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You are viewing the most recent 20 entries July 17th, 200909:34 pm: A Bloody Deed, live, tomorrow!
Just got an email from Michael Anderson: Hi all--
On short notice, I got a call asking me to do a story (A Bloody Deed, from Free-Style Shakespeare) tomorrow afternoon (Saturday) as the warm-up to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)
OUTDOORS AT CHRISTIAN HERTER PARK (Home of The Publick Theatre) 1175A Soldiers Field Road, Brighton, MA, Saturday 1 PM. $15
The Complete Works show is hilarious. http://www.orfeogroup.org/productions/completeworks.html Tags: shakespeare, silliness, theater
01:48 pm: Favorite line from Readercon
"The squirrels squonking in her squinches were subsequently squelched." Tags: silliness
July 16th, 200911:04 am: Convention theory
Fascinating discussion going on over here about convention structure in general, and Readercon in specific. Lots of talk about what various types of panel structures either encourage or discourage. I asked a question asking for more data that started a sub-thread. "discouraging small or individual book conversations among people who are not panelists"
I am not aware of any convention that has mechanisms in place to encourage such conversations, nor do I have any clear notion what such mechanisms might be. I'd be interested in having this ignorance corrected, if you know of any examples. A bunch of examples were provided, though none of them seemed close enough for me to easily check them out. The more I think about this, though, the more I realize that my problems with various panels don't *seem* (to me) to have anything to do with structure. When I go to a panel, I want to hear interesting, non-annoying people talk. "Interesting" can include any of the following: Informative, Witty, Insightful. Conversely, "Annoying" includes things like: Pompous, Sexist, Self-absorbed. Qualities like Rambling and Off-Topic can be positive or negative, depending on what other qualities they are paired with. The problem, then, is to give the Interesting people lots of time to speak, while squelching the Annoying ones. Unfortunately, 'being on a panel' is only weakly correlated with this divide. Someone on a panel is *slightly* more likely to be interesting, whereas an audience member is *slightly* more likely to be annoying -- but there have been plenty of times when an audience member proved more interesting than a panelist. Indeed, it was the feeling that *I* was more interesting than some panelists that prompted me to start being a panelist at Arisia. The one significant thing on the panelists' side (to me, as a consumer) is that I can (eventually) have some advance knowledge of what they are likely to be like. I know that any panel with at least two of Greer Gilman, Faye Ringel, and Sonya Taafe (sp?), is going to be entertaining. I have identified a few people who (naming no names) will reliably piss me off if I attend a panel they are on. Audience members, on the other hand, are catch-as-catch-can. Is there any structural way to promote Interest, and reduce Annoyance? I can't think of one off hand. Strong moderation is one approach, but that can fail drastically when the moderator himself turns out to be Annoying. Further discussion welcomed. Tags: cons, philosophy, psychology
10:49 am: "I like to see dat."
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kestrell & I went to the doctor the other day. At one point, she had to get some lab work done, so we were hanging around in the waiting room for a while. I don't remember what we were doing or saying; nothing out of the ordinary. But after a while, a nurse came by who needed me to take care of some paperwork, so I got up and left Kes to wait by herself for a bit. Later, she told me that, just after I had left, a woman with a Caribbean accent had leaned over to talk to her. "'Dat your husband?" "Yes." "He *love* you. I like to see dat." So now we have some new catch-phrases around the house :-) Tags: diary, kes
July 10th, 200904:59 am: New iPhone
I have a new shiny toy. I can't seem to sleep right now, so I might as well try posting with it. Internet access to Melville Keep is still being spotty at best, but I appear to be able to get online with this new toy via 3G. It does drain battery quite fast, though. Still getting used to the typing interface, but it's not bad, especially with smart autocorrecting (which at least is often right). Tags: diary, technology
July 7th, 200911:23 am: Chicago visit brief diary
Had an uneventful flight Friday morning. During the flight, I finally got around to reading Fredric Brown's _The Screaming Mimi_. On the whole, an average Brown mystery -- which is to say, above average for the genre, but not a must-read. On the other hand, the first page of it is priceless, and good reading aloud material. When rickthefightguy picked me up at the airport, I read it to him on the way back, and then read it again to tamarinne when we arrived. I append it to the end of this post, under an lj-cut. Friday night, we went to see the stage play adaptation of Cory Doctorow's _Little Brother_. It was quite good. It's not a trivial story to adapt, and the playwright did an excellent job. Mark Harvey starred as Marcus, and did an *amazing* job. Also brilliant on the tech side, great set design, music, and multimedia integration. Saturday was D&D overload. A bunch of folks came over for a double-length stand-alone session. Hypothetically, this was to be eight hours, but what with late starts, socializing players, cooking breaks, eating breaks, fireworks breaks, etc., it ended up running until 3 AM! On the one side, it's good to know I am still capable of gaming until 3 AM, but I'm definitely too old to do it regularly any more! This was my first experience with 4th ed., and I quite like it. First level characters are *way* more fun than they used to be. After that epic day, Sunday was definitely low-key. Mostly just sitting around chatting about media, ranging from Italian Ren epic poetry to modern superhero comics. Which topics aren't nearly as distinct as you might think :-) Home again with another uneventful flight. Very happy that the sun seemed to come home with me! Less happy about the ongoing lack of either internet or microwave at Melville Keep (which is part of why this post is being made belatedly and from work). And the sun proved fleeting. Ah well, this too shall pass. In the meanwhile, have a delightful literary nugget, on me: ( Read more... )Tags: diary, gaming, media, theater
11:21 am: Dream fragment
A fairy-tale setting, roughly equal parts Italian Ren and Terry Gilliam. There's an evil witch in a cloud castle, and a young prince with a magic sword goes up to do battle with her. After various surreal adventures, he succeeds, and hurls her body down to earth. "Then came forth all the women of the town, to see the witch or the sword, to poison them, for surety." Tags: dreams
June 23rd, 200912:38 pm: Neil Gaiman understands strawberries
From his blog: When I am king I shall make out of season non-local strawberries illegal. They don't taste like strawberries. Every year in June I have to remind myself that actually, I like these things, and that sun-warmed strawberries fresh-picked in season are one of the heavenly delights of the world. It's those big red faintly starberry-flavoured things called strawberries that turn up the rest of the year I dislike. Also, when the sun is shining as you pick them (alas! all too rare an experience this year!), they look like edible rubies, like something that belongs more properly in Oz or Narnia than the everyday world. Tags: strawberries
June 17th, 200902:42 pm: Maxim Insults and Injuries
I had a subscription to a magazine called Electronic Gaming Monthly. I say 'had', because they folded a few months back. Last night, in my mail, I found not one, but two issues of Maxim magazine, with stickers on the front explaining that the remainder of my EGM subscription was being converted to Maxim, and giving a snail-mail address to complain to if I preferred an actual refund. Damn *straight* I prefer a refund! And I find it insulting that Hearst Publications actually think that the one is a good substitute for the other. I didn't want to trust to snail-mail speeds, as I want this dealt with ASAP (lest they send me more issues I don't want). So I went looking on their web-site. They did have an email submission form. After filling it out and clicking "submit", this is what you get in response: OOPS?
You know, we could try and say this was part of the plan...
But guess what? We're too busy trying to act like we're working and not just looking at hot chicks to care.
<3 the Maxim Dev Team I did eventually find a working form on an entirely different site, specifically for dealing with subscription issues. I added a complaint about the error message on the main site while I was at it.
Tags: game industry, media
June 9th, 200907:23 pm: That book meme that's going around
List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you: list the first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes. Don't take too long to think about it.I'm limiting this to prose works. I might do another one for comics, later. 1) Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass 2) Snow Crash 3) Watership Down 4) All of Miles Vorkosigan 5) True Names 6) Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit) 7) The Dragaeran novels 8) A Christmas Carol 9) The Anubis Gates 10) Lizard Music (and much more of Pinkwater) 11) The Society of Mind 12) Orlando Furioso, etc. 13) The Incredible Umbrella 14) Tunnel in the Sky (and many other Heinlein) 15) The Flight of Dragons Even limited to prose, I can't stop at just 15... 16) Freaky Friday (and sequels) 17) The Westing Game 18) The Way of a Man With a Maid 19) The Day of the Triffids 20) Diaspora 21) Baum's Oz books 22) The Romance of Lust 23) The Steerswoman series Tags: books
04:30 pm: Strawberry report
Got a harvest run in before the rain started today. About a gallon, and I didn't get through half of the yard. Please come visit us and take away strawberries! Tags: strawberries
June 6th, 200912:27 pm: Synchronicities
The most recent post my sweetie made, well before my injury, involved the definition of trouper. In other news, I was not the only person related to this event who went to the ER last night. Our head cook, rufinia, carved a small piece off of herself. I profoundly hope no one *else* gets hurt! Tags: diary
02:17 am: Brief after-action report
The performance went pretty well, and was well-received by the audience. Some excitement during the Harfleur battle, though, as CHip went way off his choreography and clocked me in the head with a sword. Good thing I was wearing an absorbent red velvet hat, as scalp wounds do bleed prodigiously. Li Kung Lo made an emergency backstage visit to patch me up, and the show went on, with most of the audience hopefully thinking it was just a blood pack. My performance was not the best it has been, but was pretty darn good under the circumstances. I must say that the lines in the latter half of the play about 'blood' and 'wounds' really had extra resonance for me. Here's hoping tomorrow's performance goes smoother! Tags: diary, shakespeare
June 4th, 200910:10 am: Strawberry status
Harvested a bit over a quart of strawberries this morning, and didn't quite finish the garden. That means that we are officially past the point of keeping up ourselves. Anyone who wants to stop by and pick strawberries from our front yard, please feel free. Really, we mean it. Tags: strawberries
June 2nd, 200901:27 pm: E3 impressions
I'm not there, but there are tons of videos on the web Assassin's Creed 2 My god, 15th Century Venice looks incredible! I can probably put up with more of the horrible frame story to play there. That is, as long as there is some sort of swimming mechanic. If falling into a canal = insta-death, No Buy. Batman: Arkham Asylum A mode where you play as the *Joker*?!? I'm not sure whether the wrongness or the awesome is dominant here. Apparently, this mode is a PS3 exclusive. Halo 3: ODST Fan service alert: I recognized both Nathan "Captain Mal" Fillion and Alan "Wash" Tudyk among the voice actors. As well as someone who seemed to be trying for an Adam Baldwin impression, but not the man himself. Left 4 Dead 2 One of the settings is a garden maze. Combine this with the fact that the AI Director now has the ability to dynamically alter terrain, so that the maze can be different every time, and this is very intriguing. Natal Project Peter Molyneux is showing off a new tech where "your body *is* the controller!" It uses a Wii-like camera setup, and (allegedly) does full-body motion capture, facial recognition, voice recognition, and *emotional* recognition. I suspect that some future generation of this technology may achieve awesome-ness, but that this one is not going to manage it. Prototype Looking better and better. The sheer glee of superpowered destruction runs through this title. Also looks to have some above-average storytelling. Star Wars: The Old Republic Man, LucasArts sure knows how to make a trailer! Watched it three times. I doubt they can make actual gameplay this cool, but I'm still wicked excited about this game. (Is that Darth Malak? If so, he's gotten a *lot* more badass since KotOR I...) Beatles Rock Band Want. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle OK, let me get this straight. The black pimp(?) boss fight starts with him hurling two huge-afroed bimbos at you. You duck, then pull out your lightsaber to start fighting him. He fires two huge missiles from his boom box, and then his boom box morphs into mech-like body armor. Then the chandelier falls from the ceiling, and in order to recharge your lightsaber(?), you start jerking it up and down rapidly, looking like you're jerking something else entirely... And this is just one tiny part of the preview vid. I've heard mixed reviews of the first game in the series, but everyone agreed it was totally different than anything else you ever saw. I can believe that. Tags: game industry
June 1st, 200902:15 am: a Gyzki-style movie review
Marlon Brando got top billing, despite only being in about 20 minutes of the movie, though I grant there was some very excellent material in those minutes. Louis Calhern was the title character. But the film really belonged to James Mason, who did a marvelous job with a complex role. Also a "cast of thousands" (well, hundreds, anyways) in several scenes, used to very good effect. Well worth seeing, if you're a fan of the writer. Tags: movies
May 22nd, 200911:59 am: Lyrics: "I'm going to go back there someday"
A while back, a friend of mine expressed surprise that the Muppet I most identified with was Gonzo. There are lots of reasons why, but one of the ones that remains most resonant is his song from "The Muppet Movie": This looks familiar, vaguely familiar, Almost unreal, yet, it's too soon to feel yet. Close to my soul, and yet so far away. I'm going to go back there someday. Sun rises, night falls, sometimes the sky calls. Is that a song there, and do I belong there? I've never been there, but I know the way. I'm going to go back there someday. Come and go with me, it's more fun to share, We'll both be completely at home in midair. We're flyin', not walkin', on featherless wings. We can hold onto love like invisible strings. There's not a word yet for old friends who've just met.
Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?You can just visit, but I plan to stay. I'm going to go back there someday. I'm going to go back there someday. The song as a whole, and the bolded lines in particular, capture well my feelings on first discovering SF conventions. The wonder of finding My Tribe, after years of not even knowing that such a thing existed. I still tear up at it. Kermit is an Islander who lives close to the Mainland, and is conflicted about whether he should move there. Gonzo lives much further to sea, and couldn't even *conceive* of moving to the Mainland. Tags: introspection, muppets
May 18th, 200905:53 pm: Plants vs. Zombies!
Some of you may wonder why I haven't been playing World of Warcraft lately. It's because my gamer-obsessiveness has been (temporarily) taken over by another game: Plants vs. Zombies! People around the office are saying things like "Game of the Year, so far." PvZ is the fusion of two things I'm a big fan of: Tower Defense, and Popcap. It's got all the depth of a good Tower Defense game, with the accessibility of a Popcap game. It also has tons of charm and humor. These intersect in sometimes surprising ways. For instance, when you click on the Help button on the main menu, here is what you get: ( Help Image )Yes, this game is easy enough to learn, even if you've never played one of this genre before, that they can get away with making the Help button, literally, a joke. Veteran gamers may find the first few hours of the game to be really easy. But the charm, the humor, and the pacing of new gameplay elements and modes, all contributed to hold my interest easily. And when you finish the main game, you're not *nearly* done. At that point they start to unlock tons of new modes, many of which I found to be extremely challenging, and almost all of which I found to be great fun. It costs twenty bucks to download direct from Popcap, or a mere ten if you get it via Steam. There's at *least* twenty hours of gameplay here, if not more, so that's extremely good value for your entertainment dollar. Currently only available for PC and Mac. When they make a version that works on the DS (or whatever my new phone turns out to be), I will probably buy it all over again. Tags: game design
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