Gaming and scripting and scripting

Last night’s Games Club was back at Columbia, yay! I showed up in time to join in The Testimony of Jacob Hollow, a horror-themed card game by a company that obviously doesn’t care whether people will be able to remember the name of their games. (I googled for “game testimony hollow”, the latter two words being all I could remember.) It was amusing, but I don’t think I’ll be inclined to play it again. It’s one of the family of Magic-inspired games where there’s a loose structure, and the cards all represent narrative objects — places, characters, actions, etc. — which interact in various ways. Such games generally have a large number of cards that let players screw each other over, which means that game play tends to go on until people get sick of playing.

I also played a bunch of games of Falling, one of which I even one (for the first time).

Did a pretty good sketch of Melorne the other day, with new horns, based on those of a bighorn sheep:



I’m still fiddling with both her facial features and the rest of her design, and I’ve been coming up with ideas for a bunch more supporting characters. Some plot stuff, too.

Today I tried my hand at scripting. It’s tough. I’ve got snippets of dialog, but I’m not so good at building conversations around them. I spent a chunk of the day banging on a Perl script to automatically generate directories to put scripts and notes into in a structured way. ’Cause that kind of scripting comes easier.

BFL, week 8, day 1: upper-body

Two 10s today!

(  Upper-body workout numbers  )

Art and politics

( Sketches )

Yet more hanging out at Ground; it’s almost like having a social life. Today I walked in on a political discussion and was immediately asked who my favorite communist was. I gave Trotsky, not having the presence of mind to answer with Ken MacLeod or Steven Brust.

I sketched a couple of people while I was there (the cute woman on the left with glasses was playing Scrabble, the guy on the right is James, my chess partner from the other day), but my main reason for being there was to brainstorm ideas for the webcomic somewhere I wouldn’t be distracted by the temptation of a handy net connection. I picked up three cheap notebooks for a buck at a nearby 99¢ store, and, well, I didn’t actually get to the point of scripting out anything, but I got a few more ideas. I seem to be asymptotically approaching the point of writing an actual script. Maybe I can get there by rounding.

James, who’s in highschool, was complaining about his excessively conservative social studies textbook. It assigned the fault for the Seattle WTO riots to anarchist protesters, which didn’t strike me so much as conservative bias as a bias towards the mainstream view that police can be trusted not to start riots. (I suppose that’s conservative in the traditional meaning of the word, but not in its modern political meaning.) But when he got to the point where the book criticized liberals as inconsistent for advocating regulation by the state, but not advocating state regulation of abortion, well, that pretty much tore it.

( Political rant )

Worst Bush ever

I’m pretty damn sure that Ted Rall’s depiction of George W. Bush is the single most inept job of caricature in the history of professional cartooning. Seriously, does that look anything like Dubya? Is Rall’s even trying? It looks like Bush is a werewolf or something. And the medal-bedecked uniform is a mistake. Assuming Rall’s putting any thought into it at all, he’s probably trying to portray Bush as either a banana-republic-style military dictator, or just poking fun at the way Bush associates himself with the military, but what he winds up doing is reinforcing that association, which is a tactical mistake.

Gary Trudeau made a much better choice with his depiction. By choosing a Roman centurion’s helmet Trudeau breaks associations with the modern military. The flag he shows Bush using as a cape also works along these lines — it's a misuse of the flag, an abuse of a patriotic symbol rather than real patriotism.