Monthly Archives: March 2021

March 2021 Wrapup!

Curse this Smarch weather!

But March is over and we’re moving on to April! March lacks a theme, which means that anything I wrote in February and went: Hey hang on, this doesn’t relate, got bumped. And thus, I present to you something you can read that directs you to other stuff you can read, that’s all fun and good.

What did we get in the Game Pile? Two videos, and two text articles. The videos were on Second Sight, and how meritocracy is fake and Games Journalism is fundamentally broken, and on how Minecraft doesn’t have anything like Goblins and how that’s? interesting? I also tackled the digital Root board game and how it isn’t quite the same thing as the physical game, but how that can be a good thing, and finally, I took some time to take down Genewars, a 1996 RTS. Man, 90s RTSes are just a genre for me to poop on huh.

The Second Sight video was something I was pretty proud of, especially because there’s some techniques in that that I was afraid would look dumb and bad and it didn’t.  The process of turning a 1500 word article into a video produces a video of about that length, which I think is good, since it means that there’s no reason to just list a series of things that happen in the game and to instead try to focus on what the game is trying to do.

In my efforts to not just become an anime review blog, I wrote about some deliberately oddball stuff. I talked about Chess, a really good musical that fits almost too well into modern discourse about what gamers think matter. I briefly talked about Until This Shakes Apart, a new album by Five Iron Frenzy I’ve been listening to in parts to repeat for months now. I got a single anime article in with The Ascendance Of A Bookworm, which I love a lot and will still use to tease Nixie. I talked a little bit about the way medium influences content with the book series of the Muddle-Headed Wombat. And finally, just a few days ago, I talked about complicated feelings around the series Black Books, which was made by a dreadful dickhead.

What else do I recommend you check out this month? Well, there are two pieces that were put up as part of a sort of ‘Hi, I like you and I like knowing what you like’ Birthday celebration: my article on being Edelgard in 4e D&D, and my article on the Hindren in 4e D&D. These were both little hat-tips to friends near their birthdays, and it seems they were well received, but they also were just, you know good content for if you’re into 4e D&D. While we’re talking about building in other games’ spaces, I wrote about how I use ‘pushed’ when talking about custom magic cards and how Competeitive Commander is essentially building its own game in another game.

On other topics, there’s an article about The Games Of Orcs, which is worldbuilding for nonhuman cultures in fantasy settings. This was really fun to research and involves a lot of thought about the sheer mechanisms of what goes into folk games. I also wrote about how to handle gods based on my own thinking for the gods of Cobrin’Seil, and there’s a piece about how character creation needs to avoid Owlbear Traps because they don’t work.

Game-making practice, there’s one big one: I broke down the rules of my game Die Rich after finally, finally, finally getting a chance to playtest it with some real humans. Also, Fox and I talk about how we’d design Pokemon to fill some holes in the type lineup. It’s a long conversation, about an hour, but you might like it!

Finally, I did write about three equally important political topics; that a dedication to nonviolence doesn’t mean an abdication of a willingness to use force, that Rush Limbaugh is fucking dead, and that Garfield is probably white and Heathcliff is probably black.

Next up, here’s this month’s T-Shirt. Thanks to 2020 I never got to show students my original Naruto-style did you check the subject outline, but I wore it to class this year and they loved it, so it inspired another, updated version of the same idea. I expect I’ll make more on this theme.

March has featured some illness, which in our current situation kind of slowed things down more than I expected. I have two classes going this semester, and they’re both exciting and interesting and I’m talking to students who seem to be split into ‘let me pass and let me out’ and ‘I am genuinely interested in this,’ which is a good split to have. An important piece of PhD documentation got completed and handed in and now I’ve been working on the research part of that, which is exciting. I’m basically finding I have a little more time than I thought I did – that the kind of administrative work of the research project is less arduous than the work I’m enjoying doing, which kind of stands to reason. I even participated in a twitter event with other educators, about games, and got to get them to read ‘Gamification is Bullshit,’ which is

Fun.

Weirdly, I know I said this last month, but another friend had to bow out of a game I was running. In this case, it wasn’t mental health, it’s that they’re a parent to a two year old, and time in the evenings has become precious. Oh well!

MTG: March’s Custom Cards: Boros Blessings!

March is over, and as I’ve been doing so far this year, it’s time for another round of custom cards! Despite what you may think if you’ve dealt with me on the subreddit, I am not against white getting good stuff. In fact, I’m a firm believer in white’s weakness in Commander presenting an exciting area to put new and interesting things rather than just recoloured Concentrate. It goes even moreso for Boros, where I see their flavour space as full of interesting potential, that largely goes untapped as people just try to fix their problems with the same simple tools of ‘but what if blue,’ and ‘what if I make something overpowered?’ Thus, this month, I’m back to the ‘what about white in multiplayer?’ hobby horse, and we’re looking at Boros Cards. Some quick rules on this front:

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Story Pile: Black Books

Black Books is a short British TV series, available on Netflix and other less reputable streaming services, that was made in 2000 through to 2004. It means that this series is twenty years old and oh goodness me I am old now.

The series Black Books follows the … let’s be very generous and say ‘life’ of Bernard Black, a second hand bookstore owner in London who hates his job and hates his customers and hates having to do his taxes and hates restocking. It is, on a very deep level, an entire sitcom oriented around the story of a misanthropic shopfront owner, which may read as very true to life if you’ve ever encountered this kind of shopowner. Now, he’d be content to just boil away in his horribleness on his own, occasionally prodded into activity by his ‘friend’ next door, Fran, but then one day, circumstances bring Manny Bianco, a bohemian accountant into his life shortly before an incident of violent assault by some skinheads.

It’s a show that does a lot of weird stuff without spending a lot of money on doing weird stuff. You’re more likely to get weird people saying weird things than special effects, but it does a good job of showing off those weird things.

Black Books is one of those small-cast, small-season British comedy shows that leaves the more sitcom-oriented viewers wondering where the rest of the show went – you can watch all eighteen episodes and think ‘oh that was a short season,’ only to find that was the whole show.

It’s really good, it’s funny, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, and you’ll see, if you watch it, a small who’s who of British comedy people from twenty years ago, people who have since moved on to do solo shows or more prominent roles on their own. Particularly there’s the excellent Bill Bailey’s Guide To The Orchestra, which should be available for free on Youtube at the moment. Dylan Moran’s done solo shows and Tamsyn Grieg went on to lead Green Wing. Great stuff all.

 

Sooooo…

We’re done, right?

Right?

Weeeeellll…

Content Warning: Transphobes

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The Circumbendibus of Haruhi Suzumiya

Anime is an art movement that has encapsulated thousands of different competing threads and there’s no true centralising canon because it’s fragmented across all sorts of cultural anchor points. Australians of my age that are into anime so often got started because Aggro’s Cartoon Connection screened Sailor Moon, the ABC screened Astro Boy, Cheez TV screened Teknoman and SBS, in the late 90s, screened Neon Genesis Evangelion, meaning that those four anime are sometimes seen as ‘common ground’ topics. Common ground for one age bracket in one country, and even then, only sometimes.

There are some events that can be looked upon, in the english-speaking anime fandom, though, in terms of their impact on shared cultural spaces, typically conventions, but also just, anime releases that somehow managed to be widespread enough at the right time that they became foundation to the conversation. The big three of Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. Evangelion movies. Fullmetal Alchemist, then Fullmetal Alchemist again. A collection of trans girls and boys and nonbinary people that can trace a lineage from Ranma 1/2 through to Kampfer and Haku and Soul Eater and maybe a few tracing lines to Vandread.

There is a category of people I can annoy enormously by responding to a Touhou picture with which anime is this from?

There’s only so much room for any given series to suck up a lot of the oxygen in the fandom space. You can’t typically have five or six ‘big name’ anime that ‘everyone’ has an opinion on. One of those ‘event’ Anime, that rose, became incredibly prominent, and then deformed the culture at large, becoming one of the rings in the tree trunk that is this strange cultural enclaves, was the enormous franchise known as Haruhi Suzumiya.

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How To Be: Edelgard von Hresvelg (In 4E D&D)

In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:

  • This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
  • This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritive but as a creative exercise
  • While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
  • The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.

Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.

Now this month, we’re going to return to How To Be’s roots, and once more we’re looking at a character from Fire Emblem: Some Number Of Houses. Yes, it’s the gal who’s Horny For Priest Murder (And For Other Reasons), the Look Up Other Reasons People Like Her, the One, the Only: Edelgard von Not Pronouncing That!

Game Pile: Gene Wars

Genewars is a 1996 videogame release from games industry innovator and technology boundary pusher Bullfrog, at the height of their heady, genre-establishing, world-shaking PC gaming juggernaut status, overseen by the pandimensional fish-hoarding gamer genius explorer boy and repeated game revolutionary Peter Molyneux. After inventing the God Game genre with Populous, the RTS genre with Powermonger, perfecting the spatial management game with Theme Park, redefining flight simulator games with Magic Carpet and creating the fantastically engaging real-time squad based strategy dystopian cyberpunk offend-em-up Syndicate, but just before all-purpose warm-fuzzy-feelings inspiring Dungeon Keeper, Bullfrog announced a new RTS game called Genewars.

The premise of Genewars up front was that you weren’t going to buy units from a list, like some kind of plebian, Commanding and Crafting. You were going to create your own units, based on stitching together the DNA of species on the planet, and the possibilities were endless.

And from this perfected and extremely shiny forehead of Peter Molyneux, what could spring, but excellence?

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4e: The Hindren

Hindren are a type of cervitaur (‘part deer, part-humanoid, with four legs and two arms’) people you can meet in the indie videogame Caves of Qud. They’re originally a fan creation by indie bespoke curio crafter Caelyn Sandel, before they were implemented in the game proper in part thanks to the efforts of new Caves of Qud writer Caelyn Sandel, which meant they were present in the game to be streamed by Grahu-Rubufo, the Caves of Qud vtuber (voice acted by Caelyn Sandel).

Here, in this article here, is a version of the Hindren that you can bring to the table in your D&D games, as long as you’re playing 4th edition and have a DM that’s understanding about gay deers. Why now? Why am I doing this? Because it’s someone‘s birthday soon, and she’s lovely, and I like what she does.

Art Source: Phineas Klier. Don’t like the watermark? Go check out his work, it’s clean and big there!
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The Unused Pokemon Types, with Fox Lee (@MunchlaxRegrets)

This audio was originally recorded in March 2020. The intention was to use this audio, along with some video editing of our own original art, to demonstrate the designs we had in mind. Turns out that was a bad time to commit ourselves to a big project idea that maybe required drawing lots of art.

Nonetheless, here’s an hour and change of Fox and I discussing the different unused Pokemon types, and what we’d do to fill those design spaces, and how the ice type sucks.

Story Pile: The Muddle-Headed Wombat

There are fifteen books that could be called Muddle-headed Wombat books. They have such titles as The Muddle-Headed Wombat And The Invention and The Muddle-Headed Wombat Is Very Bad. They are all pretty simple and formulaic narratives following the central character of Wombat, who is muddle-headed, his best friend Tabby, who is convinced that nobody in the world has suffered like him, and his other best friend, Mouse, who is a Mouse.

The stories follow a pretty consistent pattern: Wombat gets an idea inspired by some passing fancy or local event, and tries to get involved, gets it all a bit wrong because he’s a bit stupid, the friends have a bit of a tiff because someone is being a jerk, and then they sort it out by communicating and forgiving one another for their very understandable limitations. They all go home and have lemonade, or a tea cake, or something.

It’s all very low-stakes high-emotion narrative, because it’s aimed at five year olds, but it has a sort of easygoing charm that makes it easy to enjoy as an older reader. Oh, the plots aren’t interesting, not in a truly complex way, but there’s a lot to be said about the way that the stories put weight on finding fault and blame – there’s a lot of effort put in the way the stories flow that the story seldom treats accidents or happenstance as a get out clause for a character being a dickhead to someone else.

Iiiii love this character. I love the illustrations, I love the language, I love the charming simplicity of it all, and I love the way the stories breeze on by. I love the people who respond to this character by laughing and remembering his silly phrases or the way he fell about and kicked his fat little legs in the air. It’s so wombatty with Wombat’s stubbornness and his near indestructibility meaning that he’s not in danger of harm as much as he is in danger of upsetting someone or being upset. It’s a story full of feelings!

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Iteration on Experience

I play Picross pretty regularly. It’s a simple little game that my computer can pull up in a browser window and then I can belt through a game, or fail at it, very quickly. It’s something I’ve been doing pretty much on and off since Fox got me into the game in a waiting room at a doctor’s.

Picross, or a nonogram, is something I’ve written about in the past. The tool I use generates random ones within a particular difficulty grade, and you can ramp it up or remove elements that make it easier whenever you feel you need to. For me, this means that my personal limit on picrosses is around 15×15, no-mistake wins, with the occasional exception for unwinnables. I’m not amazing at them, but they’re functionally infinite and I don’t find myself holding onto great examples so I can share them around.

Though maybe I should.

Chances are if you’re on youtube, you’ve seen some of those specialised channels for dealing with particularly dense, high-potential games like Chess, where there are dozens and dozens of chess channels that want to break down famous games, or explore potential games, or just talk about games in progress as puzzles. In this space, there’s the fairly well known Cracking the Cryptic, which does Sudoku puzzles (and other things, they promise, but, I mostly see Sudoku puzzles).

I haven’t picked up Sudoku as a skill, mind you: I’ve just been observing it, from this other channel, and something I find most interesting is the ways that the people involved get very familiar with making intuitive leaps that they then explain. They’re not guessing – they just see solutions, and then they have to back-fill the explanation, to bring you along with them on their path of logic.

When I start on Picross now, I tend to see how quickly I can get the basics laid down – I know the numbers that matter the most to the kind of things I can do, I’m familiar with certain patterns that reach further than you think, and that means that I have tools that make approaching a Picross puzzle a little bit quicker. Not fast by any means, but it gets some of that initial friction out of the way.

Tonight, as Youtube brought on another Cracking the Cryptic to me, the puzzle involved ‘thermometers’ and that yielded someone describing the way you can slide numbers forwards and back, but you have limited space, and that gives you information you can work from. It was a small detail, but it made me sit up and go: Oh, like 4s in those regions.

And just like that, I was seeing the way these skills translate. I didn’t study Picross, I just played it a lot. Playing it a lot resulted in familiarity. Familiarity made it easier to play a lot. The systems of games feeding one another, and only when you put that in a different context do you see the way that familiarity can be turned into actionable, practical, pragmatic result.

CoX: Brambles

Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose.  This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.


In the fey realms, there are courts; courts overseen by great powers, lords of realms or even of ideas themselves. The greatest and vastest powers, strange and incommunicable, are overseen by the Great Courts, with the fey royalty, the names people know, the names so important that they slip through even into the mortal’s realms.

But one court, the Court of Voids, lays hidden and secret, ancient beyond even the knowing of the Fae. A mystery of mysteries, with its Secret Queen, She Who Touches As Iron. Precious and few are the fey of this court, paying fealty to this secret queen, with blessings of stealth, secrets, combat and healing for the maimed.

His name, he says, is Brambles, and he lays fealty to this Secret Queen. But the Secret Queen wants secrets and justice – and where better to find those than the City of Heroes? 

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T-shirt: Did You Check The Subject Outline, Sci Fi Version

First up, the design:

I have a shirt like this already, which I wore to my first of one of two classes this year. When I did, students all reacted positively to it, and I am an absolute sucker for even the most modest elements of praise. And so, here’s another familiar design that builds on this same joke.

Here it is, check it out on models:

You can buy this design on Redbubble with Blue Text, Yellow Text,White Text, and Black Text.

The Games of Orcs

In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga argues that it is not that games are a byproduct of culture, but that games represent the defining aspects of the formation of culture. That is, ‘making games’ and ‘playing’ are things you do before you get to the stage of having ‘a culture.’ And that’s exactly as much as we should listen to Huizinga about what and who counts as having ‘a culture,’ because it gets a touch yikesy with all the colonialism.

Nonetheless, Huizinga does argue that games are part of the formation of culture, and he suggests the way that animals with proto-cultures play games is itself a step on that path towards creating a culture. Wolves and birds play with one another to learn, and that implies that there’s a connection between playing and learning, and learning, the assumption runs, turns into civilisation and waistcoats and brandy eventually.

I don’t think that Huizinga was a furry, but I’m saying he’d see top-hat wearing waistcoated werewolves and go ‘yes, that.’

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The Tragedy of Big Willie

There’s this song. It’s called Big Willie Broke Jail.

Big Willie Broke Jail Tonight

Song’s pretty cool, I like it, I like some of the subtle details about it – like this is about a community being deputised to deal with a dangerous criminal, rather than about ‘the cops’ doing it. It’s got a good rhythm to it, and if I, an uneducated person on the matter, might call it ‘Mexican.’ This is the earliest version by a guy called Gus Backus, who is primarily known nowadays as a Schlager singer in Germany. He passed away in 2019.

I don’t like this version, not really? It’s a recording from the 1960s, and it shows – the mixing makes him sound kinda ‘soft’ and underwater, his enunciation isn’t quite my style, and while the music is fun, it’s a bit simple-sounding? I don’t mean to sound like I know how to do better, but I just know I like music that feels a bit more like the people involved are having fun. Definitely a 1960s country song style.

And now, unbelievably, Content Warning: some mentions of child sexual assault.

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Story Pile: Ascendance of a Bookworm

It’s something of a meme that ‘light novel series’ is a subgenre of anime that throws up some warning signs. It shouldn’t – after all, two of my favourite anime of all time are both from light novels, but traditionally the field of light novels are known as being primarily harem or isekai anime, often being quickly produced to cash in on recognisable or marketable characters. Often these characters have some particular visual motif that makes them very recognisable and makes for good merch opportunities. Well, Ascendance of a Bookworm is an anime that started its life as a series of light novels, and it is an isekai, and it features a recognisable main character who has a lot of good merch opportunities.

It’s just that she’s also five.

The premise! Urano Mototsu, college nerd and bibliophile dies in a hilarious bookshelf-collapsing incident during an earthquake. Upon her death, she wakes up in a new body, in a fantasy kingdom, which should be considered rather rad, except Urano was not someone who lusted after adventure in fantasy kingdoms, she lusted after books which are pointedly absent in this fantasy kingdom, and her new body, Myne, is also five years old.

What you then follow is a sequence of narratives about a five year old girl personally trying to catapult herself up the tech tree in order to have access to books, even if she has to prompt industrial revolutions to do it.

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MTG: It’s Tough To Be Competitive (When The Format Doesn’t Want You To Be)

Everyone plays Magic in their own way. The game serves as a platform for players to find one another, but even the people who engage with that platform in ways that seem the same are still approaching it in different ways. Players are simply too complex, motivations to play are too varied, and the game itself is too complicated for two players to sit down and truly want and expect the exact same thing out of the game as they play, and formats and rules and social responsiveness are tools we have to make sure people are at least engaging with one another on a reasonably equal level. The utility of the game is that the game sets rules and boundaries that players can use to meaningfully communicate their own parameters, making it easier to dial into what they want out of the experience.

Knowing that, it’s got to be rough to be into Competitive Commander, or, as it’s known, CEDH.

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Writing Up Die Rich’s Rules

Die Rich is a card game I developed… I want to say early 2020, late 2019. The idea comes from a long time ago, and it’s built around a design I used for referencing a thing in a RP space, of the Carthaginian General Hannibal.

The thing is, something happeend in 2020 (like, all of 2020), and that meant I never developed the rulebook for it. I’d played the game, before I ever made any of the cards, and I’d tested it, I knew the game worked… but I never wrote down the rules.

Now I don’t know if I remember them, exactly.

But I do have a deck of the cards, so I can play the game, and see the problems, and reconstruct what I generally know. Then I’m going to construct what I need the rules to cover, and you can read that. This is how these rulebooks kinda got made.

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Game Pile: Root

In 2018, the board game Root was released by Leder games, to a sort of confused, but very enthusiastic ‘hooray!’ Based on earlier successes by the same developers (and some weird, contentious ‘hey, you copied my notes’ complaints), Root is an asymmetrical war game, where in the base box, you have four factions competing with one another to try and take control of a nonspecific woodland glade. Each faction, the game promised – and delivered – are different; not the same rules with a few different units, but entirely, meaningfully, complicatedly different in how they relate to one another.

Lauded for its emergent complexity and its charming aesthetic, Root is one of those games that quickly became institutional; multiple expansions, fan merchandise, an RPG in the setting, all that stuff that signalled people are into your game, the base board game Root is probably one of those recent classics.

I never wanted to buy Root, though.

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The Calidity of Haruhi Suzumiya

Anime is an art movement that has encapsulated thousands of different competing threads and there’s no true centralising canon because it’s fragmented across all sorts of cultural anchor points. Australians of my age that are into anime so often got started because the ABC screened Astro Boy and Twins of Destiny, Cheez TV brought us Dragonball Z and SBS, in the late 90s, screened Neon Genesis Evangelion, meaning that those anime are sometimes seen as ‘common ground’ topics. Common ground for one age bracket in one country, and even then, only sometimes.

There are some events that can be looked upon, in the english-speaking anime fandom, though, in terms of their impact on shared cultural spaces, typically conventions, but also just, anime releases that somehow managed to be widespread enough at the right time that they became foundation to the conversation. The big three of Naruto, Bleach and One Piece. Evangelion movies. Fullmetal Alchemist, then Fullmetal Alchemist again. A collection of trans girls and boys and nonbinary people that can trace a lineage from Ranma 1/2 through to Kampfer and Haku and Soul Eater and maybe a few tracing lines to Vandread.

There is a category of people I can annoy enormously by sharing a Rozen Maiden picture with DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU DESU etcetera.

There’s only so much room for any given series to suck up a lot of the oxygen in the fandom space. You can’t typically have five or six ‘big name’ anime that ‘everyone’ has an opinion on. One of those ‘event’ Anime, that rose, became incredibly prominent, and then deformed the culture at large, becoming one of the rings in the tree trunk that is this strange cultural enclaves, was the enormous franchise known as Haruhi Suzumiya.

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Training Players On Owlbear Traps

A million years ago – oh wow, 2019? Okay, sounds fake, but whatever – I wrote an article about the idea of owlbear traps. Owlbear Traps are the D&D-specific notion of gameplay elements where a player can be tricked into doing something that’s bad for them or unsatisfying without having actually done anything wrong.

Owlbear traps are some of your basic ingroup-outgroup problems, and it’s very important to know that an owlbear trap is not the idea of unbalanced design; where you make a design and don’t quite realise how good it is, or how bad it is, and so players who choose one option over another wind up unsatisfied because of the power difference. An owlbear trap is intentional.

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Story Pile: Until This Shakes Apart

Five Iron Frenzy are one of the few remnants of my Christian upbringing I am in any way fond of. Even the hymns I respond to I don’t like, but Five Iron Frenzy are the rare example of a Christian band that are primarily a good band.

They also were in the habit of getting into trouble with the conventional Christian media landscape that presented the hegemony. You might wonder, hey, how does a Christian ska band do something to annoy the people printing their CDs and distributing them?

Well, there’s this thing with Five Iron Frenzy: They practice what they preach. They formed, they got repeatedly rebuked by Christians for their anti-corporate, pro-Native American, anti-revisonist Christianity stance. Basically, they made the right kind of enemies. Eventually, after having done what they wanted to do, and, rather than make demands of a band member who was facing a religious crisis, the group resolved to break up the band.

Then they gathered back together, for The Engine of a Thousand Plots through Kickstarter. And that was kinda a nice denoument on the band. That album had some reflections on what it’s like being a 1990s none-hit-wonders, about being in your forties doing a musical style that’s renowned for being immature, for being ultimately a bunch of gen-X nerds who love Millenial fans. It was a bit more mellow, a bit reflective, a bit sad. After Cheese of Nazareth, and Engine, I thought maybe that was going to be the farewell to music that the band had. They’d made their points, they’d shouted their rage, they’d changed what they could, and they were done.

Right?

In 2020, right at the tail of the year during lockdown, the band kickstarted and released another album, and…

No, turns out that they’re still mad and they’re still right.

This latest album, Until This Shakes Apart is, well, it’s more Five Iron Frenzy. It’s the best produced album they have, and turning forty-five has done a lot for the voices and talents involved. The vocals are clearer when they want to be and the writing of the lyrics is still that mix of thoughtful and angry I like.

The weird thing about recommending an album rather than a movie or a series is that it feels like it’s something I can just like, link to you, and share with you directly so you can decide what you think of it yourself.

Still, some of the songs and my thoughts on them:

  • In Through The Out Door, a piece about the cruelty and violence of conservative christianity in America, with its anti-immigrant, pro-corporate position.
  • So We Sing. Oh my god, they said ass. I kid you not, this is a big deal! The song is also a very real feeling of mortality in a space and style that tends towards being brief. As someone who feels 17 when he listens to their songs, hearing the song evoke Peter Pan rings true for me.
  • Tyrannis and Renegades both capture that same intense rage that they’ve always had against corporate entities.
  • Wildcat is a classic Christian story of looking at the life of someone who considers themselves outside their faith and yet what it gives them. Not wild about the message but undeniable that the character they outline is vivid.
  • Huerfano seems to be a song sung for a friend who was abused and bullied for being queer. Five Iron Frenzy have considered their role of enforcing queerphobia in their childhoods, and in older songs like Farenheit they reflect on what they know now.

Me, I recommend this album, I liked it a lot.

Making Gods in Cobrin`Seil

I have my own D&D setting; I’ve talked about it before, not because it necessarily is a thing you should want to play in, or I’m going to make you pay for, but because the process of building a world is itself full of interesting insights. Particularly, I find that the surest way to know what you like in world building is to look at other world building and see what about it makes you mad.

This time, I’d like to talk a little bit about Gods, in my setting. No, this isn’t going to be a specific list of those gods (though, you know, maybe). It’s about what gods are and what they mean.

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Recognising Caches

Hey, you notice the way you end the game with resources you hadn’t spent?

I don’t mean resources that stop being useful. Like, in a Pokemon game, you may end the game with a bunch of juice and Pokeballs that you bought when they were useful, didn’t need them, and never found time to sell them. That’s not important per se, because those are games that are designed to have a lot of slack around your resource management.

It seems pretty common that people finish RPGs with piles of elixirs in their pocket. And like, it’s specifically elixirs. If they aren’t elixirs, they’ve got their own name, and then when you ask ‘what does this thing do?’ the response is ‘oh, they’re basically an elixir.’ It’s a thing that recovers all of your pertinent stats – like, all your health and mana, or all your valor and your armour points or all your cheesecake and bundt, whatever. I know a lot of people – and okay yes I know a lot of people with anxiety and that’s a factor – but these resources become not a resource for spending but a resource for saving.

And then players don’t fire it off? Ever? Even when those resources are explicitly about just providing more resources you already have.

I think of these types of resource as caches.

Caches are an interesting thing because they’re a way a game can reward behaviour it likes without necessarily creating a disruptive tool. A thing that kills one enemy, guaranteed, is a different kind of resource, because enemies are part of an interplay of resources, an exchange of them. Killing a single enemy can make important single enemies into anticlimaxes – it can deflate the tension of a game, whereas a ‘cache’ represents a way of extending tension or surviving long enough to crest that tension.

One of the skills that I had to build playing the game Star Realms is recognising when I am close enough to the end of the game that junkable cards give a meaningful reward. Some things, like bases, may be worth buying so to use them as a burst of early game resources – like the Blob Wheel – but mostly, junking cards is a skill you have to develop. This is really useful in this game, too, because it means the game can give you cards that build up to an engine and again, you get that crescendo, but if you notice it, you can just do the math and recognise that in one turn, you can just win the game – meaning that the losing player isn’t losing long, and turnarounds can happen in big explosive arcs.

Caches are sort of inherently nice to have around in a game. Players can find them reassuring, and can find stockpiling them rewarding (even if they never use them). But a cache unused is just a sparkly gegaw. That means that they have to be worth having and not necessary for the game play. The question becomes: How can you make your game encourage people to pop open their caches?

An area where these kind of resources do see their use is in speedruns. There, these items can present a burst of speed or endurance. In absolutely optimised experiences, these short term bursts are all you need to reach another checkpoint – that’s that control over the game play experience. And then you maybe can learn how to pop caches from seeing how much effect they can have in a speed run.

All that notwithstanding, though, the thing with these caches is they’re meant to reassure players, and don’t do that.

Now, in The Art of Failure Jesper Juul talks about how games are these contradiction engines; we don’t like failing, but we play games which are trying to make us fail, to make not failing enjoyable. The idea that lies at the heart of it is that types of failure are interesting, and there is this kind of same contention with caches. If you stockpile to save yourself anxiety, to play the game safely, knowing you have reserves to protect yourself, knowing those reserves are limited and precious creates another source of anxiety.

In conclusion, brains are stupid and games are hard.

Slacktivism

Last month, Rush Limbaugh died. This isn’t important to the issue, though it is worth knowing that it is good that he died, because in terms of harm reduction, he was stopped from causing more immense harm. Also, it’s bad that he died, because he didn’t die, screaming, in pain, over the course of multiple years, as the evils of his life were revisited on him showing that there is a just god. That his obituary will not be officially concluded with the best phrases, ‘in a humiliating shitting incident,’ or ‘after having tazed himself repeatedly in the balls,’ is a crime against the idea of at least comedic justice itself. What I’m saying is that Rush Limbaugh’s death should have been a lot funnier or a lot more painful, and the fact it was neither indicates that we do not live in a just world.

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Making a Flag THREAD vs a Flag BOOK

Flags are a fun topic because to dumpster on, you only need a tiny bit of research to learn the principles of good flag design and then see how almost all the flags you’re going to see if you go looking (in English speaking spaces) are just the worst. Like this isn’t a complicated discipline, it isn’t a hard set of rules to bear in mind, but overwhelmingly, the flags that exist fail to follow these rules.

There is, simply put, no lacking of material for making fun of flags. It’s public art, it’s endorsed by community, and it’s largely all public domain (even if it sometimes claims? inexplicably? not to be?). Really, all it takes to engage in flag discourse is a combination of patience and rudeness, because there’s way more bad flags than good flags to ever spend your time on.

Why then, has nothing materialised of my project to make a readable, convenient release of an ebook where I dumpster on flags?

Part of it is framing. A tweet thread is fast and can be a bit sloppy or a bit loose. The absence of an edit button means that sometimes it’s literally not worth retracting or correcting something beyond just saying later in the thread ‘oops, made a mistake,’ which means there’s a certain lairiness to it all. It’s not comprehensive per se, it’s just thorough. Lots of jokes get fired out in a rapid succession, and if they’re not very funny, they’re not very funny, but that’s okay and we move on.

Now obviously when you’re writing as book, not every page needs to be full of bangers, but it is important that you don’t misrepresent things, and if you are deriving humour, you’re not deriving that humour from a mistruth. There’s an open social silliness to twitter, a feeling of looseness that means a joke can be a bit less thoughtful without it being unreasonable. But if you’re putting it down in a book, you owe it to the task you’re doing to be both more factually rigorous, and more thoughtful in the analysis.

There’s also just a question of real estate on a page? Assume a page layout with say, two flags on a page, vertically, with captions/analysis underneath each one – and some of these flags have some really specific reactions and need some background information as well, so it feels like the layout would get really boring and samey.

The other part is scale. Do you know how many flags I look at? For some flag threads, they’re really small: after all, Australia has six states, three internal territories, and therefore a total of nine capital cities. Stretching that at two flags a page, when a number of them are just ‘wow, look how bad this is and how much it breaks those rules I mentioned,’ is going to fill, what ten pages?

At best?

But then on the other side, America has fifty state flags; twenty five pages? That’s still basically a pamphlet

… But if we go to city flags, suddenly that balloons and we have seventeen hundred flags, and of those, fourteen hundred and twenty two are all just bad seals on a bedsheet!

A possible plan going forward, something I’ve been musing about for now, is what if I treat it like a tour of the worse flags in an American state, one at a time, just doing the ones that I think could be fun? Little ebooks? I mean at this point I’m basically monetising twitter threads.

Why Garfield Can Be White

This all started with Elmo, of all things.

I don’t remember where it started, I don’t remember who started it. I want to blame Corey and Clay for putting the idea in my head. It’s a notion that can be expressed in big, complicated questioning ways, like, how is race as a socially construct aggregated in characters that can only represent that construct in social ways, or it can be simplified into is Elmo black?

(The answer by the way is, like, probably.)

Most recently, I asked about the characters from newspaper comics Garfield and Heathcliff: Are they black or white?

The idea is that on a surface level, ‘black’ is a character trait that is commonly seen as being associated with a skin colour, and that is it. That is, that blackness is explicitly related to skin, that blackness is something that can only be born inherently to a person. And let me be clear, in this discussion, this is about characters created for fictional works. I’m not saying that blackness, as a cultural identity, is just 100% socially constructed and there’s no reason you cannot choose to change to adopt that cultural identity and Dolezal this shit.

These things and cultural spaces are zones, with grey and fuzzy areas between them, but it’s very important that you understand that this conversation about the blackness and nonblackness of fictional nonhuman characters and not some sort of statement about how black people are like, faking having a cultural identity or something.

First things first, there’s a kind of response to this question, that ends the conversation dead, and I hate it not because you’re bad for making it, but because it is boring and it shows you don’t want to consider the conversation. When we talk about these two cats, if we jump to they’re cats, then we’re asserting that character-wise, nothing about these characters is encoded except their catness, that there’s no signifiers as to their relationship to the way we treat people. Let’s talk real quick then, about encoding.

If I tell you there are two characters named Jenny and James, unless you are a total smartass who thinks I’m trying to fool you, you know what you can infer from those characters. One of them, James, is probably a guy, and Jenny is probably a woman. And if you think that gender in names isn’t important, notice how a lot of trans people opt to change their names, as a way of asserting control over how they are encoded. This isn’t to say that these names have inherent girlness or boyness to them, but you exist in a society-

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY

– that has cultural expectations and information we convey in all sorts of ways. And we know this has applications in other ways. Resumes that whiten, to depict the subject as less black or less asian, are more likely to get responses from employers, showing that we do parse ‘blackness’ in sometimes details as simple as names. People are made up of complex collections of interrelated factors, and we do perceive cultural signifiers from one another in different ways. Even a name on a page can bring with it some of those signifiers, and what characters do, and how they do it, is so much more.

The choices made in designing a character reflect choices made by the creator, and what they express. A lot of the time, these choices are not going to be made to express an inherent cultural value, or consciously done to represent a particular significant group, which means that instead, we get subconscious expressions.

Think about it. There are some behaviours that are more embarrassing when a character does it that seem ‘wrong.’ If a character breaks out in rap, it often seems jarring and inappropriate, usually because the character isn’t someone who should rap. Now, that’s often because characters that rap do a bad job, but part of doing a bad job is about not having the right affect or style to do it ‘properly.’

When we talk about characters like Garfield and Heathcliff as ‘just cats’, we’re saying that they aren’t carrying these signifiers or traits that we pass on. That tends to mean in a very 4chan way that they are ‘anyone,’ but that really means they are ‘default.’ Characters start from a default, but then how they talk, their word choices, their behaviour present them in different ways. If Garfield’s dialogue alone said “oi boyo, what y’cuttin’ a’?” or “whattya at?”, then you’d probably –

Well, most people would assume that he’s meant to be Irish and some might assume an Australian just tried to write Newfoundlander dialogue. And note, Irish and Newfoundlander aren’t white, there are plenty of people who talk like that who aren’t white! But they do imply whiteness.

Remember, these works are created by humans. They are created to behave like and relate to the world the way humans do, hence anthropomorphic behaviour. Humans base their conception of human behaviour on observing and relating to other humans. What you’ll find is that in works that seek to avoid these signifiers will often unthinkingly create something out of subconscious biases.

This is why I asked, originally. Heathcliff is quiet, but also feared by his community for criminal behaviour; his origins are known as being poor and inner city, away from the suburban life he lives now; his dad is in super prison, and he hates cops, even going out of his way to bully police dogs! Now, does this mean he’s black? Not necessarily, not by any means. After all, these are stereotypical simplicities to say that this means he partakes of, or shares in ‘blackness’ as a character. What about Garfield? Well, he has none of that. When he’s scared, he runs to authority, including looking for police for when he’s lost. When Garfield is in trouble, he’s shouted at by his owner, which makes the relationship different.

There is cultural character in the way these characters are, and in our communities, whiteness is a default. When you say ‘no, this character is a cat,’ to the question ‘is this character white,’ you’re effectively saying that the ways the character are is part of that default – and that if the characters can be seen as being very white, then very white is a default.

It’s easy to not want to get involved in the conversation, of course! But to try and dismiss the conversation is to dismiss the idea of it, and to resolve to the default.

Again.

Story Pile: Chess

Chess is a 1984-to-pretty-much-still-going-on-now musical made in part by the brains behind the band ABBA and Tim Rice. It is institutional in the world of musicals, one of those theatre productions that give a lot of people ‘favourite’ songs to do. It includes a well-known pop song, One Night in Bangkok, and the enormously popular look-I-can-belt song Nobody’s Side. It follows the narrative of basically three people across a set of chess games done for the sake of International Relations during the Reagan era of anticommunist nonsense.

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