PAX East

Attention K-Mart Shoppers!  We will officially be attending PAX East in Boston!  We are leaving on the evening of the 25th and arriving on the 26th at the hotel adjoining the convention center and then leaving on the morning of the 29th.

I have already spoken to a few of you about our possible arrival but now it is certain. If you are also going to be at PAX East please let me know so I can arrange the phone number swap for meetups. If you don’t know me in person and are not part of Team Burlodge North but still want to meet up to see that I really am as short and loud as rumored, let me know as well.

Also, the schedule is totally up now.

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Dostoevsky as MUSH Log

I am a lifelong fan of Russian literature, especially the fine works of Fyodor Dostoevsky. I love Notes from the Underground and Crime and Punishment. I decided to try out Daily List by reading a free translation of The Brothers Karamazov. I had started reading it once a long time ago and I figured I would finish it. The translation is very spotty in places but the copy is readable — I would recommend springing for the Penguin Books version.

The Brothers Karamazov is about three brothers, Dmitri, Ivan and Alexey, who were abandoned by their father after their mothers died. Dmitri has a different mother than Ivan and Alexey. Old Fyodor is a drunk who hates everyone. The cook, Smerdyakov, also hates everyone and he might or might not be Old Fyodor’s illegitimate. And girls are involved: the beautiful Katerina Ivanova, the trollop Grushenka, the crippled Lise. And here’s a bit of plot:

Dmitri is engaged to Katerina Ivanova but for some reason his father Fyodor wants to marry her so Fyodor has gotten Grushenka involved and Dmitri is obsessed with Grushenka but now Ivan is moving in on Katerina Ivanova who is having fainting fits and Alexey (Alyosha) simply wants to marry poor crippled Lise and make his family whole but Ivan is an atheist and Dmitri is crazy and Smerdyakov is plotting to get them to all kill each other…

Eventually the plot devolves to stabbing and deep introspection of the soul because:

- It’s a Russian Novel
- It always devolves to stabbing
- The soul needs some serious introspection

And reading along… I get this strange feeling I have read all this before. I feel deja-vu.

A good, solid, Russian gothic novel is everything a MUSH devolves into given five minutes and half a playerbase: lots and lots of people sitting around discussing how they are quite upset, then going on a huge monologue about God for a few pages, some tension, perhaps a good war or two if reading Tolstoy, and then someone gets a good, solid stabbing. Then after something finally happens everyone — yes — sits around in cafes and discusses everything again! Wash, rinse, repeat. (This ties back well into Rob’s post about romance novels.)

This sort of thought leads me down the path to all sorts of MUSH-like genre games where the novel reads an awful lot like a MUSH log with some better language, punctuation and spelling:

- Romance games, where everyone sits around and talks.
- Jeeves and Wooster games, where everyone sits around, talks, drinks, and fails to shoot pool.
- Russian novel games, where everyone sits around, talks, drinks, stabs, and angsts.

I, personally, will be the first person to app on the Jeeves and Wooster MUSH.

Piano

For Christmas I bought a Yamaha Clavinova CLP digital piano from Jordan Kitt’s Music in College Park, MD. It is not the sexiest digital piano ever conceived but it has 88 gravity-weighted touch-sensitive keys, an excellent fully sampled grand piano sound and, most importantly, a headphone jack for silent playing. And while it doesn’t hold up to an actual grand, it feels much better than a plastic synthesizer with spring-loaded keys.

Mostly I bought the piano for Katie because I have this idea in my head that Katie’s life will be much richer if she has music hardwired in her brain. But I decided, what the hell, I would learn how to play, too, simply from constant practice and staring at the little numbers on the sheet music for hints where to put my hands.

I can read music (treble and bass clef) fine. I have a head full of music theory. I understand how music is built. I don’t need books and videos full of “this is middle C.” I need to just play — scales, hand strengthening exercises, easy to intermediate pieces. Scale runs up and down the keyboard with my left hand. I bought a book full of technique (keep the thumb in, how to go up and down scales in 3-4-3 formation, wrists up, proper posture, how to stretch with thumb or pinky for the leap) and another book full of “Early Intermediate Songs” (better known as lead and bass part together) and went to town.

The first month was constant pain for my left hand which wasn’t used to my pinky having to move anywhere — it has had no feeling for 15 years due to arthritis. Month #2 wasn’t too much better. But I’ve noticed that the playing has become smoother — muscle memory is starting to kick in. Things are easing up.

I suck horribly. I won’t remove the headphones to force people to listen to me work through Bach’s Minuet in G Minor with pain. But it all does seem to be, at day’s end, about muscle memory and endless practice if one already has a head full of theory. My muscles are starting to remember. That is the baseline: for your hands to figure out consistently where the A key is without having to look or hunt-and-peck, it’s two months of practice, minimum 30 minutes/day.

Meanwhile, Katie is having faster and faster recognition of what notes go with what keys and what fingers to press what keys when it says so she is already making progress. She is starting to figure out that practice == getting better == playing more awesome little songs.

Oh! I can recommend the clavinova for anyone who has limited space and/or resources but still wants a piano that plays like a real one. I am jonsing to plug it into my Macbook through its MIDI interface and see what sort of havoc I can enact. I need cables, though.

Hat with Braids!

Katie in Hat

I made this hat out of a pattern from One Skein Wonders by Judith Durant. The book is a little hit or miss but some of the patterns are fun. It took me two tries to get this hat right and I had to adjust my approach but it came out looking like the picture but in black instead of purple. It has exciting features!

* It is hat shaped, hat sized, and fits on heads that may choose to wear hats.
* It has a 4 inch band of seed stitching along the headband for a neat look.
* Earflaps!
* Two long braids, one from each earflap.
* Special flower bling!

My Special Model looks great in the hat. She especially likes that she can smack me with the braids. Knitting a hat is slower than crochet so the hat took about 8-ish hours to make and about 2/3rds of 1 skein of Lion’s Brand Lion Wool, a yarn that is extremely OK.

This has emboldened me to try a single sock. GASP!

Meanwhile, I heard something about some dude trying to give a big speech after the Apple Tablet announcement this afternoon. When are people going to learn that one cannot attempt to follow Steve Jobs? New Apple Bling? State of the Union. Apple Bling. State of the Union. Easy call.

Anyone have a SotU drinking game?

Dragon Age: Origins

Warning: Contains mild spoilers!

In the end, he was the King of Ferelden and I was a city elf from the Denerim slums and it couldn’t work out. Wynne spent half the war yelling at the two of us that it could never work, and even pulled me aside at one point to spell this out in painful detail. It was the great Romance of the War and it died when he became King.

I have played nearly every major console or computer RPG since Bard’s Tale so I feel like a bit of an authority on these sort of things. Dragon Age: Origins reminds me strongly of, strangely enough, Ultima VII: the Black Gate. It was the not the first game with strong moral ambiguity — that crown goes to Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. It was a game more about the strong characters and a decentralized plot than a linear plotline and pretty scenes. U7 was about murder and the evil in the people you thought good and choices and fewer rails. Other games have tried to emulate the style; DA:O nailed it.

I have to admit: I loved DA:O and not because it had a special storyline. It had wonderful worldbuiding but blah blah, giant evil, blah blah, must save the world, blah blah, a bunch of quests. Seen it, done it, it took two tries to kill the Foozle in the end. The strength and brilliance of Dragon Age: Origins is two pronged: the characters and the illusion of control.

(I contend the award for strongest story on a pure console game goes to FFX but that is a debatable point.)

JRPGs bother me because the cut scenes have gotten longer, the choices fewer, and the save points — save points! In 2010! Save points are a criminal offense! — have become scarce. It stopped being a game and turned into a carnival ride. I nearly threw Star Ocean IV across the room when the cutscenes made it to 20 minutes long. It’s called “Cut Scene Hell” for a reason. When SOIV froze I sent it back to Gamefly. I was done 10 hours in. These games feel like 50 hour long interactive movies where the character makes no more choice in the story. They are boring.

Dragon Age: Origins forces the player to make actual choices. Even if the choices are ultimately illusory and the Foozle still must be fought, most (but not all) of the major decisions are through dialogue trees and the result of player choice. The player can choose not to get Sten’s sword. The player can put this dwarf or that dwarf on the Throne. It doesn’t make much difference in the end but it sure seems that way. Returning control to the player is key: the player feels they have a stake in the outcome of the game. Emotional investment keeps players returning over and over. “But I could play evil! I can make this awful choice to see what happens! Awesome!” Returning control back to the player is the core of a great game — like Fallout 3, like Mass Effect (also BioWare). All hail the return of the player actually playing a game!

The true strength is on the characters. The party members have beautifully drawn personalities. They interact with one another. They talk. They argue. They squabble in your party — Wynne explaining where babies come from to Alistair had to be the best exchange in the entire game. The game supports interesting choices and party dynamics between the player and the characters and between the multiple characters. The choices in party composition and party dynamics almost feels real, not just a bunch of scripted events by trigger points. Of course, they are scripted events by trigger points, but the tricky part is to smooth that over and make the characters feel spontaneous and real. JRPG characters feel like caricatures in pretty clothes — Dragon Age: Origins characters felt like people. You find yourself doing the wacky sidequest not because the sidequest is interesting but because you can take Zevran and Oghren in your party and who knows what wackiness might come from the two of them together.

I readily admit: I cannot remember the names of the main characters in most of the JRPGs I have played. They just fade. They were called what again? But I will certainly remember Alistair and Morrigan for a long time.

To sum up: incredibly detailed world, awesome characters, short on the cutscenes, lots of serious meat, and raising the bar for gameplay. It was awesome. Also, in the end game, you get to do what you always wanted to do in every CRPG ever: you get to kick the Bad Guy in the junk. How great is that?

Wombat of Shame

fade and I have the same knitting book: “The World of Knitted Toys” by Kath Dalmeny. I have made a large number of Amigurumis and they are super cute but the crocheted creatures always have some mild coherence problems. No matter how tight I pull the magic circle closed, I can always see white dots of polyfill through the tips of legs and the top of the head. The weave isn’t tight enough and polyfill shows through. We decided to do a knit-along to try something different with a new technique and fade picked the wombat. It’s easy! It’s straight forward! It’s adorable! What could possibly go wrong?

My wombat didn’t come out. I knew something wasn’t quite right when I made his body but I pushed on through. He is full of shame. He is a wombat. Of shame. I have no idea what went wrong. The pattern was mostly making squares! And yet here he is. Not looking anything like a wombat. At all. I looked him up on Ravelry (where you can friend me as multiplexer…) and it looks like the fault is the pattern, not our inability to knit. All the wombats from that pattern are full of sadness and shame. Shame wombats. Sad.

We’ll make something else but I heard something about a request for a Jayne hat. Knitpicks Wool of the Andes yarn totally has the right colors and I found a pattern…

I have learned lessons from the Wombat of Shame!

Pros:

- The weave on a knitted toy is tighter than an ami so no polyfill shows through.
- The toy is overall softer, squishier and more toy-like.
- Makes a much larger toy with far less yarn.

Cons:

- Knitting has fewer weapons for sculpting than crotchet so getting a nice rounded ear requires more elaborate measures and careful counting.
- About 5x longer to make a knitted toy than a croteched toy.
- The increases/decreases much more difficult than the same crotched.

Overall it was a pretty positive experience. I’ll totally make another one. Hopefully it won’t also be full of SHAME.

Maryland Ren Fest, Tom Stoppard and SPX

Maryland Ren Fest: We took Katie for the first time since she was very small, and she loved it. She got to run around in a princess dress, get her face painted, get her hair braided, ride a pony, play in bubbles, and eat deep fried macaroni n’ cheese on a stick. I finally bought the boots I had been eying for five years. Unfortunately, it started to rain on us around 4 and it was not the sort of rain you can just wait out. We went back to my parent’s house and then we left Katie to spend the night.

Tom Stoppard: Once home, we watched a little Tivo and then watched the 1990 production of Tom Stoppard’s Rosenkrantz and Guildestern are Dead. I had forgotten how wonderful the dialogue is, how hot a young Gary Oldman was, and how much I enjoyed the artistic structure of the play. Unfortunately, I was falling asleep at the end but I still need to own a copy on DVD.

SPX: … and I went to SPX in the afternoon! I nearly exploded in the squee of happiness. I also have far less money but I have far more comic books. I cruised all the tables leaving behind a little trail of butterflies and rainbows in the air wherever I went. I did notice that, since the last time I went to SPX, the quality of the mid-tier comics has really picked up. Also, last time I went the porn – comics ratio was fairly high but this time actual comics outweighed the porn about 20:1. I still don’t have any interest in hand-drawn super-artsy books on xeroxes and stapled together. I like my books to be books and I’m enough of a snob that I do put a huge amount on production values. I also refused to buy anything I could get off the web trivially or pick up in a Barnes and Noble. I must support my favorite artists who are awesome! I ended up with a huge haul:

Never Learn Anything from History by Kate Beaton with a little drawn FAT PONY in the front cover;

Beards of our Forefarthers, Clever Tricks to Stave Off Death and the Annotated Wondermark, all Wondermark collections by David Malki!

To Afghanistan and Back by Ted Rall who drew a whole little Osama bin Laden for me on the front page;

Dignifying Science and Bone Sharps, Cowboys and Thunder Lizards by Jim Ottaviani. He was a little taken back by someone showing insane enthusiasm over his science comics but Two-Fisted Science was one of the best collections on 20th century science I had ever read. I was being evangelizing it to the Unsuspecting around me. He threw in a copy of Charles R. Knight: Autobiography of an Artist.

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook by Eleanor Davis for Katie Rose. The production value on this book is spectacular and the whole team did a full color picture for Katie on the frontspiece.

From Top Shelf Books, a copy of the Surrogates (Robert Venditti and Brett Weldele) and VEEPS: Profiles in Insignificance by Bill Kelter and Wane Shellabarger. How was I supposed to pass up a book on Vice Presidents? You tell me that because I could not. I was beholden.

Sadly, all the books for Rice Boy were gone by midway through yesterday. But woo! Comics!

Now I must disappear to read.

Rock Band: The Beatles

General Option: Awesome

Review: Having been raised on a strong diet of the Beatles and having vivid memories of my parents arguing over the Paul is Dead symbolism on the cover of Abbey Road, I have about 95% of the Beatles catalog committed to memory. I was a little iffy going into the game because the music is such a part of my DNA but I really do enjoy being able to play guitar and sing the songs. The selection of songs was a little puzzling at first — why Taxman instead of Eleanor Rigsby from Revolver, for instance — until I realized the song choices were heavily weighted to George Harrison songs because his son was the one who brought the project and worked to get the licensing. That’s why you get songs like Within You Without You instead of something easier to sing like Lovely Rita from Sgt. Peppers.

I find playing through story mode to be very interesting. I don’t usually listen to the albums in chronological order, and playing through gives me this sense of a band who went from being this bar-blues-band/rip off of Chuck Berry to a group with their own unique sound that still built all the pop songs over a 12-bar blues sequence to a group that tried to push what they could do musically (which culminates with Dig a Pong in the Rock Band collection, in my opinion).

I have mostly played guitar and done a little singing, although the singing is more on par with “what I do in the truck alone on the way to work.” Generally I find the songs well balanced although the guitar is a little picky about being late on hitting the notes. We haven’t explored the harmony option because we need another microphone. Also, Katie is insisting on singing the songs, so we’re happy for No Fail mode. I need to get off my butt and start mastering songs in Hard.

I actually don’t feel dorky playing the songs on a plastic guitar instead of my perfectly good real guitars, surprisingly enough, despite owning piles and piles and piles of Beatles guitar tabs. Maybe because a) I cannot play the harder songs anyway and b) the singing is about the same if it’s car-signing or if it is rock band singing.

Best Songs in the Collection: Something and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band / With a Little Help from My Friends. We haven’t played yet Dig a Pony but it’s one of my favorites. Katie loves to sing Yellow Submarine, but then again, who doesn’t?

Notable Songs Missing: Help! Penny Lane. Your Mother Should Know. I wish Because was on there but it’s a little more obscure. Most of the 1st album of the White Album. However, the albums are all coming out, starting with Abbey Road, then Sgt Peppers, and Rubber Soul.

Entertaining Easter Egg: There’s a special reward for playing the 32-bar guitar solo on While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Expert without missing a note. I joked this was the special Eric Clapton award since the White Album recording is a Clapton solo.

Random Comments: Twist and Shout and Boys are both covers played by the Beatles of other bands.

I will probably make more comments about Maxwell’s Silver Hammer being the stupidest pop song in existence after Abbey Road is downloadable and I can play it. Who writes an ironic happy pop song in a major key about stalking and double murder?

I found musty live 1964 Beatles concert footage on YouTube this morning. For some reason I cannot remember the song but Ringo is just going crazy on those drums. He looks like a mid-70s punk drummer with that stripped down set. It was awesome.

Video Game Frenzy Weekend!

I indulged in my favorite time-wasting habit in a big way this weekend and previewed four (!!) games. This included my first major foray into the XBox360 Marketplace which turned out, much to my surprise, to be a positive experience.

Marketplace Games:

1. The Secret of Monkey Island SE

LucasArts upgraded the graphics, the interface, and added new voice acting to the original Secret of Monkey Island for the Xbox360. It’s Monkey Island! It’s a download from the Xbox Marketplace! It’s $4! How can you not download Monkey Island for $4? It’s MONKEY ISLAND! I am waving my hands around and doing the “go play it” dance.

It has an integrated hint system for the truly lazy who needs to get prodded in the right direction once a while. I thought the interface with using a controller rather than a mouse was a little strange to get used to at first but I did get the hang of it. I was totally consumed by this for an hour and change before Katie started getting real wiggly with me and we needed to get out the door. I cannot imagine anything that is a better buy at $4.

2. Castle Crashers

This totally adorable side-scrolling beat things up game is totally adorable. You can look at it here. You grab swords, you beat things up, you occasionally kill a boss, and the graphics are super amazingly cute. It also has 2-4 player cooperative and 2-4 player online multiplayer. It’s $6. We played through the demo level last night but haven’t bought the full game yet, though.

Real Games:

1. Street Fighter IV

I may or may not have ruined my left hand playing Street Fighter II many years ago… *shifty eyes*. I have played a huge number of fighters including variations on Street Fighter on consoles for years and the only game that has ever really pleased me is Soul Caliber II. (THE SOUL STILL BURNS.) This game comes very close: the game is stripped down to essential Street Fighter II-ness without all the silly crap accompanying fighters recently. The control scheme is very responsive and it is possible to play with a standard controller. Move list has been returned to the essential moves. Arcade play, two-player play, online competitive play, downloadable content, leaderboards, etc. It is an excellent fighter. The issue, of course, is that after playing for 2 hours on Saturday my hand still throbs, so I don’t know if I /can/ play it any more. The Dhalsim animations are awesome.

2. Star Ocean IV: The Last Hope

Star Ocean is a funny franchise from Square Enix because, unlike FF, all the games are set in a coherent and contiguous universe. However, I almost threw Star Ocean III across the room at the 70 hour mark. I go into IV with that in mind.

So far, the game has a compelling enough story to keep me playing for a little while. It’s a “prequel” which starts with Mankind’s first forays into the stars to find planets to colonize and inhabit. The combat is a real-time Tales of Symphonia-style action system that is RPG-like but allows you to mash some buttons to some effect which keeps the combat from seems too automated. However, I am only 4 hours in and these games usually fall over at the 10 hour mark so it needs another night of play. I don’t see any major glitches in the code or anything too stupid… yet.

Funny, I had a more positive overall experience with the Marketplace games than the very expensive DVD games. I suspect the future of video gaming is in the smaller, cheaper downloadables. Sure, they are not as whizz-bang full featured as the DVD games, but I am wondering if SFIV is worth $60 for the DVD. Best game of the weekend? Monkey Island, hand’s down.

Also, I’ve started a Fallout – 3 game, which I hope to get back to.

Added bonus — the web comics I currently read:

Dinosaur Comics, Diesel Sweeties, FreakAngels, Order of the Stick, Overcompensating, PartiallyClips, Penny Arcade, PHD Comics, Questionable Content, Sinfest, and XKCD. Cat and Girl and Wondermark both were added over the weekend. I’m still previewing the other comics people sent in that require me to read 2-3 years of backlog (*cough girl genius cough*). Winner of the most compelling comic is Digger, which is on the top of my review list.

Thanks to all who contributed to my addiction!

Friday Question!

Maybe someone on my friend’s list can answer this:

I have a four year old with a super active imagination, lots of dolls and stuffies. She is starting to get the hang of consistent rules and rulesets. What games — board games and rpg games — do you recommend for a little poo?