Justin Achilli

Category: Uncategorized

14 January 2013

Gamer Challenge: Charity Food Drive

We’re running a charity drive at Red Storm Entertainment. One of the teams has a setup by which you can take out a “hit” on a coworker. One of the teams accepts traitors from the other teams and collects their contributions. Another team offers cupcakes for contributions.

So far, my team hasn’t done anything. Well, it’s time for that to change, buddy boy.

The beneficiary is the NC Food Bank (the Durham branch), which usually has enough stock to help hungry families during the holidays, but which runs a little low during the first three months of the year. The NC Food Bank has a relationship with food providers, so money is actually a better donation than actual goods — each dollar provides five meals to hungry individuals, and 97 percent of each dollar given goes to the final recipients, as opposed to paying for infrastructure for the charity itself.

I thought about writing a check, but I think the power of crowdsourcing and social media can turn an initial investment into a much greater contribution. Here’s my plan:

I’m printing 50 stickers (see below). I’ll trade you one sticker for one Paypal contribution, with the simple  stipulation that your contribution is $2.00 or more (because giving negative money to a charity is not so great). Alternatively, you can choose to simply contribute and specify in your Paypal comments that you don’t wish to receive the sticker.

One of these can be yours! Just click the donate button below and let me translate your kindness into food bank dollars.

I proofed the stickers this morning and they’re scheduled to arrive on the 28th of January, so I’ll send them out as soon as I get them. Once I’ve sold the allotment of stickers I’ll do a follow-up post to show you where the money went and the grand total we collected. If you’d be so kind, please also pass this on to gamer friends who might have an interest in helping me and Red Storm stock the pantries for less fortunate families. Thanks!

UPDATE: Contributions now closed. The stickers have shipped to me for fulfillment, and I’ll write the status update soon. Thanks for your support!

UPDATE 2: The stickers should arrive tomorrow, according to the tracking number search. That means I should be able to get the stickers out to contributors by midweek or so. Thanks for your contribution!

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6 January 2013

The Glorious Mess

I have too many notebooks, note-taking apps, and devices. And I just bought another. Some are grid-ruled, some are lined, and some are blank sketchbooks. Some are spiral-bound. Some let me paste in media and some let me edit that media, scribbling over it or making notes on it. I have the paradox of choice — I have too many tools from which to choose when taking notes, and as a result, I have shit all over the place and I can’t find any of it, even though I wrote it down so that I wouldn’t forget it. I have notebooks dedicated to fiction writing, scratch pads for hashing out game design ideas, app subsections for reference works, and little folders full of scraps of paper and physical copies of articles that I really, really promise I’ll mark up or read again this year, definitely.

The romantic notion of the glorious mess, I find, doesn’t work for me. I’ve never been the type of creative who thrives in the chaos of pure potential. I like to know what I’m doing and then work toward that goal. As a designer, I’m more like a producer. I want the thing I’m making to be tight and complete, not sprawling and overstuffed (but only partially done and, hey, we didn’t have time to test that, but it’s in there). I like iterative development because it lets me get rid of stuff that’s rattling around under the hood more than because it gives me a chance to cram something else in there.

It would be excellent if every idea naturally fell into a proper nook and I could just dig it out later, when I needed it.

But of course, life doesn’t work that way. I don’t get to pick and choose my inputs or decide when an idea is going to come to me. (The shower, when I literally cannot scribble something into a notebook or peck it into a mobile device, is a particularly fecund idea time.) And that’s why I have ideas scribbled all over the place, spoiling on their vines until I can give them a little attention. Assuming I can remember where I wrote them. But at the very least, I take the first step. I write the thing down so I can come back to it later. The journey of a thousand awesomes always begins with that first step, which must be more ordered line than inchoate scribble.

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5 January 2013

Optimal Party Size?

From the text of the 1980 Moldvay edition of Dungeons & Dragons (p. B19):

It is not wise to adventure alone, for the monsters which may be encountered are numerous. It is much safer to go adventuring with a group of people who can help and protect each other. The best size for an adventure party is 6-8 characters, enough to handle the challenges which will be faced, but not too many to become disorganized or to ruin chances to surprise the monsters.

300 PCs stand down an entire sourcebook full of monsters.

It’s interesting to observe that as time progressed and both editions and iterations of the game did likewise, the practical optimal party size decreased in membership. On the one hand, in terms of rules and systems, this correlates to the expanded versatility and durability of individual characters. In terms of designing for a particular audience, however, I wonder how much of this arose from the fact that, quite often, it’s damned difficult to be able to coordinate the schedules of 7-9 people (that 6-to-8-person party plus the DM). Did the need for fewer players in characters roles emerge because people still wanted to play in smaller groups? Ludic ethnography at work.

(There’s a separate argument to be made that, as editions progressed, individual characters have become less versatile, owing to an expanding skill system mechanic. To a degree, I buy this argument, as the more systems that exist, the less competent an individual character is if he doesn’t possess an amount of aptitude in that system. Particularly among old-school mentalities, the game revolved around rulings as opposed to rules, and clever plans hashed out via conversational give-and-take with the gamemaster superseded having enough skill points to overcome a static difficulty roll. In this case, a “thief” could generally approach any problem, so long as his player could talk through a logical or exciting method of handling that problem. In later systems, when a character faces a trap, he needs a skill score + die roll to exceed the obstacle value of that trap, which makes the game less about problem solving and more about allocating points and hoping the dice fall fortuitously. Naturally, player styles can achieve an optimal blend of these resolutions, but it’s inarguable that those mechanics exist and can thus substitute for critical thought.)

Other roleplaying games have their own twists on the optimal party size. Vampire, for existence, relies less on monsters and fighting physical challenges. Personally, I greatly dislike running or playing in tabletop Vampire games of more than four players’ quantity, because the character construction and conflict resolutions systems don’t have the same niche protections that D&D does, and sharing the limelight comes as a result of story construction rather than environmental challenges. The Storyteller chooses when and where to put a player in the spotlight, as opposed to the cooperative “dungeon.” On the other end of the spectrum, in games like Call of Cthulhu, it doesn’t matter how many party members you have; you’re not taking down an elder god with revolvers and sword-canes. The environmental threats in CoC tend to be more of mystery resolution and incidental conflict.

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3 January 2013

Appetite for (Cooperative) Destruction

I’ve been thinking lately about how people do things cooperatively online (no surprise), but I’ve also been thinking about “consumable” media and its persistence. For example, Bret Easton Ellis includes name-brand references in his fiction, the result of which is an intentional obsolescence that marks the writing as belonging to a particular period of time. As well, books that affect their environment, like Jorn and Debord’s Mémoires, and other artistic endeavors, like The Return of the Durutti Column, both of which featured covers made of sandpaper that abraded — destroying, slowly — whatever occupied the spaces next to them on the shelves or even the individuals holding them. The art resided as much in the statement of where it had been placed, at the choice of the owner, making that statement mutual and participatory. Putting the book or album on a shelf meant damaging the other objects nearby, so the owner engaged in the conscious action of the experience.

Image

Now, my natural inclination is more toward creation than destruction, so I don’t want the same effect there. A while back I did have the idea of writing a book, printing it, and then deleting the data once it had been printed, both planning for obsolescence and destroying, as it were, but that doesn’t leave much room for the individual’s participation. So now, I have in mind a writing, and a printing, and then a pass-off of the book text to the reader. I’m thinking via a wiki: I dump the raw text onto an editable website, deleting the original data, and leaving it to the tender mercies of anyone who wants to make a change.

This is how Wikipedia works (to an extent), but I don’t know if it’s a good fit for a piece of fiction. Part of Wikipedia’s appeal is the plain truth, without bias, and its legion supporters work scrupulously to cull editorial and revert malicious change. I don’t know that I necessarily want that, because even “malicious change” is participation, to whatever end, though it would certainly be remarkable whether people attempted to preserve some amount of the original intent, or would rather engage in pure defacement. Wikipedia also has the benefit of, being factual, a great deal of investment by people who care about that plain truth, and I don’t know that such a thing is possible for a one-off piece of fiction intentionally designed to be manipulated into something other than its original shape.

Still, I think it’d be an interesting experiment, particularly as word-of-mouth spread to people without the first-degree interest of people who cared that I was working on it. Would Kevin Bacon make an edit, once it made it through the six degrees of removal?

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1 February 2011

Vixen Voyeur

Here’s another mixset of music that puts me in a Vampire mood (click, yo). This time, I’m seeing a Ventrue observing his prey from a rooftop opposite her high-rise flat, where she’s preparing for a night out. He follows her for her perambulations, and it begins a bit tweaky, turns moody quickly, goes a bit poppy, then takes an aggressive turn and finally culminates in the Kiss. Lots of great lyrics in here, too, from Little Boots’ move while you’re watching me/ dance with the enemy to Neon Trees’ I won’t be denied by you/ the animal inside of you and We play pretend/ you’re such a cannibal. Anders Manga’s most poignant here is Delusions of the damned…/ the airing of enduring flesh/ the voyeurs, the parodists. Very Kindred.

The track listing:

  • Vitamin String Quartet, “Animal”
  • Simian Mobile Disco, “The Count”
  • Black Devil Disco Club, “Constantly No Respect”
  • Little Boots, “Remedy” (Avicii Club Mix)
  • Cobra Starship, “Hot Mess” (Nervo Remix Extended)
  • Sia, “Clap Your Hands”
  • Shiny Toy Guns, “Major Tom” (Adam K and Soha Club Mix)
  • Dangerous Muse, “I Want It All” (Dismantled Remix)
  • Combichrist, “Scarred” (Club Mix)
  • Anders Manga, “At Dawn They Sleep”
  • Neon Trees, “Animal” (Smash Mode Radio Edit)
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11 January 2011

Music Mix: AM Inbetween

Click on the spider for the AM Inbetween mix. Be patient. It's 90 megs.

This one’s a bit of a digression for me. I usually put together a 4/4 dancefloor stomper, but on the cold, snowy winter night when I assembled this one, I specifically picked out songs that were, well, quite the opposite. Most of this mix is downtempo and everything on the list has an element of sadness, whether wistful, longing, desolate, alienated, or brooding. There’s also a lopsided balance of new to old music in here, with an almost nostalgic arrangement venerating the various eras in which these songs were originally recorded.

Once, when Brian and I were driving a 22-foot panel truck to some convention or another (Wizard World in Chicago, I think), we hit this “dead zone” of radio signal. Mind you, this was in the days before iPods, and the truck didn’t even have a CD player in it, so we had to rely on the radio. Anyway, it’s been dark for several hours and we were in the middle of some square-shaped state with lots of nothing on either side (or maybe it was cornfields) and all of the sudden the radio picks up some channel playing a then-brand-new BT track. Middle of nowhere, no city in sight, black as the literal night surrounding us and out of the ether came this completely incongruous dance track. While I’ve eschewed the dance arrangements this time, that’s the feeling I wanted to invoke here: a late-night trip somewhere with a litany of weird, almost diametrical musics pouring into the listener that provoke the question, “Man, whose radio station is this?” The name of the mix is AM Inbetween, because I wanted it to feel like an AM radio station in the who-knows-where, as the listener is between his point of origin and destination.It feels like a good mix for Changeling to me, but the beginning end and middle tracks also make this a fine fit for some peripheral Vampire tangents.

Here’s the playlist. Enjoy.

  • New Order, “Salvation Theme”
  • Dead Can Dance, “The Carnival Is Over”
  • Mott the Hoople, “All the Young Dudes”
  • U2, “I Will Follow”
  • Gogol Bordello, “Zina-Marina”
  • Edward Sharpe & the Magnetic Zeros, “Home”
  • Danzig, “Pyre of Souls”
  • The Stooges, “Gimme Danger”
  • Shane MacGowan, “Danny Boy”
  • Wings, “Mull of Kintyre”
  • The The, “The Beaten Generation”
  • The Church, “Under the Milky Way”
  • Joy Division, “Atmosphere”
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17 December 2010

ElectroSanta

I’ll have a new, real post later today, but I just liked this. Happy holidays.

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1 December 2010

Rental Car

My car is at the body shop. The repair ran past the estimated time, so I have a rental car until then. The rental car is a Dodge Avenger.

An “avenger” is one who delivers vengeance. Vengeance itself is retribution, a retaliatory punishment. “Avenger” comes from a French root, which in turn comes from a Latin root — the etymology is entirely straightforward, from the Latin vindicare through the French venger.

It is an awful name for this car. In fact, were I to have named this car, it would be called the Rattletrap Plastic Nightmare.

The whole thing screams, "Regret!"

With a sound like a strip of sheet metal clattering down a stone staircase, the wretched thing groans to life. It handles like an overturned sled, or perhaps a series of logs on which Egyptian slaves might have pushed stone blocks while constructing the pyramids. It gets death-wobble at around 60 miles per hour. The cruise control has no visual indicator that signifies whether or not it’s active — you have to watch the speedometer to see if the car is slowing down after you’ve let off the gas, or if it’s maintaining its speed. The interior dress is about six dollars’ worth of cheap plastic molding that a man who laments his choices in life but once had an exemplary health plan pressed into the recesses of the eyesore metal carcass.

And it’s an upgrade! The rental agency was supposed to give me a compact, but they didn’t have any on the lot, so they bumped me up to midsized. I shudder to think what the step down might be. A bicycle set on fire by a local bat-swinging maniac, I suppose.

An awful car, this Dodge Avenger. A veritable testament to the reason American car manufacturers almost dragged themselves screaming into Hell, before you and I paid to send their cancer into remission so they could survive long enough to hang themselves.

4 comments
13 October 2010

Sinister Sister Succubus

In the idiom of what I played at the Grand Masquerade’s Succubus Club party. Happy Halloween!

Track listing:

And One, “Mein Anfang”
SITD, “Hurt”
Reaper, “Totengräber 07”
Cesium 137, “Simulacra”
Assemblage 23, “Binary”
VNV Nation, “Sentinel”
Vampire Lust, “Lucretia My Reflection”
Sohodolls, “My Vampire”
Le Castle Vania, “Nobody Gets Out Alive”
AutoKratz, “Always More” (Yuksek Remix)
Portishead, “Sour Times” (Ben Preston Dub)
Tiesto f/ Diplo, “C’mon”
G Tom Mac, “Cry Little Sister”
Urbs f/ Rodney Hunter, “The Chauffeur”

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11 October 2010

Poveglia Unveiled

Unclebear.com sent a link to a travel journal on Poveglia into the Twitters this morning and I absolutely fell in love with it. There’s something edifying about the real world being a font of astoundingness even more fascinating than the flights of fancy of professional fantasists. So, instead of once again lamenting the garbage state of modern fantasy, I propagate the link.

As presented, Poveglia as a game resource could make for a great modern location, a haunting echo of what was lost to a post-holocaust game, or a foray into lost civilzations for a fantasy or scifi game. It’s also a great example of being able to fill in the details, much like my favorite authors allow, as the relics found there offer no context themselves. Imagination and the imcomplete story is what makes the sparse details here so captivating.

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