After a couple of weeks off, I couldn't resist doing this Friday Five

1. What is your favorite type of literature to read (magazine, newspaper, novels, nonfiction, poetry, etc.)?

Science fiction, of course. Having grown up early on Bradbury, Asimov, Vance and friends, there was little chance I wouldn't love it. I currently read (books that is) 45% SF, 45% Fantasy, 10% Non fiction or other.

2. What is your favorite novel?

Arrrgh. A very tough question. It might be Silverlock by John Myers Myers. But other choices come to mind as well. Dune. Foundation. The Dying Earth, and of course, Nine Princes in Amber

3. Do you have a favorite poem? (Share it!)

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

--Percy Bysshe Shelley

4. What is one thing you've always wanted to read, or wish you had more time to read?

Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Gibbon

5. What are you currently reading?

(I've got to update my list at right, this reminds me!)

The Incompleat Nifft, by Michael Shea

U.S.Diplomat's letter of resignation.

The latin phrase, by the way, translates (as much as I know latin) to "Let them hate so long as they fear"

And for the Biology side of me, where I got my degree:
Computer Made from DNA and enzymes.

You say cyberpunk, I say RIBOPUNK.

What makes a planet a planet?

Its not as easy a question as you might think.

Here's a UC Berkeley online article which helps illustrate the variance in opinion. Heck, not everyone thinks poor little Pluto is a planet. At the American Museum of Natural History in NY...Pluto's been demoted, and does NOT have a model in the new Planetarium as the other planets do. Instead, it is lumped with the Kuiper Belt objects. Those are, for the uninitiated, a sort of "asteroid belt" beyond Neptune, mainly made of ice-dominated bodies. Some of them are quite large, Astronomers recently found one, named Quaoar, which is about 800 miles in diameter. That's larger than any of the traditional asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and about 4/7th the size of Pluto. So if Pluto is a planet, is Quaoar? And if not, why not? If you consider planets to have a "rocky" core, Pluto gets demoted. But Pluto has a moon, shouldn't that count for something? And maybe we should consider a "Grandfather" clause for Pluto, and exclude bodies like it from planet-hood?

So does the solar system have 9 planets? Or 8 (if you exclude Pluto)? Or more if you count objects like Quaoar?
Perhaps we can have "major planets" and "minor planets"...but where do you draw that line (one possibility I think are between Major Gas Giants and Minor "Ice/rock planets". Of course, that means Earth is a "minor" planet under that definition.

Yes, this is the sort of thing which does float my boat. I've liked thinking about this stuff ever since good old Carl Sagan put together a little series called Cosmos.

Now he is a neighbor to those in the Great Beyond

Fred Rogers, of Mr. Rogers fame, has passed on.

Pioneer 10, that venerable voyager through and beyond our solar system, has sent its last signal.

Jenn has posted what she has entered for games. I finally did it this past weekend, thanks to that nasty depression. And yes, Jenn, I have to get back to you on your AAPA character. I promise.

So, for the interested:

Slot 1: It's a Mad Mad Mad Chaos, co-gming with Felicia Olson
Slot 2: Ad Amber per Astra
Slot 3: Rites of Passage (campaign). Will Cadmus figure out his parentage? Or at least what Fi and Brand have to do with it?
Slot 4: My primary choices are Deb and Bridgette's To 'Scape the Serpent's Tongue and Felicia's Revelations in Amber
Slot 5: Ghosts of the Past
Slot 6: Wizard in the Attic, the 2003 Edition
Slot 7: I signed up for Chris Kindred's A Night Amidst Wolves. With his popularity, its a crapshoot if I will get in
Slot 8 I signed up for (again) Chris Kindred's To Live and Die in Texorami. See Slot 7

I'm hoping, and dreading for the diversity to be in the people who come to my games. I think its going to primarily be in WITA, because most of my friends who could, DID play in the original edition. (Bridgette is an exception, and she will not be able to make it this time, either). So I could wind up for the first time with a room full of strangers without a single person I know.

Here is the question that is bothering me right now.

"If I had not re-engaged my relationship with Bonnie in 2001, and moved out here to be with her in 2002, would I, in the course of my attempts to branch away from my domestic situation at home in New York, have considered Southern California as an attractive destination?"

The answer to this question is the answer to whether I stay here, and how soon do I leave if the answer is no.

A quote from Arref on Amber relationships:
Audrey: all too often, games define Fiona through her brothers and/or the Chaosian men who are attracted to her; in my Amber, no one is frigid

As if. To further promote Arref's logic, in Strange Bedfellows, she has three children, Lorius, Shannon and Brandeigh, all of which are her children by different men, and none of those men are Chaosians.

Frigid? Not even close.

Think all the craters on the Moon are older than dirt (with the exception of the big event documented by English monks and Chinese astronomers in the 12th century AD)?

Think again.NASA Solves Half-Century Old Moon Mystery

Claire gives some notes on a "unrun" scenario of her own, featuring a Chaos city divided between Amber and Chaos a la Cold War Berlin, or modern Nicosia (on Cyprus)

I'd play in such a scenario, absolutely. Scipio would flourish in such a climate.

Update: I see I have much more editing to do on my pages. Scipio's is a bit out of date.

Punning joke of the day:

What did the space alien say to the store clerk, when she walked into the soda (pop) aisle?

--Take me to your liters.

Let's try it again, perhaps a little less rambling.

I like to customize my scenarios to the players. I do not feel that a con game is ready for prime-time until I have the characters in hand, so that I can meld them into the universe. While this does not mean that I can't run a con game again (I am doing it with Wizard in the Attic after all), it means that each experience is going to be unique.

Last year, in AAPA, I couldn't wait to get a hold of the characters (and even penalized same-day characters) because I wanted to seamlessly put them into the context of the game, and I like to have time to do that. Oh sure, you can do it on the run, and I have (in FTF one shots) but I like to have it somewhat smoother. In AAPA, having the characters in advance allowed me to create their "dopplegangers" in the space-opera shadow much easier, and allowed me to get the characters more organically tied to the game at large.

When I ran Wizard in the Attic for the first time, I did the same thing. Oh, Anne's Rebman works in the forges of Amber, eh? We can use that. Another character has a clockwork chess set? There's an idea. A character who is Brand's daughter (as it so happens, TGFKAB). Oh, that is too perfect for my plans.

It will be the same this year, no doubt. I am eager to see what players I will have and what characters they are bringing to the table, so plotlines can be formed around them seamlessly. For characters who I know are going to be in the games already, I've begun this process already.

What this means of course is that while this weekend I did some talking plot points for AAPA and GHOP, I really need the players to make them complete. Similarly, I have WITA's stuff already--but it needs the players to make it come to life.

I'm not a perfect GM. I've made mistakes and miscalculations. For instance, I had far too much plot for too little time last year with AAPA and it was rushed, badly. It really needed a 6 hour slot and I tried to do it in four hours. Hopefully this year I will do better and learn from those mistakes--and that all of my players, both old friends, new friends who have not gamed with me before (yes, you, Jenn)_and strangers will have a fun time.

One can hope, anyway

Arrgh! A long post on con games and such ruined because IE crashed before I saved the post.

ARRRgh

Other games to run, someday

I want to run a FTF game. Or another game, although SB does fill the online niche more than adequately.

It's not a need to run a game, per se, the large and diverse canvas of my magnum opus is almost more than I can handle, sometimes, and its when I get depressed that the game suffers badly.

But I have lots of ideas, though, to run, or at least play in, other games. I'd love a copy of Nobilis because I'd want to try that system, player and GM, for instance. But its not the only thing I could do. Ideas are like seeds, and in the Amber system alone I have a bunch that wait the right climate to germinate. They are larger than single con-slot games, which is why I am reluctant to bring them into a forum like ACUS unless I was explicitly trying for a campaign...AAPA I sort of stumbled into doing a sequel more than anything else. There are so many campaign slots (too many I think) in ACUS that it certainly doesn't need more from me. So these ideas are not likely to wind up at your local Con, I prefer ideas with tighter focus and smaller scope than these.

Borders of Eternity
Inspired at first by Arref's successful creation of the Empire of the Gleaming Banner, the opening image is what drew me to this and its stayed with me since. One of the player characters, on a private secluded beach in shadow, a shadow no one else in their family knows about, finds a set of footprints where none should be. Not Amberian, not Chaosian...someone else.
In its most epic and ambitious form, this would be a three sided game with characters from the three poles of the universe...Amber, Chaos and the third pole, hitherto unknown, in a direction perpendicular to Amber and Chaos both. My mental modeling of this third world is a quartet of shadows influenced heavily by Elizabeth Willey's books. They have a quartet of elemental powers, scions of them able to travel shadow, and an even match for Pattern and Logrus masters and mistresses. They are just as real.
What happens in the contacts between these worlds? Intrigue, adventure, conflict, and exploring new worlds and lands. Expanding one's vision of just how large the universe is. Finding the borders of Eternity.

Status Quo Ante Bellum
I'm a little less inclined to do this game at a con, considering the success and the prevalence of Rebma-based games lately,but it could work in a long term campaign format.
It's an alternate Amber, where the War turned out somewhat differently. During the attack on Chaos, when Amber's forces were at the Courts, a expeditionary force from one of the aquaphilic Chaosian Houses made a bold strike on Amber...specifically on Rebma. Moire was killed, LLewella has fled, and these Chaosians now rule Rebma.
The War has ended, and Amber has demanded, as part of the peace treaty, a status quo ante bellum...a return to the way things were, before the War. However, the Chaosians in Rebma refuse to leave. What's more, not everyone in Rebma is unhappy at the change in administration either, especially the males, since the new Chaosian overlords do not like the matriarchial system of Rebma and have begun making moves toward more egalitarianism. Plus, Rebma was very much the dependency of Amber before the War, and the new rulers want Rebma to be a free and independent power of its own.
So...Amber is unhappy at this state of affairs, LLewella herself hosting a "Rebman government in exile", Chaos is unhappy at these renegades, and Rebma itself is fractured between those who like the new Rebma and its promises of becoming an independent state, and those who want things to return to the way they were. A game heavy on intrigue, spying, and diplomacy, the player characters could be from one of any number of factions, or pretending to be with their own hidden agendas.

Wish #35: Music

How does music influence your campaigns? As a GM, do you feel there are ‘soundtracks’ for scenes, and as a player, do you perhaps have ‘songs’ for characters? Name three songs that relate to favourite characters or situations.

I'm not that musically inclined, despite the occasional posting of lyrics here.

I don't for instance, have theme songs for characters. I've never quite had that capacity, nor do I really have theme songs for campaigns. That piece of music you hear on the SB main page is from Microsoft Music Producer, which basically lets you tinker with some pre-set sounds to create compositions. And I do like fractal music composers.

But I've never been able to say. "Oh yes, Marcus' theme song is "xxx" or Ad Amber per Astra has a theme of "zzz".

On the other hand, though, I do think of situational music on occasion, and that bleeds over into PBEM turns. As a very recent example, Deb's character in SB, Leigh, recently learned of a mess that was occurring in her ways, or otherwise. So, I titled her turn "Welcome to River City"...I'm sure if you've seen The Music Man, you know what song i am talking about.

But other than those situations, music rarely enters into my games at all. I'm not just inclined competently, that way. It's not that I don't like music (although that is a story in itself), I'm not good at integrating it into the mise-en-scene of my games.

A movie idea.

I'm not sure where this came from, it erupted in my head as I was watching Ebert and Roeper's review show this weekend. It's not a happy movie, but I would watch this movie. Maybe you would, too.

The key event of the movie starts with a couple, unmarried. We see them in their apartment discussing going to some event or place. They flip a coin to decide who drives. We see it come down heads, and a cheer from the guy, and then we see it come down tails, and a smile from the girl.

It's then a bit of alternating scenes. We see the guy get in the driver's seat, we then see the woman do the same. This continues for a short while, until the tragedy strikes. The volkswagen beetle that the two are in is blindsided by a speeding SUV. And there the split becomes bigger. We see the car crash twice, with the two drivers and occupants.

In both cases the driver is killed, the non-driver survives. And the movie shows bifurcating scenes since then, showing the reactions to the death, the meaning of why the other feels they were spared, how the people react to the death of one or the other in the horrible crash. So, the movie would explore the nature of what happens when tragedy strikes a relationship and the people around it, and taking the "Sliding Doors" approach to see it from both sides.

Then again, since its not "It's exactly like fill in name of movie xxx", It wouldn't get greenlighted in a thousand years.