Avram's journal

I noticed, rereading Samuel Delany’s Nova a couple of weeks ago, that Delany doesn’t spend as many words as most male writers do talking about how hawt his female characters are, but he does quite often point out when his male characters have broad fingers, bitten nails, or work-roughened hands. The reasons are obvious if you know anything about Delany.

Just today I realized: He does do some of the usual excited description about one of the women — Ruby Red, when describing her in the part of the book that focuses on Lorq Von Ray. Tyÿ, the other major female character, doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention, but she’s only in the parts of the book that focus on Mouse’s point of view.

If all of the male rough-hand descriptions occur in the Mouse sections, that could be saying something about Mouse’s sexuality.

Hey, indie role-playing game designers! I love many of your games, but there’s this one thing’s been driving me nuts, and I think you could maybe do something about it: When you’re coming up with a name for your game, could you consider that people interested in it are going to do Google searches, not just for the game’s home page, but for online discussions?

Take Vincent Baker as your model in this. When you google for Dogs in the Vineyard, Kill Puppies for Satan, or Mechaton, you get links pointing to pages about those games.

But what if you’ve been hearing about this awesome SF RPG called Diaspora? Not only do none of those links point to anything having to do with the game in question, but one of them is about an entirely different game! The same goes for Shock:.

Worse yet is a game I found mentioned today on an RPG forum — Project: Vanguard. Without the colon, this was the name of a US Naval Research Labs project from the 1950s, with the goal of launching a satellite. Not only does a simple Google search not turn up anything about the game, but “vanguard” is a common enough term in RPG names and discussions that even putting the name in quotes and adding “rpg”, while it does turn up good links, also turns up a lot of false positives.

So, yeah, big Amazon-Macmillan dustup. Story in The NY Times. Various perspectives:

• Patrick on Making Light
• John Scalzi
• Cory Doctorow
• Nick Mamatas
• Jim Henley, and more
• Roz Kaveney

I’m not planning on boycotting Amazon, or emptying out my wishlist, or anything dramatic like that. I’m also not planning on boycotting Macmillan, or snubbing my friends at Tor.

A few thoughts:

• As Henley points out, this dispute is costing both companies money, which means it probably won’t last long.
• As Doctorow points out, this is just the sort of thing you’d expect to happen when a major book retailer is also heavily invested in an ebook-reading platform.
• As Mamatas points out, book publishers are in this for the money too.
• As Kaveney points out, Macmillan isn’t above pushing people around when they can get away with it and it profits them.

The point that I’m not sure anyone’s made explicitly: The other big publishers don’t seem to have any trouble with Amazon’s ebook pricing. And I know — from having heard grumbling about it — that Macmillan was somewhat slow about embracing the idea of ebook publishing. Henley’s “tough love” theory seems plausible to me.

I have been casting my eyes longingly over in this direction, while thinking about how much more comfortable my apartment would be with fewer dead-tree books around.

Our apartment building has a recurrent problem with leaks. As one of my neighbors joked, leaks are how we meet each other.

Tonight we discovered a leak in our bedroom, and I went upstairs to tell the guy above us about it. Turned out his bedroom ceiling was leaking, too, so we both went up another level to some neighbor I hadn’t met before. I knocked on the door, and then again, louder. Between the knocks I could hear someone talking from inside: “If you roll a seven, you get to decide who the robber attacks.” So when the door opened I introduced myself with “Sorry to interrupt your Settlers of Catan game, but…”.

I heard about King-Con just a few days ago, through Becky Cloonan’s blog. A comics convention within walking distance of my apartment, how could I not go?

It was a small con, even smaller (I think) than the first MoCCA Art Festival, but the vendors managed to fill up the lower level of the Brooklyn Lyceum. The Act-I-Vate crew had a table, of course, since a lot of them have studio space in the area. I held back from buying a lot of stuff, since money’s tight, and I’ve still got books from MoCCA 2008 that I haven’t gotten around to reading. I limited myself to a (half-price!) copy of Joel Priddy’s new book, The Gift of the Magi.

One nice feature of the dealer space was a row of benches along one wall, which gave me a place to sit down, pull out my sketchbook, and do these:

That guy in the lower right? Neal Adams.

Google Books has confirmed for me something I recall noticing — that Orson Scott Card’s 1995 novel Alvin Journeyman takes place in a world populated by owls:

• Page 35: Becca hooted.
• Page 38: The boy hooted.
• Page 57: Alvin hooted derisively.
• Page 138: […] but Horace hooted […] It was Vilante’s turn to hoot with laughter.
• Page 192: The lanky one hooted and several others chuckled.
• Page 195: Measure hooted with laughter.
• Page 199: Marty Laws, the county attorney, hooted at the joke.
• Page 210 Alvin hooted.
• Page 215 “Only so’s you can lick it out after!” hooted Mike Fink.
• Page 218: He hooted twice, high, as if he were some kind of steam whistle, and Holly hooted back and laughed.
• Page 316: The bailiff rummaged through the handbag, then suddenly hooted and jumped back.
• Page 360: Measure hooted once — after the door was closed.
• Page 366: He looked at Margaret with all the meaning he could put in his face, and everybody hooted and clapped.

There are also a couple of people not giving hoots, on pages 73 and 337.

This was the book that put me off Card’s writing permanently. I’m not the only one; this was also the first Alvin Maker book not to get a Hugo nomination (and it’s not as if the competition was particularly strong that year), and none have gotten one since. In fact, as far as I can tell by skimming through Locus’s records with bleary eyes at 2 AM, Card’s last Hugo nomination in any category was in in 1992, around the same time that news of his anti-gay bigotry was starting to spread through the SF fan community (I first saw photocopies of the linked essay handed around as photocopies at the 1991 Worldcon in Chicago).

I have successfully raised my computer from the dead.

Seems it was just the hard drive. I swapped out the old, dead 100 GB drive for the 320 GB drive I had sitting around. There were a lot of screws involved, and I had to zip out to the hardware store at one point to get a better #00 Phillips-head screwdriver than the one I was using, but aside from that things went pretty well. Oh, and Migration Assistant bogged down while porting my Applications folder across, so I had to finish that up by hand.

So I’m back, with 200+ GB of free hard drive space that I don’t know what to do with.

Rope in Fate

Watching the latter part of Hitchock’s Rope, it seems to me that you could run that whole long psychological and investigative cat-and-mouse game in Fate, with most of the movie consisting of Investigation, Empathy, and Deceit rolls, trying to assess and declare aspects, leading up to a big Will conflict at the end.

Also, that scene at the end where Jimmy Stewart’s character summons the cops by firing a gun out the window? Hope there wasn’t anyone standing where the bullets came down.

An encumbrance mechanic

An idea for D&D-like games: Give each player an (empty) Altoids tin, or some other small container. This is a holder for the items their character is carrying. For small items (scrolls, flasks of potion, daggers) use scraps of paper or business card. For larger items, use pieces of wood or Lego or other substantial items. You’ve got to write the names of the items they represent on these objects, so if you don’t want to write on your Lego blocks, use something else.

If you’ve got several different sizes of small box, give the larger ones to the players with stronger characters. If all you’ve got is the same size box, give the weaker players null items (Lego blocks with nothing written on them) to represent a smaller carrying capacity.

I just played a few games of Dominion on BrettspielWelt, and saw some cards I hadn’t seen before:

Upgrade

+1 Card, +1 Action. Trash one card from your hand to gain a card costing exactly one more. Cost 5.

Nobles

Either +2 Actions or +3 Cards, your choice. Also, worth 2 Victory Points at game end. 6 cost. (The interface for this one on BSW is a bit weird. You have to click on the card image in the play area of the window.)

From this, I assume the expansion set is out, or close to it. BoardgameGeek says the new set is called Dominion: Intrigue, and it can be played as a stand-alone, without the original. It’s got a full set of Treasure and Victory cards, 25 new kinds of Kingdom cards, and rules for playing with up to eight players.

I see on the BoardgameGeek forms that there were copies at Origins, so I expect mnemex has already picked one up. There’s some discussion of the new cards here, and here are descriptions of 11 of the cards, but I don’t see a comprehensive list with full descriptions.