So C. E. Murphy is up for a Rose & Bay Award for crowdfunded fiction. You should vote for whichever fiction you like best, but if you don’t know the others and you like Catie’s stuff, you can take my word on it: she’s the right choice. LJ membership not required. Also, if you want to continue voting in that vein, you can vote for me as crowdfunding patron of the year. I think Catie nominated me for this because I pestered her until she tried patron-funded writing, which is totally kind of her.

Chronicle is a sort of unfortunate title. Hard to search for it, and it’s a lousy entrance point into the film. If you hadn’t seen the trailer, you’d never know what it was about. On the other hand, once you’ve seen the movie and you’re done getting smacked around by the turbulence caused by all your exploding assumptions, it’s a huge clue about the underlying mise en scène of the movie. If you have seen the trailer, you only sort of know what it’s about, but that’s par for the course. Let me fix that for you. Have no fear; I won’t spoil anything you don’t find out immediately. At least not before the cut. Here’s the important thing: it’s not a found-footage movie. The movie you see on the screen cannot be an artifact from the fictional reality. Everything’s framed as a camera shot from within the fiction, but there’s nobody who would or could piece together the varying footage into what we see. At the screening I saw, Josh Trank referred to it as a PoV movie, which is a much better term. The secret piece of knowledge you need is that his dad’s a documentarian, and Trank’s intimately familiar with that form. The movie is titled Chronicle because it’s a documentary. Sort of. It’s not a documentary from the world of the film, though. It’s a movie that’s made in the documentary style. There’s no voice over, no connective tissue, no explanation: just footage from a variety of sources. That choice works because it’s a mirror of how Andrew, the protagonist, sees the world. He fits right into the isolated teen niche, unable to relate to his peers because his adolescence has been stunted by his abusive father and the emotional absence of his dying mother. His environment is established in the first minute of the movie. He’s filming everything because it allows him to both hide and document. Trank also mentioned that his goal is to make character-oriented films that happen to be genre pictures. He nailed it. The powers are a device to heighten the drama of Andrew’s journey. I found the movie to be rather harrowing at some points, because it’s so raw and painful. Andrew is a sympathetic character all the way through. Spoilers and loose thoughts coming up next.

A while back I promised I think Adam Jury and Fred Hicks (original) a post on Creative Commons, the Open Gaming License, why I think the OGL has problems, why Creative Commons licenses don’t always work for tabletop gaming publishers, and so on. This is too much for a single post, so I’ll start with my technique for emulating the OGL using Creative Commons licenses. It has the virtue of being productive thought as opposed to criticism, and it seems more useful to lead with something someone might actually use some day.

Prompts courtesy of Atlas Games. I have gamed with kids a little bit. I ran a mini-campaign which included a friend’s… 10 year old? I think? It was fine; I played to his needs a bit more than I usually do and his dad helped him on the rare occasions he needed help with dice or advice on what to do. It wasn’t his first experience with the game. I am probably not a great choice for teaching someone how to game; I’m not super-experienced with kids and appropriate educational techniques. But if the kid knows the game, I like making it fun for her or him. You get better

Dear Reverb Gamers: nope. I work in computer games, which makes it very easy to be out without consequence. It’s actually a career bonus to be a tabletop gamer, despite the fact that my day job is unrelated to game design. Even before I got into computer games, the Silicon Valley dot-com was a pretty friendly place for geeks of all stripes. Even if I went into something more conservative, I’d still keep a D20 keychain ornament on my shoulder bag, though.

See here for prompts. I’m going to the old 1999 WotC survey for this one, because I kind of like it when types are developed via research than just out of a fevered gamer brain. (But I’m an Method Actor with a side of Tactician, as one may have guessed from the previous post in this series.) That said, on the WotC chart I live on the tactical side of the strategy/tactics line. I generate strategy by improvisation, which is no strategy at all, but sometimes I make it look good enough to pass. Between story and combat, I lean strongly towards story. That’s a less important division to me; I think tactics over strategy matters more.

Prompt courtesy of Atlas Games again. “What is it about gaming that you enjoy the most? Why do you game? Is it the adrenaline rush, the social aspect, or something else?” I think it comes down to the fantasizing. When I’m actually gaming, I love roleplaying and immersing and speaking in my character’s voice. When I’m not sitting at the table, I’m still having fun thinking about what the world’s going to be like or how those NPCs are going to act or how my character might develop. I read sourcebooks because I like things that trigger my imagination. ...

Prompts courtesy of Atlas Games. I was, I’m not sure. 14? 15? Something like that. We were living up in New Hampshire. There were these family friends, who we met I don’t know how; probably one of those hippie connections we were rich with in those days. Teo was four years older than I was. Huge Rastafarian. If I remember right, his family’s lore said they were related to Haile Selassie? Seems unlikely, but who knows. ...

At the time, I found Sideways somewhat unapproachable. I wasn’t really sure why. Now I’m thinking I didn’t have the vocabulary, and I think it was a privilege problem. Alexander Payne made this great movie about the sad life problems of a pair of well-off guys. Yeah, Paul Giamatti is presented as a failure, and English teachers don’t make much money, but he can afford to take his pal on a week-long wine tour? That’s not realistic. ...

Very sadly, A Dangerous Method wound up being the weakest Cronenberg in a long time. The material was more or less perfect, but Keira Knightley let down the side. It’s not that she’s a bad actress, it’s that Cronenberg has never been the kind of director who draws forth the exceptional from his actors. And Knightley doesn’t know how to give her role weight. So instead of getting a damaged genius/patient, she’s playing another edition of the plucky young woman who stands up to the world. This time with more jaw tics.