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.]

In the two and a half years since his death, a D.F.W. cottage industry has sprung up… To speak of Wallace, now, is inevitably to take part in all of this — and to suffer the D.F.W.-esque worry that you are not just thinking about or enjoying D.F.W. but are actually performing your thinking and enjoyment for some kind of social gain.

- Sam Anderson, “David Foster Wallace’s Unfinished Novel – And Life” (Illustration by the wonderful Tom Gauld)

This is a sophisticated videogame. The urination mechanic itself is remarkable; the game implements a strange attractor that draws and repels the player’s cursor target in an increasingly haphazard fashion. The lack of control is palpable, a superb unit operation for the physical and psychic incapacity of  intoxication.… The Toilet Training Game enacts the moment in the player’s simulated evening when he doubts the wisdom of the lifestyle that has landed him there, stumbling against the doors of the toilet stall.

from page 221-22 of Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 2007.

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.

Hilarious, juvenile, borderline obscene. Loved it.

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It seems that this is a posthumous publication of a lightly-edited version of Baker’s notebooks or journals. I loved some of the little stories or character sketches, done with an economy of words. But the book avoids self-reflection, context, or explanation like the plague, so while it’s possible to get an idea of what Baker’s life was like as he went through bands, women, drugs, and countries, I don’t know any more about why Chet did the things he did or how he felt about it all than I did before I read the book.

Still, it’s enjoyable and short, and I read it, if not in one sitting, then in one brief evening.

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“We discovered that bumblebees can use a combination of colour and spatial relationships in deciding which colour of flower to forage from,” the students wrote in the paper’s abstract. “We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”

“Dr Neylon thinks it would be far better for all the artefacts of the research process, such as videos, samples, data and images, to be made freely available in an open-access format – hosted either by journal websites or alternatives such as university repositories, individual researchers’ websites or large commercial providers such as Amazon.”