October 2011

So… what are you reading and/or watching?

After I finish the errands (they kinda didn’t get done yesterday), I’ll finish the first season of Fringe
. I hope. (I’m halfway through the episode with the upside-down writing kid and they’re trying to find The Artist.)

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I’m going through “Lonesome Road” on New Vegas (I’ll link to the Game of the Year edition when it comes out) and I’ve started Vampire: The Gathering Bloodlines (on sale until Monday morning!) and I took the personality test and, once again, I am a Malkavian.

So… what are you playing?

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Well, today we went up to Denver to say “has it been 10 years already???” at the place where they do all that biometric stuff for your Green Card. (It has.)

Tonight will involve ordering a pizza, playing New Vegas, watching Fringe (dude, we learned about Zerstörung durch Fortschritte der Technologie last night… my jaw hit the floor), and enjoying a little red something.

Tomorrow will be devoted to errands but, given the next few weekends all involve someone being unable to make it to game night, we will be having another game night and Maribou’s Anniversary present to me arrived and so we will be playtesting Quarriors Dice Building Game… don’t worry. A full review will be forthcoming.

Sunday will be devoted to *LAUNDRY*. How I love my Sundays when they are devoted to laundry…

So… what’s on your docket?

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The four of you who read this site but not the main site will want to read this post.

Short version: Vampire Bloodlines is on sale for five bucks. This is that game I talked about. This is the best game ever. Get it.

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I dream about music.

The most recent dream was me quitting my job and becoming a one-man Ben Harper cover band who played the restaurant circuit (this song featured prominently). This is weird because I cannot carry a tune in a bucket, have never successfully played a chord on a guitar, and can barely play a C-Major chord on a piano.

I have never flown under my own power before either and I do that all the time in dreams so maybe it’s not *THAT* weird. Still weird though.

Sometimes I write my own songs in the dreams, sometimes I take an existing song and tweak the lyrics here, the chords there, and make the new song my own… and it’s so much better than the old one. (One song had me turn Californication into a song about the difficulties of being a real person in a real relationship with another real person and the main metaphor in the song was mining for rare earths… I woke up and the lyrics evaporated. Which is too bad because I’m pretty damn sure that they were better than the tripe in the real song.)

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about Chinese Democracy and how it reminds me, if anything, of the music that I’ve dreamed. Specifically, of the music I’d be stuck making if I had the skills to try to recreate in the real world some of the songs that I wrote while on the other side of sleep. As such, I guess that that album is something that I very, very much enjoy but cannot in good faith recommend to anybody else.

There are 14 tracks on the album and there are only three that I bother seeking out when I put the CD in the player (Better, Catcher in the Rye, and Madagascar) which is nowhere *NEAR* the ratio of listenables on any of their other albums (excepting that one which was totally awful). The reviews of the album you’ve read are pretty much right: This album is a hot mess. Indeed, one review I read said that all of the songs are either about Stephanie Seymour or about how difficult it is to make an album like Chinese Democracy.

Which brings me back to dreaming about music. This album reminds me of the evaporations of music that fall though my fingers first thing in the morning. Which is why it’s a guilty pleasure that I still listen to.

I can’t really recommend it, though.

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Maribou and I have been married 13 years as of today. So I went through the various things that happened in the late 90′s to see what happened and all sorts of memories came flooding back… hey! Remember Chef Aid: The South Park Album? Remember The Slim Shady LP? Oh, my goodness do you remember Downward Is Heavenward???

None of those made for a particularly good “happy anniversary” kinda post, though.

I then shrugged and said “well, heck… what album was released on October 26th, 1998?”

As it turns out, R.E.M.’s Up happened to be released that day… and that album happened to have a perfect song on it.

Happy Anniversary, Sweetie. I’d do it all over again. In a heartbeat.

So… what are you listening to?

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So, on Saturday night, we sat down and played King of Tokyo.

The box says 8 and up, 2-6 players, 30 minutes. It seems to me that if the child is old enough to play Yahtzee, s/he is old enough to play this. The sweet spot of players is probably 4-5 (we played with 4). 30 minutes seems long by about 10 minutes (then again, I was pretty sure that we only went around the table 3-4 times per game… Dman explained to me that, no, we went around 7 or 8 so my time sense may be off a bit). It’s a simple game to just pick up and play. We spent only a moment with the instructions before we started rolling our dice… I’d say that it’s simple enough for me to break it down for you here:

You are a monster in Tokyo Bay (monsters include a giant ape, a giant lizard, a giant mechabunny… you’ll recognize the archetypes). You have 10 hit points. You have 0 Destruction points.

Everybody rolls the six (identical six-sided) dice that come with the game and the person who rolls the highest number of Whack!s moves ahead to Tokyo…. everyone else remains outside in the Bay. And the game then starts.

Each die has six faces with the following: 1, 2, 3, Lightning Bolt, Whack! (a paw print), or a Heart. Each person rolls the dice 3 times, keeping whatever dice s/he would like to keep after each roll. You get destruction points by rolling triples of the numbers (and quads or quints or sexts are worth 1 or 2 or 3 additional points, respectively), you get energy by rolling the lightning bolts (energy can be used to buy cards), you heal points of damage you’ve taken by rolling hearts (unless you’re in Tokyo), and you do damage by rolling a Whack! (If you’re in Tokyo, you do damage to everyone else… if you’re everyone else, you only do damage to the monster in Tokyo. Watch out, however. If you do damage to the monster in Tokyo and that player cedes the city, *YOU* will find yourself in Tokyo! You get 1 destruction point by taking Tokyo and 2 destruction points if you’re holding Tokyo at the start of your turn.)

The cards contain stuff as simple as a one-time buy of Destruction Points to additional powers to attacks on your fellow players. (Those of you who are fans of the movies the game is based upon will be tickled by each of these cards… you’ll recognize each event. “The National Guard!” “Tanks!” “Extra Head!”)

You win by either being the last monster standing or by being the first to get to 20 Destruction points.

That’s pretty much it. You’re ready to play. It’s family friendly, it’s quick, it’s fun, it has enough strategy for the hardcore gamers in the group while is light and fluffy enough for the casual gamers who may show up. Most importantly, there is plenty of space for smack talk. This was a fun, fun, fun game. You should introduce your group (or kids!) to it.

So that’s my recommendation for you this week.

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It seemed to me that the best way to process the question of whether The X-Files is fantasy or sci-fi is to ruminate upon the inheritor of the X-Files’s's mantle. No, not Millennium (though that was a corker of a show, wasn’t it? I could watch Lance Henrickson read the phone book).

Fringe.

Now, before we start getting into arguments about the cow, I’ll say that I kicked around all sorts of theories about the differences between Fantasy and Sci-Fi and touched on the things touched on by Patrick and RTod (and a handful of others):

“Fantasy has an underlying moral fabric while Sci-Fi is more interested in what actually happens” or “Fantasy has a point that it’s driving towards while Sci-Fi has an experiment that it wants to see the outcome of” or even “Fantasy’s point is that nothing changes while Sci-Fi’s point is that things can.”

All of these are well covered (and better) by others… it seems to me, however, that the difference is best exemplified in the best examples by not the ground covered by the story but the goal of the author when it comes to what he is trying to process and, by extension, who is audience actually is. For the sake of this essay, I’ll say that there are two particular audiences in this particular Venn Diagram: “Us” is a small circle entirely within the larger circle of “Those willing to listen” (which is a smaller circle within the gargantuan circle of “everybody”).

I will posit that Fantasy is explicitly written for Us. It tells Us what assumptions to make and, indeed, We make them. We are more than happy enough to make them. When we are told that “The Force is what gives a Jedi his power. It’s an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us, and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together.”

Instead of saying “WHAT THE HECK IS WITH THIS CLAPTRAP”, we say “oh… so that’s what It is called” and boldly go forward. (Indeed, this explains what was so upsetting about the Midichlorian issue in Episode 1… we were explicitly told that this was no longer a story for Us but for those inclined to ask questions in all caps.)

As implied above, Sci-Fi is where the author understands that there are those who need convincing and, as such, gives the underlying explanation behind everything (which, in the best examples, is the *REAL* story… for example: Asimov’s Nightfall (warning: PDF)). The explanation to those who need convincing is the point in Sci-Fi while Fantasy is written for those who need no such explanations. (We’ve already shown up, you see.)

Now, what does this mean? Well, it certainly means that things are much messier than we’d like things to be. This episode of Star Trek may be Sci-Fi, that one may be Fantasy. The entire story arc of Babylon 5 may be Sci-Fi, but almost every single fanfic inspired by the show qualifies as Fantasy.

And, indeed, Anne McCaffrey is a Sci-Fi writer despite the presence of dragons.

The so-called “sci-fi” show that relies heavily upon “insert technobabble here” appearing in the first draft of most every script would be a fantasy show. “We” smile and nod when we hear that a reverse tachyon pulse has reversed the polarity of the dilithium crystals… even though, seriously, this should have all of us standing up and yelling “WHAT THE HECK DO YOU TAKE ME FOR?” at the television when they say something like this.

Which brings me back to Fringe… the intention of the show, when it starts, is to gain converts. After it has them, it can loosen up. It starts out at Sci-Fi but just like the X-Files before it and Voyager before that and The Next Generation before that and Quantum Leap before that and so on and so forth back and back and back:

It eventually becomes Fantasy… even as we watch the authors got really, really good at cleaning up the portions of the script that say “insert technobabble here”.

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