Update: I won! Well, I am in a five-way tie for third place, which is winning in my book.

Vornheim Communication Networks

Information moves quickly in the city, but it also moves differently depending on the social strata. Below are sketches of a few of the many ways that information moves throughout Vornheim.

State information-gathering

The “Wolfkasten” are found in virtually all Vornheim neighborhoods. They are hollow, open-mouthed statues of large wolves, designed so that citizens of Vornheim can denounce one another to the authorities by dropping a written message through the wolf’s mouth. No one ever sees the statues emptied, but enough people have been questioned or simply disappeared after being denounced in this way that citizens fear being cast to the wolves.

People believe that if anyone dares to submit a false accusation, the Wolfkasten will bite off the hand of the offender. If anyone is foolish enough to try to retrieve a letter from inside the Wolfkasten or destroy or tamper with the statue in any way, Vornheimers believe that the entire statue will animate (as a stone wolf golem) and attack and pursue any vandals unto the death.

Aristocratic communication

Just as the Vornheim aristocracy has cultivated slow pets (see “Oddities of Vornheim,” p. 7), they also employ elaborate slow-moving processionals for the delivery of official messages. The slower and less timely the message, the greater the respect shown to the recipient. When sending invitations to a party, the ideal is for the messenger to deliver the invitation just as the recipient is leaving his home in order to attend the event in question.

To avoid a state of constant surprise from these late-arriving messages, aristocratic houses maintain a complex network of servant informants. Wealthy houses have informants in all the best families’ kitchens, stables, boudoirs, and drawing rooms, and likewise employ many servants that they know or suspect to be informants for other houses. These informants are commonly called “ears,” as in “let it be known to the ears that we shall be hunting bats by the full moon” or “find out from the ears what Lady Frost will be wearing to the tournament.”

Those employed as ears by the most powerful families wield an enormous amount of power and influence. By controlling the flow of information to and from both the aristocrats they spy for and the aristocrats they spy upon, they can affect the rise and fall of houses. When an ear can carry on such a performance with discretion, taste, and cunning, he often becomes a trusted advisor to both houses. When an ear in such a position makes a misstep, however, the two houses will fight over who gets to draw and quarter him in front of Palace Massive.

Ears for less-wealthy houses have a job that is difficult in another way. Greater houses are unlikely to accept them as servants as little benefit and less prestige comes from sharing information with lesser houses. Nor will those higher-class houses be particularly eager to spy on less-powerful or wealthy aristocrats, simply because they don’t care what these minor houses are up to. Ears for these lesser houses will be forced to spend much of their time in taverns that cater to the servant class, desperately seeking information that others do not want to share, and likewise seeking to pass on information that few are interested in.

The wall

Many of Vornheim’s poorest residents live along the city’s inner and outer walls in shacks or lean-tos. Even in those neighborhoods that aren’t slums, the wall seems to attract the shifty, the dangerous, and the desperate.

While the culture of the wall is mostly an oral culture, all along the wall one will find graffiti written by literate wall rats (as these men and women are called). But the writing is very seldom straightforward and easy for outsiders to read. Writers use slang or simple codes, or often just distort the letterforms so far beyond the norm as to make the writing indecipherable to those not in the know.

Much of the content of this graffiti is simple and simple-minded, but when major news is in the air–news that affects the wall rats and their neighborhoods–PCs will see variations on the same message over and over again. If they have a local informant (and in this case it must be a very local informant as styles and forms of graffiti seem to change radically with every block), they can easily learn what these messages say. Without a guide, they may wish to try and decipher the messages themselves.

When players declare that they want to try and read the graffiti, use one of the messages below (or devise your own similar method) to show them an English message that is difficult to read at first glance. Players whose characters are not literate should not be allowed to try to decode the message. PCs who don’t have access to writing implements should not be allowed to keep the written message itself, but should only be allowed to look at it while they are standing in front of the wall.

1. Fold a piece of paper, unfold it, and write the message along the crease. Tear or cut the paper, and give either just the top halves of the letters or just the bottom halves of the letters to the players.
2. Write the message without vowels or omitting letters from the first or second half of the alphabet.
3. Omit all vertical strokes (or horizontal strokes or curved strokes) from all letters.
4. Write multiple letters over top of one another.
5. Write normally, then inscribe dark “O”s over parts of each word.
6. Use crude drawings as pictographs, or even as a rebus.

[Note, the idea is not to reproduce exactly what the characters are viewing as written on the wall, but to present an appropriate reading and reasoning challenge to the players.]

It’s foolish to be shocked at sexism in MMA, with the UFC’s “Octagon Girls” and pinup spreads in MMA “lifestyle” magazines. But while that stuff is a little juvenile, it involves women who have knowingly taken jobs that play on their appearance and sex appeal.

The dustup this week has been a different thing altogether, with Quinton “Rampage” Jackson telling a reporter she was making him horny and motioning as if he was going to “motorboat” her by putting his face between her breasts. At my favorite MMA news/fan site, Brent Brookhouse wrote a very good post titled UFC 130′s Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson and the MMA Community’s Attitude Toward Women. In a few days he received over 500 comments on the thread, including comments that support him, comments that say “what’s the big deal?”, and comments that are just in it for the lulz.

But hardly any of those comments really go completely off the rails in my opinion. At least not as spectacularly off the rails as UFC commentator Joe Rogan did in a comment on another site when he called Yahoo! Sports writer Maggie Hendricks ” all kinds of cunty” and insulted her “shitty, cunty brand of writing.” Hendricks had the gall to say in her post, ‘Rampage’ continues to assault reporters, find it funny, that Rampage wasn’t cute, he was a person who thrived on attention when the cameras were on him.

Brookhouse took up the topic again on Bloody Elbow in Joe Rogan Jumps Into the Rampage Jackson Debate. This comment thread isn’t as long (yet), but it’s a bit more extreme and a bit more heated. Still, I really enjoy the level of conversation at Bloody Elbow, because it includes comments like this one (quoted in full below) from Luke Thomas:

What is this cunty, faggot talk really adding? Let’s say people are still vindictive. Rogan still says Hendricks is a shitty writer and fucking moron. He just stops short of calling her a cunt or Rios a faggot.

What’s missing?

Nothing.

Even if you think Rogan should be free to say these things because the mainstream is too santized and uptight, what’s really added to UFC or MMA with the tolerance of this dogshit? Nothing. It benefits nothing. It seeks only to legitimize boorish, discriminatory behavior.

The truth is if you want to be mean, vindictive or horrible to a person, you can do it without crossing the line. And even if you think that line is arbitrary, people in positions of power don’t. So it’s there, like it or not. You can still be a bully and not get dragged into problems like this.

You have to have positively zero verbal discipline and a total lack of social awareness to understand what language is appropriate for which audiences and in which formats. It’s easy to get your point across and even be a raging asshole without resorting to the bottom of the barrel stuff like this. You have to be desperate to say you can’t communicate without these hugely charged terms.

That’s the thing, for me. People could still argue, even in pretty crude terms, and I’d be happy with it. But when this aggressively sexist language comes in–from one of the main faces and voices of the UFC–I can’t take it.

So yeah. I don’t know where that leaves me. I’ll continue to read and sometimes comment on Bloody Elbow, because it’s a site where the hostile sexists can’t simply assume that everyone agrees with them, and because the more straight-up fight commentary and discussion tends to be really good. But I’m pissed at the UFC for seeming to allow all this with no consequences for Rogan or Rampage.

OK, enough of that for now. Isn’t Jose Aldo’s left hook-leg kick combination a thing of beauty?

In real life, stereotyping groups of people is reductive by definition and usually harmful by default. In genre settings, however, stereotypes are a time-honored way to help an audience get a quick handle on a type of character: dwarves are gruff and suspicious; elves are haughty and distant. Prominent characters often have to struggle against type: Vulcans don’t show emotion, but Spock isn’t a typical Vulcan; hobbits love comfort and home, but Bilbo and Frodo have adventure thrust upon them.

Below is a table of one hundred stereotypes. If you like, you can take these traits at face value. Perhaps in your game, dwarves aren’t gruff and suspicious they are [rolls d100 twice] hard of hearing and promiscuous! Players will learn not to assume that ogres are stupid, dragons cunning, and vampires sensualists just because they have been before. Using it at face value can also give some texture to new races and species for which the players have no preconceived notions.

You can try and make them work more like stereotypes in the real world: “everybody knows that women of the Tiger Clan have bad breath (but I wouldn’t say that with them around)!”

Lastly, most of these are bad stereotypes, but it’s relatively easy to roll and then quickly come up with an opposite for a good stereotype. More complex is to try and see this from the stereotyped group’s point of view: “Those elves will tell you that we smell like fish, but really we smell like a clean ocean breeze.”

I hope all you fat, bearded, smelly nerds have fun with this!

When I was studying acting in college, I remember standing outside a rehearsal room listening to the guy who was playing Caliban in an upcoming production of The Tempest. He was rehearsing on his own, just inhabiting the character, improvising, playing. That was something I wasn’t really able to bring myself to do, to try. And seeing, hearing that other student playing may have been my first solid understanding that I’d never be a actor.

I am also a lapsed member of the Church of Getting Things Done. I still believe in David Allen’s revelation, I just don’t always practice it.

This morning, I had a thought that GTD might help with overcoming some creative obstacles. The foundational insight of GTD is that you must separate collecting from processing from doing from reviewing. So collecting is a process of emptying your head, getting all the ideas or worries or plans out of your mind where they either roll around and obsess you or are apt to be forgotten, and putting them instead somewhere you can keep them: on paper, in a digital file, etc. Processing is a method for going through all those thoughts quickly to decide what, if anything, needs to be done about them. Doing is putting in the effort to actually do the work necessary. And reviewing lets you see how you are doing overall and provides space for evaluating your work.

I am pretty good at doing all that when I sit at my desk to do my job–if I don’t always do it, I know that the system is there to fall back on when things feel out of hand. But I hadn’t really thought of creative work in the same way.

So often when there’s something I want to do or some kind of creative inspiration strikes me, I forget the lesson of GTD. As the ideas come to me, I don’t get them out of my head onto paper. I don’t stop myself from trying to process the ideas and judge which are the best and which are not worth pursuing. I start trying to do the work inside my head, even though that’s not where the work happens–it has to be externally expressed to be work. And I end up in a constant loop of review, trying to evaluate a project that hasn’t even begun.

So. First step, this is what all those notebooks and sketchbooks I keep are for. Let’s use them.

Louise posted a thread on FriendFeed about “comfort books” or books that one reads over and over again for a sense of well-being (or something like that). I thought I didn’t really have such a book and was about to post a comment saying so, but then I remembered Madame Bovary.

I first read Madame Bovary in college, but I think not for a college course. Paul Edwards had adapted “The Legend of St. Julian the Hospitalier” and “A Simple Life” for the stage, and I had a part in the ensemble. I hadn’t read Flaubert before and I was more intrigued by the thought of working with Paul than I was excited about the source material. But it’s hard to work with literature night after night and not come to a deeper appreciation for it, and that’s what happened with me and Flaubert.

I’m pretty sure I read Madame Bovary as part of that experience. I then may have re-read it the next year or later that same academic year when I took a class with Paul that dealt with performing Madame Bovary. We read the novel, we read Paul et Virginie, we watched an opera, the opera that Emma and Leon go to see together before screwing in the back of the cab. ( I just checked, and I remember incorrectly–the opera is where she meets Leon for the second time, and the bouncing cab ride necessarily comes later. I still can’t recall the name of the opera.) It was in this class where I read Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Perpetual Orgy, a book that I think was on the recommended reading list, or perhaps we read a photocopied chapter.

I found the novel fascinating and Vargas Llosa’s response to the book struck a chord with me. He wrote of how, during a very dark time in his life when he thought he might kill himself, he returned to Madame Bovary again and again, especially to Emma’s suicide scene. He felt that Emma was killing herself so that he might live. And I think (and I think I thought) that this is a perfect, moving response to this novel. Emma reads her romance novels and finds that her life will never compare to her fantasies of how life and love should be, and her dissatisfaction leads to everything–her affairs, her debt, her suicide. Vargas Llosa reads Madame Bovary and finds that his sadness and self-hatred are expressed so exquisitely, so strangely in the book that he need not kill himself.

The people in Madame Bovary are all fools and charlatans, leaving a wake of destruction that they seem to be unaware of. (I was thinking today that the Cohen Brothers should adapt the novel into a film set in present-day Minnesota or something.) It is easy to feel superior to them or contemptuous of them. But I think that one of the keys to enjoying the novel is Flaubert’s statement, “Madme Bovary c’est moi.” The book forces me to perform the trick of seeing Emma for the fool that she is while also seeing myself fully in the fool. Is this something like what Freaks and Geeks does but without the comforting haze of nostalgia? Yes, I am that foolish, yes I am that vain, yes I am that tacky, yes I am that egotistical, that conniving, that self-deceiving.

The writing knocks me out every time I read the book too, though of course I’m not capable of reading the French. Regardless, the translations seem to all have the same sense of words used economically, with understatement. Flaubert writes with a scalpel, not a cutlass (or a blunderbuss like David Foster Wallace).

How, though, could this be comfort reading (apart from the guard against suicide that Vargas Llosa mentions)? I think that comfort reading might often involve those passages and details that are mostly remembered and then appear in the novel and don’t disappoint, but just sink in deeper as right, as inevitable, as perfect. Even in just the first few chapters I read today there are so many moments like this. Charles’ hat and his pathetic cry of “Charbovari!” The first Mrs. Bovary’s bony shoulders and cold feet, and her death: “She was dead! How surprising!” Emma licking the drop of liquor from the bottom of the glass. The convent’s relief at Emma’s departure. Emma reflecting on her desire for a honeymoon in a more exotic location: “It seemed to her that certain places on earth must produce happiness, like a plant native to that soil which grows poorly anywhere else. Why could she not be leaning over the balcony of some Swiss chalet, or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in the Highlands, with a husband wearing a long-skirted coat of black velvet, soft boots, a pointed hat, and ruffles at the wrist!”

Vladimir Nabokov’s illustration of Charles’ hat.

I find it a joy to read at the level of the sentence. At the level of the plot and the characters, I find it something that makes me very satisfied in the welling up of contradictory feelings and thoughts. They are all vain fools who make terrible decisions and show little understanding of themselves. And yet, if Flaubert were to write of my life and my blindnesses and my petty egotism, would it not sound the same? That’s not to say that I think this is the point of the novel, but it’s one of the ways that it gives me an apparently endless supply of happiness.

Interesting and perceptive analysis of the design of my current favorite game, World of Goo. This video actually gives away a lot of level designs and gameplay–in some ways I wish I hadn’t watched it, since it showed several levels in detail that I haven’t seen yet. Maximize the video for best results. (Via Waxy.)

I saw this idea reflected today in the post Overheard Comments from United Airlines Employees on Telstar Logistics. Here is the quote:

We’ve flown most of these airlines at least once during the last year or so, and the experiences are hard to differentiate: All were dismal. The aircraft are old, crowded, and uncomfortable, but most of all, we’ve grown weary of listening to airline cabin crew kvetching about their work schedules and grievances with senior management. This is what it must’ve been like to fly Aeroflot Soviet Airlines back in the Brezhnev Era.

The airline industry is going down the tubes in terms of even pretending it is in some kind of customer service business. As higher fuel prices affect other areas of the economy, we’ll see the dirty, poorly maintained workplace everywhere. As grocery stores (for example) can’t afford to compete on price or service and become unable to import huge varieties of fresh food from all over, we’ll see those conditions there, too, and I assume it will cascade to other areas of public and private life.

Yeah. You gotta love that.