On a beautiful fall night in Boston, we grabbed the last table at the Cask and Flagon and watched the game. It went just about exactly like this.
Month: October 2003
Just a little more on the Hudson story before I hit the bars for tonight’s game:
ESPN picked up the story. No additional info, though.
However, a guy named Andrew just called into the Ted Nation show on WEEI, and claimed to have been present. He said that a Red Sox fan picked the fight with Hudson, and that Hudson was a complete gentleman up till that happened — signing autographs, and so on. “Zito tried to calm Hudson down.” He said someone (wasn’t clear, but I guess the club bouncers) kicked the Red Sox fan out and got Hudson off into another room to calm him down.
So there you go.
Today’s Monday Mashup concept was contributed by Eric McErlain, who runs the excellent Off Wing Opinion. He suggested Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend some time ago, but I put off using it for a while because I thought it was a little close to Body Snatchers. But time has passed and here we are.
If you haven’t read I Am Legend, allow me to strongly recommend it. It’s the story of the last man on earth, beseiged by a horde of vampires. He defends himself, despite the fact that he has nothing to live for. In the end, he realizes that to the new society of vampires, he’s the legendary monster. My brief summary doesn’t do it justice, but it’s a start.
Mash!
Boston Dirt Dogs has an email exclusive (will scroll off the front page after a day or so) on the Tim Hudson nightclub brawl. I’d be pretty pissed at Hudson if I were an Oakland fan.
Edit: David Pinto notes that the story is anonymously sourced. He’s got a point, but Boston Sports Media mentions that Steve Burton of WBZ’s Sports Final also reported the story Sunday night. The San Francisco Chronicle article ran on Monday and was not sourced by Steve Burton.
I believe they call this a developing rumor. Er, developing story. Yeah.
Charles Kuffner is still the man for Texas redistricting news. At the moment, the Republicans can’t agree on a map. The Legislature has adjourned until Wednesday for Yom Kippur. They’ve missed the deadline for redistricting in time to get all the necessary changes made before the 2004 primaries, which means that if they want to redistrict now they have to reduce the importance of Texas in the presidential primary process.
Now, I suspect that the impending pressure of the end of the third special session (next Monday) may result in a deal before then. It’ll be very embarassing if Texas has to call a fourth special session to get this done, and it’ll probably squelch any possibility of the redistricting occuring before the 2004 elevtions, so I can easily see a few Republicans putting aside their redistricting differences.
But man. What a foulup on the part of Texas Republicans. Maybe redistricting was a bad idea to start with, huh?
WISH 67 is all about the story:
How do you tell stories in your games? Are there character stories, overarching stories, and/or other kinds of stories? Could you tell a coherent story from games you’ve GMed or played in? Does it matter to you? Why or why not?
I don’t ever strive to tell stories, but it’s nice when it happens. I’m really more interested in exploring the story space than I am in setting out to tell a story. I like it when things happen to my characters and I like it when my characters do things, but I find plotting for a story to be restrictive.
My characters sometimes have goals, but I regard those as plot hooks for the GM rather than indications of where the story must end. I expect goals to change in play. My goals in real life certainly do.
The Dear Brother letters are a solid example of this. Reese actually didn’t have a goal; he had a desire. He wanted to show America the true road. I didn’t know how it was going to play out, and in the end it’s been a little darker than I envisioned. People have told me that it works as a story, and I think it does, but that’s more because I’m making an effort to write the letters as stories — I’m subscribing to the conventions of fiction rather than gaming.
It means that sometimes I talk about things Reese didn’t see, and I take a few liberties here and there, and I leave out great swathes of things that make the campaign interesting. In the end, the differences between Rob’s campaign and my Dear Brother letters illuminate the differences between playing in a campaign — even a story-oriented campaign — and telling a story.
Notes to self:
ECS EZ-Buddie Barebone case, $200. Celeron 1.7 GHz CPU, $57. A 256 MB RAM stick, $44. Linksys WMP11 wireless PCI card, $50. 80 GB Maxtor HD, $83. Total is under $450, and it makes a nice quiet little wireless MP3 jukebox.
I can’t quote just part of this. Here. Have the whole thing.
It’s going to happen someday. We’re going to win the world series someday. You know it. I know it. We all know it. And somewhere buried deep within all of us is the tiniest sliver of the joy that is that someday. And that joy is boundless. If it were a mountain it would stub it’s toe on Mount Everest. If it were an ocean, it would consider the Atlantic a puddle of rainwater. If it were a painting it would make the Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa, and all the works of all the greatest artists in all the great museums of the world look like the fingerpaints of a two year old. In its depth, breadth, and sheer beauty, the world has not seen its like. Perhaps that’s why it has been too long, because the world is terrified what might happen if that joy is released. Breaking the atom has nothing on this.
And we’ve each got a little bit of that inside us so when we take the field Saturday night our world will be filled with joy. And should we lose, our world will be filled with joy cunningly disguised as anguish, fury, and utter disappointment but only for the moment. Once that moment has passed the crowd will rise as one and cheer for the team, for the joy we’ve had in watching them, and for the knowledge that someday it will be our day.
The MacArthur Foundation announced its 2003 MacArthur Fellows today. It’s such a great concept: $100,000 a year for five years so that you don’t have to worry about anything but your work. Makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
Mike Tinney’s deposition in the White Wolf v. Sony case is mildly interesting, if only for the following paragraph:
White Wolf has been in discussions with Sony Online about it creating a massively multi-player Internet game based on White Wolf’s Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and World of Darkness.
It also sets out the course of events which led to the lawsuit. On April 21st, 2003, Tinney sent Andy Zaffron (a contact of his over at Sony, presumably for the EverQuest pen and paper adaptation) email asking for help getting in touch with Sony Pictures:
“I’ve taken a look at a trailer for an upcoming film called Underworld that is to be distributed by Sony Pictures this coming Fall. It looks (from the trailer) as though it borrows fairly heavily from our World of Darkness IP.”
In a subsequent email on the same day, Tinney said:
“When a film like the Underworld comes across our radar, detailing Vampires and Werewolves, who live in secret societies and fight each other, we immediately begin looking for IP similarities. At an initial glance we’re not excited about what were [sic] seeing. Our initial concerns are that the movie looks like it uses themes and elements from our world, character concepts, points of conflict. We’ve crafted a unique and distinctive IP, one that’s a rich blend of old world monster legends with a modern, gen X updated feel and cosmology.”
Which, I suppose, tells us how high the bar for White Wolf IP concern is.
Tinney got a call from Sony, and on May 8th he sent another email to Zaffron thanking him for his help. He never heard back from Sony Pictures after that.