Games people play and/or make

Last week, in my coding/web development class, we not only had to make a Checkers game in Javascript, but for our first hackathon, many people went ahead and created computer games, including a computer version of Speed. Which I guess is kind of like Spit, which is what we played in the Blattberg house.

All of which led to a discussion of card games at the DevHouse, which led to a long night of Cards Against Humanity (with a little Egyptian Ratscrew on the side, for nostalgia's sake). And being as we're all web developers in training, it wasn't long before we started proposing alternate rules and hacks. So, for your edification and annoyance, I present, a few strange ideas/sub-ideas for Cards Against Humanity.

1. Throw a random white card in with everyone's choices
1. Give the Card Czar the black card if they guess the random white card
2. Let anyone throw in two white cards, but cost them a point if neither of their cards are chosen.
3. Play card-on-the-forehead-style, where the Card Czar doesn't get to see their card, but has to infer it from the option given.
4. ...

Actually, I guess we didn't have too many ideas for hacks/add-ons to the game. Not so easy to come up with ideas when most of the game is focused on coming up with some ridiculous and awful materials.

Though I think my favorite combo of the night was when the players were asked "What is Batman's guilty pleasure?" and the winning answer was "Vigilante justice."

I just love the idea of Batman talking to people (while he beats them up, probably), saying, "Oh, don't tell anyone about this, it's sort of my guilty pleasure."

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 245: Truman Capote, On Richard Avedon (#245)

Truman Capote, On Richard Avedon (1959) from Art in America 1945–1970: Writings from the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism:

If you're here, then there's a chance you'll know I went through a pretty hard-core photography phase. (I mean, if you're here, you're probably me in the future, trying to remember something I wrote in the past.) I never wanted to be a photographer, but I brought my (film) camera around just about everywhere. I had three nice lenses and a fair bit of dark-room experience, long before photoshop made photography a less chemical-filled experience. I also had access and flipped through a bunch of books on the great photographers and I loved to look at Steichen, Munkasci, and Man Ray's works.

And yet, four pages on Richard Avedon, and I feel my mind start to wander. Don't get me wrong: there is something thrilling about the master, the perfectionist, and their on-going quest for the perfect work of art. But that thrilling something isn't always enough to catch and keep one's interest, especially when there's not all that much else there besides "This guy is good at his job."

I'd much rather look at some of Avedon's work.

Shower Awkward Comics #13: Inheritance

Exercise on the cheap

I ran outside this weekend, voluntarily. I was neither running to the bus or running away from slavering hordes of zombies. (Why are the zombies slavering? Do their salivary glands still work?) I ran just for health reasons.

Let's edit that: Health and financial reasons. Back in San Angelo, I used to go to the gym in our apartment complex. It was cheap, convenient, and almost always included at least one working piece of equipment.

Here in Austin, I have not yet made the plunge and bought a new gym membership. There are some cheap-to-reasonable ways to get a gym membership here. (For one thing, the Rosewood Park near-ish to the DevHouse has a really... uh authentic exercise room. And it's only $15 a month, which is pretty cheap.) But there's nothing that's both cheap and convenient. In San Angelo, I would go to the gym almost every day because the gym was less than a five-minute walk from my apartment. Put another obstacle in front of going to the gym and chances of going drop precipitously.

But what if the gym weren't just near the house, but right outside? What if the whole world was your gym? Ugh, that's too much, let's shrink it down: what if you just ran around inside the cemetery very close to the house? That way you get to avoid the annoyance of other people driving/walking and you get the fun of looking at some old graves.

Of course, that said, I feel like I might need to get better sneakers if I'm going to start running with any frequency.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 244: F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Ice Palace (#244)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Ice Palace" (1920) from F. Scott Fitzgerald: Novels & Stories 1920–1922:

I have a secret love of Fitzgerald. No, not secret: late. I'm not generally a believer in the idea that literature classes ruin people for books (or vice versa); but I do remember reading and hating Great Gatsby in high school and only later on realizing what sort of game he's playing.

Which is why I'm pretty unreserved in my recommendation for people to read some Fitzgerald, such as the earlier LoA stories: "Bernice Bobs Her Hair" (rom-com with a bitter end), "The Cut-Glass Bowl" (a beautiful transition from laughing at a character to feeling her pain), and (to a lesser extent), "Porcelain and Pink" (light comedy in a bathtub). I'd also recommend all those as a primer before getting to today's story, "The Ice Palace."

The LoA headnote makes a lot of Fitzgerald's biographical connections to this story: in the story, we follow a Southern belle with a certain not-so-Southern liveliness (so says the story) as she gets engaged to a Minnesotan, culminating in her disastrous trip to the snowy North. As a New Yorker and a Chicagoan transplanted to Texas, I feel her pain. I also feel her emotional tumult, feeling that the South is too sleepy and dead, but also knowing that it's dear to her.

(Or rather: as a friend of liberal Texans, I've heard much of their plight, both at home and in the rest of the country, where "Texan" is a byword for conservative.)

In his own life, Fitzgerald was a Northern boy (hey, Minnesota) who fell in love with a Southern belle named Zelda; and once he proved he could provide for them by writing (so the headnote says), they got married. Like the Minnesotan in the story, Fitzgerald got taken to a cemetery by a girl who had some poetic ideas about the dead.

But curiously, in the story--spoiler alert for a story that's almost a century old--the North-South alliance comes to tragic end, whereas the Scott and Zelda story... well, had a different tragic end. Except maybe "tragic" isn't the right word for this story: sure, the girl who wanted to move out of her small sleepy town ends up back there, doing the same things at the end that she was doing at the beginning, but at least she didn't marry the guy, who ends up being a little bit in the mold of Tom Buchanan from Gatsby: a little bit of a giant jerk. I mean, he takes this girl to the Ice Palace (fine) and to the ice maze (still fine) and then he runs, expecting her to keep up (oy vey). Seriously, it's such a drip move to make that I almost can't feel bad when the engagement falls apart.

Of course, that's just the straw that breaks the ice camel's back. Before we ever get to that point, we've seen some of the cultural difference between North and South--the unbridgeable gulf that Sally Carrol "couldn't ever make [him] understand." Or, as she puts it about growing up in the beautiful, glorious, fantastic shadow of the Civil War, "people have these dreams they fasten onto things, and I've always grown up with that dream. It was so easy because it was all dead and there weren't any disillusions comin' to me."

Easy dreams, man--they'll get you every time.

Bonus points for the literature professor who speaks of the Minnesotans growing "Ibsenesque."

Shower Awkward Comics #12: Throwback: my first shower awkward comic

Roundup: blogging elsewhere, hard to get into books, code as brain-colonizer, a weak September movie list

Today, a roundup of smaller topics, for reasons that number 3 will explain.

1) While I'm in the MakerSquare course in Austin, I am trying to blog daily (for now) over at Incremental Code. Writing daily is... perhaps not the smartest thing to do, time-wise; but I'm limiting myself to 15 minutes or less per post; and writing daily helps me to process the day.

2) Before falling asleep many days, I read a few pages of Iain M Banks's 1987 Consider Phlebas, the first book in his Culture series. Banks is loved by people whose tastes match up with mine. And I like it... but I find it hard to get into.

Partly that's due to the writing, which is occasionally odd--and even when it's in a good way, odd prose is odd.

Partly that's due to the structure of the book, which is very episodic: one guy gets lost in space and tries to get somewhere. Even when the scenes are interesting--as when the main guy gets marooned on an island of religious cannibals and has to figure out a way off--it's hard to see the long-term stakes of these episodes. And long-term stakes matter when you've got such a long book.

3) In college, I took some computer science courses, and I noticed that writing code is a lot like playing Tetris: if you do it before bed, you'll start to dream about it. You'll look around the world and say (Tetris) "I wonder if an L could fit under that branch" or (code) "I wonder is a hash would be a better way to model bus riders." Like Tetris, code-writing colonizes your brain. (Kind of like any language, I guess.)

But the real way that code will colonize your brain is in how--hold on, I just thought of something.

::Time passes while I try something out on my code.::

And that is really the way that code colonizes your (or at least my) brain. You can be doing something else and suddenly--wham!--you thought of a way to solve a problem that you were stymied by before. That's just good, old-fashioned subconscious puzzle-solving, the same as when you fell asleep and woke up with the answer.

The colonizing part is when you have to stop whatever you're doing and go check that solution to see if it works. And that example above, that wasn't a joke. I really did have an idea and I wanted to see how it worked out.

Which is great for my code, which is getting incrementally better.

But it sure is hard on the rest of my life, which at any moment can be taken over by a code-related idea.

4) Which brings us to this: For that past few months, I have kept careful records of any movie I saw and I saw a lot of movies. Movies I watched with Sarah, movies I watched while at the gym, etc. So far, in September, I haven't purposely watched any movies. In fact, I purposely watched an episode of Star Wars Clone Wars--and that took me four-five days to watch a 20-minute show. This time in Austin may be not so good for my culture consumption. Which is ironic, since it's Austin and there's so much going on!

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 243: Francis Scott Key, Defence of Fort M‘Henry (#243)

Francis Scott Key, "Defence of Fort M‘Henry" (1814), with an account by Roger B. Taney (1872) from The War of 1812: Writings from America’s War of Independence:

So, sometimes, these LoA stories give a glimpse behind the history: the story from before people knew how history would turn out or a view of a historical event from someone else's POV.

Today's selection doesn't really do any of that. We have Francis Scott Key's "Defence," which we know as "The Star-Spangled Banner." And sure, it's nice to see all the verses and think about people struggling through more of that before they get to see a ball-game.

After that, we get Key's friend Taney's account of how Key came up with that song. Which is almost exactly what we read in the headnote: Key goes to negotiate for the release of a friend; he ends up a temporary prisoner of the British so that they can attack Baltimore without fore-warning; Key ends up watching the bombardment of the American fort; and he is much relieved when, you know, the American flag was still there.

Which means that we get a glimpse of history almost EXACTLY as it is often told. I rarely say this, but you can give this entry a pass.

Shower Awkward Comics #11: Shower cosmicism

Fiasco game play review: Fort Two Fork, TX

For most of my life, I've been into roleplaying games but not a big player of them. It was always easier to collect and read the gaming books than it was to collect actual players (except for a brief, shining moment in college). Even when I lived in San Angelo, where I wasn't likely to get a game going (largely because I didn't leave my apartment), I still read about new games and occasionally put them on my present list. 

Which is how I ended up with a copy of Fiasco, a game where three-to-five player co-create a Coens Brothers-style story where ordinary folk get caught up in schemes that inevitably go horribly wrong. It's really an interesting game, which I liked so much--in theory, after reading but not playing it--that I recommended it on Twitter to screenwriter and occasional gamer John August. And that's how we got this episode of his podcast, where he and two other screenwriters played an on-air game.

Finally, after telling other people about it, I got a chance to play a game last night with some other programmers who live in this student-housing. (Which I will explain later.) Luckily, there were only four of us and one had already played and I had the book with me to refer to for any questions. It all went relatively smoothly game-play-wise.

But as a story, it was amazing. The first part of Fiasco is picking a setting and using some random dice to help build up your characters' relationships according to the setting options. We played in the wild west, so the relationship options included things like "sheriff and deputy," "opium dealer and addict," "reformed criminals," and "mail order bride and groom." As soon as we had those relationships mapped out--and the setting options and dice really help here by limiting the choices--we could instantly see all the forms of conflict embedded in these characters. Which is, of course, why Jason Morningstar doesn't give individual character creation, but only gets at those characters through their relationships.

Perhaps now is a good time to note that our game played a little silly with some parts of the story: our "western" sometimes had Indians acting up on the frontier and sometimes had the internet; sometimes there were horses and sometimes cars; and above all, while character generation keeps things vague, when we never really decided if the "mail-order bride" was actually a woman or if we had a homosexual relationship, that turned into a running joke about how progressive our town was.

As for the story itself, it turned out to be a classic tale of innocence abused: our good sheriff was also an opium addict with a plan to get all he could from the town; our reformed criminal and opium dealer wasn't so reformed after all and wanted to take over the town, using whatever mysterious prize he had stolen years ago in a deal gone wrong; our mail-order partner really did want to leave his criminal past behind and wanted to help the deputy see all the evil machinations that the sheriff and the opium dealer were engaged in; and our deputy, oh our deputy, was the easily confused muscle who kept getting used by people. (Really, I spent most of my night busting in to confront people about their villainy, only to be turned around and sent off to confront someone else. Imagine Brad Pitt's character from Burn After Reading but with a badge instead of a bicycle.)

It all ended with a lot of bloodshed and tears and new bad habits--which is how you want your game of Fiasco to end.

Library of America Story of the Week Read-Along 242: Jerry Izenberg, A Whistle-Stop School with Big-Time Talent (#242)

Jerry Izenberg, "A Whistle-Stop School with Big-Time Talent" (1967) from Football: Great Writing about the National Sport:

It is college football season, which I know for two reasons: one, I'm living in a house in Austin with some people who are interested in college football; two, I'm living very close to the UT-Austin campus. So, yesterday I went out grocery shopping at 9--before it got too hot--and I passed a bunch of people who had set up in the stadium parking lot for some tail-gating. Think about that for a second: people set up to hang out at 9 for a game that starts at 6, knowing that it'll get up to 100 degrees around 2 or 3. That's dedication.

Which is one of the themes of today's LoA story, which is an article about how pro-football scouts discovered the talent pool available at all-black colleges, starting with Grambling State University--and starting because a series of men were dedicated to the work and to the people they served. First, there's Grambling's president, Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Jones, who took a struggling college and made it into a successful institution; second, there's coach Eddie Robinson, who Jones brought on to coach football, and who believed in himself and in his players enough to make them work hard; third, there's the star running back; fourth, there's the black pro player who finds this news article on the college player and gives it to his scout; fifth, there's the preacher and coach who taught Eddie Robinson, etc.

(If you're wondering, women play an out-of-focus role here: they are the mothers who need to be convinced that Grambling is the place for their boys, they are Robinson's aunt who told Jones to go hire him, and so on. Their role is important, but not really what Izenberg is interested in.)

It's all set up almost perfectly for a sports movie: how the little (black) guys persevered and overcame the odds.

Underneath that, though, Izenberg is not shy about the racial angle and about what that means for these men. (Interesting to note that this story was written for but not run at the Saturday Evening Post.) When he notes that Jones and Robinson help their players with their contracts, he notes that many white players would go into those negotiations with a lawyer, but the black, low-income, and rural students of Grambling don't have that option. When he notes how much Robinson gets paid or how many people the stadium can hold--or even that Robinson, after his own graduation from college, could only find manual labor--Izenberg hits on the notion that America hasn't been the land of opportunity for all its children. Which, in 1967, might've been a radical tone for a sports column to take.

Shower Awkward Comics #10: Shower decision tree

Etc., etc., etc.

A few thoughts on mid-life career changes

Labor Day seems like a fine day to consider what work means to life and vice-versa; and especially for me since I've just started an immersive web-programming/development course.

You might think that this is a radical change for me, going from English major to programming, but I've always been interested in science and especially computers. I mean, I had all the classic kid-scientist toys: microscope, chemistry set, physics set, telescope, scissors for cutting through electrical cords when the fan was still on, etc.

I also took just about all the computer science classes that Bard offered when I was there. I started by learning to sort using wooden blocks (cedar, according to the teacher, so after learning to sort we could keep the moths off our sweaters); and I ended by learning assembly code. I wasn't one of the kids programming his TI-85 to play Monopoly in high school, but I did build some websites from scratch in college. So let's not say that this is a big change in interests, just a change in focus.

Now, after that big introduction, I have to be honest: I don't really have all that many thoughts on changing focus. Or rather, I have one big thought: if you're changing focus or even having a more radical career shift, it probably means more to you than it does to anyone else in the room. I don't mean "it's all in your head, man"; I mean, everyone starts somewhere. So even if you started by sorting cedar blocks (which I still have in my closet, keeping my sweaters moth-free), there's still no telling where you'll end up.

But just to prove that I haven't given up all my literary interests, I'll add that many of my favorite writers basically began writing in the middle of some other career, like Sherwood Anderson. Anderson operated a successful business selling paint when, at the age of 36, he suffered a pretty serious nervous breakdown, including disappearing for four days and walking (probably) from Elyria, OH, to Cleveland, OH. (Which really shouldn't take four days.) Only then did he begin writing.

So, if you're changing careers, just remember: as long as you don't disappear for four days, you're doing OK. Heck, even if you do disappear for four days, you might be doing great. Just look at Sherwood Anderson.

2014 monthly movie list: August

1. The Lego Movie
2. Guardians of the Galaxy
3. Saving Mr. Banks
4. The Infidel
5. Bad Milo!
6. Mary Poppins (never seen entirely before and interesting: so much of the story was plot-unrelated spectacle; and the real protagonist of the story--in one reading--is Mr. Banks, who hardly gets any screen time at all, but has the biggest arc, from caring about the bank to caring about his children*; but a lot of this is still very enjoyable and engaging)
7. Brave
8. Turner and Hooch (so 80s, so young Tom Hanks)
9. Pontypool
10. 20 Feet From Stardom

This was a good month. Even the lower rated movies were still pretty solid. 20 Feet From Stardom is a documentary about back-up singers that was very interesting, but not quite for me; Pontypool was a strange horror film that didn't entirely work, but at least it went for something a little different with its language virus and limited setting (a radio station under siege).

Special note here for Bad Milo!, which is a very particular type of horror-comedy film--and that particularity is a lot of anxiety about the ass. And anxiety in general. Ken Marino plays an anxious husband and employee who swallows all his anger and other ugly feelings: when his overbearing boss makes him fire people--swallow it; when his new office is a repurposed bathroom and his new cubicle mate tries to use one of the (non-functioning) toilets--swallow it; when his dad who abandoned him can't bother to help him through crisis--swallow it; when his mom's young new husband is very demonstrative about their sex life--swallow it.

In a move worthy of J. G. Ballard and David Cronenberg, these bad feelings that Ken swallows cause/exacerbate a medical situation: he has a polyp in his rear that is actually a Dark Half. This is somewhat archetypal Jungian/Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde material (or at least our modern form of that story): when someone upsets Ken's character, Bad Milo comes out to kill them--but since Bad Milo is a part of Ken's character, he can't just kill it, but has to reconcile with it.

Of course, given that premise, this isn't a philosophical film about accepting your shadow--or it is a film about that, wrapped up in a lot of jokes about things coming into or out of Ken's ass. As you can tell by the fact that I don't even know Ken's character's name, the film is not a masterwork of narrative storytelling. (I mean, if the main couple is waiting to have a kid, why are they seeing a fertility expert?) But it is a fine execution of an odd premise.

I'll talk more about the film du summer, Guardians of the Galaxy, at a later date.