You ever have one of those days where you go from one crisis to the next? That's the kind of day I had at my "real" job (both my wife and father are sure to remind me that the job I spend my days at is the "real" job, lest I suffer from the delusion that I can make my living full-time as a publisher of D20 adventures). I think one of the most galling things is that having had this hellish day, it's nearly impossible to explain why it was so bad.
When I say, "We were getting a 500 error when the web server tried to bridge over to the Crystal Enterprise Server because the authentication had been hard-coded," my wife looks at me with a screaming baby in her arms, a petulant toddler clutching her leg, a preschooler with a permanent marker mustache in the background and a kindergardener on her lap trying to sound out "Brobdingnagian" (my daughter has a thing for Swift -- that's the last time I try to explain a Yahoo commercial) with a look that says "And?"
I was back on Snopes the other day and they mentioned that some Cable TV Urban Legends show had repeated as true a Snopes story which was in their Lost Legends section. All of the stories in the Lost Legend section are designed to be so implausible that you can tell they're untrue just by reading them. Some of the things I've said are that same way. For example, the idea that my six year old daughter enjoys reading Gulliver's Travels. Though we have made her read "A Modest Proposal" just to keep her on her toes...
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
The toughest part of being creative for a living are those times when you are not creative. Then you sit down with a blank piece of paper, or in this case a blank computer monitor with a cursor flashing ominously in one corner. It's even worse because I'm composing this using a Linux text editor, run from a command line so I don't even have a neat background or spiffy GUI to take the edge off the void. Though it could be worse: at least I allow myself the minor comfort of using pico rather than the soul-crushing emptiness that is vi.
I image that some people have no idea what vi is. Allow me to explain. I was once reading a book by Guy Kawasaki who was talking about his days at Apple and describing what it was like to compete with Microsoft. This was back in the late 80's, so back when most people liked Microsoft. If I recall correctly it went soemthing like this, "If you want to know what it's like to compete with Microsoft put your head in a vise and turn it until you can't stand it any longer, then turn it three or four more times." This is what vi is like. (You knew I'd get to the point eventually).
If any of you made it this far and didn't see the notice on the front page, we are now accepting credit cards through RPGNow. You can either sign up here and then go there to complete the sign-up process, or you can just go there and then we'll e-mail you a link to complete the sign-up process here. With that out of the way, all of the core functionality of the site is complete and now I can focus my attention on some other cool features. I'm thinking of adding a pizza delivery option...
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I have a co-worker who's from Uganda. For most of last winter we car-pooled and I got to be pretty good friends with him. Enough so that I can talk intelligibly and at some length on the merits of R. Kelly and whether pedophilia has anything to do with good rap music. He sent me a link today to an article in a paper called the "East African" about the aftermath and lessons of the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. I did not realize that "The rate of carnage during the 100 days of terror is estimated to be three times that at the height of the Nazi Holocaust."
I think that one of the most difficult things to maintain is a sense of perspective. My grandmother, who was born in 1912, lived through both world wars, the Spanish Flu Pandemic, spent her 20's in the midst of the Great Depression, thinks that kids today have it tougher than she did. Do we? It's hard for me to imagine that any dispassionate observer would agree with her. In other words, she's lost her perspective. I think the connection to the previous paragraph is pretty obvious.
I've always found it interesting how obscure some incredibly deadly events have become. I already mentioned the Spanish Flu, which even with the SARS epidemic is still relatively unknown, but one in particular that has always amazed me is the Tangshan Earthquake of 1976, where officially 255,000 people died but a better estimate would be closer to 655,000 people dead and another 780,000 injured. To give you an idea of how obscure that is try finding a page devoted to just that event (not part of a list) on the Internet.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Last night was another role-playing night. It was a campaign run by a wealthy friend of mine for all of his employees. They were playing "When Dire Kobolds Attack!" (which I wrote) so I was along to observe and be an "Assistant DM." One of the great things about DireKobold is that since the adventures are dynamically generated every time, I can always go back and make little game balance tweaks should it become apparent that something like that is necessary. I haven't ever gone back and tweaked an adventure (though I have gone back and corrected errors), but it's nice to know that I could. This is one advantage an electronic publisher has over a print publisher.
I just kind of tossed the whole wealthy adjective out there without really backing it up. A couple of months ago he bought an H2 with cash. Everytime he gets together to game he tosses down $100 and buys dinner for everyone, but perhaps most importantly from the perspective of a role-player, he has a set of the Dwarven Forge stuff that rivals the Dungeon Delve set-up at GenCon. What does he do you ask? Well he has a dot-com just like me, only instead of going into the huge D20 publishing market he decided to go after that tiny segment of people who like to make money.
Am I jealous? Yeah a little bit. Am I bitter? Probably. Have I tried unsuccessfully on numerous occasions to lure him into a dark alley, beat him into a coma and take all his stuff? More times then I can count. But it goes both ways: he's jealous of my spectacularly large head, so we're even.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
If you're paying attention (and came here via the homepage), you'll notice that we just released another adventure. As I mentioned earlier, the "snippet" for the adventure will be available in about a week, in the hope that there is someone, somewhere who can't wait a week for the new OGC and that will be the difference between them subscribing and not subscribing. Or maybe I'm just doing it to be mean -- you can never tell with me. The author, Don Mappin, is local, so unlike most of the freelancers I've worked with, I've actually met him in person (a hell of a nice guy). Of course, this also means he's met me in person, and those psychic scars won't heal anytime soon.
What attracted me to this adventure was the way that it could easily be played by characters from all parts of the moral continuum. Most adventures are written with a specific heroic plotline, and to be frank, I think most parties act in what is at least a vaguely heroic fashion, but it's always nice to have the option to be greedy rather than generous, duplicitious rather than trustworthy, scruffy rather than clean-shaven, and in a larger context, to be the one guy shouting "go forward!" when everone else is shouting "go back!" In a marginal segue off of that last point have you ever read any Harlan Ellison?
Of course, the whole topic of favorite authors is one which would take several of these columns to address with any thoroughness, so I'll just end here with a quote from Heinlein:
"Unless you intend to kill him immediately thereafter, never kick a man in the balls. Not even symbolically. Or perhaps especially not symbolically." --Friday Jones in Friday
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well, the adventure snippets are now available for all you demo subscribers out there. Yesterday I said that they would be up "later this evening." I don't know, does 2 am still count as the "evening?" Probably not, but this morning I was able to experience one of the true joys of working, running a website on the side, and raising a family all at the same time. After dragging into bed at 3 am, my son woke me up at 6:30 to mention, as sort of a casual aside, that he was going to take advantage of our indoor plumbing, and now that I was up could I make him breakfast? Which was okay, really, because I needed to be to work by 8 am anyway, so what the heck?
Wil Upchurch (13th-Level Freelancer) opined on the lack of a Talkback forum, which is a good point. Certainly I plan on eventually having forums, but too many times I've gone to websites, clicked on the forum link and been treated to the electronic equivalent of Roanoke, circa 1590. The vague feeling that someone once posted there but the only thing remaining is a thread with the title "Croatoan." Okay that particular metaphor may have been a little over the top; the point is I don't want to start forums until I have a bigger potential audience than the guy in Southeast Asia, D20 authors who have been paid to like me, and my wife.
Somehow, without any kind of planning, I've ended up doing three paragraphs every day, and including one link with every column. So I guess I better stick some kind of link in here so I can keep my streak alive. I don't really consider myself a hardcore surfer, but one site I've visited consistently over the years is The Onion (one of the reasons I'll miss having GenCon in Milwaukee is you could get the print version for free) in particular the "What Do You Think?" feature has always been wickedly funny. There, that's a link and three paragraphs now go sign up for a Demo Subscription or something!
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I just got done reading the new entries at one of my favorite sites, www.snopes.com. The newest entry concerned a technical glitch over at CNN which ended up making several "obituary templates" available for public view. Bob Hope, Ronald Reagan, Fidel Castro and Dick Cheney were among the people whose templates were included. I doubt I'll be famous enough for some news organization to pre-write my obituary, but that doesn't mean I haven't thought about what it might say.
When I was younger, my obituary always had phrases like "heroic astronaut" or "best-selling novelist" or even "rock and roll messiah." These days my goals are more modest, "computer game addict" or "occasional cyclist" or "unrepentant curmudgeon." I'm not a big reader of the obituary section, in fact, I don't even take the paper, because my vague desire to recycle combined with my compulsion to never throw anything away soon creates a situation analogous to Europe in 1942 with the newspaper playing the role of the Nazis. But I have yet to see a URL included in an obituary. Something like, "Go to www.x-cise.com to read Bob's ironically titled blog, 'Exercise Never Killed Anyone'".
Anyway, when I started doing this, I wanted to make sure I didn't spend too much time doing this to the getting new adventures out. So I told myself I could only spend 15-20 minutes on each of these. I'm (well) over my time so I'll end here. But make sure to check back on Friday when we publish our next adventure, "Legacy of Horrors" by Don Mappin, best known for his work on the Star Trek RPG. I should also mention that adventure snippets should be up later this evening, so check back!
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I hate meetings. Mostly, I hate long meetings. Generally speaking, an hour is pushing it: anything over that and I start fashioning a noose using strips torn out of my shirt. By hour two, I'm generally so annoyed with the person who scheduled the meeting that I've rejected the hanging idea and have started planning on how to kill everyone in the room and make it look like an accident. By hour three, I no longer care if it looks like an accident. Today, I had one of those meetings.
Not only was it three hours long, but it involved marketing, sales and consultants. If you've dealt with any of these groups you know that this is a combination at least as dangerous as saltpeter, charcoal and sulphur (it is left as an exercise to the reader which group is the saltpeter). A normal meeting is like being kicked in the giblets. A three hour meeting with consultants, marketing and sales is like listening to Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva argue about post-modern feminism in French. (Again, it's left as an exercise for the reader to determine which group is Cixous).
I'm a big fan of quotes, so I thought that from time to time I would include one, to help illustrate the point:
"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face---forever... And remember that it is forever."
George Orwell, 1984
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I think all of us have, from time-to-time, engaged in the mental exercise of a hypothetical situation. "What-if" situations that test our ideology and preferences in situations we might never encounter. For me, giving my friends and family these hypothetical situations is definitely one of life's little pleasures. I think one of the more common might be the question of what you would do if you won the lottery or otherwise had wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. Of course, as an aficionado of these situations I have moved well beyond the novice questions like that.
Warren Buffet, the second richest man in America, is notoriously cheap. Which is precisely why he's the second richest man in America. Notoriously profligate people may be wealthy but they are very rarely uber-wealthy. In any case, I digress. Warren Buffet has a private plane which he has named the "Indefensible" because it could not be defended under any reasonable standard of frugality. So the hypothetical question is: if you were one of the uber-wealthy (like Buffet or Gates) what would your "Indefensible" be? Mine would definitely be a personal luxury sub.
In site news, some people have mentioned the fact that Demo Subscribers can't see a list of all the adventures that are available to a full subscriber, which is a good point. So over the next couple of days, I'll be releasing sample encounters from each adventure that will allow you to get a feel for the adventure and give you a scalable encounter that can be dropped into your own campaign for free. This will increase the amount of quality free content available in addition to giving Demo Subscribers a way to sample all of the adventures which are only available to a full subscriber.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well, I had promised to give you a rundown of the "family campaign." The family campaign is a unique creature -- very atypical. I mean yeah, sure every campaign has the player that insists on wearing Mickey Mouse ears to the table and the guy that plays from under the table because he doesn't want to corrupt his performance by seeing the other players. But in addition to that we have an Aasimar Paladin (I know Aasimar are normally rogues) and, wait for it... an Elven Arcane Archer!
Okay so neither of those characters are particularly unique. What is unique is that we have an equal number of male and female players. Which may not be extraordinary for some of you, but historically it's very atypical for me. Also, each couple takes a turn cooking dinner before we start playing, so it makes the whole experience almost too domestic to be an actual session of role-playing. Also, because everyone is relatively new to the game, no attempt has been made to achieve anything resembling party balance. The most significant omission is that there is nary a cleric in sight.
I noticed that Enter the Matrix is scheduled to be released for all major platforms on the same day as the Matrix Reloaded. How on earth they accomplished that when Blizzard can't come within 18 months of one of their release dates is completely beyond me. I only hope that I might be able to squeeze some small amount of time out of my schedule and get a chance to pick it up and play it.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well, like many of you out there, tonight is game night for me. Yes, every other Friday is when we get together to play a little Dungeons and Dragons. I'm involved in two campaigns. The one is just about exactly what one pictures the average game of Dungeons and Dragons to be: a bunch of male computer programmers gathering in the office after hours to roll dice, eat pizza, drink Mountain Dew, and discuss the relative merits of Supply Side Economics. It's a pretty geeky group.
To give you an example of this "geekiness," allow me to relate a story. (First off we're playing D&D so the geek level is already pretty high). One of the characters was passing out healing potions, but he would only give them out one at a time. One of the players became frustrated and said, "We're not in combat any more! You don't have to act asynchronously!" When I pointed out that he was a big geek, initially he flipped me off, but later admitted that, yes that probably was pretty bad.
I was actually going to spend most of today's entry talking about the other campaign I'm involved in, the "family campaign", but I think I'll wait until tomorrow to do that. Meanwhile, for something completely different, I direct you to a great article in Slate I just read by Christopher Hitchens, for a different take on the whole Halliburton contract in Iraq.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
If you've been following the discussion, and according to the webserver logs, there is at least one person somewhere in Southeast Asia who is a devoted fan (though maybe he's just harvesting my e-mail address so he can start sending me porn spam), then you'll remember that this is supposed to be a break from the other stuff I have to do to keep the site running. As you'll recall from yesterday, I wanted to be a writer, though for many years I didn't actually like to write. I gradually did get to the point where I enjoyed writing which is why doing "View from the Bushes" is a break.
Some styles of writing I have quite a bit of experience with: lovelorn letters to girls who find me repulsive, crazy demands to high-ranking government officials, critical Freudian dissections of novels I've only read the first 20 pages of, and line after line of barely functioning Perl code, but blogging is something I admit to being something of a novice at. According to one of my favorite blogger/columnists, Andrew Sullivan, in an article in Wired blogs are to words what Napster was to music. (Actually, he said "Blogger could be to words what Napster was to music", but I was close enough).
So that, of course, is what "View from the Bushes" is all about: seizing the means of production, starting the revolution, putting the "Man" out of business, and empowering the lumpen proletariat to create a worker's paradise... Yeah right...
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
When I was a boy, I wanted to be a ballerina. A stern talking to by my father changed my mind, and for many years I was left adrift in a sea of indecision and tutus. Eventually I decided what I really wanted to be was an author. Like most of us, I was in love with the idea of writing, but had very little affection for the actual hard work of sitting down and spitting out words on to a sheet of paper. I think a lot of role-players fall into this category, people with great imagination and a so-so work ethic. :)
This is not to say that I was complete failure (it just hurts too much to admit it). After I started high school, I began to actual write, not merely daydream about how cool it would be to be a "writer." So I started reading all this stuff from other authors telling you how to write. And it's pretty depressing, because they all basically say that in order to be a writer you have to write (and everyday at that, oh, the humanity). Which, if you're anything like me, despite its complete obviousness nevertheless comes as a cruel blow, because as I mentioned I liked the idea of writing but I still wasn't very fond of the actual process of forming words into sentences.
Gradually, I got better at it. One of my big breakthroughs was when I realized that writing a 10-page short story was easily ten times as hard as writing a ten page chapter in a novel. That's when I switched from (trying) to write short stories to (trying to) writing a novel. I got about 100 pages into it before the financial responsibilities of having children forced me to sell out to the "man" and become a webmaster.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
Well, it's our first full day of taking subscriptions, and to those of you who have already signed up, thanks! Of course, if this ends up being a dry recitation of marketing statistics I doubt anyone will read it (not that anyone does, but I think you get the idea). As many of you may know if you frequent the Industry Forums on ENWorld, my wife and I just had our fourth child. As far as I could tell, the conventional wisdom was that the big jump in difficulty was when you went from two to three kids, but I'll tell you that at least for us, it was a lot tougher to go from three to four. A big part of that was three of the four kids having ear infections, plus all of them are six and under, anyway it was crazy...
Of course, just when you think your children will lead you to an early grave, they do something precocious. My four year old soon was watching the baby breast feed and asking questions, A few of the questions seemed to cause him to enter deep reflection. After a couple of minutes he walked over to me, raised his shirt and under-shirt and said, "See, I have a nipple too, it's just really tiny."
Currently the only D&D campaign I am involved in is the "Family Campaign." It consists of me, my wife, her sister and her sister's husband, my sister and her husband, and my best friend as DM. My son (the one with the tiny nipple) just loves to look at "monster books" and "monster magazines;" at four he's still too young to play, but boy, does he love the pictures. Speaking of "monster books," if you haven't picked up the "Monster Manual II" I would highly recommend it. Initially I avoided it because of it's dearth of OGC, but despite this shortcoming it's worth the money.
I suppose it's required by law that if you write something on April 15th, and you live in the United States you have to mention taxes. As someone who's voted libertarian, more than anything else, my feelings on taxes border on psychotic, but I think devolving into a rant this early into the game would be a bad omen.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross
I thought I'd try something out, now that DireKobold.com is finally completely functional. Okay, completely may be a misnomer. I'm sure there is still some stuff here and there that isn't at 100%. Anyway, in the past I've fancied myself quite the diarist (think Samuel Pepys without so much talk about the Restoration of the Monarchy). Since this is ostensibly a magazine, I thought it might be nice if there was some kind of letter from the editor, an occasional pseudo-article or perhaps a blog, since this is a website. In any event, I'm going to call it "View from the Bushes."
Obviously the primary purpose of DireKobold.com is to publish adventures, by some of the best authors in the business, which means that there is no guarantee that this particular column/blog will be published with any regularity, nor will it receive the same rigorous editing that the adventures get. Which reminds me of a story, but I'll probably wait to tell it until I have more than one reader (Hi Mom!).
More than anything, the point of this will be to take a break for the rest of the site: coding adventures, updating content, reading submissions, and fixing bugs, and yet still hopefully add to the enjoyment of the site. One of my inspirations for this is Bill Harris, the Night Call guy over at GoneGold.com. I'm not sure if any of you have had the chance to read his thrice weekly column, but I highly recommend it. Not as well known as the Wil Wheaton blog, but just as funny.
So bottom line is that this is something I would like to do, and we'll see how it goes. To be honest, I'm insanely busy with my "normal" 9-5 job, my wife and four kids, and of course, DireKobold.com. But you know there is certainly a slim possiblity that I'll be able to keep up with this column in addition to everything else.
Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero,
Ross