Blue Gargantua's Journal
(Latest 20 entries) (Calendar) (Friends) (User info)
Navigate: (Previous 20 entries)
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Hey,
So at HAVOC this year, I picked up some old RAFM boxed sets of fantasy figures. I painted up the first batch.
( photos of ye olde tyme leetle dudes )
So that's it. The whole sorry lot. The names are classic D&D though and I need to remember to be a bit more loopy when naming my PCs in the future. These were a fun bunch of guys to paint up and a fair bit more colorful than the usual modern-day guys I've been doing. I've got another box set from the series, a group headed up by a wizard. Hasn't been promoted to "old guy at the tavern who gives you a mission", he's still got to go into the field. But he's got an oddball group of misfits to help him out. Photos when they're finished.
later
Tom
Hey,
So...I stayed up way too late to finish A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix. Just demolished the thing which probably means I really liked it.
Basically, this is a kinder, gentler Warhammer 40K novel with the serial numbers filed off. The Empire of Man is still basically a totalitarian regime, but it has science and technology that is improving and alien species are incorporated into it (though Humans First! as always) and they ditched the skull motif in favor of tasteful decoration.
You've got an Emperor, but hier gets replaced every 20 years by a prince. A prince is basically a Space Marine Primarch -- a human being enhanced with biological/mechanical/psychic tools so they become supermen. They carry out the executive orders of the Emperor and are assisted by a household retinue of "priests" (a.k.a. scientists/technicians).
So...40K, but the whole thing is put together really well. There's also a dash of Amber in here. Princes are fiercely competitive and while it's difficult it's not impossible to engineer the death of a rival prince.
So in this story we follow Khemri, a new prince just out of candidacy school. As a newly-made prince he is assigned his first household staffer -- his Master of Assassins. Said Master of Assassins promptly thwarts an attempt of Khemri's life and the prince realizes that his job may not be as cushy as he was lead to believe.
So then it's a race to get him signed up into Imperial Service and then off on his career. Eventually he gets sent beyond the frontiers on a special training mission and makes an important discovery.
There is not an original idea in the book, but these tropes have been spun out really, really well. I would totally adapt a Dark Heresy game for this. I'd even be up for reading sequels and while the book clearly ends and is quite stand-alone, there are some obvious loose ends that might mean follow-up books are coming. Those loose ends are the only downsides of the book. It's not that there are major, outstanding plot issues left unresolved, but rather some obvious consequences to the choices Khemri makes that shouldn't let him think he's off the hook by book's end.
But, minor quibbles, the book pretty much had me at page one and I couldn't put it down. Fails the Bechdel Test utterly -- I'm pretty sure none of the female characters ever speak to each other. Khemri is described as a POC, but gets a white-guy cover so I don't know how that scores. The Emperor is referred to as Hier and all Princes are Princes male or female so that was interesting. But really, it's just good popcorn reading.
later
Tom
Still
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
Hey,
So my infatuation with the Austro-Hungarian Empire continues with A Nervous Splendor: Vienna 1888-1889 by Frederic Morton. The book mostly follows the lives of various famous personages living in Vienna at the time (Brahms, Klimt, Mahler, Freud) and also details the events leading up to the Crown Prince's double suicide with his mistress Mary Vetsera on January 30, 1889.
The book was a breezy read that tries to draw parallels between Prince Rudolph's frustrated desires to modernize the Empire and the larger issue of modernity running up against the Empire's entrenched aristocratic society. In fact, most of the protagonists in the book are young Turks trying to forge their own path forward in the face of hidebound tradition. But the descriptions of life in Vienna at the time do show the glittering facade that papered over a fractious empire.
Also, I learned something interesting about Gustav Klimt -- apparently in his younger days he would go on "fight-hikes". He'd go out hiking along roads/trails that often proved difficult for carriages to negotiate. If he came across a carriage driver mistreating his horses because they'd gotten stuck, he'd bait the guy into a fist-fight. For some reason I find that kind of adorable.
So yeah, the book is about 30 years old (cripes!), but it was a fun read.
later
Tom
Wednesday, May 16, 2012
Hey,
So I chugged through a bunch of stuff today.
Comics: Went into Worcester and picked up my subscription. They sure do think I want The New Deadwardians. It's an interesting concept, but not really my bag. What did I get?
iZombie -- this is the comic book about hipster monsters in Eugene, Oregon fending off the apocalypse. It's been pretty good for its two-year run and apparently is ending with Issue 28. Which is good because it was starting to drag for me, but with only 3 issues to go, I'll be happy to ride it to the end.
Batman and Robin -- I think I'm pretty much done with this one. It's not bad, it's just not something I want to keep up with any more. I think the Bruce/Damien dynamic is pretty good but this last issue kinda went off the rails. I'm betting Chris Sims didn't care for it either.
The Sixth Gun -- A supernatural Western involving six guns forged by the Devil, each with a terrible mystic power. They keep doing interesting things with it and just when I think it's going to fall into wash-rinse-repeat mode, they change it up. In the previous issue, the heroine suffered hearing loss from an explosion so the entire issue was silent without dialog or even sound effects. It was interesting.
Cassanova -- This book. I really need to get all the issues together and read them back-to-back because it makes heavy use of multiverses and that means it can be wildly disjointed, but it continues to be fascinating even when you have to struggle a bit.
Fankenstein Agent of S.H.A.D.E -- Hands down my favorite "New DC" title. It's the Creature Commandos with a Hellboy twist. Always a good 32-pages of monster-on-monster beatdown.
Saga -- Oh man, this is just an excellent title and I strongly recommend it to folks. It's a "Demon and Angel fall in love and have a baby" deal except it's a super sci-fi setting so the Angel and Demon are aliens and there are intergalactic bounty hunters and...it's good stuff.
In the book department I've resumed my slow plow through the Dumarest Saga -- a series of books by E.C. Tubb about Earl Dumarest's quest to return home to long-forgotten Earth. Book six of the series Lallia finds Earl hiring on to a decrepit ship plying a region of space engulfed by a dust cloud. Along the way they pick up a beautiful woman named Lallia and have some adventures.
So, not gonna lie, the women are basically set dressing in these stories and you might expect that, like Conan's women, they never last from one book to the next. This particular story was pretty weak all around although Earl does get a lot of really useful information on this quest. Which is good because we're now one-fifth of the way through a 30+ book series spanning 30 years. I'll be interested to see how/if this series grows and changes as the author matures. Mindless popcorn reading, I'll let you know if gets stunning.
So that's what I've been reading. Next up: Vienna in 1889.
later
Tom
Monday, May 14, 2012
Hey,
This is easily the greatest thing I've seen all weekend on the Internet:
Seriously, it starts out with an instrument you'd associate with a Lovecraftian cult and when you reach the dancing...it only gets amazing. Also -- bonus surprise near the end! Tom
Hey,
So there's this indie game out called Artemis. The pitch is that you're the crew of a starship and you boldly go, etc.
The twist is that you play on a team of six people. All of you really are the crew and one guy sits in the middle and acts as captain. It's a high-tech Star Trek LARP (or Red Alert, the LARP).
I kinda desperately want to play this. Preferably with someone who has a projector so the captain's "main screen" really is. The game is $40, but that includes a license for the six computers you need to play and I'd totally spring for it.
later
Tom
Wednesday, May 9, 2012
Hey,
I hate it when people just lock into that state where every attempt to explain something only further confuses the issue. I'm not sure if I haven't tried enough different kinds of explanations or if I'm the one who doesn't get it. But please, just let me go ahead with this solution. If it doesn't actually solve the problem (and I'm almost positive it will), it'll almost certainly show us where we are going wrong.
My boss is generally great about this stuff and I like her so this is kinda extra-frustrating.
later
Tom
Hey,
So in late June I'm running a game based off events that happened during Operation Anaconda -- a massive fight in Afghanistan in 2002. So I thought I should read up on the fight a bit (one of the many side benefits of playing with toy soldiers is that I get to learn more history).
The book I picked was Not A Good Day To Die by Sean Naylor. It was a good book that laid out a pretty good picture of what happened and the book's only fault is related to the root causes of the mission's failures.
The short story is this -- Afghanistan has just fallen to the Northern Alliance. Local warlords, assisted by a few special forces teams and a lot of US airpower booted out the Taliban in a few months. Now intelligence sources suggest that there are Taliban/Al Qaida gathering in the Shahikot Valley in eastern Afghanistan. So they put together a group of Afghan militia and plan to use them to sweep into the valley from the west. Regular Army units will block trails leading out of the valley to east and catch any high value targets that come out. Intelligence figures there's maybe 250 bad guys tops and once a few bombs fall on them, they'll roll over.
Things don't go according to plan. Post-battle analysis suggests there may have been over 1000 fighters in the area. They were well-equipped, dug in on the mountains overlooking the valley and prepared to stick it out to the bitter end. Combine this with a fractured command structure and various technical failures and the whole thing fell apart before it got started.
The Afghan force got shot up by an AC-130 gunship on their way in and then an expected bombardment never materialized causing the Afghan militia to pull up and retreat. The Army units landed on the valley floor and came under intense fire from the enemy ranged around them in the hills. Near the end of the fight, a team of Navy SEALS flew onto a mountain top that was infested with enemy troops and got clobbered.
Eventually, superior firepower and a better understanding of what was happening proved decisive and Afghan/US forces drove the enemy out, but a simple mop-up operation turned into three days of hell.
The book tries hard to present a fairly even account of events and give everyone involved a chance to tell their side, but it suggests the main problems were caused mostly through a fractured command system that saw various special forces units and regular military units expected to work together but commanded through separate channels (some from as far away as Saudi Arabia or Washington DC). There was no overall commander who could co-ordinate communications and support assets for troops on the ground. There were also technical problems that hampered communications. Advanced surveillance gear failed to detect dug-in troops in rough terrain, but human intelligence sources suggesting a more numerous enemy were discarded.
What's amazing is that despite all of this -- despite a friendly fire incident involving an AC-130, US casualties were less than 20 dead and 80-odd wounded. Body armor and combat lifesaver training were a big part of this, but it's also true that enemy forces weren't very well trained. The ability of US troopers to "un-fuck" themselves was pretty much what saved the mission from become a complete disaster.
The book's only problem is that so many people were involved in the mission, that it's sometimes hard to track who's who -- a problem that was abundant during the actual mission with dire consequences.
Overall I thought it was a pretty good book and a detailed but accessible look into one of the first major military operations of the 21st century.
later
Tom
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Hey,
I'll be performing in the PMRP Spring Sci-Fi Spectacular. I'll be narrating the Adventures of Red Shift and in the second half we're doing a retelling of The Day the Earth Stood Still. We're running this Friday and Saturday at Davis Sq. and you should come check us out.
later
Tom
Sunday, May 6, 2012
Hi,
So this afternoon I watched The Pirates: Band of Misfits and Aardman animation about...well, a band of pirates and then I watched The Avengers which is pretty much the best super-hero movie I think I've ever seen.
Both movies are fantastic, both movies you should sit all the way through the credits. I might say more later on, but for now, go see them.
later
Tom
Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Hi,
So the MBTA is part of the Mass Dept. of Transportation (MassDOT). Although the T raises money through fares and the like, they certainly get funding through the DOT and thus through the state.
My question is, which legislative committee is most responsible for approving funds for the DOT (or the budget in general)? It's not clear who holds the purse strings.
Thanks
Tom
Hey,
So I broke down and picked up a subscription to The Legend of Korra, the Avatar sequel on Nickelodeon.
First -- I bought a subscription to a new tv show...the future is getting better.
Second -- yeah, I'm still really enjoying this. I can tell when they're trying to make ties to the previous series, sometimes it's just a touch ham-handed, but I think the show is moving forward and the new cast will come into their own. I'm also a little confused that fire benders can also cast lighting bolt (that really should be an air trick, but earth benders can levitate rock which also seems off-element).
Because, you know, The Internet, I was able to look up that some fire benders did have lightning powers and that it now appears to be a much more common technique. In much the same way that earth benders could sometimes manipulate metal, but now Republic City cops can do it at will. I actually really like this -- as the setting has advanced in a technological sense, the magical powers have also grown and developed. Fantasy is often a quest for the status quo, but here it changes and evolves in a more science fiction-y way.
I also really like the bad guys of the show. They've got a solid motivation (we're jealous that some people have magical powers and we don't), and are actually effective (chi-blocking strikes to shut down benders, but they have to get close enough). The bad guy did, in fact, totally fail to kill Korra when he had the chance, but you can't have everything.
So yeah, good stuff
Tom
Monday, April 30, 2012
Hey,
So this weekend there was a Jiffycon out in Northampton. Jiffycon is a one-day DIY gaming convention where people show up and play various games.
In the morning I ran the introductory adventure from Over the Edge. Over the Edge is a roleplaying game set in the fictional island of Al Amarja and heavily influenced by Kafka and William S. Burroughs. It's a fun little game with a rough-and-ready game engine. It's also 20 years old...and man does that make me feel old.
The players were a team of oddball spooks sent to protect a courier who would be exchanging information at various points on the island. The team consisted of a smooth-talking con man, a burnt-out NYPD cop, a bodybuilder, a narcoleptic pilot, Indiana Jones with a heroin problem, and an expert in propaganda.
I didn't do enough prep for this. The adventure is mostly a series of short fights one after the other. It showcases the system mechanics and if you were going to return to the island you could dig into the weirdness, but I really need something better. People seemed to have a fun time, but I should've come up with a better adventure that exposed the characters to the high weirdness of Al Amarja.
In the afternoon, I opted for board games. In particular, I wanted to play with my shiny new copy of Wiz-War from Fantasy Flight Games. Wiz-War is this great little board game from Tom Jolly where, as the title implies, you play a wizard who wanders through a maze-like dungeon trying to steal treasures from the other wizards or flat-out kill them. Basically Magic: The Gathering stole all their best ideas from this game, but forgot to steal the bit where you have fun. The problem is that the game has barely been in print (Chessex held the license in a death-grip for years) and the previous versions have all been pretty low-tech affairs. The FFG version has solid components, miniatures for the wizards, glossy, full-color cards, and a solid review and re-write of the rules by Mr. Jolly. Purists have decried the re-writes, but it does appear as though the game is now much more coherent.
So we have a full game of 4 people, I hand out the cheat sheets and we sit down to play.
The first game was...a first game. We were all learning so that was to be expected, but the game just didn't have the pop or sizzle that I remembered from college when I played it last. In the end, I was held up by the Red Wizard who foolishly pursued a vendetta against me while Yellow strolled about and simply stole the two treasures he needed without much of a fight.
But there was plenty of time so we had another go at it. This game, this game was much, much better. You deck of spell cards gets customized each time you play. There's a base group of cards plus another three "schools" (out of a possible six). I think our first game suffered from a deck of spells that were usually personal in nature. This time around we had more active spells that littered the board with objects and items and actively screwed with other people.
So here's my Wiz-War story: I've got one treasure secured and I need one more. I walk up to a opening, cast Destroy Wall so now I can see Yellow's home base and the Green treasure he left there. Then I cast stretch which lets me reach halfway across the board, and snatch the treasure away. On my next turn I've got the card I need to walk back to my home base, dump the treasure and I win. Victory is assured!
Green's turn, he's got nothing.
Red's turn, he rotates my board segment so now I'm staring down the hallway at Green and Yellow.
Yellow's turn, he walks up, casts Strength so he can rip the treasure away from me. I Counterspell. He Anti-Counterspells my Counterspell. So his Strength goes off and he pulls the treasure away from me. Then he rotates my board away again.
On the next round of turns, Green tries to kill Red with a treasure chest, but it gets bounced back on him and he almost dies, then Yellow punches him and he definitely dies.
On the final round everyone has 1 VP and a treasure so it's a race to home. Red eats his way through a wall and makes a shortcut. Red wins.
And THAT'S how a game of Wiz-War should go!
So I want to get in some more plays of this because I think it's going to be a real winner.
We still had a little time left so I broke out my Decktet. Decktet is a deck of cards, but the wrinkle is that there are six suits and most cards have two suits showing on them. There's a book that goes along with it detailing various game people have invented to play with it. We played a game called Gasp! which is a trick-taking game. Win a trick and you get a token of one of the trump suits. The idea is to get two tokens of each suit. It was fun. The cards are very evocative and fun to play with so hopefully I can break that one out a bit more too.
So yeah, it was a fun day.
later
Tom
Hi,
So a friend mentioned that she loves root beer floats, but dairy problems prevented having them. Well you know me, I like ,,helping,, so I thought about how to fix that.
So the ice cream is easy, you just get coconut milk ice cream in vanilla bean flavor. Coconut milk ice cream is, quite possibly, better than real ice cream. Obviously, the coconut flavor always comes through not matter what flavor it's supposed to be, but a strong vanilla bean flavor holds its own.
So now we're done right? Just get some high-end froo-froo root beer and you're good to go.
Yeah, that works, but I was thinking about this float idea while drinking an Angry Orchard Cider. This is my new favorite hard cider -- just incredibly tasty. Comes in a couple of different flavors including a ginger-laced variant that has a real apple pie taste.
Huh...apple pie...and ice cream...I wonder.
And so was born the Dariy-free, hard-cider float.
She really liked it. I have a bigger sweet tooth so it wasn't quite the pie a la mode I was hoping for. But it's still two great tastes whether you have them together or not.
later
Tom
Sunday, April 29, 2012
Hi,
I finished up another round of painting. This time, it's a bunch of vehicles.
( Come on down to Crazy Tom's Slightly-Used Military Motor Pool! )
So that's all the vehicles. I was planning to move on to some 28mm fantasy figures I picked up at HAVOC, but I need to order/build/paint a building for an Afghanistan Force on Force game I'm running at the end of June. The building should be a pretty fast job, but I want to make sure it's done before committing to other stuff.
later
Tom
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Hi,
So I got through a couple of interesting books:
First up Lost Everything by Brian Francis Slattery. He wrote a book called Liberation that I really enjoyed and he returns to similar themes here.
The book takes place in an America shattered by global warming, disaster climate and a war for the scraps left behind. Sunny Jim and Reverend Bauxite used to be part of the resistance. Now they're fleeing the war up the Susquehanna River to find Jim's son Aaron and take off before the war, or the apocalyptic storm simply called The Big One sweeps everything away. The book jumps around to several viewpoints -- Jim and the Reverend, the army people trying to catch them, Aaron, various people on the riverboat Jim travels on. The book slowly builds up a picture of Jim and his sister Merry and how their past defines their present.
It's all covered by a mysterious narrator who collects their stories and hopes to preserve them for some future generation if there is one. The book clipped along and it was a fun read. Certainly good for post-apocalypse readers out there.
The next book I picked up on the recommendation of Sam Harris from his book Free Will I looked at last week. The book is Meditations on Violence by Rory Miller. Mr. Miller has trained extensively as a martial artist and works as a corrections officer. So aside from working out in the dojo, he's actively been involved in any number of violent assaults. Although the book compares and contrasts martial arts and violent assaults, much of what he has to say is interesting and useful no matter where you stand.
His basic tenet is that no amount of sparring can prepare you for an actual assault and it may do more harm than good. In a real do-or-die situation, you've probably been jumped by surprise, you've already been hit, stabbed, shot and the best your training can offer is a slim chance at explosively reacting and giving you a chance to get away or turn the tables. Real self-defense is in avoidance or evasion and not kung-fu. He peels back a lot about what happens in the actual fights he's been in (often with people who regularly employ violence as a strategy) and tries to illuminate what leads up to violence, what happens during violence and what happens after violence. He's also quick to point out that violence is huge, how it happens to you will almost certainly be different than how it's happened to him, and that he shouldn't be taken as gospel. But it pays to listen to a guy who has to break up prison fights for a living. A very interesting book. Again, a fairly short piece (under 200 pages) and I skipped some of the "if you're a martial arts instructor/student, you should consider adding this to your training program", but lots of interesting stuff to think about.
later
Tom
Friday, April 20, 2012
Hey,
So when my cats look at me judgmentally, I'm pretty sure they're disapproving looks are in regard to how incredibly noisy I am.
"Look, Mr. Man, there's a time and a place to make noise. When you put us in the box for trips in the car to the vet. When we need you to feed us. These are appropriate times and places to make noise. Getting scritches? Well, purring is a noise, but we keep it on the down low, y'know? But you, Mr. Man, you make all kinds of noise. How the hell do you manage to catch prey with all that warbling you do?"
later
Tom
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Hey,
I forgot to mention, Comicazi in Davis Sq. gave me a free graphic novel. I got to pick one of three choices.
I picked Moon Knight: God and Country.
It was awful. I was tempted to go back to Comicazi and demand my money back.
later
Tom
Hi,
So I zipped through a couple more books and here's what I think.
First up, Angelmaker by Nick Harkaway. Mr. Harkaway was responsible for the amazing Gone Away World I read a few years ago so when I saw he had this new book out, I was anxious to pick it up.
So Angelmaker is mostly about Joe Spork, clockmaker and reluctant heir to a criminal empire his father started. Yes, his last name is Spork and it's a thing. Everyone has an odd last name. Anyway, Joe has been working on this intricate clockwork device that his pal Billy Friend has almost certainly not stolen from somewhere. Then mysterious people start asking after the device. Then people turn up dead. Then things get interesting.
Meanwhile, Britain's oldest super-spy reflects on her lifetime of adventure and whether it's all been worth it and what she has left to do to try and set things right.
Meanwhile, a madman plots to become God.
Meanwhile, golden mechanical bees are spreading across the Earth wreaking havoc with the power of Objective Truth.
The writing is simply delicious. Lovely turns of phrase and great imagery. It was a real treat to read. Certainly I think it'll appeal to a fair number of people -- especially if you're a fan of Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett (although the fantastic is turned way down and the adventure turned way up). Good stuff all around.
After that...well, it's hardly a book, it's more like a long essay. It's called Free Will by Sam Harris and its central conceit is that you don't have any...free will that is. We think of ourselves as being able to choose our actions and reactions, but the truth is that the decision-making process is buried in the Senate of our Subconscious. Genetic tendencies, evolutionary adaptations, past experiences, and a host of other factors promote a chorus of differing opinions on what you should do next. The mechanisms of your brain lets one opinion rise to the top and suddenly your conscious mind is aware that you've "decided". Harris cites several neruoimaging studies showing how our decision process is completed sometimes well before we become aware of it.
The rest of the book is a short discussion about what it means if we accept that our free will is an illusion and what implications that has in terms of justice, politics, and our identity of self. Harris feels that we can drop the illusion of free will without automatically replacing it with a robotic view of humanity. His analogy is that we don't generally look at people as collections of atoms, we look at them as people and physics and chemistry are still just as true. He personally finds it freeing since it means that no matter what he's done in the past, there's still a chance for tremendous change and growth in the future. A cynical me would argue that there's just as much chance for things to go wrong and it's hard to see how a brain can make a significant change without a great deal of change in it's environment (i.e. I'm not more likely to become a better person if my friends and associates are all criminals). Yes, people do experience miraculous turn arounds in their lives, but that's often down to luck or freak chance and it seems like you should be able to build a better you without relying on the luck of the draw.
Anyway, it's a slim little volume and quite thought-provoking so I'm sure my philosophy-geek friends will find it interesting.
later
Tom
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Hey,
So tonight I went to see Raid: The Redemption at the Kendall Sq. Theatre.
It was an hour and a half of solid beat-downs. Some gunplay, but mostly beat-downs. There was a fair amount of blood, but not too much gore. The really squicky stuff was telegraphed so that we could avoid it.
The basic story is that a group of swat guys raid a building owned and operated by a gang kingpin. But the gang leader rents out to thugs of every kind and has cameras set up everywhere and is all "hey, guys, cops in the building, take care of that for me will you?"
Carnage follows.
It was a pretty good film on it's kung-fu violence premise. People moving really, really fast. Hyper-kinetic and fun.
later
Tom
Navigate: (Previous 20 entries)
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92){kind=small}
