Category: Pulverbatch

I would like to see their webmaster’s face when he checks the referral logs

June 17, 2005 /

Oh man oh man. Neil Gaiman has discovered Jennifer Brummett.

This may not mean much to you, but it’s pretty glorious for those of us who endured her “reviews” for four years of DramaCentre (aka CentreDrama). Brummett is the Advocate-Messenger’s theatre “critic,” and the depth of research and literary acuity you see in that article was exactly what she applied to our work. I’m not trying to say we were de Sade at Arenton, but the things we did took time and thought and pain. Brummett could be replaced a rubber cup on the end of a stick.

It’s nice to have some validation that the woman has no business putting two words together, whether it has any practical effect or not. Dear Jennifer Brummett: Welcome to the interweb! I hope you like being the message boards’ new darling.

June 16, 2005 /

The first Anacrusis ad ever is running at Blank Label and its principal sites for the minimum of 20,000 pageviews. Judging by the run length of other ads I’ve seen on the site, they burn through that pretty quick.

The fact that I am paying to persuade people to come and look at something else I pay to make available is not lost on me. I always said I wouldn’t advertise for my work until I thought it was good enough for anyone to read it and like it. I held true to that.

Aikido Bishops

June 10, 2005 /

The problem with chess as the universal metaphor for conflict–you know, like in every movie ever–is that there’s no nonviolent way to play.

June 1, 2005 /

I stated in an Anacrusis LJ feed comment-thread, last week, that Memento had more structural influence on my writing than basically anything ever. I realized later that that’s not exactly true; it did have a lot of influence, but before I saw Memento I was reading Margaret Atwood. Cat’s Eye, The Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake and Lady Oracle are all shuffle-structured books, although they tend to start at middle / beginning and finish at end / middle (whereas Memento starts at the beginning / end and ends at middle / middle). Orson Scott Card does a lot of shuffling within the corpus of The Worthing Saga, too; I actually read that in high school, so I guess it was really my first exposure to the style.

Of course, that’s omitting the randomly jumbled reruns of cartoons I watched as a kid, which seemed to come from different seasons at random–not that Thundercats drove a terribly epic tale, but the cast (to my perception) did expand and shrink on a daily basis. They weren’t doing it on purpose, though.

I’m not sure what single factor determines my fascination with these stories. My borderline ADD is certainly involved, which doesn’t imply a negative context: there’s something important and powerful about screwing with linearity, about building a narrative out of noncontiguous events. It makes individual elements of a story stronger, for one thing; there’s no room for laziness when every page has to give you something to take back to the larger structure. (Note that this is also one of the big reasons I like word-count fiction so much.)

May 23, 2005 /

So I already put my bragging rights at stake in the Iron Game Chef contest, which means I need to design a game. This year involves not only the standard time limit and ingredient requirements, but a set of rules limitations as well. It’s a timed constrained game writing exercise! It’s a good thing those all make me gasp with excitement, because I’ve only got six days left and I haven’t so much “started.”

So here’s where I’m thinking of going. This isn’t an opinion poll–I’m going to make the game that I believe in the most; I just want to have a sketch-record in case I come back to some of these later. You’re welcome to steal anything here and make your own game, of course.

  • Enemy of the People: Two groups of players work in tandem, able to communicate only via a shared map. One plays a group of Navajo scouts in 1360 AD, the other a modern-day group of archaeologists, both trying to unravel the mystery of the abandonment of Mesa Verde–the former group via the spirit world, the latter via science. The game is played on a strict time limit, because once the sun goes down, the mystery starts to reveal itself in a supernatural, lethal fashion…

    Ingredients: Anasazi disappearance, 1300s. “Entomology,” “Accuser” and “Companion.” Multi-meaning die rolls and pregenerated characters.

    Problems: Huge and clunky. Not sure I can do this without a very coordinated pair of GMs, which I don’t want.

  • We Are Rock Stars: 1998, California. Brilliant geeks search for identity and social acceptance while struggling not to let their offbeat interweb startup get washed away in the tide of venture capital–or see the tide recede.

    Ingredients: Dot-com boom, late 1990s. “Entomology,” “Wine” and “Invincible.” Multi-meaning die rolls.

    Problems: InSpectres probably does this as a subsystem, and better.

  • Alexandretta: Merchant caravans roam the highways and seaways of a young and exotic island empire, racing to clinch deals, watching (and affecting) the wash of supply and demand to maximize their profits.

    Ingredients: Loosely based on the heyday of the Silk Road. “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution and custom card deck.

    Problems: I don’t know anything about economics. Also, not sure this is actually a role-playing game.

  • Welcome to the New World: Accused criminals are denied trials and sentenced to hard labor at a lunar prison colony where all light is blue, and visible colors a jealously guarded luxury. The prisoners’ desperate secret is that only they can produce the physically inexplicable property of color–and only by their suffering and death. Lethal, oppressive horror.

    Ingredients: “Wine,” “Companion” and “Accuser.” Color-based resolution, obviously. Historical basis: pick one.

    Problems: I’m not sure I have the balls for this, and I don’t know anybody who would actually want to play it.

I’m kind of scaring myself, right now, by leaning toward the last one. I’ll pick for real tonight.

An answer, for some of you

May 20, 2005 /

In some genres there’s never really a question of whether the protagonist will get what she wants. Stories are often about emotional fulfillment, after all, so when you start watching (say) a romantic comedy, you’re not really wondering whether they’ll end up together. You’re wondering what it will cost.

I asked myself: What does it cost?

  • A finger
  • Your innocence
  • Fifty cents
  • Your honor
  • Your life

Wanna see how?

The Good Girls

An Anacrusis Exclusive

Starting Monday