Frobozz's Journal

I just got back from the amazing Bay-Area role playing convention Big Bad Con this weekend. While I was there, I was reminded of how much I love learning and exploring new narrative games and how much I am just in this hobby for crafting stories between people who love storytelling. This coincided with me lamenting that I wasn't doing much non-fiction writing any more and wishing for some kind of themed writing project that I could use to get myself back into the practice of setting down a few brief thoughts about a topic important to me.

In the coming days I plan to start reading independent pen and paper narrative RPGs that I have in my collection and thinking through how they speak to me. I don't want to review anything; I want this to be a project where I engage with the material, explore the structure of the rules, feel how these games make me feel excited and give some thoughts on my experience with reading it. If I'm really very lucky, I might even be able to get to play it with someone, though that can be hard. In most cases I'll just need to be happy with reading the games.

What constitutes an indie game is going to be very loosely defined; essentially an indie game is a game that feels independent. It will be a very real case of 'I'll know it when I see it'.

The definition of narrative game will be even looser, if such a thing is possible. You could justify almost anything as a narrative game as long as it's attempting to tell a story. But for the most part, it will refer to any game where crafting the fiction takes priority over rules and uncertain outcomes.

I hope someone, somewhere on the net will find these thoughts interesting.

If you're in the mood for some beautiful literature wearing the trappings of science fiction, may I direct your attention to Amal El-Mohtar's book This Is How You Lose The Time War.

On the surface of it, this is a book about time travel. But at its core it isn't. It's a book about love as a motivating, driving force that can push past the impossible. It's a book about language as a clever, ever-winding snake that slithers from meaning to meaning, making them more real as it passes. And it's a book about how words don't just lend meaning to the concepts for which they're synecdotes but retain some of that weight of meaning through association.

It's a book about two bitter enemies, Red and Blue, on different sides of a fierce war in the cosmos with the stakes being the shape of the future to come. And it's a book about two people coming to love one another by the passing imprint the other leaves on their lives.

It's a glorious tale and the complexities of time travel are shunted to the side because they're not needed for this story. But the narration and the prose... now those weave and wind and become very tangled in metaphor in small, subtle, joy-filled ways that you might miss if you're not keeping an eye out for hidden beauty while you read.

I'm a little disappointed with my reading tally for 2016; so much happened during last year that I didn't get as many chances to read as I'd have liked. Here's the (probably incomplete) list of what I read last year, culled mostly from order histories.

Magic and Mistletoe
The Dark Forest
Heartless
Feedback (Newsflesh)
Project Elfhome
Plastic Smile
Once Broken Faith
Stars Above
Full of Briars
Velveteen vs the Seasons
Full Fathom Five (Craft series)
Fool's Errand (Tawny Man)
Golden Fool (Tawny Man)
Fool's Fate (Tawny Man)
Words Like Coins
The Willful Princess and the Piebald Prince
Ansible season two
Chaos Choreography
Mistborn: Secret History
Nemesis Game
The Bands of Mourning
The Language of Power
The Last Steersman
Cibola Burn
The Magicians of Night
Shadows of Self
Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus
A Closed and Common Orbit
Were-
I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This
Real Food Fake Food
The Basoon King
Myths, Lies and the Half-Truths of Language Usage
Gumption
Troublemaker
The Other Side of History: Daily Life in the Ancient World
Scientology: Abuse at the Top
The War of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors
Born a Crime
The Church of Fear
Forensic history: Crimes, Frauds and Scandals
1066: The Year That Changed Everything
You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost)
One More Thing
Hell's Angel
Days of Rage: America's Radical Underground
Trust Me, I'm Lying
Neil Patrick Harris: Choose Your Own Autobiography
Gnosticism: From Nag Hammadi to the Gospel of Judas
Yes Please
The Barbarian Empires of the Stepps

Long day today; but it was for a good cause. Last night was Rifftrax: Timechasers, which was amazing and takes place in Vermont, so there's that. After that we decided to double down and went to see Civil War.

Absolutely a blast of a night. I don't think I could do this again for at least a year. ;->

Conspiracy theories are one of those things that pop up like weeds every day in so many different ways and its hard to avoid their influence. Just about everyone has held one or two of the smaller conspiracy theories in their lives; and a large number of perfectly rational people still believe in things that don't make much sense in the light of day.

This is largely due to the fact that we're wired from birth to look for patterns and find them wherever possible. We pattern seek because way back when, the reward for matching a pattern (say a tiger hidden in the woods) was surviving another day. False positives had little to no consequence; if you run away from danger that isn't there, you're still alive unless you run into the maw of a waiting shark or something.

It can be really hard to talk to someone about their deeper held conspiracy theories. In part, not only do we want to have matched a pattern and seen something hidden; we also want to be part of the few who have Seen the Truth and understood that which separates us from the 'sheeple' who mill contentedly around us. This kind of thinking often self-reinforces, because many theories hold that there's a conspiracy of silence going on which prevents the truth from getting out and it's all up to *us* to make sure that these dark figures don't get away with what they have planned.

Fortunately, a science writer (and totally not a lizard person) has done some math centred around how hard it would be for a conspiracy of silence to exist and remain silent. Since, as he points out in this article, not everyone who believes in conspiracy theory is unreasonable, this might be a good way to engage with people who haven't fallen too far down the rabbit hole and are willing to take a step back and use a neutral tool like mathematics to analyze their beliefs.

This is something that I've believed in for a long time: vast conspiracies fail the smell test because the amount of work required to keep them secret exceeds how much work any group of people could reasonably do. The more people in your vast network of shadowy figures, the more people there are who might talk about it and let things slip. Thinking that someone won't have an attack of conscience or just a moment of loose lips is to fundamentally misunderstand human nature. In movies and television shows we patch this problem by having large panopticons of surveillance that alert stone-hearted assassins and cleaners to possible breaches of confidentiality; but even those would-be counter-measures involve people who are just as subject to the laws of human nature as anyone else. So I'm very glad that someone who actually groks math has sat down and crunched the numbers for us.

And lastly, remember that some conspiracies do exist. They just exist much closer to the surface than we are led to believe by popular media and our own imaginations. Conspiracies leak information proportional to the number of people in them and there's not a darned thing even the most clever plotter can do to completely eliminate that.

Yesterday, I was listening to Nick Offerman discuss Wendell Berry (a topic upon which Nick has much good to say and has a very compelling way of talking about it); one of the things he discussed was Berry's attitude towards work. The part that struck me was his thoughts on 'pretty work'; in the sense of someone looking at what you've done and saying 'that's very pretty work'.

That's part of what I like about being in the field I'm in. When things are at their best is when I'm able to devote myself to making things not just function but function well. There's a satisfaction to writing code in a way that will prevent the need for a future refactoring... to get it right the first time, structurally. There will always be days when I have to go with whatever's 'good enough'; but when I get to put polish on my work, I get a sense of satisfaction out of what I've done and I can feel very proud of that day's work.

It made me realise that I'm lucky to be in a job that allows me to take pride in what I do and affords me the chance to put a craftperson's care into the end result. I'm not very good with my hands; I've never had a talent for woodworking or painting or anything else like that... but I can still experience that satisfaction day to day. I should really never complain about my job again.

I mean I will. Let's be honest. But I shouldn't.

Finished another audio course on my way to/from work: Jewish Intellectual History: 16th to 20th century, taught by Professor David Ruderman.

Very interesting course; a good survey of the various movements of Jewish thought, both orthodox and secular. Had a problem with the professor that's probably just peculiar to me: I had to focus hard, or my mind would drift a little while he was talking. I've had this with other professors in the past, so I know it's not necessarily that he's boring.

I didn't realise that a *lot* of the action in this field took place in Germany over the course of quite a few years. I also got insight into some really thought-provoking ways to think about God.

I've just finished a couple more audiobooks as part of my daily commute/exercise/walk places routine. Both are ones that I'd feel safe in recommending.

The first was 1066: The Year that Changed Everything, a lecture series by the Great Courses (taught by Professor Jennifer Paxton). This was a laser-focused six-lecture series about the historical events leading up to the Norman conquest. The professor has a real love of this material and it comes out in the course of her lectures; and that's probably in no small part because the material itself is *fascinating*.

Starz? Showtime? HBO? If you're reading this, you totally need to make your next anachronistic historical drama series out of the Norman conquest. There are so many great figures and situations that you could adapt to the small screen! Plus, you won't have to go searching far for strong female characters... they're all over the place during this time period! Remember who turned you onto this money-maker, guys. Now get to it. I want to start watching this by October 14th.

The second audiobook that I listened through was Trust Me, I'm Lying by Ryan Holiday. This book essential reading material, I think, for absolutely everyone who follows the big blog networks out on that there internet. This book is partially a confession and partially a warning about how easily online news sources can be manipulated into accepting whatever narrative you wish to insert into them. Holiday was an online media manipulator for many years and goes through the many ways in which he pulled the wool over the public's eyes through the use of manufactured controversy; trading up the chain from small blogging outfits to major news networks; and feeding the insatiable maw that is the constant fight for clickthrough traffic.

The book paints a fairly dismal picture of online journalism; and the really scary thing is that it doesn't seem particularly far off the mark. Blogs make money from page views of their sponsors' ads, whether those ads are actually seen or not. This results in the need to churn out attention grabbing, seemingly important and sensational news stories and 'exclusives' to keep eyes on their stories and thus money coming in from advertisers. The responsibility for this constant churn is passed down to the bloggers who work for these outfits, encouraging them to produce news (or 'news') as often and as rapidly as possible.

Because of this need for speed, bloggers have largely embraced what's referred to as 'beta journalism', 'iterative journalism' and also 'not journalism'. The idea behind 'beta journalism' is that you put out a story the moment you hear a rumour or catch the faintest whiff that something newsworthy might exist. Then you iteratively update the story as new information comes in. In theory, this should result in an end product that's just as polished as a major news outlet's story. In practice, this means that viewers will read the story once, accept its premise and then never see the updates, because the human mind is designed to believe first and analyze after (if at all). This practice also leads to dispensing with such frills of journalism as 'verifying sources' or 'getting comments from the subject of the stories' or 'being right'.

It's fascinating that Holiday is able to trace a direct link between the arc of online news and the arc of the US printed news' historical trajectory which began with party papers, proceeded to yellow journalism and finally found some degree of respectibility and trustworthiness through the subscription news model. Blogs are currently in the yellow journalism phase of having underpaid newsies yelling their headlines as loud as possible to drown out the rest; though there is no real evidence that there's going to be any sort of transition from this phase to a subscription model, in which newspapers court returning readers through trustworthiness and are freed of the need to daily out-compete other papers by having perpetual subscribers.

And just like yellow journalism papers, blogging networks are more than happy to manufacture news when it doesn't just fall into their laps. Steve Jobs, for instance, was declared dead at least three times by blogs in the five years before his actual death. A political figure was drummed out of office because an out of context clip of one of her speeches (which was about how *not* to be racist) was edited to make it seem like she was giving a hate speech. ACORN... well, you know about the tragedy behind ACORN. Planned Parenthood... well, you're angry as hell about what's happening to Planned Parenthood. These blogging networks are passing conjecture and intrigue off as news and then doing nothing to clear up their mistakes when the truth comes out. If this doesn't sound like journalism to you... well, it doesn't to me either.

This book is highly recommended if you feel like completely ruining your daily blog check; and I think it's worth ruining your daily blog check. If nothing else, it will help you (and me, since I have not been innocent of being taken in by blog controversies, over and over and over either) think more critically about the stories you read and what you accept as news and what you instead accept as innuendo.

Two excellent audios. And only one of them made me terribly depressed about the world. Hurrah!

The other night, I set up a Chromecast audio and an old speaker set in my room. I flipped through my collection to see what I wanted to play to inaugurate the setup and came across The Best of Simon and Garfunkel (which Google Play had offered as one of its many, many free album offers). Feeling a little nostalgic, I hit play.

It really took me back. On the day that I went off to university for the first time, this album was playing in the tape deck of the family van. I'd made a copy of it the day before for whatever reason. Because I'd listened to the album over the course of the three hour drive, the songs became truly embedded in my mind.

Over the course of the next four months, I would return again and again to my copy of that album. The brooding, philosophical stylings of the artists put me in the perfect state of mind for starting a new life, filled with new experiences and learning how to be myself all over again. It reminded me strongly of the car trip up and helped to stave off homesickness because of that strong aural connection. It became the soundtrack of at least my first semester of university, if not the first year.

I haven't listened to that album since I made the move from tape to CD, lo so many years ago. Until the other night, when memory crashed over the shore of my mind and I was taken back to when I was a much younger, much different person. It reminded me of some of the best, most wonderful and terrifying and exciting times of my life.

So thank you, S&G, for having been there with me. And thank you to my parents, for playing that album en route to my new adventure.

One of the (few) nice things about having a commute to work that doesn't involve a bicycle is that I'm getting to listen to my audiobooks in bigger chunks. I've been able to go through a couple of very interesting books in the last few weeks (adjusted for vacation).

The first was Furiously Happy, by Jenny Lawson. Jenny is a person who has led a life in which she's had to deal with a panoply of mental health issues like anxiety, depression, the urge to pull out her own hair, etc. She has taken the incidents of her life and rather than hide them, put them together in an amazingly funny and often touching series of anecdotes, which in turn help other people who have some of these issues know that they're not alone. This is the furthest thing possible from a 'tell all' book... this is a comedian mining her personal pain to deliver a series of amazing punchlines. I also highly recommend her first book, Let's Pretend This Never Happened; I even more highly recommend reading both as audiobooks, as they're narrated by Jenny herself and thus contain an amazing amount of subtext and emotional resonance.

The second of my sojourn books was Scientology: Abuse at the Top, by Amy Scobee. Now I 'love' insider looks at Scientology (love is in scare quotes because the actual melange of emotions that I feel while reading or listening to these books is one of horror, sympathy and fascination... none of which is really anything close to love) because the religion does a whole lot of harm and I want to help stop it doing that harm, if only by passing on some of the human rights violations going on within the church. I've read several insider's looks at the religion over the years, but Scobee's was a very different take from what I was used to. She made it to the upper echelons of Scientology while relatively young.. and discovered that she had landed herself in a culture of fear, lies, random punishment and lost dignity (hey, just like my former place of work over the last couple of years!). Whereas you'd think that the top Scientologists would be the best off as they dined on the profits accrued by the faithful's donations, you'd be wrong. The only person at the top who enjoys any of the withered fruits of Scientology's labours is the Miscavage Patch Kid himself, David Miscavage. With a sociopath's flair, he's taken something wrong, dishonest and harmful and has made it bad! Its really hard not to wonder just how much more future damage the church is going to do under this man's leadership.

I really should get back to listening to some more Great Courses; but lately I've been in the mood for something with a bit more of a human touch.