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May 11th, 2012
 | 01:36 pm - Eldritch Skies Out!!!!
At long last, and a year to the day after the Kickstarter ended, Eldritch Skies is now available as a PDF on drivethru RPG. I'm exceptionally proud of it, the art and layout look awesome, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) amberite's fiction pieces are excellent and I really hope people enjoy the book (and buy lots of copies, especially since I get half of the profits for each book :)
Pre-orders for the print book will start very soon.
Current Location: Home
Current Mood:  jubilant
Current Music: Hey Ho by Tracy Grammer
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May 2nd, 2012
 | 05:53 pm - A Wonderfully Hopeful Series of Blog Posts
I'm posting this because I've only seen on mention of it on LJ and it's an impressive and wonderful story. Here's an article about a couple who were raised Quiverfull (aka scary extreme fundies), who got married and had a few kids. At that point, one of them realized she was transsexual and transitioned, the couple stayed together, made a new life for themselves, and left their religion behind
The article is good, but it's even better to read the series of nine blog posts one of the two people wrote about this. The blog posts are powerful and excellent and gave me insight into a life and a journey that is well beyond my experience.
I also looked at some of the other posts on that site and was very impressed with them. I particularly liked this one about looking for bibles and books of bible stories to read to her young children, and being overcome with horror at how brutal these stories are and not wanting to inflict them on young children – a feeling I've also seen posted by several parents on my f-list who are now ex-religious.
As I mention here and in other posts, Christianity comes from an era when people's regard for the lives and suffering of others was simply less than it is in the modern developed world, and I can easily see people deciding that such attitudes have no place in modern life.
In any case, the posts about how this couple's lives changed is one of the more powerful, joyful, and hopeful things I've read in a while.
Current Mood: impressed
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| 05:09 pm - Musings on "Gritty" Fantasy
After reading another post about the problems with the current fascination with rape, misogyny, similar vileness in modern "gritty" fantasy novels and TV shows, I remembered the only fantasy series I've read which had extensive depictions of gritty warfare, the protagonist was the leader of a 15th century mercenary company - Ash: A Secret History by Mary Gentle These books were exceedingly gritty – passages about being covered in gore, cold, hungry, and listening to the screams from the medical tent were not rare. The pre-modern warfare in these books was ugly and brutal. However, when rape was mentioned in the books, it was both clearly shown as a problem (in the sense of soldiers being out of control in ways that their commanders found problematic), and it was never portrayed in great detail. I found the third book of the series to rather weak, and wasn't as satisfied with the ending as I could have been, but I enjoyed it a great deal, and was never once tempted to throw any of the books across the room, unlike the time I read the first part of Martin's first Game of Thrones novel. I've attempted to read other similar novels and never get very far as a mixture of boredom and disgust sets in. I've complained about Martin's novels before, and they are far from alone (Here's a ludicrously self-indulgent rebuttal to the post I link to by R. Scott Bakker, who also writes "gritty" rape-filled fantasy novels). In thinking back on Gentle's Ash series, it occurred to me that that major difference is that Martin, Bakker, and similar authors are not simply attempting to write fantasy that's "grittier" or more brutal, they are making a conscious or unconscious decision that gritty realism not only must include large amounts of rape, misogyny, and racism, but that all of these must be described in extensive detail. These are not choices that I respect or am willing to read. In any case, if you want to read a fascinating, unusual, and seriously gritty fantasy series, Ash:_A_Secret_History is well worth reading.
Current Mood:  thoughtful
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April 20th, 2012
| 06:07 pm - My Recent Gaming
I've been making my (admittedly) meager living writing RPGs for around 15 years now, but for the last few years I've only had fairly sporadic gaming, until this year. Within a month of each other, two games started that I'm in, one run by each of my wonderful partners. For those of you with an interest in such things, here's what games I'm currently playing: ( Info on both campaigns follows )
Current Mood: pleased
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April 17th, 2012
| 02:40 am - Musings on History, Violence, & The Hunger Games
When I saw The Hunger Games a bit over a week ago, one of the more striking things in the film was the use of the mass media in the movie's setting. They had a similar reality-TV-like aesthetic, but for a show about children murdering one another. My first thought was that nothing like this would or could happen anywhere in any nation at all like any of the modern developed world. Legal restrictions aside, the entire developed world (and much of the rest of the planet) is now a place where open bloody violence is no longer acceptable entertainment, that's as true in Germany or Japan as it is in the US, even long cultural traditions like bull-fighting in Spain are under intense public pressure and are in the process of (thankfully) being banned. Anything involving bloody violence against humans is on the far cultural fringes even if it doesn't involve any risk of death or serious injury.
However, then I considered the past, including the recent past. 150 years ago, public executions were considered great fun by many and morally uplifting by some – people regularly took their children to them, both for the spectacle and for moral education. Going further back, we have quite a bit of writing from various Roman authors, and while a fair number of them wrote about gladiatorial combat, only one, Seneca wrote against them, and his objections were largely that they were only fit for base minds and that they promoted decadence among the viewers than that they were intrinsically hideous and wrong. Of course, prior to the early 20th century, with the rise of modern medicine, death was far more ever-present, and quite honestly life, including human life was considered far cheaper than it is in any of the developed world and much of the rest of the planet (life sadly remains pretty darn cheap in places like Pakistan or North Korea, but such hell-holes are growing increasingly rare).
In any case, if there was some way to combine pre-20th century attitudes towards violence with advanced technology (which seems far from impossible, especially if, like in the film, access to this technology was drastically unequal), then I can definitely see people avidly watching their view screens at the sight of children murdering one another. Such are the ways that humanity changes, and yet another reason that I regard the pre-modern past as universally hideous.
Current Mood: contemplative
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 | 02:18 am - Theories of Politics and Mind + the Current Broken State of US Politics
I've discussed Jonathan Haidt's moral foundations theory previously. It's interesting and he and some of the others working on the relationship of cognition and political preference seem to be onto something. However, I've also recently begun to encounter a number of articles like this one, that both attempt (rather dubiously, as is true of at least 95% of all evo-psych theories) to tie these preferences into inborn genetic traits, and also to use them to explain the current political tensions in the US.
I've written a number of posts about why I think most evolutionary psychology is not merely bogus, but that it is also ideologically motivated pseudoscience .
However, that's only half of my disagreement with thin and various similar articles I've seen. While most don't come out and say it, they hint that major tensions between conservatives and liberals are unavoidable and thus that the current poisonous state of US politics is in some way natural or unsurprising.
However, it's worth considering exactly how bad US politics has become and more importantly exactly how insane and twisted the Republican party has become. Yes, it seems liberals and conservatives evaluate the world in different ways, and yet in the 1990s, a similar set up of a Republican House and a Democratic president was at odds with one another, but somewhat less badly than they are now. Also, prior to the 1980s, the Republican Party was not the party of fundy bigots and was a whole lot less crazy.
More importantly, the differences between conservatives and liberals may be inherent, but the extreme differences are clearly not. The UK is a nation with common cultural roots to the US, and yet while I consider their Tories to be fairly vile, they also aren't insane fundy bigots. The closest UK analog to the US Republican Party is the BNP, who are insane racists. However, in the UK the BNP regularly only gets around 2-3% of the vote and are widely reviled by everyone else. It's well worth keeping in mind that the current state of US politics and of the Republican Party is in no way normal, it's sick seriously non-functional. I've also rather suspicious of the motives of writing articles that imply that the current state of affairs is in some way normal.
Current Mood: thoughtful
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April 9th, 2012
 | 01:51 am - Musings on Movie Trailers
The trailers were also an interesting mix – The Avengers looks to be fun (especially with Joss Whedon directing it, since he's best at working with an ensemble cast, but the presence of only one female hero was also very noticeable – perhaps if this film does well Black Widow will get her own film (given that she's played by Scarlett Johansson, this seems like a definite possibility). I'd also love to see Wasp, She-Hulk, Monica Rambeau/Captain Marvel, Carol Danvers/Ms Marvel/Captain Marvel, or the Scarlet Witch join up to make the team a bit more balanced. Either Carol Danvers or Monica Rambeau seem like the best choices to me, but the Scarlet Witch could also work.
I also saw a trailer for what will clearly be a total train-wreck of a film – Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter, which if the trailer is correct is about a wire-fu/wuxia Abraham Lincoln killing (or perhaps more accurately killin') vampires with an axe. This could have been a bad & cheap comedy, but it actually looked to be action-horror, which was simply ludicrous (much of the audience was rightfully giggling after that trailer). The fact that it's being directed by the director of the Russian films Night Watch and Day Watch is just going to make it more painful to watch – wow. I am baffled that this was made.
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| 01:45 am - Two Movies Well Worth Seeing
Last week I saw John Carter, and it was as visually stunning as Avatar, while being both considerably better in terms of the plot making sense as well as far less offensive. It was lovely, the plot worked, the hero could perform impressive feats because he was essentially Superman (ie he came from an environment with a much higher gravity) on Barsoom, Dejah Thoris was both a skilled warrior and a scientist and well acted by Lynn Collins, and both facts were important to the plot, Tars Tarkus was played wonderfully by Willem Dafoe, Sola was an interesting and complex character with her own story arc, and amazingly the sex of female tharks was actually not exceptionally obvious. Taylor Kitsch can't act his way out of a paper bag, but everyone else made up for this also, the helpful and heroic Martian "dog" actually survived the film, I kept expecting it to die in a scene of cheap pathos, and it didn't, a fact that contributed to the film's overall humanity
teaotter and I saw The Hunger Games today. As I'd read, it was quite impressive from a gender PoV – As this article discussed, Katniss Everdeen is an unusual character for modern US film or even for wildly successful modern YA novels. TV is typically considerably more progressive (and simply more adventurous) than film, and we had Xena and Buffy in the 90s, but Katniss isn't inherently outside the range of humanity, like Buffy or Xena. Also, and perhaps most importantly that fact that she's a female hero is less important than the fact that she's a hero, and that's not something that I've seen very much in any US film. Later this year, we have Brave, and Snow White and the Huntsman both coming up later this year – interestingly enough in a year also featuring both the Republican War on Women, and also a significant feminist push-back against this.
It was an interesting film in other ways – the scene where the tributes were initially styled reminded me (certainly intentionally) of the make-over scenes in America's Next Top Model, and the entire feel of the movie was informed by reality TV. However, it was also discomfiting and a bit frustrating to watch a film about injustice and the first stirrings of revolution to overthrow a truly hideous society, which also clearly contained as little social commentary as the people who made it could possibly manage. I haven't read the book (preferring to avoid YA dystopias) and so don't know if the book contained much in the way of social commentary, but I suspect not. It's equally clear that in the modern US, if the film had contained significant social commentary it would not have been a big-budget picture, but this lack was still frustrating, since it felt like it should have been there. In some ways, even John Carter has a bit more social commentary than The Hunger Games (although nothing more complex than environmental destruction for profit & shadowy white overlords = bad)
The Hunger Games was however, very well done and visually quite impressive despite this lack.
Current Mood: pleased
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March 26th, 2012
| 06:22 pm - A nifty sounding upcoming book
The 3rd Doctor (played by Jon Pertwee) is one of the my two favorite Doctors (along with 9), and so this alone would be mildly interesting:
"Harvest of Time will feature the Third Doctor as played by Jon Pertwee and will be the first all-new adventure for a Past Doctor that BBC Books has published since the show’s return in 2005. A novel set on both 20th century Earth and far into the future, it will have the Doctor battling his arch-nemesis, The Master, to save the universe – and facing the ultimate moral crisis."
However, I'd normally also be somewhat dubious, because the few Dr. Who novelizations I've read have been fairly mediocre, except that this one is being written by Alastair Reynolds, who is my favorite living SF author, and it turns out a big fan of Doctor Who. The only downside is that it won't be out until 2013, and I also have to wait until then to get the 2nd of his so-far-excellent Poseidon series.
Current Mood: pleased
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March 24th, 2012
| 03:14 am - Iain M. Banks' Culture novels and disagreements about Utopias and Dystopias
I enjoyed reading most of the novels in Iain M. Banks' Culture series Banks' has stated that one of the reasons he started writing about the Culture was to create a space opera for progressive, rather than yet another example of interstellar feudalism, and which Banks has described as " a Socialist utopia written as a Lefty wish fulfillment". Add in the increasing number of transhumanist technologies that have appeared in those novels and you have a setting that I greatly enjoy reading about (in a number of exceedingly well-written novels).
However, moving beyond the novels' admitted literary merits, I enjoy reading about the Culture, because it's fairly close to what I would consider not merely a utopia, but one of the most appealing utopias that I've ever encountered (although, it's also a place that's clearly non-ideal to live near, given the way amount of well-meaning interventionism). It's definitely on the rather small list of places that I'd moved to in a heartbeat if given the choice. In a recent and lengthy discussion of history and fiction with alephnul, amberite, and alephnul's relatively new housemate, and relatively new friend of mine, Ben. What puzzled me was that Ben had read several Culture novels and considered it a fairly unpleasant dystopia, in large part because humans and being with human-level intelligence are essentially pets of the AI Minds. This idea doesn't merely not bother me, but it seems inherently superior to government by humans, but to Ben the combination of the lack of self-determination and the fact that the Minds are sufficient smarter that they've thought of and imagined everything a human could possible think or imagine means that humans are entirely irrelevant, which makes it a dystopia to him.
I realize that my own view on politics is odd, because while I find democracies clearly superior to other existing systems of government in practice, the fact that I can vote is utterly irrelevant to me, since my vote is one in hundreds of thousands (in local elections) or hundreds of millions) in national elections, and so individually pointless. Also, in Jonathan Haidt's six moral foundations, I score by far the highest in care (ie keeping others from being harmed), high in fairness, with all of the others, including liberty/oppression being considerably lower, and with loyalty, authority, and sanctity all being exceptionally low.
Yesterday, Ben and I were talking with other people about gaming, and I was amused to learn that by far my favorite type of game is one where the GM is solely in charge of creating and controlling the world and comes up with the plots and stories for the PCs, while Ben prefers non-traditional RPGs, where power is shared somewhat, and even in a game where the GM is excellent and creating excellent and engaging stories, he has problems with that style of gaming and finds it too constricting. It immediately struck me that this difference in preference came from the same basis as my viewing the Culture as a utopia and Ben considering it to be a dystopia. In any case, I'm also intrigued this difference and am also curious as to how other people feel about this. ( Also, here's a poll )
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Steely Dan - Hey Nineteen
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March 7th, 2012
| 03:26 am - Musings on Suffering, Modern Life, and Religion
I ran into an interesting series of posts on a study about why people cease being Christians. There seem to be three primary reasons – other Christians responding badly to the person expressing doubts, prayers not being answered, and also people having theological issues with Christianity. Many of the examples of the later involved dealing with the idea that God allowed or inflicted suffering, and I found that very interesting, while also not terribly surprising.
Christianity, like all of the other pre-modern faiths, evolved in an era when many children died in childhood, when relatively minor injuries could easily be fatal, and where significant suffering was not merely universal, but also entirely out of the ability of anyone to predict. In one person, a bad scratch might heal in a week, in another, they might get blood poisoning and be dead in six days. In addition to the world seeming far more random than it does now, everyone had far more experience with death. If you made it to 30, you had likely buried your parents, at least some of any children you had, at least one of your siblings, and very possibly your spouse. People were far more inured to the deaths and suffering of others, and especially to those of people they didn't know well. You can see this in the popularity of watching public executions and of various horrific sports like bear baiting and dog fighting. Insanities like dueling or lethal gladiatorial games were also widely popular in various eras.
All this changed in the 20th century, first with antibiotics and vaccinations, and even further with vastly improved trauma medicine. For much of the 20th century (at least in the developed world) people dying before they become elderly had become far rarer than it was a century or more before. Because of these changes, attitudes have changed. Huge number of people died in pre-modern wars. Even in the last century, 10 million soldiers died in WWI and relatively few people called for these wars to stop because so many people were dying in what a relatively pointless war. In recent equally pointless wars, people all across the developed world get exceedingly upset about wars that kill a few thousand people. I even recently saw that less than a third as many stray cats and dogs are being euthanized in the US was were 40 years ago. The drop in the murder rate has been equally clear.
In the developed world, and to a large degree all across the planet, people have become are a whole lot less tolerant of others dying from accidents, violence, or any other cause other than old age. These feelings include strangers and even pets that they don't know. However, Christianity is a faith from another far grimmer and bloodier era, and all of the basic theology was written by and for people whose life was unimaginably horrible, violent, and death-filled by the standards of every resident of the first world.
It doesn't surprise me that answers about the question of suffering and of God stopping it or causing it that worked for people in 1,200 CE or even 1,850 CE do not work for many people today. In fact, that change pleases me greatly for reasons that have nothing to do with my attitudes about any particular religion, because a world where people are more generally compassionate and far less willing to accept the deaths of others is IMHO an unqualified good. The fact that issues relating to how theology deals with random suffering and death are one of the more common reasons for people to leave Christianity seems to me to be yet another proof of my idea that as life becomes less random and less violent, overall religiosity declines, which is one reason why organized religion is in such swift decline all across the social democracies of Western Europe.
Current Mood: thoughtful
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March 6th, 2012
| 03:21 am - Musings on TV, Fanfic, Continuity, and Change
I've given up on watching White Collar, to the point that after watching the season finale, I no longer particularly care what happens, and that got me thinking about the various reasons I watch and enjoy TV.
White Collar is one of a very small number of shows I started watching because I first encountered the fan-fic, which was largely fanfiction involving polyamorous triads, some of which was written by people who actually understood polyamory, which naturally made it of interest to me, and the show was enjoyable and pleasantly unusual for actually featuring a happy and functional married couple whose interactions did not have the hideousness that seem exceptionally common among TV het romances. However, I remained more interested in the fanfiction than the show, and so over the last season as the show slipped in quality and began a season-long plot that was both dismal and seemed to violate a number of established truths about several characters, my interest in the show waned. In addition to bad long-term plotting, I particularly noticed two problems. One was simply that the direction the show was taking made the fanfiction I liked increasingly less plausible for a number of reasons.
This is pretty much inevitable for long-term shows and is one reason that I've discovered that all of the shows I really like are ones where my enjoyment of the fan-fiction is secondary to my enjoyment of the show itself – as I've mentioned before, I'm a huge fan of Fringe (in fact, teaotter and I are gradually rewatching seasons 2 & 3 with amberite (who didn't have time to see it when Becca and I first watched it a few months ago), and I'm enjoying it almost as much the second time around), and I've tried reading Fringe fanfiction, but haven't found anything I have more than a passing interest in. At this point, I'll keep looking for good fic for shows that I enjoy, but it's clear that I should avoid shows if what I enjoy most about them is the fanfic.
Also, another problem I with White Collar is something that I periodically see in TV, and unwillingless to alter either the basic premise or the basic character dynamic, even when events on the show make one or both of these changes seem inevitable. White Collar set out the two protagonists as the untrustworthy and undisciplined con-man and the by the book, law-abiding FBI agent. By the end of the second season, this dynamic had changed, and the attempt to reset it in the last season felt forced. For the past 20+ years, TV has increasingly been dominated by shows which have a large degree of series-long continuity, and the older episodic (and IMHO largely far inferior) shows have faded away. However, it's clear that some people working in TV have habits formed by working on or watching episodic TV and the result is typically annoying and problematic. Also, one of the things I love about modern TV is long-term story arcs. I love good long-term story arcs, including both season-long story arcs or multi-season arcs as well as long-term arcs focused on how characters change and grow, and it's become clear to me that I'll tolerate a large number of episodes of exceedingly dodgy plots if the long-term story or character arcs are done well.
For example, Fringe has truly awesome small details, impressively excellent character arcs and long-term story arcs, as well as wonder character interaction, but many of the individual episode plots that are not focused on the long-term arcs are ludicrously dumb, and yet it's my second favorite show (after The Vampire Diaries, which has both excellent long term arcs and often equally good episode plots). In contrast, I remember that the X-Files often had quite good individual episodes, but the long-term story arc was frustrating and increasingly stupid, and so by the middle of the 4th season, I stopped watching it. Similarly, when White Collar fell down on the long term story and character arcs, I lost interest.
Current Mood:  geeky
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March 2nd, 2012
| 02:18 pm - Success With Gluten-Free Baked Goods
Both amberite and my dear friend Aaron have celiac, and so I've had to learn a bit about gluten-free baking. I've found that commercial gluten free flour mixes (I use Pamela's Gluten-Free Bread Mix & Flour Blend and have found that it's possible to make everything except yeast-risen items, but the results are usually fairly dubious. Sugar cookies I've made are sweet, but the texture is definitely inferior to conventional cookies, and so my preference is to make two batches, one for myself and anyone who can eat gluten and another that is specifically gluten free. However, while I've found that Alice and Aaron appreciate such foods, I often dislike making them, because I dislike making food that I consider seriously flawed. Given that almost all commercial gluten-free cookies that I've tried have been similarly dubious, I doubt that I'll be able to do much better that I am now.
However, I've recently been experimenting with another option – baked goods that specifically use little flour. In addition to various nut-based tortes, I recently make both
chocolate lava muffins (which has almost no flour) and sour cherry financier (which uses twice as much almond meal as flour), and the results were delicious. I've made gluten-containing chocolate lava muffins before, and there was no difference at all. This seems to be the best option I've found for gluten free baking, and given that I love European nut tortes, I'll be doing this more.
Current Mood: pleased
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February 22nd, 2012
 | 10:19 pm - Musings On PantheaCon and Oppression
The San Francisco neopagan gathering PantheaCon happened last weekend, and while I wasn't there, I know many people who were. Like last year, there was an incident involving a group of Dianic pagans (led by well-known Dianic elder Z. Budapest) excluding transwomen from their rituals. Last year, they didn't state this and instead refused entrance to anyone who they thought might not have been born female. Rightfully so, there was a fairly impressive outcry about this sort of bigoted nonsense. To make matters worse, Z. Budapest posted a vile transphobic screed that is discussed and quoted here.
This year, the same group, led by Z. Budapest had another ritual, which on the program they listed as for "genetic women only". There was a silent protest out front of this ritual, which my good friend lupagreenwolf attended – here's her account of the experience.
Many people have discussed the obvious problems with this sort of bigotry, which are even more obviously egregious because in the 1960s and 70s, one reason that Dianic Wicca cam about what the lesbians and gay men were frequently excluded from traditional Wiccan covens, including those run by various important Wiccans, because they "had the wrong sort of energies". There were even some early women only covens and groups that excluded lesbians for the same reason.
However, it's also true that Z. Budapest and her fellow bigots are obviously entirely within their rights to worship as they please and to exclude who they wish from their rituals. I've also heard of a few openly racist pagan groups that exclude people of color. I think openly condemning Z. Budapest and the other members of her group allows people to let off steam, but also isn't going to change anything.
What I see as the far more important issue is that PantheaCon is open to all pagans, and collects money from all who attend. So, I ultimately see the problem as being that the people who run PantheaCon allow people who put on rituals at the gathering, which are open to attendees, which are also openly bigoted. To me that important thing to do is to call the people running PantheaCon to task about this issue, including organizing an email campaign and if necessary, a boycott.
It's easy to see how the people who run PantheaCon got into this position – the reason is all about gaining access to resources, including money, social capital, and prestige. A pagan gathering that theoretically welcomes all pagans, including both transpeople and their friends and allies, as well as transphobic people, and allows all of these people to put on programs based on their own agendas will obviously have more attendees and more positive press than one that either openly states that the exclusion of trans-people is acceptable or which forbids this sort of bigotry.
The first choice would cause many trans people and their friends and allies to speak out against PantheaCon and would likely cause many of them not to attend, the second choice would almost certainly cause Z. Budapest and her group to cease performing rituals there and might cause them to not attend. Either result costs the people running the event money, social capital, and prestige. In the absence of strong pressure to do otherwise, the best policy for the people running PantheaCon is to say and do nothing, to forbid nothing, and thus to have the various groups attack one another, while continuing to have all such people to attend PantheaCon.
I see this as the same sort of pseudo-liberal dodge that causes radio and TV networks to permit open bigots to work as commentators and spew their hate over the airwaves, and the solution is identical – call the people running PantheaCon out on this sort of nonsense, and at that point they'll need to decide whether they will side with the bigots or the victims of bigotry. Something that I've repeatedly seen is that when groups like convention organizers, TV stations, or whatever pretend to be non-partisan, they typically end up supporting bigots and the best way to change the situation is to force them to actually choose a side.
In any case, here's contact info for PantheaCon as well as contact info for the pagan store Ancient Ways that sponsors it and that is run by the organizer.
Current Mood: thoughtful
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February 16th, 2012
| 01:19 am - Interesting RPG Kickstarter News
I just saw that White Wolf is running a Kickstarter for a deluxe edition of the 20th edition Vampire Companion, the fascinating thing about this is that this is a Kickstarter for $50,000, which is 5 x more than any other RPG Kickstarter that I've seen. Also, and perhaps more importantly, there's this note at the end of it, Whatever the outcome, we're using this Kickstarter project to gauge the players' interest in future Vampire and World of Darkness titles. Using Kickstarter, we're able to produce books more quickly and deliver them directly to the players, skipping the distribution system entirely. Simply put, if this experiment works, we can make it a business model, and bring you more supplementary World of Darkness material faster, and incorporate your feedback at every step of the way. I wish them well, I won't be contributing, because I'm simply not particularly into Vampire, but if this works (and I expect it will), I'm betting there will be more White Wolf projects coming, and I'd like that as both a gamer and a game writer. It's also very interesting indeed from the perspective of the RPG industry – suddenly this means that mid-level companies can start using Kickstarter for publishing games. This is certainly one possibility for the future of small and mid-level RPG publishing.
Current Mood: impressed
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February 9th, 2012
| 01:39 am - Musings on The Challenge From Beyond (written in 1935, by several authors)
I encountered an interesting story recently – The Challenge From Beyond (the entire story is contained at this link, since it's out of copyright), written in 1935, like several others of its era, it was written by a number of famous authors (C.L. Moore, Abraham Merritt, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Frank Belknap Long). It's more fun that good, and is most notable for containing the single most impressive disjunction between two author's writing styles that I've ever seen. First, you have a fairly typical Lovecraft story, with marvelously described worm-like aliens, and one of a number of his protagonists who screams in blind terror when confronted with his true fate (being in the body of a worm-like alien, a fact that is told to the reader well beforehand). Then we have the section written by Robert E. Howard, which can best be described as our protagonist becomes Conan of the Worms. Here's the relevant section, which is fairly amusing. If you are interested, read the rest, it's only 6,000 words, and Long's ending is fun and also amusingly out of left-field.
( Here's the end of the Lovecraft section and the beginning of the Howard section – much fun )
Current Mood: amused
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February 5th, 2012
| 02:20 am - Musings on Different Meanings of Charities, and the Komen Foundation
Like many other people, I'd only known of the Susan G. Komen foundation as one of several major cancer charities and thought they were mostly a force for good. Their ceasing to work with Planned Parenthood (until public pressure caused them to rethink this decision) is clearly deeply problematic, but from what I've since read about them, it's actually (to me at least) not the most problematic thing about them.
Instead, the fact that they work to block government funded alternatives to their charity is to me far worse, because it goes directly against what should be their goal, increasing the availability of breast cancer prevention, detection, and treatment. Instead, here's one of a number of articles that has come out about how the Komen foundation has actively lobbied against government funding for women's health, including for breast cancer screening and treatment because "Komen felt that treatment for uninsured breast cancer patients should be funded through private donations, like the pink ribbon race."
Obviously, one reason for this sort of lobbying is financial – they're an organization with a great deal of money and influence that would decline if government funded healthcare because more widely available. However, I think more than just greed is involved (although I'm also certain that greed plays a role). These actions remind me of a discussion I once had on a mailing list, where several people openly opposed the idea of an adequate government funded social safety net, because it took away from the ability of wealthy people to do good in the world by giving the charity.
My reading of this statement is what I think is exactly what such people feel (but which at least some of them, including the people on the message board, are not willing to admit) – that the ability of the wealthy (and in the case of the Komen foundation, of the people running it) to feel good about how they are helping others is to people who believe this way more important than actually helping people. This is a view that I unsurprisingly find completely reprehensible and utterly indefensible. I also suspect that for at least some libertarians and other conservatives it's not an uncommon view. In addition, from my readings of various articles from the Victorian Era, it’s clear that more than a few wealthy people back then felt the same way. Of course, I also rather expect that many of these people (both now and in the past) haven't looked at what this statement means all that carefully.
In any case, I think some combination of that attitude and the sort of entrenched institutionalization where an organization becomes far more important to the people running it than its stated goal are what is happening here, and the clear and obvious response is for people to keep up the pressure on this organization until it either changes drastically or goes out of business, since it seems to me that as a whole it's doing a great deal of harm.
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February 4th, 2012
 | 03:22 am - Modern life with cats & robots
John: I need to put the boxes in a chair so my cat Josie won't eat the box [[1]], but the Roomba doesn't like the chair I'm using because it gets stuck on it and complains, so I need to get a different chair from the basement.... The cat and the robot have different desires.
Alice: Many dreadful SF stories start that way.
John: In 5 or 6 years, I expect that an increasing number of blog posts will start the same way.
[[1]] Cardboard is clearly one of my cat's major food groups.
Current Mood: amused
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February 2nd, 2012
| 10:56 pm - Ron Paul the neo-nazi and how Anonymous is once again awesome
This is an awesome commercial, but that commercial in no way means that Ron Paul is awesome. I'm horrified when I overhear liberal seeming people in Portland talking about how cool Ron Paul is, because there's far more to him that that commercial and the associated ideas.
In addition to his libertarian scariness and fundy scariness, he's also a seriously scary racist, the sort of hangs out happily with white supremacist groups. There's been some evidence of this in the past, but he always claimed that that was all more than a decade ago. However, the awesome people at Anonymous (who have become a completely unexpected and utterly wonderful (IMHO at least) political force hacked a major white supremacist website recently, and as the article title says Anonymous Hacks Neo-Nazis, Finds Ron Paul. The next time some fool goes on about how wonderful Ron Paul is ask them just how wonderful people who ally themselves with neo-nazis and defend slavery are.
Current Mood: impressed
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January 24th, 2012
| 03:38 am - Creators Meeting their Creations
Here's a recently and quite wonderful video about Alan Moore meeting Occupy protesters in Guy Fawkes masks, derived from his creation V. This article also linked to a more general article about comics authors meeting their creations.
The first piece is quite inspiring – the thought of seeing one of my ideas made real would be amazing and indescribable. It's right up there with this wonderful incident that happened to Samuel Delany in terms of things that impress me with the power of art.
However, the second article interests me even more, in large part because I share many of Alan Moore's views about magic and imagination, as well as a long-term interest in characters and personality. Much of the second piece is about exactly the sort of spirituality and magic that I'm interested in – the ability of subjective phenomena to travel from one person to another via all manner of means.
It occurs to me that I should do more meditations and ritual work focused on this sort of thing, perhaps with some of my own creations, perhaps with the creations of others that resonate strongly with me. I'd be interested in hearing more from any of you who have done this.
Current Mood: thoughtful
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