Saalon Muyo

So, you might have noticed an absence, more extended than my usual absences.  Maybe not.  Pretend for me, ok?

Most of that has to do with a recent job change, which I’ll talk about in more detail soon.  The rest is the usual: Thanksgiving, then vacation, then Christmas, then New Years.  It added up to an awful lot of blog apathy.

Am I back?  Dunno.  I hope so.  The proof is in the Jello pudding pops.  So we’ll see.

Q: But why would I want a Kindle when I have the Kindle app for my iPhone?

A: Battery Life.

One of my Planet Money recession club friends, user47, was talking about a co worker who insulted his love of NPR right after wanting to go out to lunch with him.  His response, “Needless to say, she will dine alone,” did not parse right in my mind.  I thought it said She will die alone, which seemed to be a pretty badass sentiment to express about radio station insults.

Anyway he made this for me, and for that I am thankful.

From Massawyrm over at Aint It Cool News comes this bit of advice more people need to take. A lot more people. A giant, heaving mountain of people.

Of course, it’s buried in a review of the new Twilight film.

There is a rule about dating women like this that older generations often have to pass onto the younger: if a woman tells you she is trouble, if she tells you that you want no part in her problems, if she swears that she has too much shit in her life to fall in love, you need to fucking believe her. Because it is all true, every word of it. She is a woman so wrapped up in her own shit that she focuses like a laser beam on them making them the very essence of her personality. You will not save her. You cannot fix her. And she will be an absolute tempest of frustration and bitterness until she finds a way to get over her own shit.

I have a challenge for you.

It’ll be easier if you have Netflix and Watch Instantly.  If not, it’s still worth it if you can do it for free.

Get yourself a stopwatch.  Optionally, pour yourself a few shots of tequila or, if you prefer, vodka.  Then, start watching Dragonlance: Dragons of Autumn Twilight.

Time how long you get into it before your hand involuntarily snatches the remote and turns it off.  If you think slamming a few shots will improve your resolve, feel free.  I doubt it will help.

I was sober and I made it 5 minutes.

Trust me, you’ll be glad you tried.  It’ll be like the getting a red badge of courage for sitting through horrible animation.

Can you make it to 6 minutes?

I find it kind of surprising that 214 people would admit to attending a school called “Ashley Sugar-Notch.”

It’s for real, too. Drive on I80 through Pennsylvania and you’ll see a sign proudly proclaiming that the next exit will take you to a place called Ashley Sugar Notch.

I don’t know what else I can add to that.

My frustration with Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition is well known among my role playing friends.  It’s a system that I’ve come to actively hate, that provides such little support for its DMs that it’s borderline hostile to them.  It’s not much better to its players, but most decent DMs transfer the impact of stupid rules onto themselves to keep the game fun.  At least, that’s what I’ve always done.

Now’s not the time for a comprehensive rundown of what makes 3rd Edition (and its better but worse 3.5 patch) such a problem.  But there’s a really nasty strand of system-within-a-system rules that need a swift kick to the crotch: Sundering, Tripping, Disarming and Grappling, I’m calling you out.

These rules represent a classic How Not To Build A System situation.  They work not only off of a different set of combat statistics, they also work independently of each other.  They all work in roughly the same way as each other, but they all use different feats and skills that do little or nothing to help the others.  What’s that mean to an average player.  It means if I, as a DM, build an NPC who’s really good at grappling, unless you’ve made your character good at it as well, I’m going to succeed.  I.E. I can build an NPC good at nothing save screwing the party over. Whee!

Any of the skills above are really hard for a player to pull off at all without a special feat.  Want to disarm? Well, someone’s getting a free attack on you for trying…unless you take a feat.  Ok, if you stop there, things aren’t too bad.  But then you can start taking feats to give bonuses to disarming checks.  So now, when I try to disarm from you, not only has the in-game failsafe (that free attack) been removed, but you get bonuses to pull it off.  Now, we’ve created a separate progression path to become good at Disarming, one where a mediocre fighter can be very, very good at something, even against a much better fighter.  Put another way, D&D has given a cheap way for characters to be made more dangerous than people who should be better than them.  Game balance, have a nice nap.

It gets worse.

The repercussions of all of these rules within rules are nasty and debilitating.  If you disarm with a bare hand, winning a disarm check means you now hold your opponent’s weapon.  And since you’ve put some skills into being better at this, there is now no effective way for the opponent to get his weapon back.  Since most characters – PC and NPC – tend to have a favored weapon, one they’ve been built around using, the effect is more than just delaying or slightly weakening them.  They’ve been effectively removed from the fight.

It’s even more of a mess when you start looking at things like tripping and grappling.  Now only can you give bonus points to tripping and only to tripping, you can take feats that allow you to get extra, free attacks if you successfully trip.  So a character built to trip not only has an easier time to tripping, but gets a bunch of free damage out of it too.  All for the price of a handful of feats.  Bonus: D&D inexplicably makes getting back up not only burn a valuable move action, but also provokes another free attack to anyone within range.  So if you stat a character out for tripping, surround a target, then knock them down, you’ve set that character up to be the target of 5 or 6 free attacks.  I know.  I’ve used this technique myself.  The same can be said of grappling, which prevents a character from doing much of anything without rolling a successful grapple check; a check that, once again, one character is likely statted out to win the majority of the time.

These rules are bad news no matter who uses them.  I’ve used them as a DM and unfairly trashed people with them, and I’ve had players use them and unbalance otherwise well built encounters.  There are creatures in the monster manual who are only difficult to fight because they engage in this kind of side-rule-system combat.

They’re rules that could be softened relatively easily, too.  Why make getting up both take a move action and provoke free attacks?  Why not give a tripped character the choice: get up fast but get hit, or get up slow and be safe?  And with grappling, why not just have it immobilize a character and give a negative to their attacks instead of taking them out of the fight and subjecting them to free crushing damage?  And why in Cthulu’s name would you give anyone a system that trivializes the breaking of powerful, magic weapons?

4th Edition has clarified and simplified a lot of these rules, which is good. A few weeks ago, when I was researching how grappling rules work, I found an article written by one of the game’s designers.  The rules were so complicated that the designer of the system had to edit and strike-through at least a third of what he had written to correct it.  If that’s not the mark of an insane rule system, I don’t know what is.

I’ve been thinking a bit about the different ways platforms handle html and web content recently.  Probably because I’m right in the middle of working on my company’s Customer Center and struggling to shift from the work I’ve done recently in PHP to the ASP.Net platform my company uses.

PHP supports a model that’s a lot closer to the way I think, though I don’t know if it’s actually a good model.  You create your page, include other pages to fill in chunks of that page (like loading the header and footer) and, when needed, slap in some code amidst the page itself to dynamically load pieces.  If you need a person’s name to appear in the top of the page when they’ve logged in, you can just put in the function call to getUserName(); and whatever that function returns gets put into the page.  It’s a very procedural way of thinking through your page, and it’s comfortable.

ASP.Net – the default way,  not their newer Model-View-Controller pattern – does things in this weird hybrid way that’s a totally uncomfortable way of thinking.  You still create your base page – index.aspx or whatever – and into that page you can stick includes for other code and you can also call a templated header/footer file like you would in PHP.  But the implementation is oddly circular.  In an effort to avoid a separate header and footer file, ASP.Net uses Master Pages.   Unlike PHP, you don’t get to say, on the page itself, “Stick the header here, then do this other stuff, then stick the footer here.”

Instead you build a Master Page that you lay out like a normal page, except that where the content would go, you put an asp:contentplaceholder tag.  Then, at the top of the actual page, when you’re declaring the namespace for the page and where the code file lies, you say, essentially “Use this Master Page” which tells ASP.Net to take everything you wrote on the actual page and shove it into the place where the contentplaceholder tag is sitting.  It makes a sort of sense, but it forces you to think about the page layout from two different directions, and to build your actual code in a way that doesn’t map to the way the page will look when it’s done.

This isn’t helped by the fact that additional included code is done using User Controls, that feel like another type of file just to have a different type of file.  I guess it’s comfortable if you need a certain amount of forced abstraction, but it makes for pages that are really hard to pick apart.  Nor does the ASP.Net model of separating the HTML part of the page from the code itself help with the clarity.  They’ve got a fancy term for it – Code Behind – but it just means more time figuring out what’s loading and in what order.

PHP’s model certainly does not reward clarity, nor does it punish obscurity, but my experience with ASP.Net is that it enforces a certain opacity that isn’t good for development.  The model works – I’ve used it for years and gotten good work done with it – but it’s uncomfortable.

But is it wrong?  Is PHP’s procedurally minded comfort just a crutch?  And is Model-View-Controller, which I haven’t delved into yet, a help or is it just another flawed abstraction that confuses as much as it clarifies?  The whole nature of web development is coming up with ways of building templates that we can easily shove different things into as we need.  What works for you? Anything? Nothing?

I’ve never been much good at short form fiction.  This is partly because I don’t come up with many ideas that fit into a short form, but that’s a symptom of a larger issue, I think.  The thing is, I just don’t get much of a buzz out of shorter stories.  Whatever it is that makes people get all giddy from short fiction is something I apparently lack.

Beyond it being a really good time, one of the things I love about running role playing games (you know, like Dungeons and Dragons and all that other nerdy tabletop stuff) is that it’s this great, abstracted storytelling style that works as a mirror to my more serious writing.  You don’t have to worry about language or grammar.  The subtleties of plot development are less important.  Nothing that happens is recorded verbatim, so minor missteps are easy to wash away or simply forget.  What you’re left with is the broad narrative structure, some character development and a lot of big emotions.  It’s a great way of learning about yourself as a storyteller.

I’m coming to the end of a major section of a campaign we’ve been running for a while, and over the past few weeks I’ve felt this really significant shift in it.  Things were kind of working, but I was struggling to build and sustain momentum.  It had been a long time since we’d played these characters and while nothing I was doing was wrong, it wasn’t taking on a life of its own.  Then, about four weeks ago, it went from feeling like pushing a boulder uphill to trying desperately to keep up with it as it barreled down the other side.

That feeling of frustration, of things technically, intellectually working without the spark of life is basically what I feel, in some form or another, when I do anything short form.  Things work, I like the ideas, and maybe I even really like the story.  But it never has its own momentum.  It’s always me turning the gears and stepping on the pedal.  In a shorter story, there’s never time for all that potential energy to turn suddenly kinetic.

What changed in my campaign? Nothing, exactly.  I just reached critical mass with everything we’d built to that point.  At some point in a long story, if you’re doing things right, you cross this threshold.  To that point, you’re running around, establishing the setting, introducing characters, building subplots and moving pieces into place.  It’s a lot of work, and even when things work, there’s still this sense of things moving only where they’re pushed.  Then you hit a point where everything is connected in just the right way, where any change in the web causes vibrations throughout the rest.  If something happens in this plot, the things it does to this character over here, on the other side of the map, forces them into action.  That cascades out to three other things, and before you know it the whole damn structure is shaking.

At that point, you’re not pushing things anymore.  They’re pushing you.  Whereas before you needed to get things carefully in place, orchestrating the whole situation, now all you need to do is pick up a rock and throw it.  You aim for the place where it’ll do the most damage, and then hold on tight.

If you’ve ever watched Babylon 5, you can see what I mean.  Up through the end of season 2 it’s good.  At times, it’s really good.  But somewhere in the middle of season 3, things go insane.  No one in the story can move without knocking ten other things over.  Every single story impacts on the rest. That’s what you get with a carefully planned, long form story.  You get to reach critical mass, and the whole way you tell the story changes.  You’re still writing the thing, but it starts feeling more like aiming a fire hose than pumping water out of a well.  It’s pretty incredible.

Do I need to roll a 20 sided die to realize that?  Nah, not really.  But seeing the whole campaign take on a fatalistic life of its own is a nice, clear distillation of where my interests and instincts lead me as a writer.  The rush I feel when all the guns are in place and I can start pulling triggers has a lot to do with why I feel so compelled to write.  It’s something I notice when I write, but separated from struggling over word choice it’s easier to see that, yeah, what I really want to work on is stuff where I have enough room to build a story that takes on a life of its own.

I didn’t go to college for anything writing related, but with all the drinking and swearing and unruly behavior that comes with gaming, it’s kind of the same thing

Laura, you’ll be missed.

I’ve been on the internet a long time.  I started messing around on a network service called Delphi in 1995. My first job two years later was as tech support for a local Internet Service Provider.  I met my wife and two of my best friends on an IRC server run by SciFi channel, and met another of my closest friends writing (I hesitate to admit, and beg you to remember I was 18 at the time) fanfiction.  I’ve seen communities come and go, some brushing past some kind of perfection before flaming out.

That IRC server that Scifi ran – first called Icarus, then Events – was, for most of my life, the best community I ever found.  You don’t get friends and love out of an IRC community unless it’s something special.  Until last year, I was convinced I’d never find anything close again.  That moment of perfect beauty came and went.  So it goes.

It took the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression to change that.  Let it never be said that the subprime mortgage industry was all bad.

I came to Planet Money like many people did: through This American Life’s fantastic “Giant Pool of Money.”  I came because the only way to hold back the horror of those early days of the crisis was to stay informed.  Information made my mood darker, but it also held the panic at bay.  My wife can attest to how raw my nerves were; I don’t know exactly what had me so spooked, but I was very, very scared.  Planet Money was my life preserver.

Here’s what I didn’t expect: To find another community as special as the one I found back on Icarus.  In the past year I’ve made real friends.  It’s been a while since that’s happened online.  Not just net friends, either.  They’ve come to mean enough to me that me and Erin flew to New Orleans just to have the chance to meet some of them.  That thing I thought was just a life preserver turned out to be a boat, and I wasn’t alone in it.

Though Planet Money is a great show run by great people, there is one person who deserves much of the credit for the community the show built: Laura Conaway. Which is why I am absolutely crushed to learn that, as of today, she’s moving on to other things.

Like I said, this is not my first time to the dance.  I’ve seen great work done, work that built a deserved readership but that never built a community.  Blogs written by keen but distant minds, films shot by brilliant but reclusive souls and music performed from afar.  And I’ve seen great work tainted by disdain for its audience.  Great work married to a personal accessibility is rare, and should be treasured.  For the past year, Laura Conaway of Planet Money worked to make its blog not only fantastically informative, but inclusive of all of its readers.

I was lucky enough to work with Laura during her time on Planet Money, first on a debate with another read and later on a development project that was some of the most fun coding I’ve ever done.  Most of the fun of it was getting to work with Laura herself, who is such a rare mix of smart and personable that I wish everyone could have had that chance.

Back when Laura was still on the podcast itself, she used to say that this was our recession, they were just reporting it.  It’s a sentiment I hope does not leave the show with her.  If it does, the show will be less for it, even if the reporting stays as strong.  It’s hard to do great work.  It’s harder to build a community around it that’s more than an aggregation of listeners.  Laura succeeded, and she did so in a very, very short time.

I say none of this to sell short the hard work of Adam Davidson, Alex Blumberg, Caitlin Kennney, Chana Jaffe-Walt or David Kestembaum, nor any of the great interns who served at Planet Money over the past year. I wish only to point out the rare gift Laura gave to their show, a gift I hope survives beyond her tenure.

As for Laura, I can only hope that her destination is bigger, brighter and better than her point of departure.  She deserves it.

Raise a glass, folks.  It’s the end of the tour.

P.S. Did you know that an elegy is a type of poem? I thought it was just a style of music. The things you learn in the midst of sad news.