My next "game event," entitled "The Mischief of the Great Squee," poses several problems with regards to the gaming "system."

Specifically, it doesn't lend itself to . . . well. Any of them that I or any of my players may be familiar with. I mean, the player characters are going to be churchmice. The game is "Rats of NIMH" meets "Prince of Darkness".

(The closest system that might work that I can come up with is Bunnies and Burrows, a game from the Dark Period of the 1980s. I am pretty sure I own a copy of it, but I don't remember seeing it in a long time, so who knows. My library has about 30 years of gaming cruft built up; shit gets lost.)

So, for real. I could spend a lot of time hacking together some simple d20 variant, or even a d100 thing, but what's the point?

All of the characters are mice.

What's the point of picking up skills? They all have the same ones: running, climbing, hiding, chewing up shit. They all have the same claw/claw/bite attacks. There doesn't seem to be a lot of point in spending a lot of time trying to hammer a basic system into a game that will be comprised entirely of "special rules."

So, I think I'm going to go, uh, "systemless." No dice, no structure, no nothing. Just players saying "I do this" and then the GMs saying whether or not it works based on the needs of the story at the time.

My hope is that this grants more power to the players to define what happens. If they can justify how and why they should be allowed to do something, why the fuck not? If the players get too clever early on, we just ratchet up the bad-assery of the conflict to match the storyline as is being "written" by the players.

So, anyone have experience running a purely "systemless" game, and know of any caveats I should be aware of?

The next Cthulhu game is coming. This one is . . . radically different. Here is some background story.

This is the story that the Eldest Mouse tells to the pups.

"Gather 'round, little ones, you pups, you squee, and I shall tell the story of how we came to be.

Once upon a time, here in fair Jaru-Selme, we were but dumb and liken to those we call "squeakers". The gift of speech was not upon us then, and our instincts were our only moral compass.

There came a day when the Squee Most Holy, the Pup of The Great Mouse in the Sky, him the Furless Giants call "Mr. Jesu", was born and dieded near This Place. The Romish Cats stuck pins into his paws and left the Squee for the Snakes. And he dieded, and was bound in ropes, the Squee Most Holy, and placed in the Tomb Not Far from This Place.

But the Great Mouse was Ears Up, and saw that the Avatar was died. So the Great Mouse went to his Pup and whispered into his ears: Awake, awake! And so the Great Squee awoke from deaded!

But the Squee's paws were bound! He could not escape the Tomb Not Far from This Place. And a sadness came upon the squeakers and the dumb, and they knew of this. So a small mischief crawled between the cracks of the door of the Tomb Not Far from This Place. And they found the Great Squee, bound in ropes, but in the form of a Furless Giant.

Being dumb, they knew not why they did what they did. They set about to chew away the ropes bounding the Great Squee, so that he could be free again, and leave the Tomb Not Far from This Place, and go to hissown Mischief, the Twelve Squee.

But before he rolled the rock away from the Tomb Not Far from This Place, he said to the teenies, "You mischief! You have saveded me, and the Great Mouse loves you! Forever shall you have a Nest in my name, and from this moment you shall no longer be Squeakers, but shall have speech!"

And lo! The mischief was struck with the gift of ManSpeech! I should hope not to tell you the obvious - that we are all children of that mischief. For that is how you and you and I are not squeakers but are part of the Holy Mischief of the Great Squee, and why we live so long and deeply.

For generations of pups, we have Nested in This Place. We collect the Lost Things, and ready for the return of the Great Squee. This is what we are, and who we are."

The Ballad of Gay Tony, Grand Theft Auto IV's final downloadable content package, dropped this week and I figured I would waste my weekend on it. I loved the previous DLC offering, The Lost and Damned, so I was more than happy to drop the dosh for this one.

I am currently paused halfway through the final "storyline" mission so I think I can talk about it.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is a parachuting simulation game with some side-time spent at Studio 54. I almost wish I were joking about that but I'm not: a rather disturbing percentage of your missions in this game involve parachuting and/or helicopters. Or jumping out of a helicopter with a parachute. The largest mini/side game in TBoGT is actually (wait for it) base jumping.

The guy who sells guns out of the back of his van will also sell you parachutes. Just sayin'. There's a lot of emphasis on it.

When you're not parachuting, you're usually going to be either a) stealing weird shit for some hyper-rich spoiled Arab; b) murderizing people for some Russian gangsters, or c) running errands for the game's title character, "Gay" Tony Prince, your business partner, with whom you own two nightclubs (one gay, one straight).

So, blah-de-blah. Let's just get the "gameplay" conversation out of the way.

This is a Grand Theft Auto game. That should be all you need to know about it. I will say that Rockstar has performed admirably and up to par by including a mission that is ri-COCK-ulously difficult, and they did it at the beginning of the game.

(You'll know it when you hit it; it's called "Sexy Time" and it seems easy until you have to shoot down some escaping gunboats and then you'll start crying. My advice: Buy a bunch of rocket launchers. Find out where the boats land. Take the copter there; land early; wait; shoot them with the rocket launcher. Just don't even try to do it with the helicopter because, for real, you'll start crying.)

Other than that, the story missions are pretty much a combination of GOTO/KILLALL. The side missions are interesting (club management, for instance), and there are now another 50 birds to kill (I'm soooo not doing that; 250 pigeons was enough kthnxbye).

Are we done with the gameplay conversation? Can we talk about the story and characters? Because that's the juice.

Despite the game's title, you do not play Gay Tony. And now, I imagine a whole slew of homophobic and gay-curious-but-denying-it-by-pouring-on-testosterone dudes sighing in relief. No, no. You play Luis Lopez, who is straight (and actually somewhat of a player). Gay Tony is your boss.

Previously, I've spent a lot of time focusing on the psychology of the protagonists in the previous two games, Niko Bellic and Johnny "The Jew" Klebitz. They are interesting characters and worthy of study: Niko is a clever nihilist; Johnny is a clever optimist.

Luis is a different sort of person.

He's a man with a flexible moral code, obviously. We wouldn't have a Grand Theft Auto game without it. He is an Hispanic from the projects, and his past life comes to haunt him from time to time. He spent some time in the pokey and when he got out he hooked up with Tony and became a business man - and a successful one.

Like Niko and Johnny, Luis is a clever. But he's neither nihilist nor optimist; he is a pragmatist and a realist. He doesn't really have any pre-concieved notions about how the world works (like Niko and Johnny); the world just is. He doesn't believe that it's out to "get him" nor does he believe that it is his pal.

Luis is a funny guy. He has probably the best dialog out of the three primaries, but that is possibly because there's no real emotional baggage associated with it. When he dresses someone down, it feels genuine: he's a "really real" dude. He's got no bullshit about him whatsoever.

Sadly, this kind of makes him boring.

The most interesting character in the game - and perhaps in all three games - is Gay Tony himself. He steals every scene and every conversation he is involved in. He's smart, funny, clever, driven, and powerful. He's not a mincing stereotype; despite his nickname, his sexual orientation has little to do with defining who he is.

The banter between Luis and Tony feels very real. Tony is a surrogate father for Luis, and the two of them have a very real love for one another (but Not In That Way). The previous games have explored "male bonding" (Johnny Klebitz and his crew; Niko and Roman), but hadn't really stepped into the father/child or mentor/student relationship space. This is what we explore.

Tony is a man with problems. Many of them. A large part of the story's drama is derived from watching him self-destruct through a series of poor choices. There comes a time when we wonder if we shouldn't just cut Tony loose and let him rot, but he continues to surprise and delight.

So yes. I'm saying that the most interesting character in a video game that I've been exposed to in probably 10 years is a 45 year old, gay nightclub owner with a drug problem who is experiencing a mid-life crisis.

And I never thought I'd write that sentence.

The Ballad of Gay Tony is about a 10-15 hour experience, and worth the money. You should play it. It won't turn you gay; I swear.

Brütal Legend is a game where yoü wander aroünd exploring a world torn straight from the cover of Dio's Holy Diver and pay homage to the Trüe Metal.

Büt more on the game in a moment.

I have, in my possession, a jean jacket. It has an old-school Iron Maiden backpatch (poorly sewn in places, held on with safety pins, natch). The jacket provides me with a strange level of internal comfort and pleasüre. Not becaüse it's cool or rockin' or whatever (it is) - büt becaüse it says to me, "roots."

"This is my history."

I was a metalhead growing üp. My Roots gain noürishment from the dark potted soil that is Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Led Zeppelin, Ronnie James, and the Prince of Darkness himself, Ozzy. Smoking cigarettes and listening to Judas Priest, getting stoned and thrashing to Metallica, playing Dungeons and Dragons while listening to Slayer. Camping oüt all night for Mötley Crüe tickets.

We üsed to watch Headbanger's Ball jüst for the faint hope that they might play the video for The Last in Line. I decided to learn Latin jüst to translate the writing on the borders of Sacred Heart.

Did yoü know that the rünes on Ozzy's Speak of the Devil albüm are actüally written in the Dwarvish langüage from Tolkien's Lord of the Rings? I fückin' did. Me and my coüsin spent all night one day translating them. They talk shit aboüt Sabbath kicking Ozzy oüt of the band.

So, I say to yoü, dear readers, that this game. . . I wish I had written it.

Brütal Legend (and we have to üse the ümlaüts) is a tribüte to everything that is fine and good aboüt the genre of Heavy Metal. Tim Shafer and Double Fine are sending a message: "We ünderstand yoü."

The game takes every goofy heavy metal fantasy that has ever appeared anywhere and türns it into reality. Smokey, apocalyptic landscapes? Check. Hot chicks in leather? Check. Giant fücking axes? Check. Melting people's faces off with güitar solos? Check. Driving aroünd in a soüped üp Deuce-Coupe listening to Diamond Head's original Am I Evil? Check.

It's so fücking cheesy büt that's what makes it so fücking wonderfül. I'm going to try to explain the in-jokes throügh the üse of hyperlinks.

What's to say aboüt the gameplay? Yoü play the part of Eddie Riggs, the world's greatest roadie (voiced by Jack Black, who for all he irritates me from time to time, knows the Trüe Metal).

Eddie can büild anything, repair anything. He has the Trüe Metal in his heart, büt he's stück working for a "nü-metal" boy-band and it's crüshing him.

Literally, it türns oüt, becaüse aboüt 1 minüte into the opening cüt-scene he gets killed by a falling beam from the stage. Büt it so happens that he has a magical belt bückle, and when blood reaches it, he is transported to, well, the Land of Dio.

There, we qüickly find Eddie embroiled in a power strüggle between the good, oppressed people of Trüe Metal. They are led by Lars Halford (who looks süspicioüsly like Robert Plant). Also in this motley crew are his sister, Lita, The Kill Master (voiced by Lemmy, natch), and a hot-badass chick named Ophelia.

Together, they fight against the evil glam rock army of General Lionwhyte (who is voiced by Judas Priest's Rob Halford).

Yoü have a variety of weapons, the most powerfül of which is Clementine, yoür magical güitar. With the right güitar solo, yoü can melt people's faces off, or sümmon creatüres to help yoü, or raise relics from the groünd.

It's an "open world" büt picking üp missions is üsüally pretty linear. It's mostly "drive aroünd and fück shit üp" büt then from time to time there are elements of "real time strategy" and command. The first several missions are aboüt büilding an army of headbangers and metal chicks. Yoü'll control them, and yoü have additional abilities that yoü can üse with each "ünit type".

For example, go near a ünit of headbangers, and yoü can enter "Mosh Mode". They form üp aroünd yoü and jüst bang heads, which yoü can then üse to protect yoü and jüst walk throügh large groüps of goons, knocking them down.

To be honest, the game isn't aboüt the gameplay. It's got pretty müch yoür standard tropes foünd in sandbox games now (side missions, collectibles, üpgrades). They have a different paint scheme, one that was made from The Trüe Metal.

And that's what this game really is: it's a love letter to the Trüe Metal.

And those of üs who have heard the siren call of distorted drop d and felt something break forever inside. . . it's a love letter to üs, too.

So, the month-long wind-down of my game has come to a close, and I'll be shutting it off for good tomorrow night. The "end game" has been a fun thing for me and my testers/development team to handle. We did it slowly:

First, access to the "outer" planes was cut off. Slowly but surely, other planes were locked away, until only the Purgatorio (a giant void filled with small "islands" of land) and Valhalla (the "earth" zone) remained. Then, elements of the void started eating up Valhalla. . .

Eventually, the main island in Valhalla was "moved" to the Purgatorio and Valahalla itself was shut off. At that point, the "memories" began appearing: shards and snippets of poetry, broadcast as global messages. These have served as my "bookend" for the game, and serve to connect one of its central themes back to itself.

Here is a log of the "memory shards", including my final speech to the players. They were broadcast in sets, over multiple days.


Set One:

There is a sudden flash of light from all around that blinds you momentarily. As your eyes return to normal, you momentarily see several unknown rune shapes.

Visions and memories, not your own, flood your mind.

There are the eyes of a woman, auburn-haired. Laughing. Her name is Molly.

Here are the cracked and peeling houses of the neighborhood where the you-who-is-not-you grew up.

Two small boys are chasing a dog through a field. One of them has a bb gun, and will shoot it in the side. The wound will get infected, and the dog will die.

The blonde woman buys ice cream for her son. His name is Clay. He has a liver disease. The sun is setting.

The sun rises behind the tower, spreading golden light across a field of yellow grass dotted with sleeping horses. The king is dead; you have failed.

You will hear the racous cries of the fishermen selling their wares one day; the whack-whack snicker-snack of knives gutting tuna and salmon.

The wails of the slaves, so viscous, a pathetic, liquid sound. Mayhaps you'll eat one soon.

You should speak to her. That girl. You know the one I mean. Tell her soon; the world is ending.

The symbols fade and the world rightens.

Set Two:

The true name of the Maker lies hidden between the muted rhythm of a heart beat and the liquid eeeeeeeeeeeeeeehhhhhhhh-aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah of the lungs. Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

The dentist grimaces as she sands bits of dried epoxy from a patient's tooth. The teeth are stained - too much tobacco and coffee - and the filling doesn't match.

A handful of dirt splatters on the coffin. The mortuary gave out cards; one side has a picture of a saint, and the other side has the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi. You fold it without thinking and put it in your pocket.

His name is Richard. You can smell his lust; it's a oily tang in the city air. He intends to sleep with the blonde stripper. He will fail. You order another drink and wait, the gun heavy in your pocket.

The prisoners sing spirituals as they work along the road. The pounding of rocks punctuates each verse. The noon sun gleams dully off the black steel of the guard's shotgun.

A young brunette woman leans out of an apartment building to watch a wedding processional in the street below. This moment is captured on a greasy stream of film. It will be one of the few photographs of her. She will die a few years later, the victim of a genocidal pogrom.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Your grandfather is teaching you how to twirl a gun. His enormous hands effortless spin an antique Colt while yours struggle with a cheap, tin pop-gun. You are four years old. He will soon die, and this will be your only memory of him.

Gently the child bobs in the water, bouyed by an air-filled vest. She smiles and gurgles as she learns to swim.

Every time a baby is born in the ward, the nurse presses a little button, and strains of Brahms are heard through the floor.

The tangy smell of cordite fills the air as the deranged assassin finds his mark. The musician dies, bleeding into the gutter. His widow cries over his body.

He is furiously stabbing at the tree where he had carved their initials together inside of a heart. Tears blind him, and he cuts his hand.

The cat is in pain. It does not know how to communicate this to its mother. Instead it sets down, glassy-eyed, barely moving.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Several thousand miles away, an unsung poet dies.

Set Three:

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

She touches his hand, accidentally, electrically. "I'm sorry," she says, but doesn't mean it, not really, he is so handsome. Her name is Hannah; his Francis. One day, in the future, she will bear him a son who will become a president.

You sit at the edge of the lake. Your fishing rod is a simple thing: just a stick with a nylon line tied the end and a bright orange bobber above the hook. Father has a *real* fishing rod, with a reel and everything. There is a metal bucket filled with small trout; he caught them. You will never be happier than this moment, being a son in the moment of your father, who loves you more than you can know. Eventually, you will drift apart, and then together.

He said, "We shouldn't tell anyone about this," as he touched her. She sighs.

I have to let you go. You are no longer mine.

Her name is Tatinana. She likes playing with her doll. Her father is important somehow but she doesn't quite understand. Someday, in the future, she will help to hold down a soldier while a surgeon violently removes a bullet from his chest.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

She doesn't understand. The boy pushed her in the sand; she just wanted to go down the slide. Mother wipes away tears with a cheap tissue. There will be ice cream.

OHGOD OHGOD OHGOD DON'T FUCKING DIE ON ME YOU BITCH. ohfuck you're overdosing. don'tyoufuckingdieplease. Here, take some speed; maybe that will make you well until the ambulance comes.

Things have never been so swell.

The knives! The knives! Once, twice, five, twelve, twenty, they stab and stab. The pain, the pain - my cloak, my hands, the floor, they are painted crimson, this cannot be my blood. That cannot be my son...

I watch the fireflies swarm in the heat. They twist and dance among the eddies of the late summer night; I think of the girl I am crushing on and wish she could experience this with me.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

He is a gentle boy. He loves creatures; he loves the world. Nervously, he tells his parents that he thinks he is gay. "You're no son of mine," father says. "I didn't raise no faggot." There are bruises the next day.

I read your fucking book. Did you hear me? I READ YOUR FUCKING BOOK.

The blood washes down, mixing with the dirt, collecting in the cracks of the soles of my shoes. "I'll have to scrub that out", I think.

She lifts the bowl of soup to her mouth. She thinks of a man she used to love. He boarded a ship one day and she never saw him again.

Thrum thrum thrum.

Thrum thrum thrum.


Set Four:

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

That girl, the one with dishwater hair, the one over there...

"Faggot! Faggot!" They scream this at me as they beat me but I'm not gay! I'm not! Stop! The gravel sticks into my skin, my skull lifted and pounded into it. Jesus, jesus, jesus, STOP.

Here sings the sun. It shines yellow upon the trees. They are golden in its light. I step across a broken branch and take her hand. Her touch is electric, like a jellyfish.

There is a burbling sound as he tries to breathe. Bubbles of blood collect around his mouth; ohgod it hurtssobad. The wrecked motorcycle lies five meters ahead; the car drives off.

"I want a divorce," she says. "I never really thought we had a future together." There is a flash of patience, then a flash of rage. There is a crunching sound as you punch the wall, bloodying your knuckles. "THEN WHY DID YOU FUCKING AGREE TO MARRY ME IN THE FIRST PLACE?" you scream. The wall will bear the mark for two years before it is cleaned.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

The monitors sing. deet. deet. deet. deet. deeeeeeeeeeeet. My friend dies from cancer, unknown, alone, in a hospital in New York. His parents are informed of his illness when they are called upon to claim his corpse.

"I do this for her," he thinks. "She'll love me when it's done." Finger pulses on the trigger: once, twice, thrice, four times. Secret Service tackles him, but the hornets find their marks.

As he lays to rest, her cat settles on his chest and purrs. He is accepted. Once he sleeps, she will slink away, her purpose complete.

"I've seen you around," she says. "You're noticable. 'Hey, whose that rockin' dude, there?'" Stunned, no words, the event passes without notice.

This is your world. This is your life.

Live in it now or be a spectator forever.

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

Set Five:

Thrum thrum thrum. Thrum thrum thrum.

It is July 2nd, 1961. The voices say, "take the pills! Take the pills!" Do it, papa. Do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it, do it. Best of all he loved the fall / The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods / Leaves floating on the trout stream / And above the hills / The high blue windless skies / Now he will be a part of them forever

Christ, she is so beautiful, and I'll never. . . I'll never be able to talk to her again.

"I want you to listen to this," she says. "I think you'll like it." It's a trip-hop drum-and-bass cd. He listens attentively because she is hot and he likes her. He tries not to think that the lyrics mean anything.

A small voice in the back of my skull says "no, stop" but I keep hitting him. He's down, done, drawn - I keep punching. Wet meat, broken bone, my knuckles. Someone grabs my shoulders, pulls me off him; he coughs blood. Someone says, "Cops are comin'". I wake up the next day with damaged hands and no memory of who he was.

"You know, I thought you were going to ask me if we could get another cat," she says. He had asked her to marry him. She said 'yes'.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

"I didn't know it was like this," he said. "I had no idea, I was so scared." He kisses the other boy. "I'm so scared; I don't know what to do, everyone will hate me."

Click, click, click. The bullets go click, click, click as they are slotted into the magazine. Click, click, click. The Ambassador Hotel. He'll be there.

She coughs for the last time. A small amount of blood seeps into the tube. Her family sighs, collectively.

"You know. . . You know that I love you, right?"

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Set Five:

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

To everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under the sun.
A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill and a time to heal, a time to weep and a time to laugh;A time to mourn and a time to dance.
A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing; A time to lose and a time to seek; A time to rend and a time to sew;
A time to keep silent and a time to speak; A time to love and a time to hate;
A time for war and a time for peace.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

Thrum, thrum, thrum.

My favorite quote is by an American author, John Steinbeck. "A man, after he has brushed off the dust and chips of his life, will have left only the hard, clean question: Was it good or was it evil? Have I done well - or ill?"

Do your best to do good things because the time when you must ask those questions comes all too soon.

I have enjoyed our time together.

Thank you.

I kind of got involved in some strange conversation on the intertubes. It involved religion to some degree, and someone said that I have a level of "equanimity" about the universe. I liked the sound of that, as it made me feel less stupid than normal.

(I'm the best there is at what I do, and what I do is pretty stupid.)

I have a big joke that I have been using for several months. That I am a "Militant Apollo Fundamentalist" - that I worship the sun god. There's a reason for this. I figure worshiping the sun - Apollo - is the most productive I can be with my deity worshiping time. Because, unlike other deities, Apollo actually grants shit to you, every day, without thanks:

1) Light
2) Warmth
3) Vitamin D
4) Photosynthesis in plants, which means "food"
3) Sun Tans

That's a lot to be given for free!

Aside from Apollo, you might as well worship Danny DeVito. Because he's the one most likely to hear and answer your prayers.

This makes me sound like an atheist with a bunch of jokes to play.

However, if the truth be told, I best fall into the category of "deist". I believe, through logic, that there is a thing that we might call "god".

How is that, you ask? Mostly, it's Occam's Razor. The most simple explanation is likely the most correct one. I can hear several of my skeptic friends right now screaming, "THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS!"

But it does work that way.

So, yeah. We have this Big Bang thing. Given that, everything falls utterly into what we call "science". However, I have to ask the question: what caused the Big Bang? Well, okay. Many things, maybe? A previous universe collapsing on itself. Or something like that. Who knows?

But what caused that? And what caused the thing that caused that? And so forth, until we have turtles all the way down.

Eventually, we hit the idea of "First Cause". Something existed first. And that's a really fucked up concept. Something existed before time began. Think about it for a second. See if you can wrap your brain around that.

I'll wait.

This is where we start using the word eternal. That word - "eternal" - has been thinned out by our culture. We use it a lot, to be sure. Mostly in Christian creeds, mind you, but even there it has lost its meaning. The word means something VERY specific:

"Something that has always existed, and will always exist, and, through that, becomes its own reason for existing"

Eternal things were not created. There was nothing to create them. They are their own first cause.

That we exist is a given (well, that I exist; I'm not so sure about you fuckers still). Once we have that, it's an (admittedly complex) series of logic steps to find that there must be something that is eternal. And that thing, whatever it is, is the First Cause.

So. To my mind, the simplest explanation as to why the universe exists is that there is something that is Eternal. Occam's Razor.

For lack of a better term, we can call this thing "god."

Now, I am not certain that this "god" cares about us in ANY way, or is even aware that we exist any more than I am aware that there are bacterium swimming in the sweat my skin secretes. We are citizens of 1 planet among 8 (9!) in 1 solar system among, oh, 200 billion, in 1 galaxy among, oh, 10 trillion (easy). Those are some big numbers.

We're pretty much alone, I think.

Further, this "god" is bereft of what we call "morality". I don't think it even cares what "good" or "evil" are. These concepts are things for mortal creatures. I think that ascribing morality to a deity is the height of arrogance. Ants may very well have an idea of what is right and wrong to them but I don't give a fuck. I'll still squash them.

So "god" doesn't tell me what is fine and good or worthy of respect.

Without a deity to provide me with a map to what is right and wrong, I am left with my own, internal moral compass. That leaves me with a set of axioms to live by. They basically break down to a few simple rules, most of which are also driven by logic, and ultimately boil down to "greed is good."

That sounds bad. But let's be brutally honest with each other: you are the most important person that exists from your perspective. Oh, sure, you can try to deceive yourself into thinking "my partner or my children are more important than me" but that's a deflection: the reason they are more important to you is because you place that value on them. You may be willing to die for them, but you do so because you put that value on them.

Everything we do - everything - is for ourselves. This isn't a bad thing! Far from it. Selfishness is good! It's good for everyone.

Why? Because you, me, all of us - we may be individuals, but we are still members of a society. You are a hive creature. You cannot escape being part of the hive: it is part of your very nature.

The stronger the hive, the stronger the individual members of the hive. So, the laws of selfishness dictate that it is to your advantage to make the hive stronger.

These axioms are dependent. If an axiom violates a higher number, you shouldn't do it. Like the Laws of Robotics. Here are mine:

1) Don't be a Dick. Jesus said this, only nicer: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you". Dude had some smarts until he got stabbed and left to die on a hunk of wood. You're part of a hive. When the hive is stronger, you are stronger. If you're a dick, you make the hive weaker. Thus, you become weaker. Don't fuck over people. This is selfish, but good.

2) Take Care of your Peeps. You have a family. It may not be defined by blood. But you know who they are: the people you trust, the ones who will be there when the chips are down. You have to take care of these people as much as you can within your power. Because one day, they will take care of you. This is selfish, but good.

3) Pick a Brother Up. Your fellow hive members sometimes fall down. They may not be your family, but they are still part of the hive. Help them to become stronger, because as the hive grows, so do you. This is selfish, but good.

4) Scotch is Awesome. Fuck it. We've got very little time. As long as you're not hurting someone (axioms 1, 2, and 3), you might as well indulge in pleasure, since that is what makes life worthwhile. It's better to regret something you did do than to regret not doing something. Love who you love, love what you love. Everything drives to this, which is the ultimate degree of selfishness.

Effectively, as long as you follow 1, 2, and 3, you can engage in #4 as much as you want. 1-3 are the base. That's Taking Care of Business.

I am not saying "this is what you should do." I'm saying "this is what I do". It may or may not work for your personal situations or beliefs.

Given that statement, it hasn't failed me at this point.

(There are actual questions here, but they're at the bottom. You kind of need to know the history to understand the issues. If you don't know dick about asthma, you can skip this entirely.)

About two years ago, after a couple weeks thinking I had a super-bad chest cold and almost dying from it, I was diagnosed with what amounts to adult-onset asthma. This was another delicious genetic gift from my parents which, on top of my tendency towards spontaneous pneumothorax, ensures that I will never be placed on the front lines of combat, be a fireman, or enjoy a rocket ship to outer space.

Anyways, the doctor put me on a drug called Advair at the strongest dosage (250/50, twice a day). This drug is designed as an asthma control medication. It's designed to keep me alive so that I don't have any attacks, which, if you've ever had one (especially one that requires the use of your "accessory muscles" to breathe), simply sucks ass.

Well, that did the trick. The asthma cleared up and I got control of breathing again. After a few months, I started forgetting to take the daily dose of Advair more and more often until I had stopped taking it completely.

Every now and then, when I felt a bit liquid-y in the lungs, I'd take a crack-hit off the Albuterol inhaler. But that ended up starting to be bad for me, because it sent my pulse skyrocketing all the time. So I weaned off that, and do what I can to avoid taking puffs from the "rescue inhaler".

(For me, asthma attacks where I take a hit of albuterol go like this: "HOLY SHIT I CAN'T BREATHE I'M GONNA DIE!" (hit from the crack pipe) "HOLY SHIT I CAN BREATHE AGAIN BUT I'M GONNA HAVE A FUCKIN' HEART ATTACK AND I'M GONNA DIE!")

Super steroids.

Anyways, back in March, I caught another "chest cold". Only it, too, was a big-ass, near-lethal asthma attack that kept getting worse over the course of a week. I went to the doctor, and he pretty much yelled at me: Don't stop taking the Advair, dumbass.

Since then, I've been a dutiful boy about taking it.

However, a couple months ago, I started getting some seriously fucked up symptoms. Very worrisome symptoms, because they can point to some seriously fucked up shit (read: Lou Gehrig's disease or multiple sclerosis type stuff).

To wit:

1) Significant muscle cramping in my hands and feet, especially my left foot (about every third day for a couple weeks)
2) Tremors in my hands (sometimes severe enough where I couldn't type or even play guitar)
3) High-to-moderate levels of anxiety pretty much all the time
4) Panic attacks from time to time (usually one a day)
5) Acid reflux type things (maybe once or twice a week)
6) General malaise
7) Unexplained muscle aches

At first I didn't connect this with the Advair at all. It could be a lot of things (like dehydration or even clinical depression). I started making dietary and behavioral changes (including radically reducing my alcohol intake). But the stuff continued.

It wasn't until I made a connection: I usually had the panic attacks within an hour of taking a hit from the Advair disk. Further, that was when my hands started shaking, too.

After this realization, I started paying more attention. After that, I noticed a definite trend (including a very special instance where I felt a panic attack simply crawl up my spine and root like a dark creature after a fire engine came screaming up the street at me).

So I called the doctor and asked to get a reduced dosage. He agreed, and moved me down to the 150/50 dosage, with the suggestion that if things don't get better within a week that we revisit the problem.

Since then, I haven't had any muscle cramping or aching (yay, victoly!), the malaise has either gone away completely (I'm tired a lot, but I've been very busy and stressed). I still have a level of anxiety but I'm not sure if that's drug-induced or not.

I've had two panic attacks, neither of which were pleasant. Both of them were possibly exacerbated by not being in full control of my situations (when you start to feel a panic attack coming on, you start to panic about the fact that you might be having a panic attack, and that's a feedback loop from hell).

So maybe that's good? But I got new shit.

First, I've had heartburn from hell for the past two days. So bad that I don't really want to do anything at all, let alone eat or drink anything.

Second, the back of my throat is filled with mucous. I'm coughing from it a lot - but I'm having no trouble breathing.

So, the questions:

1) Has anyone else had this happen to them? Had this experience?
2) If so, has this been "fixed" for you? If so, how?
3) Should I just wait it out for another week? It's possible I've still got residual shit going on from the mega-dosages.
4) Maybe I'm just fucking crazy?
5) Maybe it's actually some sort of super-fucked up problem like stomach cancer?

Any help would be appreciated, because this shit is seriously impacting my ability to actually enjoy being alive. So much that I'm almost willing to risk another asthma attack.

The game I wrote so three years ago must shut down. This is the message I have written to my game's players about it.
Hello, my friends!

About ten years ago, I adopted a cat. His name was Simon. He was a good cat.

As I write this, several hundred of you are trying to log in and play this stupid little game that I made on a lark, as a hobby, because I had fallen in love with some friendships that I made once upon a time.

Many of you do not know the history of nexuswar or why it was made in the first place. It may help to explain that now.

Many, many moons ago, I made friends with some people in a game called "Urban Dead". You may have heard of it. It's a great game. I loved playing it. I made a lot of friends there, in its metagame. I was one of the founders of the Ridleybank Resistance Front, if you can believe that, and was the founder of the Militant Order of Barhah (the MOB) in that game.

We (my friends and I) loved Urban Dead a great deal, but there came a time in late 2006 when we thought the game was going to die. And we did not want our community - this group of people we had come to care for - to go with it. So I set out to create a game that would replace it should it ever fall, somewhere we could go, and own.

And after two weeks of coding, I had what was known as the very first "alpha" build of Nexus War. It was so much like Urban Dead that I am almost ashamed (but not really, because Kevan is a hell of a guy). The first players came up as alpha testers, and they played the fuck out of the game. They found bugs, they found gameplay issues, they pissed me off.

Did you know that, in early versions of the game, you could actually loot corpses? If you killed someone and they had a Hellblade, you could take it. And then, if you dropped it, it was gone forever.

In the beginning, there was only Northcamp. Later, the rest of Valhalla opened, and during the Beta phase, the first level of the outer planes.

In Alpha, Kibbs was the most brutal player, ever. Everyone feared him. I remember hours of time I spent working to balance the hiding rules just to counter-act his guile and will.

I remember when wcil slaughtered everyone in the hospital with a Death Cloud, prompting me to significantly downgrade its power. I remember the "Zerg Prison". I remember Stroth creating the first faction, "Oblivion Squadron". I remember my boss (at the time) figuring out teleport bugs. Petro dropping his fists. Mr. Shooty's Manifesto.

I loved writing every line of this game. I loved writing every snippet of lore. I loved writing every stupid little routine and in-joke. I loved creating cities and history.

And I loved creating a community for people.

I didn't start out with the plan to "make money". That was never a motive; I wanted to make a clubhouse for my friends. And somehow it grew larger: larger than a treehouse, larger than a schoolhouse, and larger than me.

Anyone who understands business or game design will see immediately that there was never a plan for "making money". That I was an idiot for not doing so.

Maybe that was a mistake? I don't know. I don't think so. It could be argued that if I had a business plan in mind from the get go we wouldn't be here today. There might be money to keep the lights on.

But I'm okay with that, because there's something wonderful that happened along the way, and because I didn't require money:

You.

Yes, you.

The community.

Sure, sure. You guys bitch and moan. At each other, at me, at the game, at the rules, at factions, at the forums, at zergers. But despite all that - despite all that drama - you made friends. You formed coalitions. Groups. Factions. Friendships. Around the entire world.

And so I succeeded in my original goal, and for that, I thank you, the players.

I cannot describe to you how much it pains me to write this. For real, and serious. This has been a big part of my life for three and a half years. I'm trying not to be weepy but that's unavoidable; I, personally, am an emotional creature, so there we go.

About a ten years ago, I adopted a cat. His name was Simon.

He was a teeny-tiny tuxedo-colored cat when I found him. He had health problems, but I didn't care. I nursed him up; he became super friendly. We called him "The Marshmallow Cat" because he was so soft around people. He developed strong friendships with everyone, especially my friend Kristen.

About nine months ago, he started losing weight. Three months ago, he was skin and bones, and the veterinarian was not optomistic.

Two months ago, I put him to sleep. He had stopped eating entirely; the end diagnosis was a stomach cancer. He died very peacefully. I was there at the end, and so was his friend, Kristen. We loved him; he loved us.

He was a good cat. He lived a good life, surrounded by people who loved him.

I remember saying to her, to Kristen, "This is the price we pay. The pain at the end, it is what we pay for the lifetime of love."

This is the end, my friends. The pain, the price? That's mine. I knew this going into it.

I don't know if you love this but I love what has happened. And I hope - with every cell in my body - that I have enabled you to make friends with others. I hope that you have made friendships - strong ones. I hope that, in the months and years to come that you will continue to talk to these people. I hope that you will remember this fondly.

This entire thing would not have been possible without the efforts of some extraordinary individuals from around the entire world. I would like to thank them personally, and will compile a list of them so that you can thank them as well.

But really, the thanks go to you, the players. For everything.

I am a fan of last.fm, and I encourage all of you to create an account and start "scrobbling" your listening habits. It's a really good tool for finding new music and analyzing your own listening trends.

(My profile is jormosaurusrex. Feel free to visit and/or add me.)

However, I ran into an annoyance the other day. I downloaded Lost Season 5 on iTunes the other day and watched it (through iTunes). And, well, last.fm scrobbled all of it, apparently thinking it was music and not video. So I had to manually delete them from the last.fm library, which was stupid.

Thinking to myself, "obviously, this has been a problem before," I looked into the options on the scrobbler app, and lo and behold there is a way to tell it "only scrobble plays from the following directories." Since my music is all in D:\mp3s, I unchecked all other drives, and then I went further in and told it not to scrobble from D:\mp3s\Movies and D:\mp3s\Television (or whatever iTunes calls the downloaded TV directory).

And Lo! It stopped scrobbling *anything*. Nothing went to the server until I told it to scrobble from everywhere again.

So, I pose the questions:

A) Is this a known bug? If it isn't a bug, why is it happening? Because iTunes is installed on the C drive?

B) Is there a work around?

This "all the rss feeds are broken on livejournal" thing is really doing a good job of convincing me to ditch this place entirely.

On Wednesday, The Beatles Rockband dropped and so I picked up a copy because A) I like Rock Band and B) I love the Beatles.

Everyone likes playing these types of games; the challenge is usually getting a group of people together at the same time. However, this weekend, Maynard's kids are staying over, so we have a full band. And this afternoon, we played (and finished) it.

The game is fab-nominal and thoroughly enjoyable from shrink-wrap to disk ejection.

As far the gameplay goes, it's frickin' Rock Band. If you don't know how this works I can't help you. With the exception of vocal harmonics, the gameplay is exactly the same as that from previous versions.

But that's now why we play Beatles Rock Band. We play it because of John, Paul, George, and Ringo; because of the powerful history the band had; because of their journey; because of the music.

Given that Activision decided to include versions of Kurt Cobain and Johnny Cash in their next version of Guitar Hero, and seem to be doing so entirely devoid of respect or concern for those artists and what they represented, I was apprehensive about the treatment that Harmonix would apply to my favorite musical band.

I am exceptionally happy to say that the subject matter was handled with respect and reverence. Each song has it's own background video, and they are tailor made for the specific songs. There's a lot of fan-service involved in this. WARNING: it is entirely possible to fuck up your song because you accidentally pay too much attention to the backgound video.

We slotted the game and blew through the entire story mode in about three hours. I did vocals the entire way (being the only person in the group who can [or was willing] to sing).

There was an interesting thing that happened to us as a group as we progressed: everyone started out on medium difficulty (or easy, for our drummer), and then, as the song difficulties ramped up (got harder), we ended up increasing our own difficulties. By the time we were performing on the roof of Apple headquarters, Maynard (bass) and I (vocals) were playing on Expert, Cailean (guitar) on Hard, and Hailey (drums) on Medium.

(Just, you know, FYI: the game is rather. . . unforgiving . . . on expert vocals. I've been singing "Sgt. Pepper" in the car for 20 years now and yet I failed the intro almost instantly. Octopus' Garden? 100%. Taxman, which is perfectly in my range? Failed. So who knows.)

The end of the game (which is, of course, "The End") is handled in such a way that I got chills up and down my arms.

This game isn't a "party" game like Rock Band 1 or 2. Those games have a very broad appeal based on the breadth of their songlist. I'm not sure Beatles Rockband would hold up on that level - but it was a hell of a lot of fun.

I've finished Batman: Arkham Asylum now. Well, I've finished the story line, gotten all the upgrades, and found/solved all 240 of the Riddler challenges. What's left is getting "gold" on the various challenge maps, which I probably won't do.

For my fellow friends working through it, please allow me to save you about three hours of frustration. All cut for spoilers.

( Are You Missing Joker Teeth? )

( Are You Missing the Last Lore Tablet )

( Other Random Tips )

Many, many moons (circa 2001) ago I wrote a program called Seraphim. Seraphim was, for lack of better terms, a "user-programmable internet radio station." It was a bit more than that - quite a bit more actually.

The problem I was trying to solve was this: I had about 2,000 albums worth of music, and I wanted something that would stream music to my internal stereo. I wanted it to be able to perform the following functions:

1) Allow me (or others) to add single songs or whole albums to the music queue;
2) Track which songs, albums, or artists were the most popular;
3) Have a "smart" Artificial Intelligence disk jockey that could spin music on its own.

The program I wrote succeeded in this regard in all aspects. Sure, sure, the code itself was ugly as shit (and written in Perl). Were I to re-write it today, I would do a ton of things differently. But I had about 8 years less experience writing stuff, so I forgive myself.

At any rate, Seraphim itself became an example of emergent behavior on several levels. Not just in the AI of the DJ, but also in the way that people used the system.

This was in the early days of internet music. Before the dark times. Before the MPAA. I made this radio station and a way to interact with it, and then we plugged it into AOL's network (I won't discuss how that happened because there may be legal ramifications for the people involved). Suffice to say, suddenly a computer in my house was streaming music to hundreds (possibly thousands) of people.

If you had an account on the system, you could do any of the following:

1) Upload your own library of mp3s so that they were available for play
2) Modify the metadata for any song, artist, or album (genres, etc.)
3) Add songs to the system's "queue" - the music it was playing.

(If you were a super-user, you could kill songs from the queue or mark them as "never play").

People would listen to the station rather than their own personal libraries because there was a significant degree of fun involved in being a disk jockey. Perhaps my most favorite emergent user behavior was when someone would start a musical "theme" and the various DJs would try to one-up each other following said theme.

For example, someone might say "the theme is fire". Then, we'd see a bunch of "fire" related songs show up ("Burning Down the House", etc.). There was a game made of the music. It was a glorious amount of fun.

Each song, artist, and album had a "karma" score. The more often it was requested, the higher the karma. Picking a single song gave a +1 to each song, artist, and album. That way the system understood popularity (though the scales were different for each [song, artist, album]).

However, the most interesting part of the system (to me) was that if no one put anything into the queue, Seraphim would "auto dj". And, having lived with it for a year or so, it became . . . exceptionally creepy in how smart of a disk jockey it became.

I wrote the artificial intelligence routines as a lark, to be honest. But this is an example of awesome emergent behavior.

The first thing I did in the system was to "fix" a weakness in the MP3 file format. MP3s have a "genre" tag but that's very limited. It doesn't say a lot; it's a single dimension. So I wrote a large matrix called "Genre Brethren".

For example, "Rap" is a genre brother to "Gangster Rap" and to "Hip-Hop." "Speed Metal" is brother to "Death Metal" and "Heavy Metal". (The system was far more complex, usually seeing 3-6 brethren). Albums, artists, and songs could be tagged with multiple genres.

When in "Auto DJ" mode, Seraphim would start with the most current song and then make choices. Did it stay in the current genre? This was maybe 50/50. If it decided to change genres, it would only move to one of the brethren genres (thus, we don't move from Slayer to Michael Bolton). We keep a continuity of musical style.

Once it picked a genre, it had to choose a song. But that's a trick, right? Obviously, we don't want to pick songs that suck. And that's where I wrote this thing that worked and worked well. To this day, though, I'm not sure how I arrived at the system.

Cheaply, you can just choose the song in the genre with the most karma. That works once. Ideally, though, you'll spread out. So I wrote this complicated system whereby it would pick songs. If I recall correctly (and I could pull up the source to see, but fuck that), it went like this:

1) Choose between Song, Artist, or Album in genre.
2) Within that subset, take the top 50 karma values as a grouping.
3) Within that grouping, weigh each one. Those within the top 5 get +5 within 6-10 get +4, within 11-20 get +3, within 21-30 get +2, everyone else +1.
4) Select within that set based on weight.
5) If "songs", play that song. Done.
6) If "albums", repeat step 3 based on songs in album. Pick song; play; done.
7) If "artists", repeat step 3 based on albums, then go to step 6.

I injected a degree of "fuzziness" into the AI routine, too. Without the fuzziness, it might play the same shit over and over again (like, all of Nevermind on repeat). While the ideal was the highest karma value in a given set, there was logic to ignore that aspect and just pull from lower in the stack (there was a routine to drop out of "standard top 50 of type" mode and pull from wherever, or to overweigh to the bottom of the stack).

As it played songs, it marked when things were last played. Thus, no repeats within 6 hours or so. It also did crazy-ass shit like "look for songs that have a positive karma value that haven't been played in 5 days" and then give those songs extra weight.

What happened was this: I ended up with a disturbing, creepily good disk jockey. My ex-wife and I had multiple conversations about this. We'd be listening to it all day and there would be strange stretches of excellent music choices. So we'd go look and see who had been programming it, and it nearly always turned out to be the machine itself.

I write this only because I'm thinking about writing artificial intelligence routines and Seraphim was one of my first attempts at doing "smart" AI.

Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best version of Metroid: Prime that you will play that includes the Goddamned Batman.

Fer realz, dog.

Have you ever said to yourself, "Self, I sure do wish there was a third-person stealth game where I played the goddamned Batman, trapped on Arkham island, fighting all of the major baddies like Bane and the Scarecrow, where I could hang upside fucking down from the rafters, watching thugs and seeing their fear levels, only to swoop down on top of them, grab them, punch them in the nose, and leave them hanging, trussed up like a thuggy pig?"

If you ever asked that question, prepare for an orgasm, baby, because this game is the answer to your . . . needs.

I cannot begin to describe the visceral thrill that engaged my spine as I took out a room of ten thugs without any of them ever seeing me. You know that scene at the docks in Batman Begins where he takes out all the goons in darkness? One of them shouts, "Where are you?" and Batman just whispers, "here." Bam.

It's like that. YOU GET TO DO THESE THINGS.

But hey, say you're not so into the creepifying ninja type stuff. That's cool, too. You can just swoop into a crowd of goons and go to fucking town. You're the fucking Batman, right? So you can do this, and do it well. Combat is both absurdly simply and absurdly complex. If you do it right, it's a fluid, bone-crunching ballet of broken noses, busted ribs, and cape-swirl induced stuns. If you do it wrong, there's still a lot of bone-crunching.

As you progress in the game you get more . . . bad-ass (I was going to say "more lethal" but the Bat is never about killing). Your initial equipment load is "just" unlimited batarangs and the grapple gun (which, by the way, never gets old). As you progress, you'll unlock new abilities (throw multiple batarangs, better combos, armor, etc.) and abilities (grappleclaw, detonation gels).

These ability increases are where the "Metroid" bits come in: you'll see areas you can't quite get to. Yet. Once you have the grappleclaw, you'll back track to where you saw that grate up high on the wall and pop it open, which opens new areas to explore and be a predator in.

But all that shit seriously fucking pales in comparison to "Detective Mode". Detective mode is a switch, like one of Metroid's visors. Flip it on and all of a sudden your perceptions of the world change. You have better night vision, for one. But you know, that thug lurking in the darkness over there? Now you see him bright as day (though in a skeletal form). Further, you get a read out of his emotional state, whether or not he has a weapon, etc. Grates, doors, other special things start standing out.

Previous Batman games had focused entirely on fighting, which, you know, makes sense given that Bruce is a fucking ninja. But the most important bit to Batman - the thing that makes him the Baddest Dude Walking - is the fact that he's the world's greatest detective. And that's hard to put into a game and make "fun." But Arkham Asylum pulls it off, and does it well.

For example, early in the game, you'll have to track down a guard. You cordon off a "Crime Scene" area and do some investigation. Eventually you find his hip flask, sample the booze, and then, using the bad-ass detective mode visor, can follow the scent of the whiskey in the air to find him.

And then there's a whole series of Riddler-based sidequests. These run from hidden-package collectibles to real "riddles". Find the solution, take a photo, bam, XP. Hunting down Riddler quests alone is half the fun for me.

The boss fights are hella good, too. I mean, like, fighting Bane is pretty typical (dodge his charges, jump on his back and fuck up his venom injectors, etc.) but he's kind of a super-strong thug. The Scarecrow boss fight is clever as all fuck. I haven't run into the Joker yet but I shiver in anticipation.

The voice acting is gold-star all the way. They got Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin to reprise their roles from the old Batman: The Animated Series. Since each of them have played those characters longer than anyone else in history, they're kind of definitive. I love me some Heath Ledger, but Mark Hamill's Joker is a different breed, and Kevin Conroy is the best Batman.

(It also doesn't hurt that the story was written by Paul Dini, who masterminded the DC Animated Universe.)

What I hate: Nothing. This is one of the best games I've played in many moons. You will love it.

Plus: The Goddamned Batman.

Blah, blah, Warhammer 40k.

No heretics were burned. This evening's game was a bunch of talky-talky and character development. Well. As much character development as fascist zealots can have, I suppose.

The end result, however is this:

1) I have advanced to rank 6, and chose the Exorcist path.
2) I was promoted to Interrogator, and given my very own Rosette.

I predict. . . many deaths.

At some point this evening I told a frickin' unbound daemonhost that had been pestering us that he could take the deal he was offering, fold it up into sharp corners, and shove it up his ass (I rolled an 07 WP check, and that's what Victus would do). That was fun, but there will likely be consequences.

Fifteen years ago today I found myself stuck in traffic on the Bay Bridge.

I remember that time very clearly because it was the first time I had ever crossed to San Francisco from the East Bay. I remember thinking "this can't be the Golden Gate because it isn't orange."

I had just driven 2,235.3 miles westward, most of the time on I-80, to move to San Francisco on a whim.

Now it is fifteen years later.

I think I am a "local" now.

So, last night we had a big, big throw-down in our Dark Heresy game. It went. . . well. It went both "well" and "poorly".

"Well" in that we ended up "winning"; "poorly" in that my dude, Father Victus, took something like 25 total wounds during the fight, about four criticals, and had to burn two fate points. He lost his left arm from just beneath the elbow.

Victus, despite being a Red Redeptionist, keeps stats about his exploits. There are tally marks on the character sheet for various things: "Dudes Killed," "Dudes Tortured," "Headshots," "Dudes Burned," etc. All of those went up a lot last night. I think I killed something like 25 people.

(Turns out that a flame-throwing weapon is exceptionally effective at killing masses of goons who are assaulting your position through a narrow cavern.)

Unfortunately, I had to add a new statistic - one that threatens Victus' position as a pure servant of the Emperor of Mankind: Inquisitors Killed.

Yeah. So, you know how we broke some guy out of an Inquisition prison? A prison we had the keys to? Well. It seems someone didn't get the paperwork and decided to hunt us down. A big, bad-ass witch hunter. And he attacked us in the middle of the fight.

So I put him down with a double tap bolter shot to the head.

Changing tack.

I've been thinking a lot about Dark Heresy as a "game". It's very strange, because even though the system is very basic and simple, the game world is some seriously advanced roleplaying. It is absolutely not a "beginner's" game. Go play Dungeons and Dragons for that. Hell, even Call of Cthulhu is an easier game to start with.

The reason is because, in the Warhammer 40k universe, in Dark Heresy, the Imperium of Man is effectively the Nazi party and the player characters are really the equivalent of the SS.

Think about it for a second. Fascist government, riddled with bureaucracy, ostensibly ruled by a hyper-charismatic figure? Check. Hyper-xenophobic foreign policy which encourages the wholesale genocide of any alien populations? Check. People being kidnapped in the middle of the night, put on secret transports, and sent to camps where they are likely to be killed? Check. Ingrained, government-sponsored racism? Check. Forced sterilization in non-compliant populaces? Check.

And the player characters themselves? Dude, we're the fucking bad guys. A secretive branch of the government whose authority oversteps everyone else's, able to commandeer whole legions, whose job it is to root out, "interrogate", and then ultimately execute dissenters?

Totally the bad guys in the story.

Which is why the game is absolutely an "advanced" game. We had a new player start last night, and we had a little chat about it. There are things that my character says and does that I do not and would never do. He fucking *tortures* people. A lot! He likes doing it, too; so much the better that he can do it with religious fervor.

I expect that if most people would be completely appalled if they just observed a game session as an outsider.

And yet, it's one of the most fun games I've ever played precisely because the morality of the situation is so foreign to my own.

Ironic.

This journal seems now to be more about chronicling my gaming adventures than anything meaningful. Turns out that most of what I have to say is best done on Facebook so if you want to follow my day-to-day life you should probably find me there.

I realize it's been a while since I've updated about our ongoing Dark Heresy game. Why is that, you may ask?

Well, we're deep undercover and have been for several sessions.

Many moons ago, we busted apart a (smallish) gang of heretics who were selling a psychoactive drug made from the distilled brains of psychically sensitive citizens of the Empire. We kind of lost threads for the "master" part of that cult and let it go.

However, several months ago (game time) we came across new information, and have since set in motion a broad and intricate plan to identify and hook everyone involved in the production of this drug throughout about 12 planetary systems.

I'm fairly certain that the adventure, as written, meant for us to find out the bad guys on Plant A and then fight them and thus win. However, we decided that that wasn't good enough, so we started infiltrating the cult. We got jobs as drug smugglers for them so that we could find out who they were selling to on other planets. This turned out to be an exceptionally good idea.

The first planet we dealt with: they were chumps. We could have burnt them instantly. But then, in a happenstance, we ran across their number one competition, a group of tech-heretics trafficking in xenos (alien) technology and drugs. So we killed them. All of them - maybe thirty or forty in one building - and took over their organization. Then we told our contacts that those guys had been following us and we were pissed so we killed them and hey, here's all their business as a present.

Many other things have happened since then but we cemented our reputation as "hard core badasses" right then and there. And we were even able to spin a hunt for a major heretic as a "personal vendetta" so we have one cult looking for the leaders of another cult for us.

We have been going from planet to planet, making contacts, dropping shipment, taking names. Cataloging. Cross-referencing. Taking our time, being patient. The drugs are getting sold, and that's bad, but a handful of fancy-pants nobles getting screwed up on a heretical drug is small fry in the grand scheme of the Glory that is the Emperor's Will.

We keep getting tested by the cult. Small things, mostly, but one of our tasks was to break a heretic out of an Inquisition prison. Turns out, when you have a fucking Rosette, "breaking" someone out of a prison that you have the keys to is trivial. I bring different contacts small "gifts" of heretical technology that I requisition from the stores.

Sadly, we haven't been able to kill a lot of people. It's been politics, deception, and intrigue mostly. Soon, though - and very soon - I will close my fist, and the net will drop simultaneously on 15 worlds, and we'll scoop up hundreds of heretics like krill.

And then I will be allowed to indulge my psychosis. I will collect them in a big group and then I burn them all. In a stadium. And we'll sell tickets.

Oh, yeah. My crazy, psychotic priest? He's being considered for Interrogator. So I'll have a full rosette. Then: many deaths.

This morning a friend made a comment about how frustrated he was with the way his company handles design documents and changes. He said he started the day being told "we forgot to include this feature. It's on the 3rd page of the 4th brief." The frustration here is that there are at least four briefs, and it appears that they are continual amendments to a core document.

This is a totally unacceptable way to work. The idea of a "living document" is an easy one to understand but I've never, ever seen anyone get them right. When the process fails, it seems to die not with a bang but with a whimper as individuals slowly stop making edits to some insanely complicated Microsoft Word file and it withers on the vine. Oh well, at least it wasn't loud.

Only thing: there will be a bang. The bang will be the sound of engineering departments getting thrown under a bus because features get missed and clients get pissed.

So, why do we have living documents? Because a bunch of people like using words like "agile development" or "aggressive schedule" or "plug-n-play featureset". So what you're working on, as a team (or even as a single engineer) often changes not only from week to week but day to day. That, combined with the fact that there are usually 3 or more people who will be authors of a document, shows a clear need.

But why do they fail? What causes the wax to melt on the wings?

Well. Lots of things, but they can be broken down into three broad categories: cultural, workflow, and technical. We'll bullet point, because that's organization!

Choice of Document Format.

This is a big one, because it can cause all sorts of problems. The most popular choice for living documents is going to be Microsoft Word, hands down - though I've been places that use Excel for everything. Plain text is also popular, as is HTML (I personally will use HTML because I can do formatting in it and I loathe Word).

The first problem we have here is a cultural one.

Program managers, project managers, and suits like Word. They know it, they're familiar with it. The machines they work with are likely to be laptops running a kind of Windows (they spend a lot of time in meetings and have to be mobile). Since they use Word constantly for other purposes, it's a natural choice for them.

Engineers, however, don't think that way. I know a lot of engineers, and only a scant handful know how to use Word and are frankly baffled by it's startlingly bad usability and overwhelming featureset. When I first started playing with Word for a game I wrote, I made a total mess of the file trying to use formatting rules and display modes and so on and so forth. I'm not a stupid guy, but the word processing program got in the way of me processing words. Word documents are binary files. They can't be grepped or diffed. They can't be parsed in perl, they can't be smartly integrated into version control.

Further, many engineers will be working from machines that are not Windows. They'll have Linux boxes or (rarely now) Solaris. And they don't have Microsoft Word - only a shitty "Open Office" version (and if you've ever shared a Word doc between a Windows box and Open Office, you'll know how badly it goofs up formatting).

Clearly the choice of Word is a poor choice for engineers.

Excel spreadsheets have nearly the exact same problems as Word, so we'll skip that (aside from sorting abilities, they don't bring a lot to the table).

Plain text and HTML versions of documents bring a similar set of problems to the mix, only from the opposite side. Engineers love plain text, but it suffers in that it is unable to support nifty things like auto-generated tables of context, text formatting, or, well, anything except words. HTML solves a lot of these problems, but you fall into the trap where by non-engineers won't touch it: it's difficult to edit if you don't know what you're doing, too easy to screw up even if you do, and the document becomes unweildy after a certain size.

There is a sort of half-way solution here, though, and that is to use Google Docs. But I'll get to that in more detail in a bit.

Version Control

Issues with document version control are the second biggest. This is also a workflow problem. Here is a common scenario:

The PM writes a Word document, Tech Spec v. 1.0.doc. Sends it out for review. The archictect makes some changes and mails out Tech Spec v. 1.1.doc. At the same time, the interaction designer makes some changes and sends out a document also titled Tech Spec v. 1.1.doc, which, of course, does not have the architect's changes in it. Bam! Version drift.

So the solution then is that the PM will painstakingly try to figure out what the changes are (he can't run 'diff' on the files, mind you). Then he sends out Tech Spec v. 1.1-real.doc. Over the next week, we'll get 12 versions of the document, an none of them will say what has been changed.

Since reading a 20 page technical specification 4 times a day is a waste of my time, I'll go on the most recent one I have open, while the latest one may have changed requirements on work I have already completed and thus don't re-read.

Part of this is workflow. It can be offset by having a single point of contact for the document author (which slows things down), and a summary page of "version changes". But that's not a great solution.

Further, we're passing information around via EMAIL. Ugh. This is the fastest way to get me to ignore a document: I get hundreds and hundreds of mails a day and everything gets lost in a morass of garbage.

Solution! Post the documents to Sharepoint or something similar. Okay, great! But, you know, again, if I'm going to get notifications that it has changed, I'm still getting spammed with mail that I will ignore. It's nice that there's a single central place for the most recent document, but we're also dealing with Sharepoint or some similar product, and they all suck, by and large.

Okay, so let's check it into a revision control system (CVS, Perforce, whatever). Now everyone has to know how to use an RCS (hah!). Plus, documents should then be in text formats for best results (so that versions can be merged and we can have multiple concurrent editors). We're back to cultural problems here.

My Solution

Wikis. Plain and simple. Wiki software (like WikiMedia, which Wikipedia runs on) brings the following to the table out of the box:

* Free
* 2 Hour set up time (less if you know what you're doing)
* Easy to use/learn text formatting system that supports all manner of object embedding (diagrams, pictures, etc.)
* Multiple, concurrent authors can work on the same document - or even shards of a document - at the same time.
* Provides instant access to what exactly changed in the document (this is my favorite thing, ever).
* Revision control
* Access control (read/edit)
* Document Search and Indexing
* Auto-generated goodies (Tables of Contents, Categories, etc.)
* End-User machine agnostic (runs in a browser)

Now, Google docs brings a lot of that to the table but it has what I consider to be two glaring flaws:

* It is externally hosted. Good luck convincing the security officers of a large company to host your top-secret project design with a third party. You can't lock it down behind the firewall, safe as houses in your intranet.
* It requires that you make a Google account. Again, this is a security thing but it's also a pain in the ass thing. I like to keep my work and personal stuff separate. I have a Google account but I don't use it (and don't really want to). A company I used to work for did all their stuff on Google docs. It was a pain in the ass for me to have to constantly remember this weird password that I put in there just to update my estimated hours on a stinkin' spreadsheet.