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Minireview: Halting State, by Charles Stross

Charles Stross is a great writer who manages to convey a lot of heavy-duty ideas within (at times) quite action-oriented and fast-to-read plots. I think there are two classes of books that he writes: the “serious” stuff (Singularity Sky, Glasshouse, etc), and the “fun” stuff (the Merchants’ War series, Atrocity Archives, etc). Halting State is firmly in the lightweight & fun category, even though it does contain some musings on the role of pervasive wireless connectivity and such.

The plot revolves around near-future MMORPGs and the culture(s) around them. If the word “MMORPG” doesn’t ring any bells, this is not the book for you. In general, I found this book extremely funny, but lots of the jokes depend on knowledge of computers, networking and various kinds of gaming. At one point, a character yells “they’re tunneling TCP/IP over AD&D!”. Again, if you didn’t understand that, skip this book. If you understood it and found it funny or bizarre… read on. You might just like this crazy romp.

So, the plot. We have a bank robbery, and some investigators sent to… well, investigate. The problem is that the theft was a bunch of virtual property from a virtual bank (by orcs, to boot), and the main investigator actually works for an insurance company and is in way over her head. Enter a befuddled hacker, some local (Edinburgh) police, some Interpol-like MIBs, the Chinese state intelligence agency and various other players. Things escalate from “just” a weird insurance investigation to death threats, assassination attempts and a zombie flash crowd.

So, it’s mostly pure fun, aimed squarely at (online) gamers and others on the semi-bleeding edge of current tech – and it’s probably more than a bit opaque to other readers. Among the more serious bits, it posits an interesting near-future society where everyone is online all the time thanks to pervasive wireless connectivity via (eye)glasses; a society where the very concept of being “lost in a strange town” is alien, since everyone has real-time GIS navigation feeds active (in addition to hundreds of other real-time helpers). Is that where we’re going? And is it a good thing or bad?

Minireview: Don't Lose Your Mind

A pair of government agents stalk a runaway girl armed only with a teddy bear. They are never heard from again. A psychopathic hero wields every blade that ever murdered, carving off pieces of his personality in an effort to beat back the Nightmares. A temptress lures the cruel and vile to assault her – only to trap them in a prison built from her own ribcage. Trailing ash and burning footprints with every step, a man cursed with Orpheus’ gift delves deeper into Hell each day on a quest to find the last missing puzzle-piece needed to rebuild his late girlfriend from the wreck she has become…

Don’t Lose Your Mind is a supplement for the brilliant and strange Don’t Rest Your Head game, written by Benjamin Baugh of Monsters & Other Childish Things fame. It’s basically a “madness toolkit” – since “Madness Talents” feature so heavily in DRYH, coming up with a good one can be tricky. This book leaps to the rescue, dribbling ichor and making strange noises. It’s a very good book, but (like the core game) extremely strange. We’re presented with 26 Madness Talents, each one weird and very detailed. In addition to the basic idea of the talent, the book also details how the talent is slowly tearing you apart and what sort of Nightmare you’re turning into (if you don’t keep the “talent” in check)… so the book also doubles as a book of new monsters for the game. Nifty. We’re also given some tips on how to handle madness in the game, and some general game tips to top it off.

I was very impressed with DRYH and this book just adds to the fun. Be warned, though, this is not everyone’s cup of tea. The themes go into the “mature” category, and the “talents” outlined here aren’t nice and comfortable “superpowers”. Far from it.

Added note: Fantasiapelit in Helsinki now carries a stock of IPR games (including Don’t Rest Your Head), so you no longer have to order the things from IPR unless you want to. Being able to browse the books and buy if you like them is very nice, compared to online ordering.

Minireview: Curriculum of Conspiracy

The first of two supplements for the brilliant Monsters and Other Childish Things, Curriculum of Conspiracy is the more “standard” one (the other one, Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor, is reputedly a more radical departure from the base game and is also still in my “to buy” queue). Curriculum presents you with a campaign seed for a “Monsters” game, one with a lot of the same Buffy-esque flavor as the high-school one in the core book. It has its own twist, of course; while the locale is still a U.S. school, here some of the faculty know about monsters – and want to control and use them. In other words, some of NPCs are actively hostile to the PCs, and also know a lot about what’s going on.

It’s not bad. The NPCs are nicely detailed and have motivations that aren’t quite black/white. Full maps of the school are given, as are notes on how to run the game. If the idea of pitting the PCs (children) against an actively hostile group sounds like your thing, this book is probably what you need. It’s probably also useful in other “Monsters” games as a source of interesting NPCs. It’s a pretty thin book, with large font – there’s not a ton of content here, though the content you do get is quite good. My copy has some binding problems, not sure if this is a common problem.

Dunno, this feels like a way to run “Monsters” more like a “traditional” rpg… which may be just what some people want. I personally am more interested in the nonstandard aspects of “Monsters”, so I’d probably either use one of the settings in the core, or (more likely) go for the reputedly weird and excellent Candlewick setting. I’ll be able to comment more once I get and read that.

Striders incoming!

Finished Half-Life 2: Episode 2 over the weekend… and now I’m stuck with the rest of the world, waiting for Episode 3. While Episode 1 wasn’t anything too special, the second ep was a hell of a lot of fun. Driving (and mowing down zombies) is always amusing, and the new Hunters were a bitch – not to mention the last big battle, which had me hitting the “reload, dammit!” button more than a few times. I thought the length was pretty much spot-on and the graphics and scenery were great (partly due to me being able to play the thing with all the HDR goodies turned on with my new graphics card).

Valve continues to rock.

Minireview: Alpha Complex Nights

Alpha Complex Nights is a fairly new book for Paranoia XP. It’s a collection of three new adventures, all written by Gareth Hanrahan. I’d say it’s a very good – with some minor disclaimers.

All three adventures share two elements: they all contain a non-standard twist, and they are all quite complicated. Complicated in that they all actually have a back story, and there’s a lot to keep in mind when running them. That complexity also makes them quite interesting, so it’s a some-good-some-bad feature. The twists add to the interest factor.

The first of the bunch is Spin Control, which features the need for the Troubleshooters to control the “truth”. While always being an important survival skill in good ol’ Alpha Complex, here it becomes a mandate. There are also zombies. Yes, zombies. Lots of them. Of the brain-eating kind. Yes, that’s the twist. Sporks also feature heavily. The whole thing is insanely complex, quite funny, and very good.

Second up is My First Treason, where the Troubleshooters… aren’t. Aren’t Troubleshooters, that is. Instead, players play “junior citizens”, fresh from the creche and straight into school (or what passes for it in Alpha Complex). There’s a lot of Harry Potter spoofing going on and lots of opportunities to stab people in the back, blame others, and try to survive. Situation normal, in other words. While good fun and a nice twist, this is possibly the weakest of the three – though that is mostly due to the high quality of the other two.

Last up, there’s Sweep Of Unhistory, where (due to a fairly unlikely plot gimmick) the Troubleshooters get re-cloned time and time again… each time further in the future. While staying quite “normal” in the beginning, the whole thing degenerates into an insane version of The Time Machine, with lots of jokes and references thrown about in all appropriate directions. Alpha Complex where the Commies won (sorta)? Flying Alpha Complex sky fortress? No computer, just lots of slaves and coconuts? Giant mutant cockroaches? All here. It’s a lovely time travel spoof and great Paranoia adventure, rolled into one. Keeping up player interest through the zillion possible futures may be a challenge, of course.

All that is based on how the things read, of course – they sound like lots of fun, but the proof is in the play, as always.

Green Brother Wants to Watch

Sigh, yet another reason to not vote for the Finnish “Green” Party… their latest brainchild is an Orwellian control horror designed to curb driving and to force people to use public transport. There are so many things wrong with it that I don’t know where to start… so I’ll just refer you to a blog entry (in Finnish) that outlines some of the problems.

Also have to love the “newspeak” of calling it a “traffic jam charge” and having it be active a) for the full day, 07:00 to 18:00 and b) in the whole Helsinki/Espoo/Vantaa area. Umm, what? That’s a “tax”. At least be honest.

Maybe Green party members just don’t ever leave the center of their city, or maybe it’s just blatant “let’s call it that so we can avoid calling it by its real name of ‘tax’” word manipulation. Whichever, the fact remains that outside the (very small) city core, there are traffic jams only during peak rush hours and only on certain roads. I’m at work right now, watching the Ring I road (one of the heaviest-trafficed roads in the whole area). It’s now 10:41, and the road is practically empty. Also, most parts of the greater Helsinki area are empty of traffic pretty much all around the clock. Collecting a “traffic jam” fee from some grandpa driving on some empty Vantaa country road at 07:15 in the morning is… pure greed. Or a mix or Orwellian desire for control and hatred of people who drive cars. Whatever.

As is, it’s a pure (almost 1,000 euros per year?) extra tax for people who drive cars in the greater Helsinki area. I thought we already had a kilometer-based heavy tax on that? It’s called “gas”. Driving over here is already ridiculously expensive, few people do it “just for fun”.

I’d support something that limits people from driving directly in (or to) the center of Helsinki during the peak rush hours — because that is a problem. Set up toll booths. Switch more streets over to “pedestrians only”. That sort of thing. There’s pretty good public transport to and from the center from most places, at the worst you’d need to drive to a “connection parking area” and switch from car to bus/train. But “cross traffic” in Espoo and Vantaa in a quite different matter. I’d like to see the idiots behind this proposal do some cross-Espoo travelling, preferrably with some baggage and in a sleet storm.

Stuff like this has always been the problem with the Green Party, and the reason why voting for them is hazardous. For every good idea they have, they have 3-4 really obnoxious ones. The same seems to apply to their candidates, for every smart one you get a bunch of morons I really don’t want to see in office. All parties have this problem, of course, but for some reason the Greens have it the worst. Maybe it’s the fact that the general party line attracts the worst sorts of “ekohörhö” wandwavers, or maybe it’s something in the (organicly grown) orange juice they drink.

You know, I’m basically a fairly green-minded person; not to the extreme extent that some people I know are, but generally… yeah. I love the outdoors and part of the reason we moved to the backwoods of Espoo was the need to have living green things around us instead of asphalt and concrete. However, stuff like this really makes me want to buy a Hummer that runs on baby seal oil and drive up and down Helsinki streets, as a way of saying “well fuck you too” to stuff like this. Well, not really. But the line between “eco-friendly” and “eco-fascist” seems to be quite thin, nowadays.

Bolognese sidesword 101

Well, since Ilkka asked people to write something about last weekend’s Bolognese sidesword seminar, I’ll try to do that (though others have already done so much better than I can).

The seminar had the usual length of our one-day seminars, running from 10am to 5pm with an hour of lunch break in between. The difference to a usual weekend seminar this time was the fact that it was the first assistant instructor test we’ve had. As noted before and elsewhere, Ilkka did very well despite Guy throwing various curve balls in his direction, and passed easily. When he didn’t know the answer to something he didn’t get flustered and just said he didn’t know (with the implication of a “yet” in there). His teaching was straightforward and effective… he talked a lot, but that’s normal and required when teaching the basics of a new weapon system. The pace was pretty good; while it seemed fast in the beginning, in actuality it turned out to be just right, I never felt we were really going too fast. I would assume the pace would be lighter when teaching a room full of beginners, instead of the semi-intermediates the class mostly consisted of this time.

The system he was teaching was based on the teachings of some-random-Italian-dude (sorry, my memory for names is as lousy as ever), with some examples from other-random-Italian-dudes. The style emphasised a natural posture, and for once “natural” here actually meant something close to actually natural. I love the rapier as a weapon, but that stance in that (well, at least in Capo Ferro) is a leg-killer. None of that here, the guards were quite relaxed ones. The way the sword moved was a mixture of the natural and the unnatural (for me, that is). Some basic techniques felt easy and fluid, while others felt very, very hard to do correctly – one specific false-edge blade deflection in particular. One technique was extremely close to a rapier technique, and it was no surprise that it felt easy and natural – I guess rapier training has had some impact, since it wasn’t easy and natural to a lot of my training partners. So it goes.

I really like the sidesword as a weapon and this style of using it seems to suit me pretty well; the techniques either feel kinda sorta natural or feel like something that I can get to feel natural, with practice. Of course, the same could be said of any style, but some are easier than others. I get the feeling that the real difficult part is yet to come with this weapon, here we just focused on the basic moves – tactics are a different kettle of fish entirely. This feels like a weapon and style I’d like to learn better, here’s hoping we’ll see some more seminars etc on it in the future. Many of the moves still felt very clumsy and… well, unpolished, when I did them. Can’t find the proper word to use here… there’s a very specific feeling I get when I do a physical tehcnique and what I do is sort of right but not quite right, my body and muscle memory are still working on the details. It’s like rapier in the beginning, you do things but they don’t feel natural, your body doesn’t snap into them on autopilot. That’s what you aim for, of course, in the long run. It’s a nice feeling when you get there, even part of the way.

Ilkka has matured as a teacher. I remember when I first met him he was a nice guy (as he is still) but very gung-ho and pretty extreme in the physical training department; his warmups got a semi-legendary reputation of being killers. That has shifted into an emphasis on smart use of excercise, on doing warmups that are useful for the specific thing you’re training instead of going for raw power all the time. He has also gotten a lot better at explaining concepts and in figuring out why something isn’t working out for someone else – an essential martial arts instructor skill.

The day was made a slight bit more difficult for me because I had a pretty serious ache in my lower back (started some days back), which hurt my concentration and technique at times. I ate some painkillers to handle that but it was still a bit of a bitch. It’s mostly gone now; no idea what I did (wrong) to cause it, but I think I’ll go to swords training next week. Maybe (or actually: more than likely) I just need more/better muscles in my lower back and abdomen regions. That’s a nicer thought than “I’m getting old” :)