So I managed to crawl from my death bed to post in my blog. Okay, it's not nearly that bad. I am sick, but mostly it consists of waking up way too early with head congestion and being groggy from sleep deprivation the rest of the day, plus an old friend of mine was in town yesterday so I went to lunch and dinner with him, which I think is as good an excuse as any for my unforgivably no posting anything yesterday. I still need to post my first xenogenic character, so look forward to that in the next couple of days. I should have already finished it but I had forgotten how busy the holidays can be.
There was one benefit from my sleeping issues. I woke up at 4:30 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep because I couldn't breathe. So after trying in vain, I decided to just go to work. It took me 15 minutes to drive to work over roads that were basically clear with only the lightest dusting of snow from the wind. Only a few moments after I got in, the heavens opened and I would estimate that we got six inches of snow between 6 and 7 am. Any other hour of the day and it wouldn't have been that bad, but coming right at the start of rush hour it laid waste to the morning commute.
The hill next to my work had a bus, two trucks, a Volvo, a van and three compact cars off to the side of the road. I mentioned it took 15 minutes for me to get to work. A co-worker who lives only a few blocks from me needed an hour and twenty minutes to get in. My boss who lives 30 or 40 miles to the north decided he was never going to make it and turned around at about the halfway mark and returned home. In any case, Thanksgiving should be fun; maybe I'll break my rule about posting on holidays (and make up for yesterday) and post the details of the cheese plate I put together.
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Ross
Today has been crazy and I think I'm coming down with something, so as usual I'm forced to make excuses for why something hasn't been posted. Tomorrow is not looking great either, but with the day off on Thursday I should definitely be able to stay up late and make sure it's out on Wednesday. In any case, I don't have much more to say tonight, so I'm going to cut it short but I will leave you with a quote and a couple of links:
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny ...'
--Isaac Asimov
Some pictures and an article about an eclipse in Antarctica
Confirmation that political correctness has gone way to far. The County of Los Angeles has banned the use of the term master/slave when describing computer architecture.
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Ross
Looking back over my record of posting on Saturdays in November, I can see that it's less than spectacular. I almost didn't post again today, but I figured I should update you on the status of the "Xenogenic NPC." I was hoping to create a seperate framework/directory/file type etc., rather than just making the NPC the same as the snippets of adventures I already do. That turned out to be harder than I thought. If I haven't figured out how to do it by Monday, then I will just post the NPC as a snippet, though I'll make sure it's available to subscribers.
Other than that, the big excitement of the day was the game between my alma mater, the University of Utah and our arch-rivals to the south, BYU. If you haven't been following the Mountain West Conference, and I've little reason to suspect that you have, if Utah (which was heavily favored) won then it would be the first time since 1957 that they had clinched the outright conference championship (as oppossed to sharing it). If they didn't, they would be tied with New Mexico. BYU had done very poorly this season so they were thrust into the role of spoilers. To top everything off, there was a snowstorm that made Utah resemble the frozen tundra the Green Bay Packers use for football.
Obviously, if for no other reason than my captivating prose, you're dying to know what the score was, well when they say it was a defensive battle they weren't kidding -- the score was 3-0, Utah. I've seen higher scoring soccer matches. Of course, the score isn't important, the important thing is that "we" won.
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Ross
Several people have made comments about the idea of having the players pay the DM. I imagine that somewhere this utopia exists (Ha! get it!), but in my experience every time I want to run a campaign there are plenty of people who express initial interest but when it comes time to do any work like generating characters, mapping, keeping track of treasure or putting together a back story, it's like pulling teeth.
In principle, the concept of having someone pay you to DM is not that far fetched. I have certainly been involved in gaming sessions which were easily more enjoyable than any movie and people pay for those, so why wouldn't they pay to have a really good DM? Speaking of movies, it's encouraging (from the standpoint of tracking the decline of western civilization) to see that the Cat in the Hat movie with Mike Myers is getting terrible reviews. There are many things which are illegal which shouldn't be (marijuana) and many things which are not illegal which should be (selling movie rights to Dr. Seuss books to talentless hacks).
In any case, I'll be putting out a scalable NPC tomorrow (assuming that there are no unforeseen technical glitches). I think the Xenogenic system is going to work really well for generating NPC's -- much better than some of the random generation systems that are currently out there. As always, when you're talking about the first iteration of something, there are bound to be some issues, so I welcome feedback, complaints, criticism and baseless insults.
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Ross
Several people have expressed some distress over the elimination of the subscription option, so allow me to elaborate. Because of the more mercurial nature of the publishing schedule a traditional subscription system will probably not be possible, but I was planning on having something like an "All Access Pass," where one could get access to all the adventures at a significantly reduced bulk rate. Since this is already the way it works and wouldn't require any cost to implement, then of course it's a no-brainer. In any case, I appreciate the nice comments people have been leaving and I'm glad to know that people are enjoying the site.
As far as site news, I think that's pretty much about it. In other news, there's the whole Michael Jackson (Warning! Link not for people easily grossed out) thing, which may be the single worst thing to happen to America since "Andy Richter Controls the Universe" was cancelled. My prediction is that if you thought the OJ trial was bad, you ain't seen nothing yet. Sure, arguably OJ committed the more heinous offence, but with MJ he was already accused of this once, plus he's a bigger celebrity. Having read the statement from the initial complaint back in 1993, I'm inclined to believe that he was guilty, but what I'm even more sure of is that about this time tomorrow I'm going to be sick of hearing about it, and there will still be 1,286,935,374 more hours of coverage to come.
Also, as I'm sure many of you are aware, "Knights of the Old Republic" is out. I haven't picked it up yet, because I don't think I have the time, but you can bet that by Christmas time I'll have bought it. In any case, that's it for now. I need to take some Advil or something -- my head is killing me.
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Ross
I didn't post on Saturday because I didn't get around to it. I didn't post on Monday because I was tired of making excuses for why the adventure wasn't done, which if it was a good reason on Monday was an even better reason on Tuesday. Basically, the adventure will be done when it's done. The guy I have wiring it up assures me that that will be tonight, but fate has not been kind to him. He also thought it would be done last Saturday, but calamities too numerous to mention have befallen him in the last two weeks, so I'm through with making predictions, it will be done when it's done. Now obviously that's not what you wanted to hear, and it's not what I wanted to say either. You deserve an explanation so that's what you'll get, though don't blame me if it's long and boring.
I've alluded to this several times in previous blogs, but essentially the pace I set with DireKobold was unsustainable, for lots of reasons. First publishing a Xenogenic adventure is probably at least 3x (probably closer to 5x) as tough as publishing a "flat" adventure, and I was publishing three a month, essentially the same pace as Dungeon magazine, which has a staff of at least of half a dozen, but doing all the work by myself, while working my day job and trying to raise four kids six and under. Your two thoughts are of course, "You were insane" and "That's not your subscribers fault," both of which are undeniably true.
Of course, the plan was that eventually it would start making a profit and I could use that profit to pay some poor college student to help me "wire" the adventures. After four months of working 90+ hours I realized that I needed help, even if I wasn't profitable, if the business was going to survive. Based on that, I went through about a half dozen people trying to find the right mix of independence, computer savvy, D&D knowledge, reliability, cheapness, etc. Unfortunately, and especially with my limited budget, I'm still working on finding that person. Which is one of the reasons why I've given the guy who's currently helping me so much time. Of course, meeting a reasonable deadline is ultimately my responsibility not his.
It was also unsustainably financially. I was paying huge sums every month to authors, artists, cartographers, advertisers, conventions, employees, etc. and during my best months I was only getting a small fraction of that back. In retrospect I probably should have charged more from the beginning, but maybe that wouldn't have worked either… Regardless, I could only continue at that pace for a limited time before breaking the bank. At the moment there is still a reasonable amount of capital left, so before I run the bank account to zero on an unsustainable plan, I would like to leave some money to see if I can come up with a sustainable idea.
Along with the two perennial villains of time and money there are a host of other issues which have conspired against me, which are too banal to waste any space on.
So the upshot of all this is the restructuring which I announced several months ago, though to my shame I haven't been as forthright as I could have been. Even though I would love to continue publishing three adventures a month and improve with each adventure it's simply not possible, and I have known this for a couple of months. My plan is to change the publishing schedule and the nature of the publishing such that I can continue to run DireKobold for many, many years. So why have I procrastinated?
Well, first off, no matter what I do people are going to be disappointed, and though intellectually I know that I can't be afraid of disappointing others, on an emotional level I keep thinking that if I am patient enough that something will come along, solve all of the issues and let me keep everyone happy.
Secondly, I want to make sure I get it right this time. I don't want to have to go through this same agonizing process again six months from now.
Finally (though this is closely related to the first point) I have all these deals, agreements, plans, commitments, etc. which have to be worked into whatever changes I decide to make. Foremost among these commitments is all my current subscribers, but it also includes my commitment to finish out Wil Upchurch's Adventure Path, my commitment to publish a Midnight adventure, and other commitments I'm not at liberty to divulge.
So where does this leave the site? Well, for starters because of (well-founded) public outcry I'm posting this before I've 100% (I'm like 90%) decided on the plan, so I can't tell you everything but I can tell you this:
1- For those subscribers who are unhappy and just want out (generously pro-rated) refunds will be offered.
2- After the next adventure, DireKobold adventures will be sold individually for between $5-$12 (depending on the length) and released about one every month or two (once again, depending on the length).
3- In general, the adventures are going to run longer, have more setting info and more new OGC.
4- Subscribers will not have to pay for the adventurers individually, but rather they'll get them for free.
5- At some point, the face value of the new adventures will vastly exceed the amount of money a subscriber has paid (especially since we're going to stop renewing memberships) at which point current subscribers will have to start buying the adventures individually just like everyone else.
6- Stand alone Xenogenic NPC's and encounters will be released once a week (starting this Saturday), to help fill the void between adventures.
Like I said, this isn't 100% finalized but it should give you a much better idea of what's going on and what the future holds for DireKobold. I apologize for my short-sightedness and the delays and hope that you'll continue to enjoy DireKobold.com. As always, feel free to comment here, post in the forums or e-mail me directly.
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Ross
My dad sent me The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés. There are some good items on the list, like #22 from Overused Story Elements and Plot Devices: A fighter pilot, upon destroying an alien vessel, yells "yeeeeeeee-haaaaaaa!" And there are some obviously funny ones as well, the problem is that in a list of 293 items some of them extremely general (like, "28. Eccentric scientists."), that very few science fiction stories which aren't covered by this list in one respect or another.
I mean think of all the great stories covered by: (#4 Section II) Extra Breasts on Alien women. Okay I can only really think of Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, but by himself Douglas Adams (a moment of silence please) managed to artistic realms reached only by authors like Dostoevsky. Obviously one of the strengths of Science Fiction is it's greater than average ability to introspect, but that also leaves it open to lots of potential cliché's and silliness.
Well it's pretty late, so I need to go to bed, lest my cold get any worse. The weekend should give my wiring guy enough time to finish the adventure so we should have something for you on Monday.
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Ross
Since I live in Utah, I feel a certain obligation to offer a comment on the actions of SCO, a Lindon, Utah based company that has mounted the first serious attack on the Open Source/Free Software movement. Most of my information comes via SlashDot, so if you're curious that's as good as place as any to start. Before I say anything else, it's important to note that if some of SCO's IP had either accidentally or maliciously been incorporated into Linux, then they would not only have grounds to sue, but I would expect that in the end they would be awarded some damages as a result. Unfortunately, the situation is nowhere near as cut and dried as that, though that's what SCO would have you believe.
Of paticular concern is the fact that SCO has refused all requests to explain exactly what IP was appropriated. Their claim is that if they revealed what it was, then the linux community would immediately eradicate it. This is almost certainly true, but the idea that this would destroy the case by eliminating the evidence is obviously wholly false since there are hundreds if not thousands of ways to get your hands on old linux distributions. To see what I mean take a look at this overview of an IBM attempt to compel discovery.
Obviously, a complete discussion of this subject is well beyond the scope of my crappy little blog, but SCO has made so many of questionable moves in the pursuit of their objectives, that one goes beyond questioning the wisdom of the SCO management to questioning their ethics. This was not helped by the revelation that the attorneys (David Boies of Al Gore 2000 fame being the lead counsel) will collect 20% of any settlement (SCO's lawsuit against IBM is for 3 billion) or sale of the company. It's the latter that speaks to a possible pump and dump strategy that so many people have pointed to. I hate to be a conspiracy theorist but there seems to be more here than meets the eye.
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Ross
Well, it's late (for an old guy like me) and I think I'm coming down with something, so rather than struggle (unsuccessfully) to come up with something witty, I'll just drop a brief line here to let you know that the adventure is almost done. I know you won't believe it, but the guy I have doing it had to get his wisdom teeth removed yesterday, after he chipped it and they told him it would be more expensive to repair it than to remove all four. Anyway, so that's all folks, nothing else to see here.
Okay, I will include a quote, seeing as how made it this far:
You can know the name of a bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird... So let's look at the bird and see what it's doing -- that's what counts. I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.
--Richard P. Feynman
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Ross
In a coincidence which has yet to be remarked on by any of the stories I have read (possibly because it's pretty slim), Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic went gold (game complete, in stores within a week) on the same day as the first jedi appeared in Star Wars Galaxies. Which leads to some very interesting questions, the first of which is, "Do you want to be a Jedi?" If you answered "no" then just get out of here, stop reading, find somewhere else to go on the Internet, because if you can't see the appeal in choking people with your mind, then I'm not sure where this world failed you, but it quite clearly has.
On the other hand, if the answer is yes, then you have the two aforementioned choices. I concede that this eliminates all the non-RPG Star Wars titles, but let's face it, unless there's a Star Wars shooter out there that lets you say, "These aren't the droids you're looking for," you're not really playing a Jedi. So the question then becomes so you want to become a Jedi by spending hundreds if not thousands of hours surrounded by annoying 14-year old griefers and 35- year old misanthropes pretending to be 18-year old girls, in an effort with an overwhelming probablity of being utterly fruitless? An effort which, even if successful, could all be taken away in an instant with a single unlucky death?
Or would you rather pick up a game which guaranteed you the role of a Jedi? A game where rather than being surrounded by hundreds of people with an average maturity best expressed in single digits, you meet elegently crafted and scripted NPC's. A game where you're essentially the single most important person in the galaxy, where empires and civilizations rise and fall based on your actions? Assuming that you're not suffering from a severe chemical imbalance, I predict you picked the second. That being the case, go out and pick up KotOR and stop paying a monthly fee to play a chef in the Star Wars universe when we all know you really want to be a Jedi.
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Ross
First off, I'd like to apologize for not posting on Saturday, it was just one of those times when I was busy all day and then next thing you know there I was lying in bed and I realized that I hadn't blogged. I pictured in my mind thousands of people staring at DireKobold.com and hitting refresh every five minutes, desperately hoping that this time View From the Bushes would appear, and I thought the longer I can keep these people in front of the computer screen, the less chance they have of passing their defective genes on to the next generation.
In any case, moving on... I try and do something with the family every Monday night, though I've been far less successful with this than I would have liked, but I pulled it together tonight and got the whole family (minus the youngest, who went out to grandma's) out to see Elf. If for some reason you're not familiar with the movie, the premise is that a human orphan is raised by Santa's elves. Eventually he outgrows the North Pole and sets out to find his real father.
The critics have been very enthusiastic about this movie and I've even seen some people calling it the next holiday classic. I wouldn't go that far, though it is better than any holiday movie in recent memory (in particular I'm thinking of Tim Allen's Santa Clause movies). However, it has been pointed that I missed seeing Jim Carrey's Grinch, so obviously my background is not exhaustive. The point being that if you have kids it's a great movie to take them to.
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Ross
I had a Dilbert Moment today at work. It happened while I was getting my quarterly bonus check and my annual raise. My boss passed me the bonus check and then he passed me a post-it note with my new annual salary on it. This was a little unusual, because before he had always told me what percentage my salary was being increased by, so I asked him what the bump was, and he explained that he wasn't suppossed to tell me. Apparently, even though people know enough to not compare salaries, they were still comparing percentage points and those getting a smaller bump were feeling bad, so someone had decided to tell the managers not to reveal the percentage. "Well, what if I can do math?" I ventured.
At this my boss gave me an expression that indicated he realized how dumb this idea was, but that it wasn't his, and indicated that obviously I could do the math and figure out the percentage. I wonder if they figure that the people most likely to be upset are people who aren't smart enough to run the figures on their own. I suppose that's possible, but it indicates a deficit in education, which would be truly appalling. Doing the long division by hand is one thing (certainly even this is not expecting to much). But if someone honestly couldn't figure out how to do it on a calculator, then they certainly deserve not getting a raise at all. To say nothing of being kept in the dark about the amount of their raise.
In any case, my "wiring guy" has finally recovered from the horrible illness which afflicted him for the majority of the week and the next adventure should be released momentarily. As always, I appreciate your patience and look forward to any feedback you care to send my way, until tomorrow.
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Ross
One of my big weaknesses is that I'm easily distracted by shiny objects, literally and figuratively. Though it seems that many people are literally distracted by shiny objects, and as a consequence pick them up, leading to a real shortage of shiny objects just out there waiting to distract me. As a result, it's normally the figurative shiny objects which distract me. The current shiny object distracting me is Mason. It's a tool for embedding PERL into text, most often HTML. It takes its name from a book I quite enjoyed, called Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (which, according to my wife has too many nipples in it, as if such a thing were possible).
In many cases, Mason ends up doing some of the same things I did with the Xenogenic System, and if I had unlimited time or ambition or if I were stark raving lunatic, I might consider rewriting the Xenogenic System using Mason, but since I am only a raving lunatic, I think I probably won't. However, it might be nice to redo the DireKobold website using Mason, we'll have to see how well my wiring person does at getting out the next adventure. One feature of Mason in particular really got me excited. It's called the autohandler. In the old days, when you want to have a persistant border for all your webpages you have to include the code for that border on every single page, which makes change difficult. More recently people store borders in a seperate file and then each page has to have a command which pulls that file in, but this isn't that much of an improvement.
With Mason you can define an autohandler, which if it exists is automatically wrapped around the content of the page. So rather than having to include a line of code in every single file you merely have to put an autohandler file in the directory and it will automatically wrap the other pages. Now, admittedly it's somewhat more complicated than that, but the complexity I'm leaving out actually increases the utility of this insanely awesome feature. In any case, if you start seeing changes to the website, that's what I'm doing.
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Ross
As I've mentioned over the last couple of days, I went and saw Matrix Revolutions today. Just before I went, I checked Rotten Tomatoes. It's nice to see that on the day of the movie that they had finally managed to assemble a decent number of reviews (38% positive). Looking over them, I saw that Peter Travers of Rolling Stone was quoted as saying "The Matrix Revolutions sucks." Now, generally I find that my tastes in movies closely mirrors his, so I was worried.
But, of course, what you're really interested in is what I thought of it (maybe interest is the wrong word, perhaps morbid fascination is closer). I'll start with what was good. Revolutions was better than Reloaded. The action while somewhat clichéd at times, but still kept me on the edge of my seat (especially the Zion battle scene). It wrapped everything with reasonable neatness, and it managed to find an excuse to bring back my favorite character, the Merovingian. The final fight in the rain between Neo and Agent Smith was very cool (though if you put an Orff style choral score behind it, I'll like anything).
Now the bad: Certain scenes did not advance the plot enough to justify their length. There were technology conflicts which cannot be reasonably explained away. (If EMP's are so outrageously effective why aren't they everywhere? Though to be fair, at least they appeared aware of this and took some pains to explain it). Several characters were demonized for no reason. They tried to get away with too much with their CGI (there's a punch in the final fight which was obviously created whole cloth). On the balance, I enjoyed it more than 2 but less than 1. I can definitely recommend seeing it as a matinee.
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Ross
First off, Paul asked in one of the comments if there were going to be anymore Chronicles of Anyaka adventures. Indeed, the double-length dungeon Wil is working on is the next installment in that series. Secondly, it's been snowing like crazy here in Utah. Generally, I don't even think about shoveling my driveway until January, because generally before then even if we get snow the next day is so warm that by the time you get around to shoveling the snow the sun has melted it. I may have to revise that rule of thumb now that there's a foot of snow on the driveway and my wife is still trying to push a double stroller on her way to school. When I talked to her this morning she said the toughest part of the whole trip was the driveway. Which made me feel bad, but only a little.
In other somewhat bizarre news, one of my old bosses was arrested for downloading child pornography (free registration required). Apparently while his computer was being checked for a virus, the university's IT department found some images which had been downloaded during an 18 minute period. There were ten images in total and each image counts as a violation and each violation carries a maximum sentence of 15 years, which means in total those 18 minutes could land him in jail for the rest of his life. I hesitate to make any allowances for child pornographers (assuming he's guilty), but that seems excessively draconian.
Finally, I secured permission from my boss to go see Matrix Revolutions during lunch tomorrow. So I'll give you a review tomorrow for all of those who didn't get to sneak out during lunch. There are finally some reviews showing up for it on Rotten Tomatoes, but they're running only about 40% positive. Oh well, it doesn't matter how bad it is, I'm obligated as a geek to go see it. I've been hugely disappointed with both of the last Star Wars movies, but I'll still be there when Episode Three comes out, just like a lemming over a cliff...
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Ross
Last Wednesday, my mother threw a Halloween party for all her grandkids. Generally speaking, you can make an event fun for children or fun for adults, but it's very difficult to make it fun for both. This particular party was squarely geared towards being fun for children, with the adults hanging around as chaperones and so my expectations were pretty low. But then my dad, who recently retired from life as a sleep and shiftwork consultant to become a science and math teacher, decided to show us an experiment he's been trying to perfect involving a lightbulb and a microwave, and that's when things became fun for children and adults.
The experiment was fairly simple: put a lightbulb in a microwave oven. The complicated part was trying to get it to explode reliably. My dad claimed that the first light bulb he had tried had exploded right off the bat, but after heating and sometimes melting several bulbs we were unable to get any of them to explode. At that point we started to look more closely at his first attempt, and discovered that while we were using a large plate he had used a smaller plate. We tried the smaller plate and sure enough the bulb exploded, but even with the smaller plate subsequent attempts were not universally successful (though one was so spectacular that my mother is going to be picking tiny pieces of glass out of her Lean Cuisines for a month). So we're still working on getting our success rate up.
I hadn't been thinking much about the problem when I just happened to stumble across a page entirely devoted to Unwise Microwave Oven Experiments. Though I'm somewhat disappointed to find that this road has been travelled before, it's nice to be able to find some previous documentation to help guide future research. And you can bet that there will be future research -- the possibility for destructive mayhem is just too enticing.
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Ross
Let's have a little talk about lemmings. There has long been a belief circulated that lemmings will commit suicide by rushing over the edge of a cliff when overpopulation gets too bad. This belief was perpetuated by a Disney nature documentary called White Wilderness, where lemmings were forced over a cliff by the filmmakers. Beyond this being yet another example of the evil that is the Disney corporation (don't get me started on the year Eisner made 600 million), it's another chapter in the unfair maligning of rodents.
Well, there's good news: the mystery of the lemming has finally been solved. In a 15 year study of a 75 sq. km valley in eastern Greenland, scientists discovered that lemmings do have a big overpopulation problem, but that as one might imagine, predators are more than happy to step in and help the lemmings solve it. In particular, as I'm sure everybody guessed, the stoat is the key to the whole situation (how many times as a writer do you get to say that?).
In any event, it's time to get to work. The next adventure is coming along and should be out next week. Wil Upchurch dropped me an e-mail in the last couple of days to tell me that the double dungeon should be done this weekend, so that will be coming up. In addition, we'll probably have another adventure from Luke Johnson coming up, and on top of all that there's some big announcements coming down the pipe in the next little while, so things are happening. Good things, even.
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Ross