Lost 2.3.10 (“LAX 1&2″)

February 3, 2010 in TV | No comments

Dear Jack,

What’s up, man? It’s been awhile. Sorry we haven’t talked. I’ve been good, you know. Working. Hanging out. Watching The Big Bang Theory. You should check that out — it’s pretty funny.

Seriously, though, man. WHAT. THE. HELL? You’ve been gone for a long time and then you show up and just confuse the hell out of me. I didn’t even know if I should send this letter to LA or to the Island! Are you still stuck there or did the bomb go off and avert (yeah, I learned that word in English class) the Incident? That’s the big question, right? Can you really be doing both at the same time? Or does “at the same time” even mean anything any more? I’m all twisted up, man!

Correct me if I’m wrong (you are a doctor, after all), but the plane is now bizarro-Lost. Hurley is the luckiest guy in the world. Charlie doesn’t die because you saved him (although he did say “I was supposed to die, man” which was pretty funny in a grim sort of way). Kate is still on the run and not annoying (yet). Sawyer is still a con-man. Locke is still in a wheelchair. But, wait. Desmond showed up and then disappeared. You had that strange wound on your neck. And your dad’s body didn’t make it to LA. What’s up with that? You were pretty calm about that whole thing, considering. I once saw this woman throw a water bottle at the airline counter person because our flight was delayed two hours by weather, and that was just a delay, not her dad’s dead body getting put on the flight to Singapore by some drunk baggage handler! Anyway, where was I?

Oh, yeah — some things are different and some are the same on the plane. Is that just supposed to show us what would have happened if it hadn’t crashed? Sawyer stays a con man, Kate kidnaps Claire, etc? Or will we see things kinda playing out in LA like they did on the Island?

Speaking of the Island, if I had to watch Juliet die one more time, I was going to get angry. First, there was the recap show. Then, there it was again with the “previously on Lost.” Then, there it was again at the beginning of the show. Then, there it was again (alternate version in Sawyer’s arms). It was kinda sad at first, but then just got annoying. And then Juliet told Miles “It worked”. What does that mean!? That you are really off the Island? Then why are you on the Island? SERIOUSLY! STOP IT!

At least we know that Smoke Monster is also the Nemesis/not-Locke. And that he’s pissed. And that he wants go “go back home” (maybe that’s off the Island?). And that he knows Judo because he totally dropped Richard in 3 seconds. Why you gotta go out like that, Richard? Well, we know that, but I guess you don’t because you are in some temple with Jesus-Sayid.

Yeah, Jesus-Sayid. Baptized. Died. Resurrected. And don’t think I didn’t notice the Jesus pose as they lifted him out of the water. I’m glad he’s not dead. Does that mean that Jacob’s power still exists, even though Jacob got all, well, killed? Those temple guys are sure scared of not-Locke, even the samurai dude. I hope they use that ash stuff better than the dude under the statue. What’s the point of a protective circle if the bad guy can just drop a rock on your head? Dude shold have cast some other spells, like maybe shield. What, you never played D&D when you were a kid, Jack? Oh, I see, I bet you were some jock. Probably a swimmer or something. Fine.

Anyway, I’m sorry if I sound mad. I was just so happy to see you again and then you go all double time line on me and I have no idea what’s happening. I really am glad you are back.

Love,

me

P.S. Hey, it’s Arzt and Boone! Good to see those guys. That Arzt is super annoying, though. I hope the timeline where he blows himself up with dynamite is the real one.

P.P.S. I totally think you should ditch this Kate obsession and get with Cindy. She’s hot and could get you lots of free flights, or protective ash, depending on the timeline).

Lost vs. Eleanor

February 2, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

I have amassed a nice collection of Lost links, with the plan of posting them all along with some preliminary thoughts yesterday, since Lost begins again tonight!

But fate and germs intervened. Rock Hill Schools (unnecessarily, IMHO) canceled schools yesterday, which meant that Eleanor didn’t have preschool. There went my morning. Eleanor took a short nap and woke up feeling poorly, to the point that she had a fever and an upset stomach by the afternoon. By the time I got her to bed, I was wiped out myself. So I had no time for my planned posting.

I hope to get to something later today, but we’ll see. Have no fear, though, as letters will be coming on the morrow!

50 in 2010 — Book 5 (You Don’t Have to be Rich)

January 31, 2010 in Books | No comments

As part of a New Year’s conversation about our financial situation, I picked up You Don’t Have to Be Rich off the shelf and started reading. I’ve had this book for a long time, purchasing it sometime during my stint at the Barnes and Noble in Charlottesville. I’d picked it up and read bits and pieces before, but never made the effort to read the whole thing. I plugged away at it this month in between my other books and finally finished a few days ago.

The financial advice contained in You Don’t Have to be Rich wasn’t anything new, but it was good to have it reinforced. The interesting thing about Chatzsky’s book was it was based on lots of survey data, so you’re able to compare your own financial habits with those of average Americans. The statistic that inspired the title was that, while happiness increases as more money is earned, that increase stops at around $50,000. After that, more money doesn’t mean more happiness (according to the survey).

No word on the BIG corollary, though. Mo money may or may not equal mo problems.

Gaming Friday — Megadungeon thoughts

January 29, 2010 in Gaming | 1 comment

I am cheating a bit and taking this from a post I made in a thread about megadungeons on Circus Maximus, but it’s late on Friday and I want to go home:

I am a big megadungeon fan. I ran an Undermountain campaign for over a year. The players would explore the dungeon, do city adventures in Waterdeep, get gated to somewhere else by a trap, come back, etc. There was politics, as various parties were at work in the dungeon and the city above.

Key to megadungeon success, I think, is keeping track of what happens and incorporating that back into the party’s exploration. I remember that a room in Undermountain had a trapped coin that would explode in fire when touched, then the coin would burn its way through the stone floor. The first time through the party cleric picked up the coin and was incinerated. Every time the group went through the room again, they’d see the hole in the floor and the charred stone around it. It became a landmark!

I’ve seen discussion on some old-school blogs that say the megadungeon doesn’t literally have to be a dungeon. That is, you can build a wilderness like a megadungeon, with some of the basic design principles involved in the construction and operation of the game.

Any megadungeon thoughts?

R.I.P. J.D. Salinger

January 29, 2010 in Books | 2 comments

I’ll try to get a gaming related post up later today, but I just wanted to take a minute and acknowledge the passing of J.D. Salinger yesterday.

For whatever reason, likely due to it’s language and content clashing with the mores of the small Southern town in which I grew up, I was never assigned The Catcher in the Rye in high school. I bailed on my English major in college, so I never encountered Catcher in a classroom setting. I didn’t read the novel until after I had graduated, actually. I remember reading it during the month or so I stayed in Greenville, working at Ted’s and housesitting, taking in Holden Caulfield while selling six packs and kegs. I enjoyed the book and recognized why it was great, but my worry about being “phony” had already been shaped by punk rock, Emerson, and Nietzsche before I met Holden. Still, Salinger was a great one. Maybe now we’ll get to read more of his work.

Silly Country Music Radio

January 27, 2010 in Uncategorized | 2 comments

Let’s not bother with why I’ve been listening to country music radio lately and focus on this one incident.

I first encountered Darrell Scott’s “It’s a Great Day to Be Alive” as a result of the compilation CD’s my father in law makes for us upon occasion. They’re awesome (remind me to tell you about The Contest sometime. Best. Christmas. Present. Evar.). The song is awesome too. Here are the lyrics:

I got rice cooking in the microwave
Got a three day beard I don’t plan to shave
And it’s a goofy thing but I just gotta say
Hey I’m doing alright

Yeah I think I’ll make me some homemade soup
Feelin pretty good and that’s the truth
It’s neither drink nor drug induced
No I’m just doin alright

And it’s a great day to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin when I close my eyes
There’s some hard times in the neigborhood
But why can’t every day be just this good?

It’s been fifteen years since I left home
Said good luck to every seed I’d sown
Give it my best and then I left it alone
Oh…I hope their doin alright

Now I look in the mirror and what do I see?
A lone wolf there starin back at me
Long in the tooth but harmless as can be
Lord I guess he’s doin alright

And it’s a great day to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin when I close my eyes
There’s some hard times in the neighborhood
But why can’t every day be just this good?

Sometimes it’s lonely
Sometimes it’s only me
And the shadows that fill this room
Sometimes I’m fallin
Desperately callin
Howlin at the moon…
Ahwoo!
Ahwoo!

Well I might go get me a new tattoo
Or take my old Harley for a three day cruise
Might even grow me a Fu Man Chu…
Oh Aww!

And it’s a great day to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin when I close my eyes
There’s some hard times in the neighborhood
But why can’t every day be just this good?

And it’s a great day to be alive
I know the sun’s still shinin when I close my eyes
There’s some hard times in the neighborhood
But why can’t every day be just this good?

Travis Tritt did the popular version that you likely heard on the radio. On the way to work this morning I heard the Tritt version — except the version I heard omitted the bridge. That’s the “sometimes it’s lonely” part. That omission completely changes the meaning of the song! It goes from being honest (he’s a lone wolf but knows the price he’s paid) to a silly celebration of shirking all responsibility. As you can tell, this bothered me.

Silly radio. Stop messing up the meanings of songs.

50 in 2010 — Book 4 (The Big Switch)

January 26, 2010 in Books | 2 comments

After a few books of fiction, I decided to switch things up (get it?!) and read something that was factually true (as opposed to being, say, metaphorically true). I subscribe to Nicholas Carr’s blog and find him smart and provocative, so I decided to check his latest book The Big Switch out from the university library. Honestly, I was a little surprised they had it, so score one for Dacus.

The ostensible premise of The Big Switch is that the emergence of cloud computing (everything is on the Net) is the emergence of computing as a utility. Thus, it can be compared to the emergence of electricity as a public utility. That sounded pretty interesting to me. I didn’t know anything about the electrification of the U.S. I am a user of the cloud but am always wary of its costs. I’m interested in how technology changes who we are. I had high expectations.

Those expectations were met for a few chapters, as Carr narrated Edison’s vision of electricity and how that vision was taken up by Insull to turn electrification from a private industry into a public one. The book gets into history and economics as it relates the subsequent development of things like the punch-card tabulator and the mainframe model of computing. I found part one really interesting from a historical and sociological perspective. Carr claims, for example, that electrification was largely responsible for the emergence of the American middle class in the 20th Century, due to the type of work it allowed.

The book went off the rails a bit for me in part 2. Initially, I was caught up in Carr’s assessment of how the cloud has the potential to change how we work and live, and not always for the better. The cloud, for example, allows work that previously took many people to complete to be done by even fewer, thus resulting in a higher concentration of wealth. But I soon grew tired of assessments that were simplistic and occasionally veered into alarmist territory. Wasn’t something similar true for industrialization? Didn’t it take fewer people to make a boat in a factory than a boat by hand? The difference was we made a lot more boats. Carr also claims that “technology is morally neutral” but then goes on to enumerate all the negative social consequences of the cloud. That demonstrates that such technology is not morally neutral; it represents the prioritization of a certain set of values and a certain set of human activities over others. No neutrality there, if one has a more robust understanding of value and technology.

Carr, I think, is right to poke many holes in the utopian vision offered by some proponents of the cloud. I appreciated his argument about how corporate interests rule the net and how such interests get wealthy by convincing others to add value to sites for free. (Facebook, for example, wouldn’t be worth anything without all of us using it for everything). But, now that I’ve thought about it, that assessment only takes us so far. We do get some value back in exchange for the value we put in (he says as he types this in Google Docs and posts in WordPress), whether such value is utility, fun, or networking. And the fact that some gain value from convincing others to work for little or free isn’t a cloud issue, it’s a capitalist issue. Granted, we need to be a little more savvy about our rate of exchange. Carr helps with that, I think, but it’s a little too doom and gloom for me.

Structure and Old School Gaming

January 22, 2010 in Gaming | No comments

My friends over at Scratch Factory have offered up a very nice post on episodic versus serial structure and how they can be used in one’s game. As you can see from the comments, I’ve gotten into a bit of discussion with them. I don’t disagree with them, really; I am just trying to work out the relationship between their narrative ideas and my own developing old-school sensibilities.

My initial reaction to the post was a general wariness that other narrative structures have only limited use in a game that tries to cultivate an old school feel. This is due to two key old-school features: emergent story and randomness.

Emergent story means the games overall story emerges out of the transactions of the PC’s with the world. It’s not planned in advance by the DM. Thus, there’s no meta-plot the PC’s must follow. There may be cultists trying to bring back the evil OverGod to reign destruction on the world. The PC’s may have even seen hints of such activity. But that’s not what the campaign is about. The PC’s don’t have to stop them. If the evil OverGod doesn’t come back, then someone else stopped them (with the accompanying loot and accolades). This makes it difficult to achieve a true serial structure, as such a structure demands meta-plot.

Randomness, in terms of encounters, treasure, and even PC death, seems to be another key feature of old-school gaming. Sure, some things are decided in advance, but letting the dice decide is also important to the general feel of an old-school game. There’s a continuum here, too. I’m still trying to figure out how much randomness my players and I are comfortable with in my game (that’s probably a different post). But the presence of a high degree of randomness would seem to get in the way of a lot of imposed narrative structure, since such structure depends on certain events happening at certain times in the session for maximum dramatic effect and good pacing. I’m not opposed to good pacing or drama; I’m just trying to figure out how they are compatible with key old-school elements.

These two factors complicate the ideas of serial and episodic structure and their presence in old-school games. They bring up general questions about the relationship between how other mediums structure themselves (TV, in this case) and how RPG’s structure themselves. Big thanks to the Scratch Factory guys for prompting these thoughts.

Also, DriveThruRPG is giving away a lot of RPG material for a $20 donation to Doctors Without Borders to be used in the Haiti Relief Effort. Donate and get games!

I Need a Nap

January 21, 2010 in Uncategorized | No comments

I have to go teach in a few minutes, but I really would prefer to go somewhere quiet and lay down. It’s cold and dreary here — perfect nap weather. More than that, though, is I am worn out from our daughter’s unkind sleep patterns lately. She needs lots of help to get to sleep, has woken up in the middle of the night several times (and then requires lots of help to get back to sleep), and routinely wakes up before 6:00 AM. 4:55 AM this morning, to be exact. I’m not sure what’s going on, but I hope it stops soon.

50 in 2010 — Book 3 (The Mystery of the Rogue’s Reunion)

January 18, 2010 in Books | No comments

One of the things I collect are the Three Investigator Mystery Series books. The Three Investigators was a book series, like the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew, aimed at kids. It featured three teenagers going around solving crimes in Los Angeles who were initially sponsored by Alfred Hitchcock. I inherited a few of the hardcovers when I was a boy and promptly became addicted, buying (or begging) for any of these I could find. Then, you could still find them at retail bookstores, but now it seems they’ve faded to the used book bin. I’m not sure why I liked Jupiter, Pete, and Bob better than either Joe and Frank Hardy or Nancy. I think it had something to do with the fact that these kids couldn’t drive and had a very cool “office” in Jupiter’s uncle’s junkyard. I accumulated 17 of the softcovers in addition to those five original hardbacks before I grew out of them, onto more serious works like the Dragonlance series. Now, wherever I go, whenever I wander into a used bookshop (I say wander like it’s an accident. The reality is I’m scanning the internet for local places whenever we visit anywhere), I look for these books. They’re surprisingly hard to find. I’ve only run across a few as an adult and I’ve never seen one of the hardcovers other than the ones I own. That’s why I was so excited when my friend Rich told me he’d found The Mystery of the Rogue’s Reunion at Read it Again, Sam in Charlottesville. He delivered it a few weekends ago when he and his wife came down for a visit.

This is the first new Three Investigators book I’ve read in a long time and, purely from a writing standpoint, the book isn’t that great. The plot deals with a cast reunion of The Wee Rogues, a Little Rascals like show that Jupiter starred in as a child. Some silver cups get stolen and someone gets kidnapped. Jupiter solves the case and is impressed with himself, as usual. Pete almost tackles someone. Bob looks some stuff up in the library. Hector Sebastian, a fictional mystery writer who is a patron of the Investigators (he replaced Alfred Hitchcock), makes the group cheeseburgers. My guess is this is probably a weaker book in the series generally, but I’m sure some of my feelings are due to my age. Still, it was a fun read from a nostalgic point of view. And now I have another book in the series.

Thanks a lot, Rich! If anyone else sees some Three Investigator books hanging around their local used bookstore, let me know.

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