The comments system stopped working last night or this morning, and I have no idea why. You can still post comments, but you can’t view them. I’ve checked my directories and everything looks fine, and I wasn’t working on the site last night. I’m baffled. But given that my host recently moved me to a different server without telling me–breaking my cgi paths–it’s entirely possible that they’ve done something else really stupid. I’m moving to a new host ASAP in any event, so I suspect the comments will stay down for the time being. I’m really sorry, as I quite enjoy them. But as I’m moving hosts anyway, I can’t take the time to troubleshoot this latest nonsense. Argh.
Author: John Scott Tynes
The new issue of Tablet is out and posted online as well. If you’re bored, you can read my film column and my article on filmmaker Jan Svankmajer. This being the smut issue, my column is an all-smut special. Svankmajer, the Czech surrealist, only offers a small amount of smut. Ah well.
If I’d had my act together in time I would have done a feature article on my friend Ron, who is an honest-to-gosh pornographer, but I didn’t think of it in time. Ron does what he calls “sex-positive” porn, which means he finds actual couples who want to have real sex–that is, the kind of sex they want to have, not what porn films usually offer–and tapes it. The problem with starting your own porn company, apparently, is that the big distributors are also the companies who make the porn. Which means they carry their own stuff, and aren’t much interested in whatever independent porn is out there. And Ron’s stuff isn’t really suited to the usual raincoat crowd. He’s had a struggle getting his tapes into stores, but he’s still at it after a couple years and a slew of releases. I haven’t watched any of his tapes, but you can check out his company’s website if you dare.
It probably goes without saying that Ron was one of the early employees of Wizards of the Coast.
After some reflection I’ve removed the descriptions of Rob’s hypothetical books from yesterday’s entry. They’re his projects, not mine, so I’ll let him spill the beans in his own way when he’s ready. I’m leaving my hypo-book up there because that damn thing dates to 1996 and I’ve never put pen to paper on it, so it’s sort of a stray dog I feed sometimes and not my flesh and blood.
My second developer’s diary for the Delta Green computer game project is online now at this web site:
Tonight I played through Serious Sam 2, a first-person shooter game, with three friends in cooperative mode. We blew through the game in about four hours and it was great. We actually played the first Serious Sam through twice in the space of a week because the damn thing is so good. These two games were made by a bunch of guys in Croatia. They’re in the style of stuff like Quake and Unreal. But they have two features that are amazing. First, the levels you’re playing in are huge. I mean huge like I’ve never seen any continuous space this big in a first-person computer game before huge. Entire valleys filled with temples and dungeons and on and on. Second, they throw dozens of enemies at you simultaneously. 30, 40 bad guys on screen at once: flying harpies, hopping frog-beasts, raging were-bulls the size of city buses, six-story battlemechs, and–no kidding–four-armed fire-breathing demons as big as Godzilla. As big as Godzilla. I’ve never seen characters this big in a computer game. If you run up to engage them close in, all you see are their toes. The scale of the game is just stunning. And on top of that, it’s beautiful to look at and it plays like a dream. These are minor classics that are just plain fun to play, very impressive stuff. The guys that make them are online at:
so check out their screenshots to see what I’m talking about.
I came home just before 2am and found that Glancy had rented Scorcese’s Casino, which I haven’t seen since it was in theatres. It’s better than I remembered, and sure enough it’s now 5:30am because we watched it straight through. There’s nothing like the sight of Don Rickles with a shotgun. Nothing.
Scotland, PA proved to be clever but not great. This is the comedic version of Macbeth set in white-trash Pennsylvania in 1975, and instead of a kingdom they’re fighting over a fast-food restaurant–first “Duncan’s” and then, of course, “McBeth’s”. Worth seeing if you’re a Shakespeare buff, since you’ll get all the gags I didn’t. I could tell they were gags, but I didn’t get them. The ones I did get were great. But the best part might have been the press kit, which was a booklet done in the style of Cliff’s Notes, complete with a character-relationship diagram, essay questions, a glossary (“A Mullet is . . .”) and more. Like I said, the whole thing had a lot of clever bits to it.
Today I did some more work on UA2 and got much of the layout done for Denied to the Enemy, which is a new Delta Green novel by the ever-coiffed Dennis Detwiller. It’s a cool story set during World War II, and Pagan plans to publish it sooner or later.
Somewhere around here I have an actual copy of Dennis and Greg’s new WWII superhero roleplaying game Godlike, which Dennis gave me a couple weeks ago. It’s going to stores next week I think. It came out well. I spent far too much of last spring and summer laying out that horse-choker of a book, but I’m pleased with the results. Dennis really busted his ass on the project and I hope it does well. The game’s web site is at:
Books & Stories
The following anecdote is not going to make much sense to non-gamers. Mea culpa. Other stuff for a general audience follows the anecdote. Special designer anecdote begins in five four three two one
BEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEP
At a convention in Dublin, Ireland, several years ago, one of the guests was a fine fellow named Andrew Rilstone. Andrew was the editor of the journal Interactive Fiction, published for a couple years by Hogshead, and a long-time proponent of envelope-pushing in gaming.
A bunch of us were staying in some rooms above a pub, said pub being the unofficial hangout space for the convention staff and guests. The rooms had bunk beds: serious cheap lodging. We closed the bar in the wee hours, having literally drunk all the Guinness the bar had in stock. (The owner was exasperated but also thrilled at the great cash-throwing mob who took over his pub for the weekend.) Andrew was there, as was James Wallis and Marc Gascoigne, and I believe it was Marc who delivered the witticism that is the point of this anecdote. Late that night a very drunken Andrew was trying to get in his room, and for some reason was only wearing his underwear. He’d gone to the bathroom and gotten locked out. But it was the wrong room, and the fourteen-year-old boy inside took one look at the mostly-naked drunken man trying to get in and slammed the door shut again in blind fear.
A separate incident that night or the next involved an anonymous drunken gamer banging on doors in the inn, demanding to borrow dice for a game. The next morning as we related these tales, someone made the joking suggestion that, owing to his earlier and unfortunate encounter, it must have been Andrew banging on doors and demanding dice.
“No,” said Marc. “If it was Andrew Rilstone he’d have been banging on doors and demanding diceless.”
Ba-dum, chish!
Today we recorded dialogue for the DG computer game engine demo, which I think went pretty well. They’ve got a keen DAT recorder intended for field use–a little bigger than a videocassette, and battery powered to boot. Afterwards I spent several hours doing layout work on UA2 and some other tasks.
Tonight I spent a couple hours chatting with my friend Rob Heinsoo. Rob and I met through Jonathan Tweet, a few weeks after I started work at WotC, and eventually we were co-workers on the Three Hour Tour that was Daedalus Entertainment. Rob now works at Wizards, as a game designer for their soccer CCG (out now in Italy, France, and the UK, I believe) and design contributor for their miniatures game and the recent Forgotten Realms sourcebook.
When Rob and I get together it’s mostly to talk about hypothetical books–books one or the other of us might write. And they’re always great talks about great books that may or may not ever exist. Rob’s particular bent is for books of sufficiently high concept that just conceiving and planning them is something of a game, let alone actually writing them. Our conversations always leave me with these chunks of imagined books swimming in my brain that I tend to remember the way I want to remember them, rather than the way Rob intends to write them.
For example, I wanted to do a haunted-house novel that would marry Shirley Jackson with Borges. The layout of the house would shift over the course of the story in significant ways, but the characters would never notice–only the reader would have the opportunity to flip back and forth and realize that the green bedroom used to be on the second floor but now is on the third with a trapdoor into the attic. Eventually even the characters would begin to change, first little bits of their clothing or hair color and then names and genders. None of them would notice, and it would occur without expository comment–again, only the reader would have the perspective to realize that what first looked like sloppy writing was actually the influence of the house. Finally the characters would realize that they were not in a house at all, but in a book, and would plead with the reader to stop reading, to put the book down and never finish it, because as long as they were in that Schroedinger’s Cat sort of state then they thought they might still be alive, whereas if the reader finished the book then they would cease to exist. The final lines would be shrieking cries from the characters to not read the next page, then the next paragraph, then the next sentence, then the last word and that’s where it ends. The working title was Book of a Haunted House.
I love brainstorming with Rob about these ideas. They’re usually his ideas–I just modulate them and kick them around. It’s all the joy of editing/developing manuscripts without the actual hard work. I love the shaping of concepts and conceits, but the real work tends to wear me down. Sometime soon I’ll be done with editing other people’s work and can just write my own, and I look forward to that greatly.
As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m making plans to revamp Revland into a database-driven structure with some goony new features. Thanks to regular reader and swell guy Clinton Nixon, I’ve found a promising software solution called pMachine. It’s SQL-based, which is a problem for my current host, but I’ve found another host I can move the site to where that won’t be an issue. I have a stupid list of stupid features I want to implement, like online postcards using my photographs, print-ready versions of my stories and essays, a searchable database of movie reviews, and other things. If there’s some kind of ridiculous feature you’d like to see on the site, post a comment about it. Everything’s up for grabs.
And once again it’s bedtime. Tomorrow I go see Scotland, PA and then off to Flying Lab to see how work on the engine demo is coming.
Magical thinking.
I’m told there is a manga series in Japan based on Magic: The Gathering. But instead of doing a story about planewalking wizards dueling in a fantasy world, they retooled Magic for a Pokemon approach. The manga is about a boy who plays Magic, and his father is a champion Magic player. Dad goes to America to compete in a Magic tournament there, telling his son that the best players in the world are the Americans. When he returns, he tells his son that he found out why they are so good: they actually summon the monsters off the cards into the real world. So the kid and his friends run around with their decks in their pockets, ready to take them out and start unleashing monsters on their enemies. The creatures actually emerge directly from the cards as they are played and do battle.
Disney tried to do Magic in their context too. When I worked at Wizards of the Coast, I was part of the Magic team. This was sort of the steering committee or brand team. My role was minor. I’d created the job of “Continuity Coordinator,” which meant I built a big database of characters, monsters, locations, and other story elements that did not involve actual gameplay. I was on the Magic team because they often dealt with licensors–comic books, computer games–and wanted me around to advise on content issues.
Some guys from Disney’s television animation group came out once to give us a presentation. They wanted to make a Magic series for their afternoon animated shows, the block that included stuff like Duck Tales. To our surprise, they had a whole show concept together, complete with gobs of character designs, paintings of locations, the works. This seemed very impressive until they described the show. It was to be about a teenager in modern Earth, an orphan, who is brought to a fantasy world by wizards. They reveal that his parents were wizards killed by an evil guy, and he was hidden among the mundanes to protect him. But now it’s time for him to become a wizard and fight the evil guy. To help and protect him, they give him a sidekick: a gruff bearded seven-foot guy. The guy was a barbarian who feared magic and wizards. Our sneakers-wearing kid cracked wise, moaned about how he couldn’t get a good pizza, and fought evil with his sidekick.
They’d accidentally invented Harry Potter a few years early. But their version sucked.
There was more. Because they felt Magic was too complex and the imagery too adult, they proposed that Wizards create a new, kid-oriented version of the game with simpler rules and art and content from the television series. Disney would publish it, market it, host tournaments at Disney World, and on and on, all for 8-12 year olds.
They’d accidentally invented Pokemon a few years early. But their version sucked.
After the meeting we discovered why they had the complete series concept together with all that art: it was a show they’d come up with on their own, and their bosses told them it sucked. They decided to try and attach a successful license to the existing show concept and then pitch that to their bosses. Their show wouldn’t actually have anything to do with Magic except the logo.
And that sucked too. So after a week or so we turned them down. But not before I took a call from a counterpart functionary at the Disney TV team, asking questions about our content. I ended up spelling out “Urza” and “Mishra” over the phone to her, trying to explain the planewalking concept, and other arcana. It was a doomed conversation.
Anyway, just some random Magic anecdotes I was thinking about.
More of the same: UA2, DG computer game. I saw the latest version of the Dark Young yesterday at Flying Lab and it’s even better. Now they’ve applied the slime filter or something to the darn thing and it glistens with muck quite beautifully. The skin texture is now bump-mapped, which is sort of a way to add more polygons to the 3-D model without adding more polygons to the 3-D model. It lets you complicate a polygon’s surface so that it has depth–bumps, pits, and the like–but you don’t have to actually model all the new shapes with polygons. You just have a graphic that “reads” as three-dimensional to the rendering engine. Anyway, it looks great.
Tomorrow two of the Flying Lab guys are coming to my house to record some dialogue and sound effects for a demo we’re working on. I’ll be voicing one of the characters in the demo. I scripted the dialogue for it so the demo plays out as a clever homage to HPL’s story “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” with a cell phone headset connecting two DG agents instead of the field telephone that connected Carter and Warren in the story. (But no, I skipped the “You fool, Warren is dead!” line.) Lovecraft fans who watch the demo when it’s online will get the gag, and hopefully they’ll realize that means we get the gag, too, and be more excited about the project as a result. It’s all about the buzz.
On UA2 I think we finally have a complete draft of the global-level section, which covers magick, adepts, and avatars. Today I started writing the first chapter of the cosmic-level section that describes the Statosphere, the Invisible Clergy, Godwalkers, ascension, artifacts, and other cool stuff. Still a long way to go.
I have a dresser now. It’s the first dresser of my adult life. When I went to my freshman year of college my parents bought me one of those wire-grid storage units with the sliding baskets, and that’s been my dresser for, uh, almost thirteen years now. How pathetic. My friends Ray and Christine are unpacking in their new house after moving here from Chicago and dropped a great dresser on me that they didn’t need anymore. It’s actually made of real wood through and through, instead of the lovely fiberboard stuff I usually buy. My cat Trouble immediately jumped on it and began walking back and forth, looking for corners she could rub her scent on.
I got the special smut edition of my column done for Tablet and as a bonus, I got to write a retrospective of Jan Svankmajer’s films. In the course of doing that I found an amazing web site devoted to his work in many mediums, not just film:
http://www.illumin.co.uk/svank/
On Thursday I’m going to a press screening for Scotland, PA. It promises to be a comedic retelling of Macbeth set in 1975 white-trash Pennsylvania. Christopher Walken is in it. Looks fun.
And now it’s almost 3am. Time to go to sleep.
Well, this is just freaky as all heck. You’ll need Adobe Acrobat to view this page.
This has been the weekend of the video games. Four hours of Halo on Saturday, then today was endless Medal of Honor: Allied Assault and Rainbow Six: Ghost Recon. Manly games for manly men!
I saw the coolest thing on Thursday: a CGI animated Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath stomping around a computer screen. It’s for the Delta Green computer game. It wasn’t even finished, but it already looked badass.
For those of you without enough Tynes in your life, my mother–a frequent poster here–has started her own blog. The first installment geek-checks LOTR and Harry Potter, so it’ll be like you never left mine. She’s a freelance computer programmer–RPG! Cobol! Other languages no one in my demographic group has ever learned!–in Memphis, Tennessee.
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ktynes/
Today is write-my-column-for-Tablet day. The next issue’s theme is “Smut,” and so per my editor’s request all four of my films this time will be smutty in some fashion. It’s due tonight and I haven’t got a clue, so it’s off to the video store.
The new issue of Tablet is out, and I’ve got some bits in there. There’s my usual film column, Film Foursome, a very brief review of the new anime film Metropolis, and I wrote capsule reviews of two films playing at the Women in Cinema Film Festival here in Seattle, Rain and The Goddess of 1967, both of which appear in the main festival article.
When I went to the press screenings of those two films from the Women in Cinema festival a few weeks ago, I arrived about twenty minutes early. The previous press screening was still wrapping up, and it proved to be the upcoming Schwarzenagger flick Collateral Damage. As I waited outside, an earnest young man gave me press kits for the Women in Cinema festival. From beyond the doors to the theatre I could hear only the loudest and deepest sounds of the film, which meant that as I perused the documents on women’s cinema I was bombarded with what seemed like an impressionist sound-collage of Arnold grunting over and over, broken up with explosions and gunshots. It was quite surreal and funny.
Dispatches visitor Martin McClellan noticed my recommendation of Tom Phillips’ book/art project A Humument in the Store and pointed me to the official web site of the project, www.humument.com, which Martin runs. It’s quite a fun site, and it links to Phillips’ main site as well which is also worth exploring. If you haven’t looked at A Humument before, you should. Those who have read “Bill in Three Persons” in the Unknown Armies rulebook would find A Humument especially interesting, or rather vice versa.
RTMark is a non-profit mischief-making organization, generally targeting the global corporate sphere. They have a lot of interesting projects at their website, and some cool tools. Essentially they come up neat ideas and solicit anonymous donations to fund their development and execution. In other cases they offer the project idea and the funding, and anyone who carries off the project gets the money.
Reamweaver, for example, is an automatic tool for generating parody versions of legit websites. Let’s say you’ve got a beef with Federal Express, for example. You register a domain name like fudex.com, install Reamweaver, and specify a list of words you want substituted. Whenever someone goes to fudex.com, Reamweaver generates a copy of the real fedex.com site, but changes the words you specify. You could replace all instances of “customer service” with “customer annoyance,” for example, and even substitute your own images dynamically. And whenever the real fedex.com site updates, Reamweaver updates your version, too. RTMark created the tool to mess with the World Trade Organization, who were trying to shut down a parody domain site RTMark had set up. By automating the parody process and giving the tool away for free, neither the WTO nor anybody else can hope to stop people from satirizing them, because anybody with a web page can instantly generate an identical or tweaked version of the satirical site. It’s quite interesting. You can get Reamweaver here.
Then there’s the Bikewriter system, which lets you turn your bicycle into a mobile, on-demand propaganda machine. You attach rubber stamp pieces to your rear wheel to assemble a sentence, and then as you ride you pull a handle to lower the ink roller down onto the surface of the tire and voila–instant imprint on the concrete. More photos and a too-large Quicktime video are at the Bikewriter page.
Rather than rattle on further, I’ll let them do it. Here’s their report on activities in 2001:
Impostors passed as the World Trade Organization at a “Textiles of the Future” conference (http://theyesmen.org/finland.html) and on European Marketwrap, a prime-time program on CNBC (http://theyesmen.org/tv.html). An anonymous investment covered some travel expenses.
A conference session on techniques to counter anti-corporate activism, normally available for $225 to corporate clients, was made available to activists for free at http://rtmark.com/prsa, thanks to an anonymous donor.
One thousand vanity mirrors were distributed at the G8 protests in Genoa, and were used to reflect the sun into the eyes of attacking policemen (http://rtmark.com/archimedes.html).
A software development kit and book from http://hactivist.com, entitled “Child as Audience”, teaches anyone to reverse-engineer the Nintendo Gameboy; it was co-sponsored by RTMark.
The same label that enraged Geffen Records with “Deconstructing Beck” issued its fourth RTMark-sponsored release, “A Mutated Christmas” (http://detritus.net/illegalart/xmas).
A catapult used to hurl stuffed animals over the fortress walls at the Quebec FTAA meeting fulfilled Project MDVL and garnered a cash reward for the creators.
Thousands of brochures advertising “Deportation Class” seating were secretly placed in airplane seat pockets to illustrate how commercial airlines traffic in unwilling human cargo (http://rtmark.com/luft).
The :CueCat, a freely available barcode scanner meant to help advertise to people in their homes, was hacked into a tool for learning about corporate misdeeds (http://rtmark.com/cuejack).
The “Heads and Tails Video Reclamation Program” which encourages videotape renters to record public service messages over previews, has resulted in hundreds of altered tapes across the US and Canada (http://rtmark.com/fundlabor.html#DUBM and http://rtmark.com/fundlabor.html#FLMC).
And finally, Dr. Andreas Bichlbauer of the World Trade Organization has chosen the winner of this year’s Corporate Poetry Contest: The Organization of American States’ “Chant to the OAS,” in the “Children’s Corner” section of their website (http://rtmark.com/corpoetry.html).
A while back I waxed rhapsodic about the car I bought, a 1983 Saab 900 stick-shift hatchback. Here’s what it looks like, since I know you’re dying of curiosity.
And here’s one big reason why I got so excited about the damn thing. This is the interior. The original interior.
That’s right. This car is from 1983–it’s old enough to vote–and the interior looks like this. Somebody loved this car. And now I do.