Just what the world needs - another journal...

(Here's where I piss off most of my friends.  Sorry, I still love all of you.)

OK, I should have wrote this a while ago.  But, what with looking for
work and all, I kept putting it off.  Here's the rant on Prop 8.




My good friend gregthegremlin writes:

"What the fuck, California? Do you people really hold the well-being of chickens and pigs above that of your fellow human? Prop 2 and Prop 8 both passed!?"

The first thing we need to understand is that nobody has the right to get married.  I'm straight and I didn't have the right to marry my wife.  Why?  Because I had to get permission from the Government in the form of a license in order to marry her.  If you have to get a license to do it, it's not a right.  How we ever got to the lamentable and stupid state where we thought it normal and just that we have to go to some village elder (in the form of the "Gub'mint") to obtain his blessing on our union, I'll leave for another day.  Suffice it to say for now that we've all bought into this lie, and we have cast our rights aside.

Let's take a quick side-trip and examine marriage.  Marriage, as it is understood in our culture (and I'm going to guess most others - I'm not an expert or anything) is made up of two parts.  The first is a Spiritual component.  This is described by the Christian Bible as a union of two people before God, such that to Him (don't get started on me about the gender of God, I'm just using "Him" as it's the usual pronoun attached to Him) they are considered one being.  The second is a Civic component, which can best be described as a contractual arrangement between two people and the State detailing a set of rights and responsibilities, and for some reason a bizarre taxation state which I won't go into here.

On the Spiritual side, the State should have no say.  That would be in violation of the separation of Church and State, a violation nobody seems to say anything about.  If a church wants to conduct the ceremony for two willing participants, the only party that should have anything to say about it is God.  So, once again, we can see that we've given the State purview over something that is Constitutionally denied to it.  But, once you give up a right, you will find you play hell getting it back.

From a Civic perspective, the contractual agreements are already covered by Civic Unions and whatnot.  If something's missing, it can be remedied by statute.

So, that said, you'd be thinking, "Why the heck is Nick for Prop 8?  It sounds like he recognizes that it's not appropriate that the State should have anything to say about two gay people getting married."

Well, here's why. 

First off, they tried to ram this down my throat.  You see, our system of representative government is set up such that we are supposed to convince our neighbors and representatives through debate and persuasion to support the things we want.  If they put a measure on the ballot to allow gay folks to get married, I could probably be convinced to vote for it.  I suspect it would pass handily.  But they didn't do that, they went and got an activist court to decree it into law.  That pisses me off.  That's strike one.

Since the people in question have already given away the Right to get married, they need to come to the government, hat in hand, to request permission to get married.  And, since I'm a voter, I'm the Government, or at least 1/zillionth of it. And if you're asking my permission, I get to say, "What's in it for me?" 

With "straight" marriage, in the nominal case, we get a foundation for raising children in a stable environment.  While I don't personally directly benefit, having a stable platform in place to develop the next generation of Californians benefits me as they will be the ones paying my Social Security checks, defending me in the Armed Forces, and what-not.  So, I am willing to give my consent.

A "gay" marriage, however, just makes those two people happy.  It really doesn't provide me any direct or indirect benefit.  They haven't tried to convince me otherwise, they simply tried to force it on me.  So that's strike two.

(I'll leave for another day a discussion about how gay couples can raise fine children, yada yada.  This rant's long enough as it is.)

Finally, they don't have the balls to simply take this right.  Here's a little uncomfortable factoid for you.  Rights don't come from the Constitution.  They come from your Will.  As I showed earlier, you lost the right to marry when you bought into the lie that you needed a marriage license.  But here's the trick: you can have any right you want, for as long as you want, if you're willing to fight and die for it.  I have the right to keep and bear arms, not because the 2nd amendment says I do (it actually only states the government can't infringe on my already-existing right), but because I have guns, and you'll have to kill me to take them.  So, until someone actually sends armed men to my door to kill me, I have the Right to be armed.  If some guy decided he wanted to marry his boyfriend and they stood up publicly and said, "We are now married.  Steve here is my wife.  If you want to do something about it, come and get us," what would happen?  Nothing.  I don't care enough about two guys getting married to send armed men out to stop them.  Guess what?  Those two guys just got the Right to be married.

But, they don't have the strength of their conviction to do that.  The come to me, demanding that I give them a right they don't have the will to procure for themselves. 

That's strike three.

So, I don't really care if two consenting adults enter into a contractual relationship.  I don't really care if some church is willing to merge those two people before their God.  But, if they don't have the nerve to do it without my permission and blessing, fail to convince me of why I should grant either, and generally piss me off by trying to force my hand, I'm gonna push back in the form of my vote.

And that's why I, a guy who really doesn't care one way or the other if gay folks get married, voted for prop 8.

I love this stuff.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTSkWnKs9rM

.

It be talk like a pirate day. 

Well, we're finally back from the hospital, and I've gotten a bit of sleep. Thomas Nicholas Svolos was born at 0512 on Monday, September 10th. At birth he weighed 8.5 pounds and was about 21.25 inches. Charlotte managed to push a regulation bowling ball out of her!

( See the pix on Photobucket )

Go here. Go here now.  Try not to get fired for laughing if you do this while at work.

This is work safe, but if you'll get fired for bursting out laughing, don't pin the results on me...

The Squirrel-a-pult

As a Republican and an ardent talkradio listener, I find it hard to think of anything stupider than what my party is doing on the Illegal Immigration debate. As many of you may know, I was a campaign worker on the Schwarzenegger campaign last year, and I remember the shear vitriol I ran into trying to get the base out to vote. That was a year when our down-ticket candidates were probably better than the Governor (I mean, it's hard to get more conservative than McClintock!) and at least 25% of the people I called said they weren't going to go out and vote simply because they didn't like what the Republicans at the Federal level were doing to stop the flow of illegal immigrants into our country. How insane! Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

So now, most of the talkradio shows are dedicated 100% to rage over the illegal immigration debate. The base is turning on the party with an insane fervor that I am afraid will hand the rest of the government over to the Democrats next year. To do such a thing during a time of war is disasterous. Can't these people see that the real issue is to keep the government in the hands of grown-ups?

Look, nobody wants the border secured more than me. It sickens me to see that people who grew up in this country can't get entry-level jobs to build the work skills they will need to survive and be productive members of this society, simply because they are being priced out of the market by people who snuck into this country and are willing to take the jobs at obscenely low rates. And don't tell me that there are jobs that Americans won't do. There is no job that, if priced correctly, nobody will take. But there are jobs people can't take if the price is set so low that they can't compete.

But, the sad fact of the matter is that this is politics. Politics requires compromise. If you are unwilling to compromise, you better hold more than 60 seats in the Senate, and the base of my party gave any chance of that away.

Just a news dump, of a personal nature.

1. Charlotte and I went for an sonogram and amnio last week. The baby looks healthy and extremely active. I had no idea they moved around that much! The kid was kickin' and stretching like nobody's business. Probably claustrophobic like his old man. We found out he's a boy, so I'll have to re-train myself not to refer to the crumb-cruncher as "it". Sono-pics will be forthcoming, once I scan them in.

2. Six months ago, I took a contract gig at ING. The pay is terrible, and I had a bad feeling about the gig from the get-go. Quite frankly, at that point I had been out of work for a while and was just sitting around playing WoW while unemployment, Charlotte and my savings paid the bills. So, I took the gig, not having much else on my plate at the time. About two weeks into it I was ready to quit. I straight up walked into my boss' office and told her that I didn't think I was a good fit and it might be better if we called the whole thing off. I let her talk me out of it, and I decided I could stick it out until something better came along and I completed the 6-month commitment. Well, the six months ended on April 1, and I am outta here. This is my last week, and I start at Toyota on the 30th. I have misgivings about Toyota as well, but the pay is much better, and it's within walking distance of my front door. It gets me out of ING and that's a good thing. Unfortunately, it's still a contract job, which means Charlotte has to keep working if we're going to keep benefits. Torrance teachers get kick-ass bennies.

3. My computer died this weekend. Right in the middle of questing with my rogue, right in the middle of a fight, no less, the damn thing locks up. Fought with it all night Friday, and started serious diagnostics on Saturday. Replaced the power supply, and the machine came up but wouldn't boot. Replaced the hard drive with one my father-in-law gave me for Christmas and spent the rest of Saturday loading XP. Sunday was spent loading software, and there's going to be more loading in forthcoming weeks as I discover things that I forgot. Good thing I had a (fairly) recent backup of my files. Unfortunately, the machine doesn't have a floppy drive, so I didn't have a recovery disk to boot from. Does anyone know how to make a recovery disk on a CD drive?

4. So, sucky weekend for me. Missed the Garou game due to my adventures with computer science. Sounds like they had a blast. As a result, no cigars for me (I pretty much only smoke them in character or at parties. Helps me to control what would easily become habit). I know what you're thinking: "Cry me a river." But, I had been looking forward to the taste of Fuente all week.

Does anyone know what the website for the garou game is? I need to set up an account and ask the ST something...

Hey, Shekky's about to go up in Engineering, and I'm trying to remember our agreement. Were you taking Gnomish and I was taking Goblin? I prefer stuff that blows up...

http://www.imao.us/archives/007501.html

I mean, my own shirt, not the one he's wearing. No telling how many times I'd have to wash it.

I mean, it would be like sharing underwear with Glen Quagmire.

Warning, this test is long. And it's probably not work-appropriate.

As some of you know, most of my project team reside in St. Cloud, MN. They've been getting a pretty bad snowstorm over the last couple of days, and most of them have been working out of their homes because the roads are pretty bad. They're doing fine, tho'. These people are old pros at this.

Anyhow, one of my teammates sent me some photos of her farm, which I now share with you.

( Click to see the white stuff )

25 mph winds where she's at, 66+ mph in the northern part of the state.

Dear friends,

I regret to inform you that I have been forced to resign my position as a blogger for the John Edwards presidential campaign. While many may consider this to be the wrong decision, I and my family simply can no longer allow my employment to distract from the campaign by being a lightning-rod for right-wing, christo-fascist, noise machine, demagogues.

It is important to note that I was not fired. I quit. Seriously.

This is a victory for no one.

(Or why I won't be running another LARP for a very long time...)

So we come to it at last. At last night's staff meeting (at which only Chris, Charlotte and I were in attendance), we pulled the plug on Dark Horizons 2.0. It's been an interesting ride, but as our player base dwindled, our fervor for the game waned, and we found ourself at a point where we could no longer continue. Now we're involved in paying out reimbursements from the treasury (whatever's left will go towards a wrap party, more on that in a later post), thinking about future projects (but nothing too soon), and taking down the website (again, not too soon, but I figure I'll use the hosting for some new project - don't know what yet).

And writing post-mortems. Here's mine.

For me this was a huge learning experience. I've never been involved in starting a LARP before, and it actually takes a surprising amount of work. We had a good 6 months of prep time before our first game. This enabled us to have a very detailed game world (it's never detailed enough), do a lot of research, and lots of recruiting. I think this paid off, as the first several games were well-attended and there was a lot of energy. We actually knew the rules. We had character creation packets, playing cards, well-defined NPCs and a storyline to kick everything off.

So anyways, here's some of the things I learned.

• Love the Genre

If you're gonna be involved in a LARP like this, you gotta love the Genre. This is necessary because you are going to need to generate a lot of energy to get yourself to do things for the game, and to get others energized to participate. I still like Vampire, but I'm not sure many others still do. I think there may have been too many Vampire games to play in, and in the words of one survey respondant, "Vampire's been done to death." It just might be that with three other Vampire games going on, there's not enough room for them all.

I also wonder if anyone actually likes the genre behind Vampire. It seems to me that nobody is interested in personal horror. I'm sorry to say it but people just didn't seem interested in exploring the vampiric condition with their characters (perhaps because they've already done it so many times with previous characters). Instead, I saw a lot of people playing humans who didn't like to go out in the daylight and had peculiar eating habits.


• Love the Setting

I have to say, I hated the setting. New Orleans is a smelly pit of a town that I have no interest in. The Victorian era is devoid of interest for me beyond an occasional Sherlock Holmes novel. I just don't like it. Once the staff decided to go down this road, my interest in the game dropped precipitously. I went from being an assistant storyteller to just a disinterested narrator. I eventually picked up the mantle of "Personal Horror Storyteller", but found few takers for my services, and never really generated the energy such things require. Without energy, the game dies. By lacking that energy, I helped kill it.

Sorry 'bout that.


• Game Frequency, tabletop sessions, organizing OOGAs

One huge issue we had was finding a location for the game. This is key, because a set location gives everyone a sense of "place". This is where we come to play. Unfortunately, we didn't have a lot of options. The Libra Lair was off-limits. Aaron, after so many years of hosting the game was just not ready to do it again. Hosting a game is a huge imposition. Gamers tend to be messy. Before and after each game you have a huge clean-up job, and not too many people stick around to help out. Your chairs prove inadequate to the task of resisting the might of the American Gamer Ass. People pee on your bathroom floor.

It ain't pretty, folks. Under no circumstance will a LARP ever be run out of the Monastery, I can tell you that.

Anyhow, our only other choices were to play at the campus of CSU Long Beach (no bathrooms or shelter when the weather's bad, no place to sit, and I'm always convinced that security is going to run us off), the Amaranthean Manor, or rent a place. The budget wouldn't support renting, and I've already mentioned that CSULB was a poor choice, and so we come to Amaranth. Tad and Trish at the time were hosting up an excellent Fading Suns game at their house, freshly married, and uninterested in hosting a bi-monthly LARP. God bless them for their generosity in allowing us to play once a month. Without them, the game couldn't have happened at all.

So anyways, once we realized we'd only be able to have a single LARP session per month, we came up with the idea of doing a second session each month as an OOGA. Players could get XP for attending OOGAs (something you didn't get in DH1.0) and we hoped that this would lead to more politics on LARP night and dungeon crawls on the tabletop night. It was a model that worked pretty good for the 7th Sea game, and we thought it was worth a try. It was really our only choice, anyways.

It failed miserably.

It seems one of the problems is getting players to organize OOGAs. This isn't an easy task, after all, because if you want to put together a group for a caper you have to juggle schedules, get everyone to agree, find a StoryTeller and a site, and get everyone to actually show up. That really is a lot more work than it initially sounds like. Most people game for fun, not for meeting planning experience. Fun means "not responsible". Putting the responsibility on our players took away the fun, and the OOGAs simply didn't happen after the first couple of months. (A few happened towards the end, but not many. Certainly not as many as we had in the first few months) So, we were left with a once-a-month game.

I don't think once-a-month games work real well. For starters, more time away means more time to find other things to do. If you find other things to do, they might be more fun than our game. If they're more fun than our game, guess which one wins in the case of a conflict? (Remember, you're gaming to have fun, right?)

Secondly, while it may seem that "the third Saturday of every month" is pretty self-explanatory, it's not. Sometimes there are three Saturdays between game, sometimes there are four. People forget. I've forgotten, and I have it programmed into Outlook to remind me. Wierd.

Thirdly, the cost of missing a game "feels" much higher. Let's say there's a n% chance of a scheduling conflict for any given player, for any given session. Should the scheduling conflict occur, they will have to miss the session. In a bi-monthly game, you only have one month between the sessions you attend. So, you perceive that your information, contacts, experiences is about a month out of date. In a monthly game, even though you've missed the same number of games, that perception is that you're two months behind. That's fairly significant. I can't tell you what I was doing two months ago. Oh yeah, it was Christmas.

I also think Saturday is a mistake for a game night. Fridays just feel better to fritter away on a game. I have something to look forward to after work. I leave the office, wolf down some fast food, get to the site and let off steam. I'd rather keep my Saturdays for something else, but that's just me.


• Sure-fire ways to get players to leave the game.


I've learned, over the course of being involved in several LARPs, that there are some good ways to get a player to leave the game. Here they are (in no particular order):

Give them a position of power
I can't say why, but as soon as people get a court position, it seems like they bolt for the door. My suspiscion is that with power comes responsibility. And these people aren't gaming to get responsibility, they're gaming to get away from it and have fun.

Write a storyline for them
As soon as I write a storyline for a character (something I love to do), the player stops coming. I can't say why, but I'll venture a guess that people don't like personal storylines.

I do, but I'm probably in the minority.

(I am open to the possibility that my personal storylines suck)

Give them a clue that's integral to someone else's storyline
One of the hooks I like to use is to hand a clue to someone's storyline to a character who is unrelated to it. They will then either sit on the clue, or leave the game. Again, I don't know why, but that's what happens. I think in the future, I'll just use NPCs to do this.

And with the learning, there are questions. Here are some of the unresolved issues.

• NPC versus Player Court


Since it's inception in the Grim Harvest days, the game has had a policy of leaving the court in the hands of Player Characters. Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn't. For this game, it didn't.

Player-run courts are great, if the court players show up. As I mentioned before, the best way to get a player to leave the game is to give him or her a court position, however, so you end up with an Elysium Keeper or third assistant deputy Sherrif running the City on game night. Not exactly an accurate representation of Vampiric politics.

NPC courts have stability, but you then have the problem of player characters vying for position, and inevitably the PCs and the NPCs come into conflict. If the NPCs back player A, then player B feels mistreated by the staff. If the players try to take down the NPC Prince, you have a problem. Do you let them? Or do you smack them down to keep the NPC court intact? Does the NPC decree the deaths of PCs? If you let the Prince fall, is there a PC who will step up and actually show up to game every session?

Well, I don't know the answer, but I see the problem.



• Balancing Elysium and the Dungeon Crawl


One of the major complaints about DH2 was that there wasn't a lot of action in Elysium. Most of the players would put together groups to go off on a caper (or "Dungeon Crawl") and leave for parts unknown. A lot of players feel that's not a LARP, but a costumed tabletop session. They're probably right. this tradition goes all the way back to Grim Harvest, tho'. The game has always had lots of storylines which take place outside of Elysium, and players are quite often running their characters off to the darkest corners of the Domain on LARP night. We might have taken it too far with this game, but I really think the staff prefers this style of play. The players we ended up with, however, didn't, and were perfectly right to find something else to do.

I'm not sure what the answer is. We tried to make everyone happy, when we probably should have focused on one gaming style and just done a good job of that.


• Storylines


A close companion of the Dungeon Crawl conundrum is the running of Storylines. From what I've seen, the politics-heavy games don't have them. Personally, I find that as boring as hell. I have described one of the local games as "Fox News Channel with Fangs". All they do is stand around and argue political philosophy. Personally, I get off on that stuff in real life, but as a game, I'm not into it. I'd rather go out and be vampiric or something. But, they don't run storylines in that game, so I'm stuck talking to characters about politics. I was looking at my watch before 8PM. A bad sign.

Me, I like storylines. It's why I game. It's why I storytell. I understand that they lead to dungeon crawls, however, and see how players who want to debate the Prime Directive or whatever feel slighted by them.

Anyhow, it looks like storylines helped kill this game.


• Alternate media


In DH1, we implemented a Forum system, and it was one of the most popular features of the game. People gossiped, roleplayed, cut deals and had all sorts of fun on them. For DH2 we had even bigger plans, most of which were never implemented. We were going to have on-line character creation, sheets, and the ability to spend XP between games. We got close, but then changed directions and never got the job done. Our boards were pretty much dead throughout the game, and I never figured out why.

Nick R. started a Wiki, which is sheer genius for a game like this. Other than Staff, I'm not sure if anyone even knew about it.

Anyhow, I'm not sure how much of this, if any, is even necessary for a good LARP. If people aren't interested, there's no real reason to go through the expense and effort.

I have many other thoughts, but maybe I'll save them for a later post. I should get back to work. :)

Say hello to my little friend



Due date is September 20.

Probably ought to be working, but I'm sick (sick enough to feel it, not sick enough to stay home) and am having a hard time focusing. To make matters worse, Charlotte's laid out from the same bug and pretty much incapacitated, so I'm pulling a double load (it's all good, she had to pull my weight last week when I was on the slab).

Anyhow, didn't watch the super bowl yesterday. I used to be the biggest football fan, but these last few years I have to say I really haven't been able to give a damn about sports. I follow Soccer, but that's about it, and even that is pretty spotty. My theory is that we care more about sports if our friends care about sports. Since none of my current circle of friends really seem to care about sports, my interest has waned. I don't know if this is valid or not, it just seems to be the case in my experience.

Instead of watching commercials yesterday, I cracked out on WoW while Charlotte was in a coma. I truly love questing with Tad and Trish. It's like I know their character's moves and capabilities so well, I can pretty much just go nuts and know they got my back. And I am also discovering that I love tanking. I just get so happy when I see that nice, big, red "Aggro" text show up on my screen.

Don't think of it as being one year older. Think of it to being that much closer to the cool, dark embrace of death.

I really should be working, but quite frankly, I'm a bit burnt. So, I figured I'd just beat on my journal for a bit.

Let's see. The Syrians seem to be up to their elbows in the murder of Pierre Gemayel. There's a link to the Yahoo story, here.  And still, the UN won't move.  Could there be a more useless organization?

I have been playing around with lots of add-ons for WoW.  One of the things I like about that game is that it provides such a good interface for 3rd parties to develop extensions.  I've been using Titan for a while now and it seems pretty solid.  Lazyscript is excellent, but I try to use it more as a training tool.  I actually got out of practice for a bit and had to relearn how to play my warrior, and I have a similar problem with my rogue.  The fact is, even using the same strategy, she effortlessly butchers mobs with the script, and I can't even come close using my fat fingers.  I'm probably doing about 65% of my potential dps when I make myself play manually.  Oh well, it's a crutch and I'll have to force myself to get better.

I downloaded Flexbar the other night, but haven't gotten around to really seeing what it can do.  I like the idea of tying buttons to events, but it's a pretty deep program and may take a while to get up to speed on it.

Charlotte was at GenCon all weekend.  I thought about going, but from what I heard I'm kind of glad I didn't.  For her, the main attraction was going to the big Cam event with her anarch game, which I just didn't like much at all.  She said the main emahasis of the game on Friday was standing around Elysium and looking cool, so I was glad I gave it a pass.   It sounded like the rest of the con was pretty dead.  I wonder if GenCon LA is gonna survive.  This is not a good town for cons.

It's also not a good town for radio.  I tend to forget about this, and I get reminded about how impovershed the entertainment capital of the world is every time I go out of town.  This time it was Santa Barbara.  I mean, they must have had at least three different stations worth listening to up there.  Meanwhile, down here in LA, you might as well rip the FM part of the radio out if you don't want to listen to Nortenos or Hip Hop.  We have one jazz station which is really good, but it's doing pledge drives everytime I tune in, so it's not worth the trouble.  

Lord, I miss KMET.