Movies reviewed this week: American Hustle.
Author: Bryant
1 bottle vanilla soda (we used Dry)
1 shot vodka (Tito’s!)
1/2 clementine, peeled and segmented
Squirt of lemon or lime juice
Pinch of ginger
Ice
I imagine the procedure here is pretty obvious. I squeezed one of the clementine segments over the drink and dropped the husk in, but the rest go in unmolested so you can eat them at the end after they absorb some vodka. The ginger is sprinkled over the top once you’ve mixed it.
Mostly thanks to Hillfolk and the enabling influence of Kickstarter, I’ve wound up with a number of decks of playing cards. As one does. In a feeble but well-meaning attempt to justify the trickle of ten buck pledge levels, I’m going to write up some quick little DramaSystem series pitches based on said decks.
I am not committing to running a DramaSystem game based on each deck. Primus, the system works better when it’s in campaign mode. Secundus, not insane.
This is the Urban Punk Bicycle Deck from UncommonBeat. (Click to enlarge, cause they’re better-looking full sized.) I am not sure if they’re still available or not; the Web site says Coming Soon. Email ’em and find out! It is not my favorite deck or even in the top half. The backs are really garish without being graffiti-inspired, while the court cards are oddly 80s-flavored. I still love the concept and the spray painted outlines on the pips.
OK, so what can we do with this?
Nutshell
Ten years after the Global Financial Crisis was not averted, all politics are local. All governments are local, for that matter: it takes too much energy and too much effort to worry about what’s happening fifty miles away. The clock is ticking, as the storehouses of resources dwindle away, but it’s hard to care much about that.
Movies reviewed this week: Movie 43.
This post has an expiration date, which is approximately three days from publication. Reading it after 9/28? You missed out.
The current Bundle of Holding is for a bunch of GUMSHOE games and it seemed worth going over what you get. It might appear that there’s a lot of duplication in the bundle, since all four of the full RPGs are based on the same ruleset. Not so!
Night’s Black Agents is the easy sell: technothrillers meet vampires. Spy action, bloodsuckers, Ronin and Alias and so on. You get the basic GUMSHOE rules tuned for action, which had not been a particular strength until this point. Also you get The Zalozhniy Quartet which is probably a solid 8-12 sessions of play, at a guess. Maybe more.
So why do you also want Mutant City Blues and the associated Hard Helix adventure? Not for the superpower rules. (Sorry.) They are a bit idiosyncratic and highly world specific. You do, however, really want the detailed description of running a GUMSHOE game as a police procedural: interrogation scenes, what a police station is like, all that good stuff. Mutant City Blues is the GUMSHOE game you’d use to run Criminal Minds or CSI.
Fear Itself is a sweet minimal GUMSHOE implementation that does a decent job on slasher films. All the other versions of GUMSHOE in this bundle deliver competent characters. Fear Itself delivers teenagers.
Finally, Ashen Stars is a cool extension of the investigative procedural engine to cover episodic SF. The included setting is solid, but you could also use this to run Star Trek (of course) or Firefly. Or anything where there’s a spaceship, or a set of portals leading to strange worlds, or some kind of time machine masquerading as a common street object, and the player characters travel around dealing with mysterious problems.
In other words, there’s plenty of overlap but there’s also plenty of unique content and you will absolutely learn something about the system from each of the four games. Since you also get a bunch of Robin Laws columns, this is a no-brainer. You also get the Ken Hite subscription but come on, that’s an evil trap. Half of that stuff is Trail of Cthulhu oriented which will make you want to buy that game too. (You should buy that game too.)
Movies reviewed this week: Yor, the Hunter from the Future.
Quick notes from the 1 PM Novels You Should Have Read Since Chicon 7 panel. Any errors are wholly mine. Panelists: Elizabeth Bear (moderator), Willie Siros, and Jess Nevins.
- Any really outstanding books?
- Siros: Sea Change, S. M. Wheeler
- fairy tale fable, internal logic, compared to The Last Unicorn
- Nevins: Brian Catling's The Vorrh
- fantasy that avoids the usual fantasy tropes
- Bear: Cassandra Rose Clark, The Mad Scientist's Daughter
- SF, robot civil rights, riff on “Bicentennial Man”
- issues of climate change, peak oil, global cultural change as background elements
- Siros: Sea Change, S. M. Wheeler
- Siros: Iain Banks, The Hydrogen Sonata
- Nevins: Selvedin Avdic, Seven Terrors
- Horror, post-war Bosnia
- Bear: Toh EnJoe, The Self-Reference Engine
- picaresque novel – vignettes revealing greater story
- Siros: Shaman, Kim Stanley Robinson
- In dealer's room – Larry Smith
- Bear: The Drowning Girl
- last year, but still good
- Nevins: Nick Harkaway, Angelmaker
- Siros: Peter Hamilton, The Great North Road
- Tighter than other recent Hamilton
- Bear: new Tales of the Beanworld hardcover, Larry Marder
- makes a good entry point into the series
- Nevins: Anna Tambour's Crandolin
- medieval cookbook novel?
- Bear: Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January series
- Good Man Friday
- historical detective novels
- Siros: Karen Joy Fowler: We Were Completely Beside Ourselves
- mainstream/slipstream
- Bear: American Elsewhere, Robert Jackson Bennett
- weird small town with small things going on that add up to something bigger
- Austin writer, writes books that are hard to summarize
- Nevins: Lauren Beukes, Shining Girls
- time travel, serial killer
- Bear: Ian Tregillis has finished his Milkweed trilogy
- Bitter Seeds, Coldest War, Necessary Evil
- alternate WW2, Nazis create super soldiers and UK turns to necromancy
- Siros: Neal Gaiman, Ocean At The End Of The Lane
- Bear: Karen Lord, Best Of All Possible Worlds
- planetary romance, not plot-driven, reminds Bear of Bradbury
- “a very relaxing book”
- Nevins: Koji Suzuki's Edge
- quantum horror about California falling into the sea, Greg Egan-esque
- Bear:
- Seanan McGuire's cryptid books
- lighthearted fun
- Jim C. Hines Libriomancer and Codex Born
- magicians who can pull things out of books they're written in
- some books are locked off… the One Ring
- Seanan McGuire's cryptid books
- Nevins: The Last Policeman, Ben Winters
- policeman doing his job in a small town before the meteor hits
- Nevins: Deb Taber, Necessary Ill
- Siros: Devon Monk, Cold Steel and sequels
- steampunk Wild West, brothers who are lycanthropes
- Bear: Merrie Haskell's Handbook for Dragon Slayers, middle school
- to write a handbook for dragon slayers, one must slay a dragon…
- Bear: Summer Prince, Alaya Dawn Johnson
- far future post-apocalyptic YA, set in Brazil
- Siros: Brandon Sanderson, Rithmatist
- math based magic, YA
- Bear last thoughts:
- Wesley Chu, The Lives of Tao
- Ramez Naan, Nexus and Crux
- The Incrementalists, Skyler White and Steven Brust
- coming in September
- Max Gladstone, Three Parts Dead
- epic fantasy constructed like an urban fantasy which is a courtroom drama
- Siros last thoughts:
- Steven Gould, Impulse
- next in Jumper series
- The Thousand Names, Django Wexler
- historical fantasy/alternate world
- Evening's Empire, Paul McAuley
- Steven Gould, Impulse
- Nevins last thoughts:
- Hannu Rajaniemi, The Fractal Prince
- Audience
- Mira Grant, Blackout (Newsflesh trilogy)
- Lois McMaster Bujold, Captain Vorpatril's Alliance
- David Levithan, Every Day, YA
- Daryl Gregory, Raising Stony Mayhall, YA zombie POV
- James S. A. Corey, Abaddon's Gate, third in the Expanse series
- Allen Steele, Apollo's Outcast, compared to Heinlein's juveniles
- Anthology: Mad Scientist's Guide to World Domination, John Joseph Adams edited
- Paul Cornell's London Falling, London urban fantasy verging on horror
- Year Zero, Rob Reed, humor
- The Golem And The Jinni, Helene Wecker, literary fiction set in 1899 NYC
- The Long War by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, sequel to The Long Earth
I wanted to give the class creation system in Adventurer Conquerer King a spin, so I cranked out a Warlord class. This is untested.
Redhat has a shiny new Openstack install process, which includes an all-in-one configuration. This beats DevStack on Ubuntu for me because it’s persistent, which DevStack is not. And I’m a bit too lazy to work through the install by hand if there are options available. I’m pretty sure this guide would have been useful if I wasn’t lazy, FWIW.
Anyhow, I’m running through the install now. Only one snag so far; the Quickstart fails to tell you that you need to install puppet. Do this before step 3:
sudo yum install -y puppet
No problem rerunning the packstack step if you didn’t install puppet the first time through. Two minutes later I had an instance up and running, and most of that time was downloading the image.