Trip's Life (Recent episodes)
18 September 2018 - Tuesday
Marith has been taken over by a swarm of microbes. It is very sad.
The Book of
Ages for 13th
Age is a supplement for fleshing out the history of the 1st through
12th Ages. This pre-release PDF is still in the "see page XX" and
"<<layout element>>" stage, but otherwise seems both complete
and workable. Each player gets a faction (explicitly not the same as an
icon), maybe the GM gets some, each faction gets some events (overall high
point, overall low point, crossover, etc) and independently assigns them by
die roll to the range of Ages. Then, starting from the earliest Age with
events, everyone goes through the Ages in order and the GM takes the roll
of a chronicler asking experts leading questions about what happened to the
various factions in that age. ("I heard your faction's greatest stronghold
of the 4th Age was here, but now there's just a big crater. What
happened?") There are lists of leading questions for GMs who can't think of
any, and a pile of premade Ages for those points in the calendar where no
one has any events. (The premade Ages come with not just icons, but also
sample monsters, spells/powers/talents, and magic items.)
My interest in 13th Age is somewhat revived, but the system still bugs
me, so now I'm thinking about what it would take to add Apocalypse
Power to 13th Age and still be distinctively 13A. One Unique Things are absolutely fine, they aren't
supposed to give you any powers, just be something that is fictionally true
about your character. There are no skills in DW,
so backgrounds are not relevant. Classes are mostly the same, because D&D.
DW has alignment, which 13A doesn't, and has both fewer and less
significant races, but switching to drives and backgrounds and making race
just a descriptor should cover both of those.
Magic items in DW are to magic items in 13A as magic items in 13A are to
magic items in D&D3,
which is probably fine.
Icon relationship dice are the trickiest because they are so
metafictional. "Bag of books" and "adventuring gear" in DW have a little of
that nature, but they are sufficiently constrained by the fiction ("You had
what in your backpack? Get real.") that it's not an issue. Icon
relationship benefits, at least at our table and possibly everywhere based
on what I see on the Internets, are completely open-ended within the vague
theme of the Icon. Contacts? Gear? Secret knowledge? Highly-specialized
magical powers? It's all possible, and there's not even the minor downside
of taking up inventory space. Of course this could be shoehorned into DW
as-is, but that's like saying you can type any letters in any order: you
can do it, but that doesn't mean the result will be aesthetically pleasing
or even legible.
Words:
157. No TV, but apparently too much
Love Nikki.
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17 September 2018 - Monday
Things I managed to do today:
Things I did not do:
- Get sick even though my flatmate is full of germs
- Watch TV
- Any significant amount of work
Words:
508.
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16 September 2018 - Sunday
I managed to do a little bit of shopping, but that was about it.
Netflix had Lilo & Stitch, which they hadn't last time we
looked, so we watched it. There was more alien hijinx than I remembered.
Later, tumblr told us about the final fate
of Pudge the fish.
AW has moves
like seize or hold by force, which is much more
interesting than DW's
hack and slash. But, I thought, if the PCs are trying to
seize something by force, who makes the roll? And then I had the important
insight that AW PCs are all major characters in the same story, but they
are not a team, and are at least sometimes antagonistic to each other.
(It's not like this is a secret, just read the examples, but I hadn't
realized the significance until now.) In AW, a move can be the whole plan,
or at least a big chunk of it, but in DW, a move has to be just one
person's part of the plan, which is a much smaller part of the action.
I think there's probably still some room to raise the level of moves for
Glorantha, but maybe not very much, and it might be more trouble than it's
worth. I mean, "kill them to death" is a perfectly valid goal for many
fights in Glorantha (like broos).
Words:
223.
Weekly total: 1582.
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15 September 2018 - Saturday
Why, oh why, does Apple not just display a time stamp with every text? It
can do it for literally every other event that happens on a phone, but not
texts? Gaaaaaah.
Boo for not setting an alarm! Hurray for turkey chili!
- Sailor Moon S 32-33: You can tell we're getting close to
the end of the season by the way Witches N is decrementing faster and
faster.
- Laid-Back Camp 10: I expected Rin to go with the "we're not
camping together, I'm just camping in the site next to yours at the
same campground", but no.
- My Hero Academia 40-41: No, in fact you cannot take these
kids anywhere without supervillains attacking. Also my brain
hurts because in my WiP, "pussycat" is a racial slur against catgirls.
- Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions 2.6: Those two are
just about the cutest ever. Also Dark Flame Master is remarkably
non-horrible for a teenaged guy in anime. Maybe he can give Mineta some
tips on not deserving death.
Words:
215.
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14 September 2018 - Friday
Coworker M, who is in NC (but well inland) reports he is doing okay.
Whew!
- The Good Place 23-26: Wow, excitement and bonding and
smooches and jurisprudence and reboot! That's the end of season 2, I
wonder what season 3 will bring?
Words:
183.
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13 September 2018 - Thursday
Giant
bug robot!
- The Good Place 22: Wow, teamwork!
Marith cooked food again! It was entirely like dinner, although we both
agreed it could have used more alliums.
I was actually wrong about the Ernalda priestess's favors of the earth.
It has only at-wills and dailies, but it's random which ones you get to
use, so still annoying.
Anwyay, the basic equation is, impress the priestess with your
mightiness and she'll give you some mojo. This is very different from the
usual D&D formula, so that's good. But how does it translate into DW?
Details of a die roll don't matter, the trigger has to be something like
"bring me the head of the goblin chief", or something equally significant if
not as murdery ("bring me the regalia of the heretical temple"). Can we rely
on the player to choose reasonable things, and not "bring me that rock"?
Probably not, but I'm not sure how to word the requirements.
In 13G, the
favor gets awarded to the next person to do the thing, but there are
multiple favors per battle, so theoretically the mojo couldn't be hogged by
one person. DW has shorter battles, which could lead to more competition,
which is probably Orlanthi (warriors, not soldiers), but do we as players
want that? But on the other hand, DW doesn't have an initiative clock to
show who was first if multiple acts ("bring me a goblin head") could
trigger the favor, so maybe that's okay?
Giving other people mojo is also not a big DW thing, but healing is fine,
and +1 forward is also a thing. It could even be +damage or +armor forward,
if we want to get really crazy.
Words:
328. Probably because we only watched one episode of The Good
Place tonight.
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12 September 2018 - Wednesday
The thing that didn't work yesterday works today, for no reason. The
Random Tech Support Excuse Generator says, "someone changed DNS". I figure
it has at least a 0% chance of being correct.
13th Age is
cancelled, Jus has the Regurgitations and no one wants to risk getting
those. Except me, because I don't care about common or garden germs, but I
don't want to be out playing
Gloomhaven
until a million o'clock on a work night, so all fun is still cancelled.
Instead I watched TV with Marith.
- The Good Place 19: This is one of the other episodes that
was nominated for a Hugo. Poor Chidi.
- The Good Place 20-21: I am glad Janet's subplot is getting
continued. I like Janet.
I could use runes for PbtA
Glorantha stats, actually, since the Orlanthi have a reasonably small set
of runes they are associated with (Air, Movement, Man (because human),
Earth (from Ernalda), Harmony (likewise), Life (because not undead)), but I
think then non-Orlanthi playbooks would have to have different runes and
probably different moves, which sounds like a lot of work.
Moving on to classes, the Earth Priestess in 13G has
three main schticks: at-will summoning of one Earth spirit/elemental to
fight for her, occasional spellcasting (a couple of dailies), and favors of
the earth: she announces that the next one of her allies to do X gets
buff/healing Y, where X is some combat thing like score a crit or reduce an
enemy to 0 HP, and Y is one of a list of buffs/heals with varying recharge.
(I've already ranted about the long lists of powers with limited recharge.)
I like favors of the earth, but DW
doesn't really do buffs, that's what aid another is for,
and healing is not that exciting, so I'm not sure how to translate it.
(Sure, I could invent a bunch of buffs, +1d4 damage forward and whatnot,
but I don't think that would really be appropriate for DW.) It also doesn't
have critical hits or other fiddly little mechanics things to hand the
rewards on. Bah.
The Trickster is also a problem. Their powers are a dozen variants on
doing something stupid and ineffectual to give an ally a bonus or let an
ally escape harm, and I don't think I can build an entire class around a
single basic move. I don't say no one can, but I'm pretty sure I don't
get the Trickster, probably because I have no sense of humor.
Words:
131.
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11 September 2018 - Tuesday
I spent like four hours on the line with a customer whose thing was not
working after he took it apart and put it back together (with software, it's
harder to see whether there are pieces left over; you have to look under the
sofa), and did not even get it working, although we did get past many
intermediate errors on our way to the day's final error.
I did a date with Avalon, but we were both lethargic, so it was not that
sparkling.
Marith made fried rice with chicken marinated in soy sauce and honey,
which is probably more advanced cooking than has ever happened in this
apartment.
I thought about renaming the stats for PbtA
Glorantha for the kinds of people who exemplify them,
Fierce/Wary/Stubborn/Charming/Thinky/Touched ->
Warrior/Scout/Farmer/Chief/Sage/Priest, but that seems like it could lead
to confusion with the class names. I also, of course, thought about naming
them for runes, but that would definitely be confusing when runes come up
in some other mechanical context (even though I don't yet know what context
that would be), and also it seems wrong to use just a subset of the 20-odd
runes that apply at a human scale. Maybe verbs are good?
Attack/Spot/Endure/Lead/Know/... See (as in seer)? Transcend? Perhaps I
can't come up with a verb that covers everything lumped fuzzily into that
one stat because it really needs to be some other number of stats. But even
though magic is common and not necessarily well-delineated from other parts
of Gloranthan life, it feels wrong to just say that social skills work the
same on spirits as they do on people. Magic needs to be at least slightly
numinous and uncanny, right? Or at least magician and face should be
different character types.
If I'm using active verbs, maybe I should look at
Blades in the Dark-type
actions? There are more of them than stats, so using runes could be a
possibility. But BitD is a much more constrained game, so a set of
essentially twelve basic moves works okay there where it would probably not
in a more wide-open game, so probably not. (Also I like specialized moves.)
Bah.
Words:
336.
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10 September 2018 - Monday
Yuck, Monday.
A new
playbook for DW
should have at least three starting moves (not counting
race/alignment/background/drive), but I've only been able to come up with
that many for a couple of the simplest Glorantha playbooks.
The Storm Bull berserker:
| You start with these three moves: |
| ☑ Sense Chaos: Add to the list of questions
for discern realities, "Is Chaos manifest here?" |
| ☑ Berserker: When you roll 10+ on
hack & slash, you must take the option to do more
damage. |
| ☑ Smash It!: <cut and past from the
Fighter's Bend Bars, Lift Gates> |
|
The Humakti:
| You start with these three moves: |
| ☑ Deathbringer: When using your personal
blessed sword, your damage die is d10 instead of d8. |
| ☑ Death is Near: When you reduce someone to 0
HP, they are just dead. They don't get to make the take a
mortal wound move, they can't be healed, they're just dead.
The same goes for you when you drop to 0 HP. |
| ☑ Bond of Truth: When you
parley, your oath as a Humakti counts as concrete
assurance, because they know what happens if you break it. |
|
But at least one move for each is a passive two-edged sword, so this
probably isn't enough, and that's not even considering advancement moves
(although I'm using AW-style
advancements, so +1 to primary stat, +1 to either secondary stat, or +1 to
any stat are all valid entries, which cuts down on that a little). Maybe I
don't know enough Glorantha lore, or maybe it just matters that I know
there is Glorantha lore to be known. ("Draw Maps, Leave Blanks" doesn't
really work for Glorantha, when legions hundreds? of fans
have spent fifty years filling in all the blanks. But that's only a
principle, a technique for following the Agenda ("Portray a Fantastic
World", "Fill The Character's Lives With Adventure", "Play to Find Out What
Happens"), so I don't think DW is completely undone by this. I might be
wrong.)
Words:
166.
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9 September 2018 - Sunday
After a month without, we have PAD&D5
again!
Having struck some kind of deal with their enemy [SPOILER], who turns
out to not be as invested in the villainous plan as some others, the
Heroines of Red Larch travel to [SPOILER], where they encounter a steampunk
space hamster (named Bruce) and some assorted locals (also named Bruce,
except for Stephanie) who introduce themselves as a recon
squad of the resistance against the local depradations of one of the
Heroines'
enemies from the Red Larch area. The Heroines are immediately drafted into
the resistance, because they have a magic item associated with the enemy
that they picked up a while back (when Rimardo stared down a [SPOILER]). Of
course they are up for that!
After a quick ambush to get the pursuers off their tail and avoid giving
away the location of the Redoubt, the Heroines arrive and are introduced to
the leader of the space hamster resistance, their old frenemy (and possible
admirer of Lam), [SPOILER]. They are just in time for the massive assault
on the villain's headquarters by the entire resistance, because it has go
forward immediately now that the Heroines have brought the [SPOILER] back into the
region.
While the mass combat plays out across the surface of the airless mesa,
the Heroines and [SPOILER] assault the main fortress, only to meet the Big
Bad and his two hulking minions (one with shoulder-mounted brother of
[SPOILER]) out front. Akrá has the implement of
boss-slaying, so they're the designated boss-slayer, while everyone else
tries to distract and flank and harry. Surprisingly, it works (it helps that
Rimardo can still banish one of the minions), or at least [SPOILER] gets
beat down enough that [SPOILER]'s mom can appear and crush the Big Bad.
Overwhelming victory!
After the victory party, the Heroines will finally get to return to
[SPOILER]!
Marith made raviolis more tasty by breading and pan-frying them, which
seemed like a lot of work. Good results, though!
- The Good Place 16-18: Wow, Michael is really not very
competent if he can be outsmarted, even a fraction of a percent of the
time, by Jason.
In Under the Pendulum Sun (Jeannette Ng), Victorian
missionaries try to take Anglicanism (which is of course synonymous with
Civilization) to Fairyland. This goes about exactly as well as you would
expect.
Also the author is probably an escaped Love
Nikki character.
Words:
124.
Weekly total: 1297. I suck.
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8 September 2018 - Saturday
I wanted to play Masks with
Carl at Big Bad Con so I can learn
how to suck less at the Apocalypse,
but that meant being home at 12:00 on the dot to click the "Sign Me Up"
button as soon as it appeared, so my daily routine was all thrown off and I
didn't get to the grocery store until things were selling out.
I did sign up for Masks vs Parental Expectations, though!
- Laid-Back Camp 9: Oh no, germs!
- Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju 2.1-2: After the 10-episode
flashback, time seems to be moving ahead faster, but I'm not sure just
how fast. Rakugo is definitely in dire straits, though.
- My Hero Academia 39: A recap episode and a pool episode are
both mandatory, so they're just being efficient. Also not much
fanservice.
- Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions 2.5: Finally, Kumin
gets to shine!
Words:
218.
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7 September 2018 - Friday
Everyone, go get your flu shot! Protect the kids of antivaxxers so they
can grow up to become sensible people!
I went over to Ken and Dave's to play
Gloomhaven
again, to give it a fairer try. I failed miserably by running out of cards,
but we did win the second scenario on normal mode, even if we didn't get the
chest that was probably full of clues.
I would be up for playing more, but if we don't even start until past
20:00, then I don't get home until a million o'clock because
someone moved further away to make gaming less convenient.
Words:
118.
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6 September 2018 - Thursday
Hey, I caught up from Worldcon!
A couple of good parodies of yesterday's NYT kerfuffle (both from We Hunted The Mammoth): McSweeney's,
and Slate.
Marith is now all caught up on Showa Genroku Rakugo
Shinju.
Ah, it was the finale of the first season of The Good Place
that was up for a Hugo this year (and an episode from second season which we
haven't seen yet). I was spoiled for the big reveal, but how it played out
was still good. I like how the consequences are being played out in the
first part of the second season, too. Go Eleanor!
The Dreaming Stars (Tim Pratt) is the sequel to The
Wrong Stars, which brings the alien menace somewhat more on-screen
and thereby diminishes it. But people still don't escape unscathed in body
or mind, so that's good. (Except for them.)
Rebecca Roanhorse won the Campbell award for Best New Writer, and seemed
awesome, so I picked up Trail of Lightning and it was pretty
good, a combination of post-apocalytic with Navajo mythology (which I know
a tiny bit of from growing up in New Mexico, but is not something I have
seen much of in books since perhaps Eye of Cat). The main
character is definitely a badass monster killer, perfectly capable of
dealing with mythological annoyances, and so very unprepared to have a hot
guy foisted on her.
Words:
144.
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5 September 2018 - Wednesday
Once again, it is time for 13th Age and CPK (which we would probably normally
spurn, but there's some kind of fundraiser thing for Jus and Nonny's
school). We managed to avoid all the fights this time, although we did get
dropped into a pit by an enraged earth elemental, and pinned most of the
evils of the world on Mike's character. A good evening's work!
Words:
168.
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4 September 2018 - Tuesday
Hurray, Avalon is alive! And spent the weekend productively, unlike me.
Words:
219.
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3 September 2018 - Monday
I did not do anything useful today. I did not even join a union.
Instead of watching Showa Genroku Rakugo Shinju like we
were supposed to, Marith and I watched more of The Good Place.
Well. That was terrifying in a different way than I expected, but I am glad
Eleanor was paying attention during class. Also, I am surprised by Janet's
subplot.
Chococat made me lie down and snuggle him, and while I was down there, I
read Weird
Little Games vol 1, which is pretty much what it says on the tin. Want
to be an Azumanga Daioh girl with the serial numbers filed off?
Want to be a member of the US Presidential Line of Succession (Extended
Remix) in a mecha? Want to be the soul at risk in a Chick Tract? Ewen
Cluney has you covered.
Words:
306.
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2 September 2018 - Sunday
After being super-useless all day (I even took a nap!), I went over the
in evening to play Gloomhaven
with Ken, because he is super-excited about it. I feel like a bad friend
for not appreciating it enough, but despite the flavor text, it's just a
tactical combat boardgame, and one with a core mechanic that is designed to
produce frustration (you start out with good cards, and have to slowly
discard them, never getting new ones). Also, I played it when I was hungry
and grouchy, so I wasn't as happy about being a weird little ghoul-rat with
brain powers as I could have been.
So how do I make 13G more
palatable? Add some Apocalypse
Power, of course!
Dungeon
World is good for a base, but the D&D stats (both in the sense of
Strength and Dexterity being stats, and of having a vestigial 3-18 value)
must go. New stats: Fierce, Wary, Stubborn, Charming, Thinky, Touched
(names not final, okay!), on the usual PbTA -1 to +3 scale. Also levels
should go away, advancements and advanced advancements are fine. Hit points
and damage dice can stay, no need to revert to the harm clock.
Most of the DW basic moves are fine, tweaked for the new stats. Ditch
Final Breath for Take a Mortal Wound (unconscious but stable/unconscious and
dying/dead), add one for coming back from the dead. I don't think we need
specific moves for general battle magic, that's just the excuse for why a PC
has like three times the hit points and twice the average damage of an NPC
with similar job description. Maybe make magical healing a basic move, as in
13G, since healing magic isn't as restricted as in D&D.
What are the playbooks? One per cult is obvious, but I don't think
that's right. 13G has like four classes based on Orlanth, which is legit
because Orlanth is both the primary god so has a portfolio that includes a
lot of stuff and is the god of rampaging around going out
and getting things done, which covers all kinds of adventuring. I am
dubious about troll PCs, so we can leave those classes out for now, but
that still leaves Orlanthi warrior, Humakti murderhobo, Storm Bull
berserker, Orlanthi rebel, Orlanthi storm sorcerer, Ernalda summoner
priestess, Eurmal asshole, and Ernalda/Yelm shield-based martial artist. I'd
also like to see Lhankor Mhy sword sage, Babeester Gor avenging daughter,
Yinkin hunter, maybe Issaries messenger? That's twelve, which seems like a
lot, but probably a reasonable start? Okay, really the reasonable start
would be to write a paragraph about each and then only create moves for the
ones that people want to play (which is none of them, because people only
play D&D).
Words:
114.
Weekly total: 1348. Meh.
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1 September 2018 - Saturday
Marith very kindly woke up well in advance of work to make sure I was not
sleeping through my doctor appointment. She is a hero of the revolution.
Having my ear vacuumed was quick and produced a great bounty of cerumen,
but it was like an action movie where the edge of the cliff is crumbling
away in different-sized chunks, only happening inside my ear canal.
- Sailor Moon S 31: Down to Witches 3!
- Laid-Back Camp 8: But ghost stories are an essential part
of Japanese camping!
- My Hero Academia 37-38: Victory: the protagonist!
- Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions 2.4: I can't argue
with Dekomori's logic: if reading the holy texts causes someone to
writhe in pain, they must be a bad person.
Jade City (Fonda Lee) is the first book of a
secondary-world wuxia gangster epic set on the one island in the world that
produces the jade that gives people of the local ethnicity wire-fu powers.
Conflict ensues. Despite being secondary-world, it's at a mid-C20 level of
civilization: banks, cars, landline phones, military-industrial complexes.
Family intrigue, family expectations, combat-drug addiction, white people
trying to exploit the local resources, all the usual gangster stuff.
Words:
280.
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31 August 2018 - Friday
Because my ear doesn't work, if I sleep on the wrong side, I can't hear
my alarm. This is bad.
Three more episodes of The Good Place. Michael seems to
be showing character growth, but I don't trust it. Also, I am personally
offended by the Bad Place people, even though they have a train.
Heroine's Journey (Sarah Kuhn) is the third book in the
series, the one the author read the beginning of at Worldcon. It is from
the PoV of yet another member of the superhero team/found family, the
former annoying-little-sister who is now all grown up, really. Like the
other characters, she is pretty messed up, because how can you even write
about humans who aren't? But these romances are way too straight.
The Little Homo Sapiens Scientist (SL Huang) is the
queer reversed "Little Mermaid" that the author read from at Worldcon.
It has all the important bits, including complete doom.
Words:
217.
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30 August 2018 - Thursday
I skipped work in the morning to go to urgent care and have a very
nice nurse irrigate my ear, but it remained barren of sounds. I will
have to go back on Saturday for a specialist, because I am just that
defective.
Troika is a
super-minimal RPG, old-school but not OD&D-based. It has like two stats,
and a mandatory roll on d66 for a character background that sets skills
(and spells). Pretty much the whole setting (such as it is) is encoded in
the backgrounds, for example, 14 Cacogen You are Those
Filthy Born, spawned in the hump-backed sky lit only by great black
anti-suns and false light. Your mother was sailing on the golden barges or
caught in some more abstract fate when she passed you, far from the
protective malaise of the million spheres. You were open to the power and
the glory at a generative time and it shows in your teratoid form. or
16 Claviger The key masters wander the universe
fathoming the workings of all entry ways they can find. Though they're
quite fascinated with simple chests and doors, they are most excited by
metaphysical and metaphorical barriers. You might find small conclaves of
clavigers camped around the feet of demon gates, debating appropriate
methods of attack or building obscure machines of entry. Seems cool,
and I'm not even sure I'd have to convert it to PbtA.
The Good Place 4-6: Now we know what's up with [SPOILER],
but the characters don't seem to be addressing the obvious question that
raises. Once again, divide and conquer is the MO of the overclass.
(Not that the overclass is coming off as all that superior, extra
dimensions aside.)
I've been slowly reading through 13th Age
Glorantha, but although I like many of the ideas, I'm not sure I like
it as a game. Even more than standard 13th Age, it
relies on a profusion of small, slightly useful, special case rules that
only come up once in a while. A good example is the standard bonus for a
rune gift in the healing category: it gives you an extra recovery, but you
can't just increase your max recoveries by 1 and carry on, because this
recovery is Special and has different rules than all other recoveries, so
you have to track it separetely and decide, every time you heal with a
recovery, whether this is the right time to use it. And everything is like
that: rune gifts (the equivalent to magic items) and class abilities are
almost all "daily" or "recharge" abilities, meaning you get to use them
once or an unpredictable but small number of times every few sessions (a
month or more of player time) and have to keep track of their availability
and decide which one to use at every opportunity. Class abilities (spells,
etc) at least give you some amount of bang in exchange for the cognitive
load, but rune gifts are just large enough that you'll suffer if you try to
blow off the system.
I expect that Dave, Mike, and Ken will all love this, because it's very
board-game like and they like finding the synergies among ten million
different rules, but the idea feels me with a deep lack of interest in
jumping through those hoops. Or playing D&D at all, really. It's 2018, FFS!
Words:
110. I blame capitalism television.
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29 August 2018 - Wednesday
My ear seems to have stopped working. I tried both water and
over-the-counter stuff, but no dice. Unless it spontaneously clears up
overnight, I guess I will have to go to the doctor tomorrow. Like an old
defective person who is falling apart.
No 13th Age,
Ken is something.
Marith shared her raviolis with me. She is a good flatmate.
Words:
226.
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28 August 2018 - Tuesday
Heroine Worship (Sarah Kuhn) isn't the book the author read
from at Worldcon, but comes between that one and the one I read. It's from
the PoV of the person the protagonist of the first book felt steamrollered
by, because of course she has her own emotional burdens to bear. Also
there's a plot, or something, that's not really the point of the book.
Words:
181.
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27 August 2018 - Monday
No date tonight, Avalon's brain is exploding. 8(
Words:
220.
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26 August 2018 - Sunday
No PAD&D5
today, Jeremy has been afflicted with humans at work or something.
I don't think I accomplished anything at all today. Because I pretty much
suck.
Words:
253.
Weekly total: 1408.
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25 August 2018 - Saturday
A routine Saturday. Well, alternate Saturday, since we had cleaners.
- Sailor Moon S 30: Well, that's not ominous at all.
- Laid-Back Camp 7: Ghost stories are important!
- My Hero Academia 36: Of course we had to cliffhanger before
Deku's exam.
- Love, Chuunibyo, & Other Delusions 2.3: The Boop episode!
Words:
248.
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24 August 2018 - Friday
Yay, Avalon is still alive!
Snotgirl vol 1 (Bryan Lee O'Malley, Leslie Hung) is about a
fashion blogger in LA who is kind of a terrible person, but probably all you
need to know to decide whether to read it is that it's by the Scott
Pilgrim guy, but is mimetic rather than magical realism.
Words:
150.
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23 August 2018 - Thursday
I don't seem to have any brain at all this week.
Marith and I watched the first three episodes of The Good
Place, because two episodes (of a later season) were up for Hugos.
Now she has Theories.
Sworn to the Night and Detonation Boulevard
(Craig Schaefer) are the first two of a trilogy that seems to be tying
together the author's two related urban fantasy/horror series and one
secondary-world series. I'm here for lesbian antihero romance struggling
against doom from before history and also rich assholes getting destroyed,
but the interdimensional fantasy stuff doesn't seem to fit very well with
the horror stuff, even though it's pretty dark fantasy.
Peasprout Chen, Future Legend of Skate and Sword (Henry Lien)
is about as adorable as the title. It is about girl power and
figure-skating-style martial arts and political intrigue.
Words:
169.
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22 August 2018 - Wednesday
We had everyone for 13th Age, so we
finished the sword-smithing fight and ate Wuhan
food.
Cool, my 13th Age
Glorantha are here! This makes it more likely that we will play 13G
after Eyes of
the Stone Thief wraps up.
Words:
165.
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21 August 2018 - Tuesday
Boss K is in town, and made me and coworkers S and T go to dinner
because talking work at work is not enough. No one knew where to go, so I
guided them to Taiwan. They
weren't overtly repulsed, and I got to walk home conveniently, so I guess
it worked out okay.
Coworker S's new Tesla 3 is pretty spiffy, but seems to have some
software issues.
Words:
142.
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20 August 2018 - Monday
There was a little more Worldcon programming today, but I needed a day to be
passively useless and do things like grocery shopping and laundry and drinking
too much Diet Dr Pepper.
Marith, who went to anime on Saturday instead of abandoning most of her
friends, got me all caught up on My Hero Academia.
- My Hero Academia 33-35: Beginning of the finals! Froppy and
Cool Bird Boy are still best! Sticky Head Bulbs is still the worst, and
should get fed to a supervillain! All Might is surprisingly scary when he's
not being cheesy!
The Harbors of the Sun (Martha Wells) ties up the plot that
started in Edge of Worlds, while opening room for many more. I
mean, surely no one will be upset by [SPOILER], right?
Words:
281. Of course, now I have to write something that takes everything I may
have learned at Worldcon into account, so I'm still doomed, but being around
other people who were talking and thinking about writing has improved
morale.
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19 August 2018 - Sunday
Fourth day of Worldcon!
- Macro
to Micro: Worldbuilding Workshop with NK Jemisin was more
geography-building, on spherical planets, and then deriving culture
from that, with audience input, so I was not that interested, even
though possibly I should have been, and bailed out halfway through.
- The conclusion from We
Dressed Those Girls: Subverting Tropes or Reinforcing the Status
Quo? was that subverting tropes is hard, and claiming that
acknowledging the tropes constitutes subverting them and people who don't
understand are the Real Sexists™ does not count.
- Body
Language - How to Improve Your Awareness and Use It in Fiction had
a cartoonist as well as
some writers, so that was an interesting additional perspective.
Anyway, body language is a huge deal, people don't even know they're
reading it, everyone should definitely include it in their dialogue all
the time. Watching humans is good for learning how humans do body
language.
- All the panelists who made it to How
Hollywood Gets It Wrong were doctors, so it was very medically
focused, but "every way possible" probably holds for most other fields.
Useful takeways for oppressing characters: everything takes longer to
heal than they show on TV, and the best place for a disabling but
nonfatal wound is the thigh, to the outside of the femur.
- YA
vs Adult Fiction: Defining Boundaries was mostly panelists who have
written both, so there was a lot of talk about what they thought the
differences were vs what their agents thought the differences were, and
how most of the dividing criteria are flexible anyway because writing,
man. It would have been better without the white guy on the panel
talking over people though.
- Reading:
Kat Tanaka Okopnik was only okay. I think her work is not entirely
to my taste, which is fine. (I think Cat liked it more.) She is down
with social justice, which is good enough for me.
- I think all the panelists for Disability
in the Future were disabled, so it was definitely a better
perspective than might have been found in the past, and I think they
were right that there will always be disabilities of some kind ("Sorry,
ma'am, your neural architecture is just not compatible with the ISO
cyberware standards."). But it felt like they were most interested in
what was coming out nowish alleviate their particular ailments, and
less in how those ailments could be eliminated altogether. (Some of
them said that they wouldn't want their disability to be gone, because
having it made them the person they are today.) I understand this, but
I think it made the panel not as future-oriented as would have been
interesting to me. Maybe we do need to be not terrible
about disabilities now before we can have a good
discussion about the future, but that wasn't the stated goal of the
panel. I dunno, I'm relatively able-bodied, I probably don't get a say
here.
- Earl and Cat escaped before dinner, so I had to go eat very unhealthy
things all by myself. Sniff!
- I tried to go to another Mary Crowell concert, but it was mysteriously
cancelled in favor of a scary old lady telling people what to filk.
- And finally, the Hugos!
Unlike the masquerade, the results are already known, and the MC was
Efficient, so we got through the entire slate in about two hours. Lots
of women, some PoC, no obvious Nazis (suck it, Sad Puppies!). Rebecca
Roanhorse, who is black and indigenous, got both the Campell and a
Hugo, NK
Jemisin got her third Hugo in a row for the third book in her
recent trilogy, which everyone agrees was well
deserved, Murderbot got a Hugo, Bujold got another Hugo,
all was good. Hurray!
THE END!
Words:
FAIL.
Weekly total: 545, but that's with four days off for Worldcon. Without
that, I would have broken 1000 for sure! Probably!
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Sproing!
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