Joe Clark is annotating Pattern Recognition, bit by bit. This has the potential to be truly cool if he gets traction. (Via Boing Boing.)
Month: February 2003
I’m all about the public service announcements this long weekend. Today, I note that the new edition of Swordspoint includes several short stories set in the nameless city. And I’m sure you already knew there’s a sequel out.
Daniel Keys Moran is sharing his current novel in progress, The Sheriff of Shokes, on his forums. (If that link fails, try this.) You’ll have to register to read it. The Sheriff of Shokes is not set in the Continuing Time, but it is related. DKM explained this once.
Who is this Moran person? He wrote four pretty good novels back in the late 80s and early 90s. You can get them today via QuietVision, and I recommend them. He’s one of the most graceful writers I’ve ever read, blessed and cursed with epic wit. Occasionally it gets in the way, but he’s just so much fun to read.
His setting is the Continuing Time, which is a vast interconnected timeline covering about ten millennia. He says it’s very detailed and that he has notes of gargantuan proportions that explain everything. Thirty-odd books, planned out and in some cases partially written.
Alas, he more or less ground to a halt as far as publishing anything goes back in 1994. In a chronology he sent out then, there are something like 30 Continuing Time novels, and we’re never going to get to see them, which is pretty sad. He’s passionate enough about his work to make me want to see the entire series, but not passionate enough to get the damned things done. Now that print on demand is a reality, there’s no “my publisher sucks” to fall back on. And he married his old editor, so he’s got someone who can edit books handy. No excuse for not giving us a book every couple of years.
Still. It’s worth buying and reading that which we do have.
CafePress has pre-announced their CD and book print on demand services. They’re hoping to get ‘em online in March. Man, that’s like less than a month away.
The prelim specs for books are pretty decent. They’re gonna be taking PDF files. They’ll probably support a range of sizes for both perfect bound and saddle stitched. Hopefully they’ll support standard book rack paperback sizes.
They’ll be doing data CDs shortly after launch.
It’s a little known fact that the best gonzo journalists around are writing for a little ezine known as the Death Valley Driver Video Review.
One time I was making fun of Bionic J because she was wearing this big skiing goggles and I said she looked like a doofus like Yoko Ono.
Worth noting: the BBC put out a call for people at the anti-war protests to send their digital snapshots to the BBC. Many responded. The BBC didn’t put up the raw results, which is perhaps a good thing, but I wish they’d filtered it a little less — we wind up with ten pictures. Still, it’s wild to see a major news publication doing this kind of thing.
Google just bought Pyra. Or, to put it in clearer terms, Google just bought Blogger. I, um, yeah.
The bad speculation is that Blogger posts will get indexed in more or less real time. I suspect that won’t happen, because there are certain technological barriers in the way, but it might. It seems more than likely that Blogger will at least be used for page discovery.
The catch-22 is that either Google intends to take advantage of synergies, which would seem liable to give Blogger users an advantage in search results, or Google just bought Pyra cause they’re doing cool things, which is not the sort of thing a canny dot com should be doing. One shouldn’t get an advantage on the search page just because one’s using a certain tool. Well, time will tell.
Feeling pretty traumatized. The Claremont/Davis Excalibur is good, and the Davis sans Claremont stuff is all kinds of fun if you like that kind of thing, which I do. But eventually Davis goes away and it becomes all fill in authors and lousy art and X-Men crossovers.
Conveniently, you can tell where the really horrendous stuff begins, because there are hologram covers. No kidding. I’ve never owned a comic with a hologram cover before. I feel kind of unclean.
WISH 34: Non-Standard Characters:
Do you prefer to build a character with a unique concept, or do you prefer a simple or more standard concept to start with?
I’m pretty prone to the unique concept. I like characters with an odd angle, or with weird hooks. The most “normal” character I’ve played in the last couple of years has been a half-orc barbarian, and even he was a trifle strange. He was on a quest to prove that half-orcs were a people, just like elves or dwarves or gnomes. Despite his unattractiveness, he might have wound up founding a church or something. I’m not the kind of guy who delights in bringing out the unique aspects of the standard character types, although I respect that tendency.
Mind you, I’m not the kind of person who plays mind flayer PCs. It’s useless to be offbeat if you don’t have the ability to interact with the rest of the PCs on a long term basis. Being weird is not a license to make other players unhappy. The oddities tend to be more psychological than physical, since those are easier to adjust for party viability.
Do you find that your preference correlates with a preference for elaborate initial backgrounds or with background development in play?
Maybe. I tend to be a Develop At Start kind of a guy. I want interesting things to happen to my characters on a psychological level during the campaign, but I have a pretty firm idea of what the character is going to start out as. In order to enjoy the journey, though, the point at which I started from has to be firm.
Since I almost always play wonky characters, I almost always have the personalities set when I start playing, since the personality is usually the biggest wonkiness.
If you?re a GM, do you find unique-concept characters easy or hard to GM for?
Easy. They come with built in hooks. I don’t really think unique-concept characters covers munchkins, because those aren’t character concepts, those are collections of numbers. It’s pretty easy to tell the difference, in my experience. If they can’t give you a rational story as to why the half-ogre (or insect spirit, or right hand man of Alex Able) is going to be able to interact with the party, they’re likely munchkins.
Come to think of it, it seems to me that player willingness to overcome the obstacles inherent to weird characters and party viability is a good way to distinguish between munchkins and people who just want something offbeat. In my book, munchkins are both those people who want their PCs to be uber death machines, and those people who want their PCs to get all the spotlight — and forcing the rest of the party to accomodate their strange quirks is a way to get lots of spotlight time. Being the best in the world at swordfighting is, when you get right down to it, just a specialized form of spotlight hogging.
What about playing alongside them?
Again, not a problem for me, given the comments above.