best Christmas movie is Die Hard. To some, it’s Gremlins. To me it’s The Transformers Movie.
But you might point out that the reason those movies are held up as Christmas movies is because Christmas plays into them! And, wittily, they might say, there is something essentially Christmas-toned about them which will allow you to watch them on a technicality on your Christmas weekend, as if you need to cheat the rules to enjoy your own time off, or the smugness makes the experience sweeter. You might want to make a point of the use of Christmas as a central plot element in Gremlins and that’s great, but that’s not why The Transformers Movie is a Christmas movie to me.
The Transformers Movie is a Christmas movie for me, because it, to me, feels like Christmas.
Waiting On Today
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Carmel Morris
I make games using cardboard, paper, dice and tokens. I try to make spaces out of things that aren’t spaces. When I was young I would draw videogame maps on paper and describe how you fought through them. When I was older I would write up plan files and documents for
I have, my entire life, been invested to some extent in the transformative ability of representation in everyday objects. Simpler: I have always loved blank pieces of paper.
When I grew up in the church, there were a lot of conventional things we couldn’t have. Lots of conventional TV was monitored, group sports and play were limited access, and I didn’t have any friends who I could socialise with. I did however, have access to paper – blank paper that I could turn into things.
One of the things I loved to turn them into was paper airplanes. I was really lucky that at some point my parents bought me a soft-cover book called Fold Your Own Dinosaurs by a guy called Campbell Morris, and another book, later, The Best Advanced Paper Aircraft, by a dude called Carmel Morris. I read these books and their sequels obssessively, and I practiced and practiced and practiced. Ironically I rarely, if ever flew the planes – that would be disruptive. But I was always fascinated with the way paper could be made to make locks and keys into itself, the way you could make a structure that wouldn’t deconstruct on its own.
This year I bothered to google Carmel Morris, wondering if he was still alive, and if I could email him thanks for the childhood books.
Turns out that my entire life I’d been mistaken. Carmel Morris was a woman, and she was still making books about paper airplanes.
The last news story I found about Carmel Morris, she was auctioning her electric car off to raise money for environmental charities. Now there’s a message about the way that my upbringing hid the influence of women who were important to me, but that’s for another day.
Thank you for helping to instil in me a love of blank pieces of paper, Ms Morris.
EDIT: I was contacted by Ms Morris’ cousin, who confirmed for me the suspected narrative – that Ms Morris did indeed first publish under a masculine name, because publishers didn’t think boys would buy… a book with a femme name on it about folding paper airplanes.
Man, publishers are the worst.
MTG: Jund Vomit Part 3
Last week, we went through the process of dissecting an archetype like Jund, and then went to work on the 8×8 theory. We decided what our 8 piles would be, and this week, I’m going to go over those 8 piles, what’s in them, and the commander who will be in charge of them!Continue Reading →
Decemberween: 0xabad1dea
As with Rachel and Clay before them, I once more turn to point to someone I know, and love, and care about, who hasn’t had a fair shake.
Melissa Elliott, two ls, two ts, is one of those people who, if the 17th century wasn’t just the most awful, would have been one of those academic thinker types we sit around now wondering where they find the time. She’s done infosec research, drawn comics, built a twitter brand, built videogame AI, done some work on videogames, reverse engineered some things, won a My Little Pwnie award for her work in information security –
er, specifically for writing a silly song –
– and she’s written a gaslamp fantasy novel, which is part of a series, as well as a web series I’ve spoken about on the blog before.
Now, none of these are raging successes, by the standards we use to determine success. This is in part because none of us grew up in cultures that value artistic expression, and I know that moreso of Melissa’s upbringing because she and I shared a particular horrorshow that was American Fundamentalism. This is not an experience and a place that, let me tell you, does much to encourage the creative efforts of young women.
I am grateful this year that Melissa has been part of it – the whole way. I feel like a walking firework alongside her, where she needs some degree of quiet, some emotional space, and I, with my big loud idiot elbows smack into spaces that can distress her without even trying – but despite it, she still shares with me what she makes, and what she wants, and what she’s interested in, and that means a lot to me.
Incidentally, she hates card games, and that’s okay – because when I share what I do with my friends, I don’t do it because I want them to feel obligated they should like them.
Game Pile: Eco Quest
Since a part of my time this year was dedicated to revisiting some of the Lucasarts classics, and complaining at length about the way Sierra hecked everything up in their development of the point-and-click genre, I thought it was important to take a moment to draw attention to a time that Sierra made a better Lucasarts games than Lucasarts made… within some constraints.
Let’s talk about some 1990s Environmentalist Kids’ Culture, in the story of Eco Quest.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Can I Pet Your Dog?
The mighty Maximum Fun podcasting network may host the entire McElempire, with both MBMBAM and their related shows of which there are roughly a fifty hojillion fold (and I like that, that’s cool), but there is one show I found from an ad in My Brother, My Brother and Me, and it’s Can I Pet Your Dog.
Can I Pet Your Dog is almost impressively nothing. It is a short podcast of two people talking about their dogs (in early episodes, they did not both have dogs). They are not exceptionally or exquisitely funny. I mean, they’re funny, but it’s not uproarious comedy; I don’t find myself quoting it or recommending it (except here, I guess).
Can I Pet Your Dog is, however, inoffensive, sweet, and comforting. It is funny without reminding me of gross comedians; it does not feel I’m about to stray into realms of vile jokes or random political stuff about this person or that person and how dare they. It is, when I do find the time to sit down and tune in, a balm of comforting, simple, pleasures of owning a dog.
Decemberween: Clay!
It shouldn’t be a surprise that I’m fond of someone I record a podcast with. To counter the claims of nepotism, I want it known that I love Clay despite him routinely making fun of me for being related to a ventriloquist.
Now, Clay’s situation is such I feel reluctant telling anyone how great he is. I don’t feel comfortable waving my arms in the air and shouting about the glory of this wonderful friend, this thoughtful man who has had to learn twice as much as I did in half the time with worse handicaps.
As Rachel, Clay is someone who makes me sure the world would be better if people like them just had the freedom to make things, to tell stories, to care about the things they care about and not deal with malarkey like the right change for the drier and washer.
Three years ago I was told it was important for men to foster stable, emotionally mature relationships so they didn’t rely on women to take care of them. I tried that, I joke, then it turns out they were all girls. Despite all that, standing out from that, there’s Clay – who has had his own path through life from similar spaces as me, making him one of the few people I know who can get a lot of the things I normally need to spend so long explaining.
Death Note 2017 – The Netflix Movie
I think I’ve given this piece enough time to cook. Let’s get business sorted out nice and early.
Here’s your super simple review: it sucks. Oh, you liked it? Well, great, thanks for bothering to ask. I’m glad we could have this fascinating exchange of ideas. Here’s a link for you to continue the conversation.
If you’re actually interested in why I think this sucks, then here’s a fold and you can meet me on the other side. I’ll spoil some things about the manga and maybe, maybe, I’ll spoil something about the movie, if it warrants discussion.
Continue Reading →Decemberween: Ex Manus Studios!
This year has been our most active convention-going year. We have gone to almost a convention every two months – and every time, this year, we have done it with the company of Pendix, of Ex Manus Studios.
Now obviously I like Pendix. We’ve been friends for years, almost since high school. But it isn’t just that Pendix is reliable, and kind, and thoughtful – gee, I like a lot of people with those traits. What I want to highlight here is that Pendix is a person who craves to create.
If you sit around Pendix, idly, if there’s a table on hand and there’s just free time, he will have plastescine in his hand, and he will be sculpting. There’s a drive, an energy, a want to create going on there and I really admire and respect that. I work with fast media, I can see the results of what I do, and yet at the same time I can save almost everything I do. Pendix works in a medium that is slow and at times impermanent. If something goes wrong, the entire thing has to be destroyed.
It might just be that the man is patient beyond the measures of saints. I mean, he’s put up with me for years.
There is however, a lesson from him I want to impart: Wanting to create is enough reason to create. Pendix spent a lot of time practicing his craft before he started making models he could sell – I mean, like a decade of just hobby practice, doing things to see if he could do them. Your hobbies grow, and help you grow. They give you skills. And if you want to make things, you can just make them. Maybe one day they’ll take you places, but it’s okay if they never do.
It’s enough to love, for now, the doing of the act itself.
MTG: Jund Vomit Part 2
Alright, last time we talked about a purpose for a Commander 1v1 deck. Now we’re going to look at a deck like it, to look at a game plan, and then look at a useful theory for generating a first draft of a deck.
Decemberween: Ettin!
I am loath to be too nice, too quickly. I worry sometimes if this means that my first impression to Ettin was that I was a standoffish dick. In my defence, Ettin likes Death Note and FATE, two things I’ve been noisome about making fun of.
As a peer, Ettin is impressive. He has built community, and interest and fanbase for his work; he’s monetised it successfully, and he’s proven that he’s capable of repeating the success. He’s got good advice for anyone trying to do that and he expresses himself directly, honestly, and fairly.
He’s also done sterling work pushing back against pro-harrassment elements of the tabletop games industry. Without going into specifics, Ettin has tried to get rid of broken stairs in the industry as best he can, even when that involves endangering his own online space and infringing on his own potential for success. No, not everything is fixed, but I at least know where Ettin falls when there comes a time to Say Nothing And Get By or Tell Evil To Go Fuck Itself.
When I approached Ettin with ‘I’m thinking about X-‘ his immediate response was to try and set up a plan. He wanted to enable what I was trying – and even when it wound up not working out with the timetable we had in mind, it was still done helpfully and enthusiastically.
Ettin may have this form of deliberately self-deprecating humour that resists praise, but seriously, I’m glad Ettin helped me out this year.
Game Pile: Sorcery!
I wrote once about the Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston ouvre of gamebooks while working on my own designs. When I did it, I was struck momentarily with the thought: I wonder how hard it’d be to convert one of these gamebooks to Twine. It’d be an interesting little project, wouldn’t it? I can even see now the kind of way that you can make the combat system work, Twine can store a handful of variables – it should be okay, right?
Anyway, turns out someone else took one of the best examples in this library of gamebooks and went absolutely hambones on it.Continue Reading →
Decemberween: Ted
How to lead into a discussion of Ted… oh. Okay.
My Ordinary Life, Ep 535 –
Betrayed by Betrayal at House on the Hill pic.twitter.com/rzGKRGTxQ3
— Ted (@teioh) June 18, 2017
Ted is many things. Ted is an artist. Ted is an academic. Ted is a father, a fishmonger, a mormon, a missionary, and a friend. Ted is a person who, by the sheer mathematics of my own upbringing and perspective, I should not have become friends with. I’m a militant (!) anti-theist atheist (booo, throw rocks at him), and even then part of my upbringing included a section on hunting the cult of Mormon.
I am so glad none of that took.
Ted is a wonderful person. I talk to Ted most weeks. We talk about marking or students or research or applications, or we talk about anime, or, more often than not, he expresses incredulity at the utter ridiculousness of the latest thing I mentioned. Sometimes he consults on Asian history for game design. Sometimes he reality checks me. Sometimes we console one another about the way things are that shouldn’t have to be.
Ted is a good person, noble, and someone I am proud to know.
Decemberween: Rachel Stevens
And okay, while I have an older sister, I kinda have a younger sister, too.
Rachel Stevens is a writer and designer, though much more world design than game design. Rachel’s writing work is over on Women Write About Comics, a website which kind of explains itself just fine.
What I love about Rachel – well there’s a lot about Rachel I love, but one of the things I love about Rachel is she’s an enthusiast. She cares about books and movies and pulp and webcomics and transformer toys and gunpla and about her Vivian and about people being kind, and about fighting Nazis and about – even considering the state of things – doing an okay job.
Rachel is a modern tragedy in that if we had universal basic income, if she wasn’t stuck working the way she is for the work she’s got, she’d be running five goddamn series and making TV shows and graphic novels and videogames and so on. There is no meritocracy where Rachel is doing anything but being able to effortlessly, constantly create the visions of a better future she wants the world to have.
I got help from Rachel this year. In Sector 86, I asked her to name all the spaceships. Not all of the names she gave me got used – you might know if you recognise them – but here’s the sheet of initial notes she gave me.
Hey Rachel. I love you, and you are wonderful, and you matter. Thank you for being part of my life, you gigantically hopeless lesbian with teen tiny hands.
Star Trek Discovery
Courtesy of my weird childhood, I never really was a Star Wars person or a Star Trek person. My sister and mother watched Star Trek on VHS rental when I was older, but there never really was any sense to me that these shows were a thing to watch. They were just a show on the television sometimes. Heck, I didn’t realise there was an actual arc to these shows – they weren’t like my continuity-driven, beloved and intellectual Robotech.
(Give me a break)
Point is, I’ve never been a Star Trek person. It’s not my thing, it’s never been my thing, and aside from being aware of the term ‘trekkie’ I never really got how or why the series actually played into this subculture. It was a show, it happened to other people, they loved it, and they maybe got a bit weird about it, but I got a bit weird about Transformers, so I wasn’t one to judge.
With all that in mind, when I saw people talking about Star Trek: Discovery, and complaining about it on all sorts of levels (it’s being distributed weirdly), and finding out that here, in Australia I can just watch it on Netflix, I popped open Netflix and had a shot.
And,
well.
Hey, wow, Star Trek is pretty cool!!
This series starts with – and some mild spoilers here, just structural ones – with a really interesting premise to me. Our protagonist isn’t a leader or a powerhouse or a figure of authority who makes final calls, but is instead someone in the midsection of hierarchy; she has to make decisions as best she can based on what’s going on around her, but doesn’t have the latitude to make a lot of free-wheeling, cowboy-captain style solutions, or back up her position authoritively in a negotiation of rules. There’s also her history, and the way her upbringing created a really interesting tension that highlights something cool to me about the universe she’s part of.
I don’t rightly know if Discovery is a good or a bad series, but I know I’m enjoying it three episodes in, and it even did something I found weirdly comforting. Episode 3 introduced a ‘science’ thing that I think is going to show up and be important to the rest of the story. It’s also total nonsense, which actually works for me, because it indicates that this isn’t going to be a series about establishing hard science fiction rules, and instead wants to talk about concepts and ideology that are more about where we are now, and use a framing device of a future that we want to get to.
The main character, Michael, is a mess of elements in conflict, and I like the ways I see the storytelling signalling it. First of all, there’s just the very basic conflict of her name. Normally when we go to the future in stories, we tend to treat elements of culture as reasonably static – look at how the original Star Trek didn’t really feature a lot of trans or queer characters; it looked forward to the question of race but that was a conversation that was already happening.
Michael’s name could be seen as queer-signaling but I don’t think it is. I think it’s taking the much simpler route of making us look at her and feel dissonance. We go ‘that’s a boy’s name’ in our culture (which, yes, is silly, but it’s definitely how the name is coded and don’t pretend that that reaction is unusual). That’s one point of contention – a now, versus a then. There’s her backstory of pure logic contrasting with an impetus of emotional perspective. There’s the tension of being a central character in a wide-open space while being beholden to the orders and mandates of the control structure around her. This leads to actions that are,
I find this really interesting!
I’m actually a bit sad hearing now,now the series is underway and going on, to see people around me talking about how it’s not that good or offering a sort of conciliatory well if the third episode is where it started tone or trying to fix a series that’s, what, three episodes long at the time of writing?
It’s a bit sad, to me. It’s weird, too – because to me, this isn’t a series trying to live up to a huge reputation. I don’t have a feel of what Star Trek should be, or how it’s meant to work? I just have, well, no real opinion. This is a pretty interesting science-fiction series, which frames itself as having a long history that we can discover, a huge infrastructure so the stories aren’t about how to get into space, and a canvas that features an enormous potential war on the horizon and a central character whose main story seems to be about an interesting contest between a logical and emotional contest.
That all seems, to me, to be pretty cool.
Decemberween: My Nephews
I don’t do a lot of information leaking on the internet. I don’t put things out there that can connect you to People Around Me. If I take photos of people it’s either at an event with their permission and permission to share, or it’s without identifying marks. I have been, therefore, pretty careful about giving out information about my family as much as I can. It may be news somewhat to some of you that I have an older sister.
My older sister has a pair of sons.
Those sons, my nephews, are great.
They are not remarkably great. Alright? I have to level with you. They do exactly what kids do, which is they shout and they jump from idea to idea, and they don’t listen to you and they’re prone to forgetting what they’re doing in that way that, let me tell you, I would be super annoyed if a coworker did it, I mean just my word how irritating. Their fashion sense is also just awful, and they haven’t read any of the classics. Shout out to my sister for having the stamina to support the little goons.
On the other hand, they love games.
I have told this story and will tell this story many times more, but I’m putting it here. There are three games in our catalogue that I made explicitly because I went to my parents’ place and hung out with my nephews and they learned I made games. We talked about it, we talked about what that meant, and they talked about things they thought games should be about, what games should do.
Then I went home and I made those games.
Some games I couldn’t make. I couldn’t make the game called GOOD COP, LOLLY COP – which conspicuously, came about when I told them we couldn’t play GOOD COP, BEAR COP, because they were too young and wouldn’t understand it. But these kids are part of my life and I am happy to be part of theirs.
This year I made a protracted plan to try and visit my family every month – at least once. I didn’t do it every month – but the point we knew was we tried. We knew we wanted to go every month, we knew we expected to. There was one embarassing day when I turned up at my parents’ place and nobody was home, and I just piled into the bus and went home.
This year has featured an effort to draw together tighter the love and the need of my family to be connected. To shoulder the people closest to me and to know they are willing to shoulder me. There are unfortunate choices ahead of us, but I’d rather face it together.
MTG: Jund Vomit Part 1
MTGO recently – like, around August – decided to decouple themselves from the EDH Council for online play, based on players primarily focusing on 1v1 commander on MTGO. I’ve not been very interested in Standard right now – not sure why, I think it’s the loss of Eldritch Moon and the failure of Ixalan to excite me for constructed – so instead I’ve been playing Commander 1v1.
The two things about Commander 1v1 that appeal to me the most are that it’s a high-variance format, and its card pool is well, kinda-vintage. It’s wide enough that I can play with some old favourites that had already left Standard by the time I saw them, but the investment to get involved isn’t like getting into canlander, legacy or vintage.Continue Reading →
Decemberween: Oh, Cae!
I have this friend – Caelyn – who is an absolute sweetheart. She’s thoughtful and smart, and willing to share her experiences and her storytelling whenever. Her stories, the things she wants to tell are often about change, in some way, but the content of the stories aside, she has this wonderful sense of technological possibility. Cae spends her time, when she’s working on things, testing the limits of what she can do with a form. Sometimes that’s just a document, sometimes it’s Twine, sometimes it’s moving things from format to another. Sometimes she’ll write fanfic of games, and sometimes she writes games that are fanfic – and she does it all, with this endless, wonderful sense of exploration
Cae is a good friend, but even that aside, she is creative. She makes things I like to try out and look at and even those things she makes that don’t click with me hard – because hey, let’s face it, I am still always going to be a Cis Boy Who’s Never Had An Attack Of The Genders – are always worth experiencing because they are interesting. Cae is a person who tries things, and when they don’t work perfectly, looks at what she got out of what she tries.
Cae is great and you should check out her stuff:
Game Pile: Rise of the Triad (2013)
As a gamer who went through the bulk of the period known as the golden era of the FPS and the rise of the console to the impoverishment of the PC in the cultural cachet of gamer culture, I have childhood memories of plumbing my way through the games media of the time that wasn’t focused on control sticks and how great the Playstation or Nintendo were, and that means that when people talk about ‘hey remember when’ I almost always have a bunch of ridiculous examples that nobody else, largely remembers. I’m that annoying guy who bothered to memorise the lineage of film history that leads from Hitchcock to Tarantino and wants to take any opportunity to tell you about it, only for PC shareware videogames, a field that could not matter any less but still has a direct line in it from Marcus Fenix back to furry porn then back further to sticking a fish in a door.
For the majority of you, this isn’t the case, so let’s talk about Rise of the Triad.
Decemberween: Generation IV
I love some dorky superhero roleplay. Ever since City of Heroes I got in the habit of just enjoying the stories I could tell, the ways I could play in story universes that care about superheroic elements and the tropes of superheroes. I like sidekicks. I like superfamilies. I like doom robots and death rays and I like capes and costumes and I like all of these things.
I love Generation IV, which is a roleplaying setting ran and maintained by a handful of friends. Gen 4 hasn’t been super busy lately – in part because some of the major players have had major life shifts and vacations – but it’s something that I’ve really loved to be able to go to throughout this year. It is a thing that my friends made and for which I am grateful.
Decemberween: Hannibal
If I want to tell you about my roleplaying character, that’s dorky. If I want to tell you about my friend’s roleplaying character, that’s inspiring.
This time last year I was involved in the beleagured RP community for the Secret World, which is urban gothic horror. In TSW, you had these global conspiracies based on particular varieties of fictive representations of ancient conspiracies – awkwardly in the representation of Asia, but pretty great as it pertained to Roman era stuff. Particularly, there was an enemy faction that showed up at the end of the game, to represent a threat for all parties, the Phoenicians.
There was a lot of work done by fans to build roleplay stuff, and in this space, one of my friends, Leastwise, came up and one day started playing a character going by the name Hannibal, who spoke about the sea and empires and overcoming great odds. He was urbane, he was stylish, and he crystallised the Phoenician characterisation into a space that let a lot of us other players latch on to it. Hannibal was a humanising element to the faction and with it came such a wonderful personality. The twist? It wasn’t just Hannibal The Name, he was Hannibal Barca, the actual warlord of Ancient Carthage. And under that jovial, fatherly frame, Hannibal boiled with rage at the Empire, at the people who had taken his home from him, and he had spent centuries nursing that grudge. The player wove this wonderful mythology in the empty space of the game, and created a really interesting, engaging faction building on real histories.
At one point Hannibal, the player, by a series of successful negotiations and people operating on incomplete information, successfully took control of the city of Las Vegas, during a RP event with over thirty players involved – resulting in a coup for the Phoenicians that the player just pulled off by just listening and talking.
I don’t play TSW any more, and I miss, so badly, being able to play alongside Hannibal.
Vandread
Vandread was an anime that came out in the year 2000 and it’s a bit tricky to introduce because everything it is it’s also not quite. It’s a harem anime, but not quite. It’s a space giant robot anime, but not quite. It’s a science fiction anthology anime, but not quite. It’s about genders, but not quite, about relationships, but not quite, and about identity, but not quite. In a lot of ways, Vandread is a really confused piece, a gem of its time.
The premise of Vandread is – okay, hold on – there are these two planets of entirely gender-segregated populations reproducing through artificial means that been at war with one another for centuries because the men planet thinks the women planet eat liver and it’s all cast as a propoganda war, where our main character such as he is Hibiki is working in an awful factory job that dehumanises him. He stows away on the warship that holds a mecha he helped to build, to try and steal it, because he’s an idiot, and then Lesbian Pirates attack as the warship is about to go show off how great it is. A Space Accident ensues and the warship is swallowed in part by the pirate ship, which then becomes an Extremely Sweet Ship with three male prisoners on board – Hibiki, and two other guys from his own home culture, a doctor and a navigator. The ship is then flung out into the middle of nowhere and our cast have to work out what happened, why their cultures are the way they are, who they are and why some of the mecha and space-ships they have can now combine into a powerful Vandread Unit.
Oh yeah, the shapeshifting robot thing comes up, and there’s also these unidentified attackers who keep trying to kill them.
This is the first episode.
Vandread then follows an almost Star-Trekky kind of plot arc where they move from place to place, and each new episode brings a new problem they handle and learn a bit about the overarcing plot. Sometimes it’s a internal drama on the space-ship, Hibiki learning he’s a doofus, or sometimes it’s going to a new planet and finding out there’s a problem there. The plot on this one kind of unfolds, but it’s also much more of a story about a world as a concept than it is about anything the story wants to say with that.
For all that Vandread is a story about segregated genders, though, there are two really weird points to it – and they get a bit spoilery, so I’ll jump on the far side of a cut for that, so you can avoid it.
Continue Reading →Announcing: Decemberween 2017!
I had a whole month of writing planned about December, which has all just been bumped to January. I don’t think anyone’s going to be spending their December trying hard to crack some personal puzzle about how to make paper look torn, or looking for a project that’s just waiting for the right artist to bring it to life.
In this month, we’re going to continue Game Pile, weekly TV and weekly MTG articles, as normal – but in the intervening days? It’s all going to be me telling you about something a friend does that I think is cool. No long-form articles or big goofy work, just sincere, honest appreciation for the work of people I love.