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Posts Tagged ‘obsession’
Wednesday, December 15th, 2010
Yes, it’s two game posts in a row. My knitting isn’t going well, so you all have to suffer the consequences. Besides, I realized when I mentioned Shock last week, that many people may not have heard of it (or indeed most, as like most Indie RPGs it has far too small an audience compared to the big dogs). This is my attempt to hopefully let even one more person know this exceptional game is out there.
Superlatives actually fail. I say things like exceptional or best or incredible far too often around here, and that weakens their sting. If I ever meant the words before, I mean them here – Shock: Social Science Fiction is the hands-down best SF rpg ever written. The reason why is simple – most SF games concentrate on the bang-zoom factor, the spaceships and laser guns and everything else. Shock turns that on its head by concentrating on the social issues the technology brings. Players choose a single “Shock” – the big SF thing that makes the world most different from now – and then each proposes an issue (often ripped from the headlines or science section of the paper) to be one of the issues explored in the game.
For example, if Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner were a Shock game, the Shock would likely be “Near-/Super- Human Replicants” while the issues might be “Nature of Humanity,” “Slavery” and “Fallibility/malleability of memory”.
Each player creates three characters , their primary character, and two minor characters (the ally of one player and the antagonist of another). Further, each of the primary characters is tied to a specific issue (so Roy Batty might be tied to “Nature of Humanity” or “Slavery” for example) guaranteeing that the issues get explored in that character’s scenes.
If it sounds like heady stuff, it is. I’ve never played a happy game of Shock, but I have also never played a game of Shock that wasn’t thought provoking and insightful. It plays like the greatest SF stories read, filled with fallible characters stumbling towards their own personal redemptions, against a backdrop that reflects their struggles rather than feeling divorced from it. If you are interested in a different RPG experience than the mainstream, I cannot recommend it enough.
PS – in pulling up the link for this, I learned that Shock: Human Contact has passed its Kickstarter goal and will be out in February. Suffice to say, I’ve already got mine ordered.
Tags: Best RPG Ever, gaming, Indie Press, obsession, Social SF
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Wednesday, December 1st, 2010
In the wake of the upheavals the last month has given me, I would have expected more progress being made on my knitting, rather than less. Unfortunately, no such progress was made. Instead I have watched a lot of television (mostly old movies on Turner Classics and Ice Hockey) and did precious little stitching.
As a result, the Clapotis still sits on my needles, though it is at least in its final stages. Once completed, I’ll be certain to post a picture of it. It’s begun moving forward now, as things slowly fall back onto their prescribed tracks, and I am chugging along towards completion (albeit later than I had ever intended.
I haven’t let my lack of progress stop me from thinking about what I’ll be working on next, however. Likely, there will be a pair of socks in my future, as I can work on those without a lot of counting or brainpower on my part. Though I admit, for a year I’ve had a lovely bit of yarn that would be just perfect for the Venus de Merino. Everyone needs a little knit Goddess figure to keep the hearth happy and safe. With luck, the dark part of the year will see faster work for the old hands.
Tags: Archaeology, Knitter Pride, knitting, obsession
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Friday, September 3rd, 2010
Welcome to another installment of the weekly link-dump known as Potpourri. It’s all comics and super-villainy this week, which is never a bad thing.
Tags: Lex Can't Get a Break, obsession, Potpourri, Supervillains, When I am a Billionaire
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Monday, August 23rd, 2010
Heather Massey posted an interesting (by which I mean thought-provoking) article on The Galaxy Express the other day. Like most articles, it got me thinking about my approach and my little corner of the universe. The line that really got my juices rolling (and admittedly made me want to respond) was Lizzie Newell’s quote decrying the lack of SF in SFR today:
“It has romance books set in space but very few science fiction books containing romance. There is too much promotion of what I consider low quality books. These are low quality from a science fiction perspective.”
At first, I felt a little guilty. After all, I write Space Opera romance. I am part of the problem, as it were. I’ve got a background in the sciences, and certainly that informs many of the decisions I make when world-building, but I also grew up on Star Wars, Farscape and Firefly. These are shows that are science-fiction only by dint of being set in space. Lightsabers and giant, living starships are cool, but we don’t like to think too much about the practicality of them. Much as I love Hearts and Minds, I have to admit that when I wrote it I would occasionally handwave the science in favor of making a more exciting swashbuckler of a romance.
And that’s when it hit me – What is the story really about?
Am I writing a story about a hardened mercenary and her beta-to-the-core empathic boyfriend? Or am I writing a story about the trappings of science fiction? For me, the core of a good SFR story should be the romance. There needs to be emotional development between the characters, and I as reader need to believe that they can connect with each other and find a happily ever after somewhere. As much as I love science fiction, it’s not the part I’m as concerned about. I would not have liked Farscape as much, bluntly, had it not been for the romance between John Crichton and Aeryn Sun.
Do I still think that the Skiffy elements need to be thought about when writing an SFR? Absolutely. I would never argue otherwise. But I also think that good world-building should show through the characters rather than get in the way of them. I tried to think about the science in Hearts and Minds – it’s one of the reasons that, despite more lethal weapons being available, most shipboard firefights use weapons that fire ceramic flechettes. Hull-penetrating weapons would be dangerous to both sides in a conflict. I never talk about it in the course of the story, but it’s there.
I think this holds true of Science Fiction in general, but it holds doubly so for good SFR – the world in which the characters live should be the background, and their relationship to it and to each other should be the focus of the story. If not, you will lose the reader every time.
Tags: Galaxy Express, obsession, SF Romance, writing
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Wednesday, August 18th, 2010
With my apologies to Robert Burns, it’s time for another knitting post. Today I need to talk about my terrible addiction to that most notorious drug of sweater and sock knitters – the cable.
I love cables. They are fun to knit, they look really impressive when you’ve done a long chain of them, and most importantly, they aren’t half as tricky as the rest of the knitting world would have you believe. (Actually that last secret is true of knitting as a whole. I shall have to do a post on breaking the great secret of knitting – that’s it’s all easy – open for all of you.) It’s not even math, like some elements of knitting, it’s just counting. I don’t even do the counting in my head – I have a stitch counter on my iPhone that I can set to count for me. I color code my cables on the needle, then label a row on my counter for each cable. When I increment the whole project one row, each of the cables increments on their own counting system, so I always know where I am. Easy Peasy, Lemon Squeezy.
There’s a problem to loving cables, though. Once you realize how easy they are, the tendency is to start putting them on everything. Like a flame paint-job on a car, cables work best with a little restraint. A thin line down the side of a kilt stocking is okay. A twenty-stitch wide knotwork probably doesn’t belong on a footie-slipper. It’s the knitting equivalent of getting a sweet flame paint scheme on your ’82 Omni. You can do it, but even ironically it looks a little off.
Okay, back to trying to figure out how to put triangular knotwork on the earflaps of a hat.
Tags: I can stop cabling any time I want, Knitter Pride, knitting, my methods, obsession
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Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010
I knit. I am a knitter. I’ve read before that you shouldn’t define yourself by what you do, but rather by who you are. Even so, I’m comfortable announcing that I am “someone who knits.” This gives me certain things in common with other knitters: I lie – constantly – about my stash of yarn, to myself and everyone else. “It’s not that big.” “Sock yarn doesn’t count.” “I’m not as bad as (insert other knitter’s name, whose stash you feel is out of control).”
Of course, all those lies go the other direction as soon as you’re around someone who appreciates yarn. “16 ounces of first-shear baby alpaca and mohair goat, dyed and then handspun.” “I had to repurpose the master closet to hold it all.” “And that’s not counting sock yarn…” It is, in some respects, the knitter equivalent of dominance displays – the wool-pack has to know its own pecking order, and stash is as good a measure of “cred” as any.
In that respect, and taking the above into consideration, I’d like to think my stash is pretty middle-of-the-road. After all, it doesn’t require its own room, or a special cedar inset closet. But it’s also well past the “store it in a basket by the easy chair” phase as well. Not that I don’t have a basket of stash yarn out there, but that’s the showoff yarn – like the special guests china – there for other people to notice, but never to use.
I suppose the root of any collection of things is a desire to, as Hunter Thompson famously said, “Take it as far as you can.” For me, the stash has become a statement of places I’ve been and people whom I love. This handspun wool is from North Carolina, that hand-dyed was a gift from one of my first-readers. In theory, I assign hoped-for projects to my stash yarn, but strangely enough, when the time comes to start something new on the needles, I’m back in the store buying yarn for it specifically rather than raiding the stash.
Except for socks, of course. But then sock yarn doesn’t count as stash.
Tags: Knitter Pride, knitting, nerdPride, obsession, stash
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