Note: I am aware that comments do not currently function. Please do not write me about it. I damn well know they're broken, and until the administrators of this machine install the Perl modules that used to be here, there's absolutely nothing I can do about it.
"Self creation is the highest art."
--Nikolos Daru Ede
Well, if I'm going to make a shrine to the ego, I may as well start it out with the right quote.
Since my interests are gaming, science fiction, hist
Well, that can't be described as "too easy." But I have now achieved my minimum set of functionality for the home network:
1) The Linux machine appears minimally configured with respect to its hardware, 2) Both machines share the DSL connection with no problems, 3) Both machines can talk to each other through the router, and 4) I can use the Windows machine to launch a virtual desktop of the Linux machine and tab back and forth between them, thus relieving the need for two monitors.
Granted, that last is a bit shaky-- for some reason, I can't get the resolution or the color depth I should be able to, and I have to de-res the Windows machine... not to mention, I have to take the firewall down until the VNC is properly launched-- but in principle, these should be solvable problems. Unfortunately, every step of this process is bitchy (the VNC software has a known, but not well documented bug, and Linux is by definition touchy and poorly documented) but I am hopeful.
We shall shortly return you to more interesting stuff.
Once again, almost too easy. RedHat does not suck as badly as I remember it sucking.
Of course, it fails to suck with three year old hardware and no dual booting. But still, it it does not currently suck. It even got the network card and through the router automatically.
Well, that was almost too easy. Going from a shared internet connection to an actual functioning network only took about an hour and six (6) reboots, including two back to back reboots with nothing in between:
Install stuff. Reboot. Configure stuff. Reboot. Install stuff on other machine. Reboot. Configure stuff. Reboot. Configure more stuff. Reboot. Reboot again.
Huh?
At any rate, aside from the manic tendency to reboot after every keystroke, I actually have to applaud Windows XP. The XP part of this process has been almost pain free. Only the Windows 98 portion has made me desire to bury someone in an anthill with honey smeared on their eyelids. I suspect that were I willing to drop another hundred bucks, I could get this puppy fully wireless in another hour or so. It's probably committing all sorts of perfidies behind the scenes, but it certainly was simple enough.
But, I'm not willing to drop that money right now. I also want Windows 98 replaced by something useful (Linux) before reconfiguring for wireless, and before Linux gets put on that machine, I need to go through and transfer all the documents from the old machine to the new machine. The last time I tried a dual boot system, I used LILO, and LILO was a fucking joke. We're not even going to discuss what the jokers who made LILO considered to be an initial diagnostic routine, or we'll be back to anthills, honey, and eyelids again. This time, it'll be a strictly Linux machine.
Wonder how fast I can copy the entire 11 GB from the 98 machine to the unused 96 GB of drive space on the XP machine...?
So, I have a router, now, and I have successfully resurrected one completely useless three year old desktop PC into an only borderline useless desktop PC (it has a network connection-- the one I'm using right now, as proof of concept, but is only running Windows 98, for Chrissakes).
This has taken me, by my reckoning, approximately twelve hours including a three hour long call to tech support that was ultimately pointless, less a midnight debacle involving a quest for dinner like food-- not to mention more fucking reboots of this piece of shit than I can count on the fingers and toes of my entire Catholic family.
Gosh, I just can't wait for phases two (properly network the boat anchor to the real machine and retreive all the useful files), three (scrape windows off and put Linux on), and four (get the wireless part of the wireless router to work.)
Iesu Christi, I hate networking and operating systems.
Two Line Summary: Forced economic singularity event occurs on a pl
anet in a repressive empire, in a weird background universe, with a spy thriller
limping through the middle of it.
Quick Rating: I really wanted to
like this. I did not, nor can I recommend except in paperback, except for real
enthusiasts of the subgenre.
For those who have read Stross' previous
short story, "Bear Trap" which was reprinted in the collection _Toast,
and Other Rusted Futures, it might be useful to note that Singu
larity Sky is very explicitly set in that universe. At the time I read
"Bear Trap" I thought to myself that it was probably the best of the short stor
ies in that collection to expand into a novel.
It might still be, for
that matter, but this was not the novel that could have sprung from that settin
g.
For those who haven't read "Bear Trap," I'll fill you in on the ba
ckground-- in the past, a strongly godlike AI called Eschaton arose on Earth. F
or inscrutable reasons (inscrutability likely being one of the defining differen
ces between weakly and strongly godlike) the Eschaton pitched 90% of humanity th
en living on earth across a 3,000 light year radius of space, and left each new
community with some life support and a big sign saying, effectively, "I'm Eschat
on. I did this. Don't violate causality in my light cone or I'll terminate you
with prejudice."
Into this background we have a little repressed pla
net in a little repressed empire named Rochard's World. If you think pre-Commun
ist Czarist Russia, you won't be far off. Because the Rochardi all have Russian
and Slavic names (as do their imperial masters) and because the regime is extre
mely repressive, limiting technology to somewhere around ca. 1900 levels, and be
cause the Rochardi we actually see all go around spouting Communist-sounding dog
ma that seems largely generated by scratching out the word "Communist" and writi
ng in "Extropian" in crayon.
Rochard's World is visitted, on the fi
rst page, by the Festival, which promptly dumps ill-designed sat-cell phones on
the populace and gives them anything they want in exchange for information and/o
r entertainment. Since "anything" includes very competent AI and cornucopia mac
hines (I usually call them Santa Claus machines, myself...) this causes an econo
mic singularity, which the pinhead imperial masters of course regard as a milita
ry attack.
So obviously, they retaliate with warships, and, being pin
heads, they decide on a scheme that violates causality, thus bringing us to the
second thread of the novel-- the attempt by two agents of two different agencies
of the United Nations of Old Earth (that's not strictly true, but it's close en
ough and avoids a spoiler) to make sure that causality violating scheme doesn't
go down.
There's certainly enough material here to make a decent nove
l out of. Alas, I can't say that's what happened here. This really has the fee
l of something that wanted to be a rather long short story, perhaps a novella--
and was written in the fashion of a short story-- but then, alas, metastasized i
nto a noderately sized novel.
It didn't work well.
Part of
this is the inherent difficulty of writing about or even near a social singular
ity. That's probably why the grandmaster of the genre, Vinge, only seems to wri
te something every five years or so, in that length. If that. Another part of
this is that Stross' style of writing, at least his short story style, is going
to be incredibly difficult, if not impossibly difficult, to replicate for the le
ngth of an entire novel. Stross' short stories, in Toast, anyw
ay, had a very high cool idea density, and often a very frenetic pace. It's not
only hard to maintain that for a few hundred pages, it's also difficult to main
tain it so that everything makes sense.
But that's only part of it. "Bear Trap" in its seventeen pages, had more cool ideas total than did Singularity Sky in its slightly more than 300 pages. That's not a good thing. I didn't find the rambling and ranting of Burya Rubinstein, inept Extropian Revolutionary on Rochard's World, to be very interesting. There certainly wasn't anything that interested me in the paranoia and blockheadedness of the imperial masters. Both were too caricatured and inept to be of any interest to me, and neither had anything new or interesting to say.
They both just bored me. I am just not interested in the antics of a group of people who, when given access to cornucopiae, manage to get malfunctioning multicolored spork factories out of the deal. Other descriptions were similarly disengaging to me. Nor am I interested in their aggressors, who are even more institutionally stupid than the Communo-Extropians on Rochard's World.
Sadly, the other part of the plot, the bit about the two agents trying to foil the counterinvasion, fell flat for me, too. I never really cared about the characters or the mission (it seemed patently obvious that it was going to succeed-- there was zero tension about any of it, really) and I can't even rouse myself sufficiently from my ennui to explain why it bored me so terribly.
Finally, there's the overall political messages, which were heavy-handed and dull (and all summed up by the most tritely constructed metaphor I've seen in calendar year 2003) to my ears. No, finally there was the revelation of who and what the Festival was. No, finally there were the aggressively wacky hangers-on of the Festival (with them, but not of them). No, finally there was....
Screw it.
Like I said, this probably would have made a decent short story, if not a great one. As a novel.... not good. Maybe the next one will be better.
_The Apocalypse Door_ James Macdonald, 2002<
/strong>
Two Line Summary: I'm not a hundred percent sure the ending
made sense, but it was a damn fun ride to get there.
Quick Rating:
If you like First Person Smartass narration (or maybe, as Kate Nepveu put it, F
irst Person Hardboiled) then it's probably at least worth a look in paperback.
At almost twenty five bucks for only two hundred pages, it's a bit steep for me
to recommend unreservedly.
The Apocalypse Door is th
e story of one Peter Crossman, Knight Templar of the Inner Circle-- an internati
onal man of mystery, a devout Catholic priest with a checkered history, an attit
ude, and a demonstrated ability to kick ass, get the job done, and narrate a fin
e tightly woven tale in the process.
The story opens with Peter being
given a Journeyman to evaluate, and a task to accomplish-- some UN officials ha
ve gone missing and for some reason people believe they are being held in Newark
(yes, Newark) and the whole assignment lands in the laps of the Knights Templar
. Ie, Peter and his journeyman, Simon B-for-Barnabas LaRoche. The Templars, in
Madconald's background, are the same worldly and now world-weary organization t
hey were meant to be. They are highly secretive, highly competent, and when the
Lord needs someone to kick ass and take names, the Templars step in. They conf
ess to each other, so that's okay.
The story progresses very rapidly as Peter and Simon don't find their quarry but do find some fungus with some very disturbing behaviour, pick up a partner in crime, Sister Mary Magdalene ("the fun nun with the gun") and generally engage in hardboiled, distinctly weird, and Catholic-themed hijinx for another two hundred pages or so. Oh, and there's an alternate storyline, told in alternating and very brief chapters, that doesn't seem to connect at all, but definitely does so at the end.
As I said in the two-line, I don't know if the final resolution makes a terrible amount of sense, and there's perhaps one or two convenient coincidences too many for my taste, but it's a hell of a lot of fun getting from the start to the end. Peter Crossman is a wonderful narrator, with just the right touch for a plot like this. He is eminently quotable, and I could probably come up with a dozen good ones just thumbing through the pages. But I'll present only two. (The first looks like a spoiler, but it's so early in the book, it hardly counts, in my opinion.)
"The mushroom stalks had seen a cross and acted-- scared. That's never a good sign."
And,
"Pudgy reached in his pocket, pulled out a pair of thumbscrews, and rolled them on the table. 'You want we should call in a Dominican?' he asked. 'We can get one.'
"The Dominicans. Lovely. Torquemada's old gang. Some of them could make Joey's people look like choirboys, once they got going."
(Some of these might be more chuckle-worthy if you are or were Catholic. And went to a Catholic school. Went to a, er, Dominican-run Catholic school.... Although I'm a bit disappointed that he didn't roll the 'domini canes' pun in that scene, somehow.)
I bought this yesterday afternoon, got home around 10:30 PM, and read it all before going to sleep. So I obviously enjoyed it. It was fun. Recommended, at least in paperback.
As an aside, I am aware that the comments still don't wor
k right. However, I am also aware now, that it is categorically not my fault.
Something on this site has broken that is beyond my control, and I can only s
it and wait until the people I told about it get around to fixing it.
Perhaps that will happen soon.
In the mean time, even tho
ugh my lack of comments has dramatically reduced my will to pontificate, I shall
nevertheless address:
How do you use different frames of
reference or mindsets in your games? In what ways do your characters or NPCs in
games you GM think differently from the people around you? What sorts of things
make them different (societal, mental, physical, etc.)? Do you feel that you?re
successful in incorporating and showing the differences?
This pr
obably deserves more responses than it really got, so even though I am not feeli
ng writerly without properly functioning comments, I'll take a crack at it. I w
onder if it's coincidence that I've gravitated to two games, Amber and Nobilis,
that can reasonably cover almost any range of PC/NPC positions on this subject?
Even on reflection, I'm not really sure. But the more I think about it, the m
ore I think that if you're a Gaming Contract kinda person, this is really someth
ing that ought to be at least mentioned or alluded to somewhere if you as a GM a
re really going to make an issue out of it-- because at core, those of us who ha
ve modern sensibilities on the issue really might just not find it all that enjo
yable to play a character that far away from those modern sensibilities.
The hierarchical order that Ginger brings up for Amber is one thing. That
doesn't chafe me, in particular, although I admit I haven't given it much thoug
ht with Brennan since he's usually not dealing with his lessers all that often.
Thinking about it, I suppose it's not unrealistic for Brennan to have a viewpoi
nt similar to some of Corwin's from the first five Amber novels-- a certain sens
e of empathy toward the poor shadowfolk. He has, after all, been kicked around
to a very great degree for the early portions of his life. On the other hand, h
e's spent most of the rest of his life-- the longer portion by far-- clawing him
self to a position where he's closer and closer to the top of the heap. And he
demonstrably does have abilities over shadow that a countable and small collecti
on of people have. He is fundamentally different from almost everyone else, and
he knows it.
Brennan probably thinks he's a screaming liberal as t
hese things go, but when the chips are down, he'll probably abuse the poor shado
w folk just as badly as anyone else. As I say, though, as long as the focus isn
't on screwing over the mortals, the medieval hierarchy as portrayed thus far in
Ginger's (and Michael's) House of Cards game isn't too radical a shift. I can
almost gaurantee, though, that I can come up with perfectly realistic and histor
ically justified mindsets that, no, we don't really want to play through,
after all. Knowing that everyone is going to have a different threshold, thoug
h, makes me think that if I'm planning on making it an issue in my game, I eithe
r need to make the game such that someone with modern sensibilities could reason
ably exist and can function, even if they catch some grief for it. Either that,
or as a GM, I'm obligated to point out my goal for the game.
To a de
gree, I've tried to do that with In Media Res, my Nobilis game. Many, many of
the major NPCs and even the PCs should have a horribly casual contempt for the n
iceties of modern society and values-- they're trying to protect the universe fr
om utter and complete annihilation, dammit, they hardly have time to worry about
whether an innocent person (or an innocent civilization!) gets crushed in the b
attle. Besides, they're just mortals-- individually, they're not that important
in the ultimate scheme of things. Crunch all you want, we'll make more. <
br />However, I'd be a fool to assume that all five of my players are going to j
ump right into that attitude feet first-- or even want to. Like many other poss
ible problems, the starting gambit of making all five player character be very v
ery new Nobles goes a long way to covering it. If you've only been a Noble for
a day, it makes sense for you to still be a little attached to your old notions
of justice and fairness and procedure. It's been good for me, too, since really
playing NPC Nobles well requires me to go in search of my Inner Ham, my own per
sonal Kenneth Branagh meets Al Pacino on crack, scenery chewing mania, and servi
ng it up in a different and recognizeable format for each NPC Noble!. Th
at ain't easy. Fun, but not easy. So the introduction method I chose lets me
ease into things, too. As yet, the only Nobles that the PCs have met have been
in the safety of one Chancel or another, where fights and serious cross purposes
have been out of the question.
When they meet some others out in t
he wide, nominally neutral world, that'll be a little different. There, people
can start playing hardball.
Another incredibly nifty thing about NPC
perspectives in Nobilis is the amazing degree to which you can be well and truly
subversive, with comparatively little effort. Just giving slightly unexpected
permutations of Domains in the same Familia, or unexpected allegiances can mean
so much. One of the two Familias that my player group are involved with
right now work for Ba'al Torifah, a DarkLord. DarkLords, for those not knowledg
eable in Nobilis lore, are one of the only two Imperial groups that really give a damn about humans one way or the other... and they care only to the extent that they'd like them all to commit suicide and die. Literally. The estates under Ba'al Torifah are:
War. Okay, that sounds like a suitably Dark estate. Politics. Okay, that's pretty straightforward, too. Spiders. Right, enough said. Games. Games? Yes, Games.
It was one of those ideas that came to me in a flash while thinking about the design of the campaign, and I knew that the Sister of War and Politics simply had to be Games. Spiders came later. That grouping of three speaks volumes about the nature of mortal competition, and the way in which mortal war and politics are viewed among the Nobles in general-- as something closely related to a game, and nothing more. Not to mention, almost every culture on earth (if not literally every culture) thinks highly of games and competition, even if some have started to view war as a bad thing. Sometimes, a poor mortal just can't tell who his friends are.
There are more examples I'm just waiting to spring on my players, so I can't talk about them.
But as a fictitious example of subversion, I think most Western players would automatically associate Democracy with some positive-sounding affiliation, such as the Light, or Heaven. There is no Power of Democracy in my game (it would fall under Politics, I guess, or be shared between Politics and some other Estate) but if there were, I'd be tempted to make it an Estate of Hell, just to make the players' heads hurt.
Another good head fake is making the Heavenly Power that is a right Bastard, and the DarkLord that's a much better drinking buddy, as long as you can get past his politics. All of these are major challenges (for me, at least) in running a good game of Nobilis. So it's a good thing I eased into the deal myself.
