Wee I can make an ass of myself using xkcd too!

Here look at this strip:

http://www.xkcd.com/150/

By choosing to retain a childish nature in this strip, instead of acting like a responsible normal women, the female in this strip is willingly giving herself over to the patriarchal male embrace that says, "Don't worry little person who can't take care of themselves we will protect you"

The male's near immediate physical response to the females immaturity demonstrates both a sexual fatherhood complex, along with severe pedophilia tendencies. However, he manages to find a sexual partner who is immature and needs taking care of, so that they do not fill their apartment with play pen balls.

The last panel is particularly telling of what the future brings. If you noticed the wall keeping the playpen balls is knocked over by the male to get to the female allowing the balls to escape. The female allowing this to happen exchanges phyical love making for the privlage of having playpen balls inside her house. Note to that he heart is also outside the doorway. Which, again shows that both of them are willing to exchange love, childhood, innocents, for physical affection and company rather than any sort of actual computability.

More so than in the strip pointed out in the first post XKCD's misogyny becomes clearly apparent. Here we have a women presented as a non threatening, confused individual who is willing to go through great lengths to procure the male's attention. She is then immediately willing to submit to him with no more than 37 (yes I counted) words passing between them.

If you are not yet convinced examine the first panel closely. He is approaching her, asking her about her plans, presumably to take her on a date or to have a friendly chat. However, considering the Schrodinger's rapist essay and the collected works of Andrea Dworkin I think we really know how the evening would of ended. That aside, her demonstration of massed immaturity, combined with her ability to rationalize out her immaturity shows that the procedural method of falling in love, and earning the respect necessary for physical coupling is no longer necessary. She has willingly regressed into a childhood state which means that she is always ready and wiling to accept her red hot slab of man cock that just happened to wander by.

I would now like to return to the posts that started this whole discussion. I think that these posts provide sufficient critical evidence to demonstrate the fact that these are not characters individually wrapped in a quiet little world. NO! In fact these characters are parables, or perhaps morality plays. I will open discussion to the proper term for anyone who wants to take it up. These characters however, do represent EVERY MAN and EVERY WOMAN without exception. That is where the brilliance of XKCD lies. It isn't about love or sweetness.

No it is about women needing to learn the comforting embrace of patriarchy because they are unable to properly take care of themselves, or make appropriate sexual choices.


See wee! Beating up XKCD is fun and easy.

I can do this for just about every single strip. I could make this strip about an abusive relationship.

Here is the thing. A nearly infinite amount of interpretations are possible. That is the reason for the death of the author. It is to turn their works into something potentially greater than what they started with. I mean look at all of what I just wrote. It is a valid argument backed up with evidence from the text.

However, just because it is valid doesn't make it right. It is wrong. That is clearly not what the strip is about and I am simply twisting the evidence at hand to make it say whatever I want, ie my soap box of the week.

More dangerously people do this in their everyday life where they will misinterpret harmless signals as dangerous and dangerous signals as harmless. There is a certain beauty in the way so many of us can look at something and we can all come up with something different. I think it is wonderful. However, there do need to be lines drawn in the sand occationaly. These lines need to be drawn with flexibility, wisdom, grace, and intelligence, so that when the inevitable mistakes are made we can see why and how to do it better the next time. FYI this process never involves throwing around post modernist terms without explaining them. Just sayin.

Okay I am done now.

This Will Start as an angry rant.

No this will start as a furious rant. This will start as a venom spitting spite ridden, spririt of pure rage, I might need a new keyboard for baby laptop rant. Then. Then I will take a month off. I WILL write a novel. Then I am going to write two essays on pornography and post modernism. I will possibly write a third one with sasha. I hope so because the third one will be a magnificent thing a beauty. Then I will come back to this. Mark my words I will return. I will be armed with post modernism, masculinity, human cruelty, intelegence, wit, rage, and a pathological need to thunder about angerly. I will do this. I will do it calmly. Collectivly and intelegently. You may not recognize they essays inspiration because I will use my foundation of anger to lay a foundation and an industrial complex that will produce massive idea which will destroy all that stands before it. I want to wear a vest, paint my nail, and I will look absolutly fabulous as I sit here in books a million plinking away filled with red hot rage funned, distilled, then forged into cold cruel ideas.

THIS WARN YOU. It will happen.

http://kateharding.net/2009/10/05/would-it-kill-you-to-be-civil/

http://contexts.org/socimages/2009/10/04/guest-post-nerd-assertiveness-and-blindness-to-privilege/

http://kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/

I think I'll start with a generalized inablity for these three people to come up with any sort of sexual identity as the reason for their critical misreading of the source text.
http://www.xkcd.com/642/

The first essay's comment on the strip? Geeky nice boy can't get pussy. Right because the XKCD guy is clearly intenrested in sex, sex only and has absolutly no desire of actual human contact of any sort. Fuck even the guy with a hat wanted a girl friend that he could connect with and not some milksop fuckpuppet.

The misreading clearly stems from the author's own inadiquecies

Okay here is what we do. We attack the idea of gender at it's root. Any and all conversations about gender come from feminism, queers, and rednecks.

A whole top to bottom gutting of certain ideas is really important. See this sort of behaviour out of people is compleatly unacceptable.

Let's back away from gender. It is possible to seperate gender and sex. Sure it isn't easy. But the hell if people were better at setting up some sort of sexual idenity they wouldn't need any sort of gender identity. Sexual idenity and self esteem issues. I have seen matriarchal systems be just as cruel, closeminded, and pathetic as patriachal ones.

I will calm down. I will figgure this out. I will retaliate. I am utterly tired of this shit.

Rpg piracy and you!

So there is this cool little website called http://www.scribd.com/. They are neat! Basicly, for those of you to lazy to click the "about us" link. It is a place where you can self publish your own works for everyone to see and download easily. I am a big fan of self publishing and there is something pleasent about scribd that appeals to eccentric nature.

Recently, scribd made geek news when Wizards of the Coast went after 5 diffrent people who were distributing the second volume of their players handbook via that web site.

Now in general I am a pro piracy, anti corporate nut job and I would be all over that sort of thing like white on lice. However... not this time. Unlike most fist wavers who just seem to be content to unitellegably yell into the distance over everything and anything I have goals. It is important to have goals when you are fighting for things. That way you know it is time to move onto the next battle.

Anyway my demands are fairly reasonable. I wish for digital media to have the same general restrictions as print media. I wish to be able to loan out, and possibly resell my books, music, and movies without a huge fucking hassle. I wish to be able to ensure that I am able to take steps to protect my investment, without a huge fucking hassle.

As far as I am concerned this battle has been more or less won when it comes to roleplaying pdfs. Instead of restrictive drm codes that interfere with everything everywhere we now have discrete little water marks. This means I can back up my files where ever and how ever I want. I can distrubute my files to my friends, and if I can find someone willing to buy them I could even sell my ebook collection on DVD. This is swell. I approve of this. The watermark sometimes is just annoying and other times if can be used to track you, like in the case of the Scribd.com morons. So if your paticular ebook ends up on a file sharing site you get what you get.

You gotta give a little to get a little, and so far the companies still willing to take part in PDF sales have been very helpful in this regard and I applaud them for trying so hard to cater to us. The companies that are being assholes numbers 1 and that is Wizards of the Coast. Just vote with yer dollars and everything is cool.

So I don't condem Hasbro for doing what they did. In fact I am glad. It prooves that watermarking is an effective tool, more effective than DRM which can be removed and then the file will be destributed just for spite. This is something I personally gaurntee. No. It works. I am also ultra pissed off that they used Scribd. People. There is a front line for this sort of thing. It is called pirate's bay. Those people have become parias in multiple countries, they risk years of jail time, all so that we can stand up and say STOP. You will not control the internet the way you control everything else. Here is where your domain ends and where mine begins. Frankly using things that aren't pirate's bay is disrespectful. Using a self publishing site not only puts other writters at risk of not being able to publish their things, but it also smacks of plagurism. So you get what you deserve says I.

And that's that.

And We are Finally Back Up and Running

So in the last two days I have slept close to 24 hours. Now I am officially back in black and ready to go. Man hibernation is kinda crazy.

Anyway I really want to do the post modern porn thing. But I am going to spend longer than a week doing it, and since I write so slowly I am really going to be stuggling with NANO soooo that is just going to have to get held off for at least a month which is sad *cries* but that's okay. It will give me time to start gathering materials up and such. I'm realizing now that I am going to need Lacan for some of this. Lanan is one of those people who I keep coming back to again and again even though I don't want to. See I love Bauldillard, he is my buddy. Yet, most of my stuff involved either Kant, Lacan, or terrible combonations of the two which have caused me quite a bit of sanity loss. However, Lacan says all these badass things about metaphores, and I am going to be tackling a genra of entertainment where a woman sticking an octopus into her vagina is a form of entertainment. There is something there. I guess I could also do something with the animal phase as normative but if I did I think I'll end up condeming certain sexual practices and that isn't the point of the post modern pornography project. Wow what amazing alliteration and I can abriviate it to PMPP which is exciting.

I think I am going to try to motivate Sasha into writing one of two things for it. Hey Sasha! DO IT! I'd ask evan but I don't know about his porn consumption habits. I also don't know about how he feels about post modernism. But if your interested evan you are welcome to join us. I think if I write two ten page things and Sasha writes two 5-8ish page things we will end up anywhere from 30-40+ pages which we could put in a nice cuuuuuute little book that we can pull out at certain times to look at then cuddle. Optimally we would also write at least one essay together. Cause that would be fun, distance and lack to time could be a issues but nothing that can't be overcome with a lil effort. So that should totally happen. I'll do some of the organization work in the middle of November.

So until then? I dunno. I really want to work on some vampire decks because they make me happy but that requires monies. I dun't wanna spend it though. I DO wanna get the last two big boxed expansions for Arkham. I still dun't wanna spend teh monies. So I guess I need to write some more fictions.

I've been really bad about that and I am not entirely certain why. Part of it was my compy breaking, and teh sickness. That did take up an entire week which is pretty sad.

Oh another thing I want to get better at is reviews. I am not talking about normal this product gets a 9.5 review but rather thouse sorts of reviews where they will talk about the product then they will go off on tangents related to the projects for a couple of pages then they will come back to the product...why I am saying product it is always either a book or a movie... anyway they come back to the book at the end.

I tried doing that with both Ultimatum and Irredeemable but it didn't go so well. I kinda wanna try it again, I'm thinking with Ultimatum but I am not so sure. I might do that tonight also, depending on how the fiction thing goes.

Oh yeah dungeon fighters keeps crashing my computer and that makes me ultra sad. *Cries* I miss playing it.

Irredeemable

I like adding extra letters to words that already seem like they have to many letters in them. I do so miss the days where spelling was a matter of style and not a way for people to feel supurior to other people who have better things to do rather than sit around and memorize proper spellings. But I digress...which should be impossible because I haven't begun yet.

Irredeemable.

There is a trope that is developing, or maybe it is already here. It is the idea of what happens when Superman goes bad. Not even bizzaro superman style I am talking bat shit peanut butter and banana sandwitch butt fuck evil. What do you do? Who do you call?

The answer? No one. Your heads and pray to whatever god is left standing. Irredeemable proudly has a volume one on its spine promising more to come. So don't expect everything to be wrapped up right away. However, unlike Black Summer where the super hero in question really thought he was doing good, this guy is very specifically doing some pretty terrible things. Terrible like wiping Singapore off of the face of the earth,

It is an interesting concept though. Most of the initial book is people slowly realizing that they never really got to know the Plutonian (ie superman). They never understood his motivations, where he came from, if he was an alien of some sort or a kind of mutant. People were just happy he was thier side. Which brings up a sort of frightening point about superman. Most people in the DC universe don't know jack about him. They don't. They know he was an alien but they don't know of his up bringing and what guides his moral compass. So when the Plutonian snaps his former team mates immeadiatly scramble to start trying to find any sort of clues as to what happened. Then they started hunting down his alternate identities, ex girlfriend, where he grew up, and where his most powerful villian had fucked off to.

It is dark, frightening and clausterphobic. One of my favorite moments is when the Plutonian comments that he fills people's worlds with magic and miracles. For the most part people are greatful but he can hear everyone who complains that they didn't get saved fast enough, or well enough. In a crowd of thousands there is at least one making fun of his costume, or complaining about something. I could see how that could wear away on a man. Always alone, feeling the tendrils of resentment. There really are people who do nothing but run around and bitch about everything.

The thing is I already feel that the world is filled with miricales and magic. It is an amazing world that we live in, it just needs to be looked at the right way. All around me I see people who are so focused, not just on the negative but on a negative that just doesn't bloody matter. I've had days where I sysmpathise with the Plutonian I really do. Fortunatly thouse days are usually very short lived. I like the book though, it made me want to go and reaccess the things that I am greatful for, and the things that aren't so great right now? Well they could be a hell of a lot worse.

I'm feeling better by the way. Time to get to work then.

Ultimatum

Man I like comics. I do. I think it has to do with the style of story telling or some such thing. Or maybe it is the intersection of two art forms from two individuals to create a whole that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or something. I don't know.

What I do know is the Loeb penned something called Ultimatum and it is supposed to be one of the most horrendus comic atrocities produced in the last ten years. Tonight I read it.

See some comic book fans are insular, whiny, arrogant sons of bitches. People like the "comic book guy" from the simpsons, yeah they exist. They are even yellow and have 4 fingers. When big shake ups happen then tend to flood the internet in droves speaking as one, they make the ten minuts of hate look like a boxed social. I swear. So I tend to take the horrid gnashing of teeth with a grain of salt, and bravely I went to Barns & Noble for a diffrent purpose. Having failed in that purpose I sat down and read Ultimatum.

It was terrible.

First the trade. Lets talk about it on a superficial level. The trade itself is incompleate. The idea of a trade is to take the core of the story and stick it in one place for easy centralized reading. Some when I am reading a trade and all the sudden, Spiderman is dead, the hulk went on a rampage, the dread Dommuru is stalking the earth with Jonny Storm trapped in his pendent, and Dr Strange dies in some pathetic way...well yeah. We are literally dropped from a page of dfialouge into the middle of a fightscene with absolutely no context. Clocking in at a measly 144 pages, the book itself could of done with another couple of comics worth of information just to help make sense of it all.

And you know it is bad when I focus on the superficial stuff first.

The store itself is...well it is kinda pathetic. Magneto reverses the earth's polarity causing earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tidal waves, blah blah blah. That sucks. Lots of snazzy people died in the initial wave of destruction, like Night Crawler and The Human Torch, as well as some others. So everyone geared up to go fight the big M himself. The thing is they couldn't kill him right away. They needed him to fix the earth magnets so our planet wouldn't go spinning out of orbit. As a result more heros died.

Here is the thing though. With the exception of Professor X and Thor, the way these people died is the same way red shirts die in start treck, or the way no name officers get cut down in Dynasty Warriors. They were dispatched with nary a second thought. Dr. Strange charged as Dommeru and ends up dead less than an instant later.

See I am all for putting a bomb in a clostet and clearing house of charecters that are dragging the narration down but this is rediculose. It is almost like the inverse of plot immunity. You must die for the body count will rise and it will add to the tragidy. People reduced to rosencrantz and guildenstern marching fowards for the readers...what? At the end of the day if feels as if nothing has been accoplished. Sure sure Marvel's ultimate universe is now a very diffrent place than the regular one. I predict that Woliverien will be back but really what was the editor thinking when he green lighted this mess?

Oh and mutants were all built in a lab by people to be super soldiers SUPRISE! Come come now. All in all it feels less like something that has been written and carefully planned out and more of just covering every square inch of the ultimate marvel universe in dirt calling it extream and then making the X extra big with senseless death and pointless revelations.

I'm sure this series has it's fans. They are strange. I am not one of them.

I am glad I read it though. Sometimes it is good to read something ultimatly aweful just to center yourself on what is really worth reading.

For example I read Irredemable immeadiatly afterwards. Now that was worth while.

Licking Puss from Nugle's Lips

Yeah that's what Nurgle looks like. In the warhammer universes he is the god of disease and he used to be my hero before I switched over to Slannesh.

Suffice to say I r sick. Not SICK sick. I mean I am not dying or anything, but I am definatly sick enough to get seriously slowed down. It caused me to cancel my writing fesitivies tonight and I am unable to read. I am really annoyed.

In good news my computer seems to be alright. For those of you who didn't know my computer started to freeze at boot splash screen. I couldn't access the boot menu, restore menu, or the bios menu. Well after doing all sorts of stuff including removing the CMOS batter I finally got it to boot back up again. Then I ran two diffrent virus scans, backed up some essential files, and just ran an extensive test of my ram. All systems are apparently go. It did have a pretty hard crash right when it happened so I guess that had something to do with it. I'll keep telling myself that and maybe I'll someday believe it. So anyway I am starting to get behind on things and now I am sick which is PISSING ME OFF. So I need to sit still for a bit while my immune system goes and commits genocide. Before that though I am busting out a to do list so when I get back in gear I will be ready to go straight off.

1) Reply to Sasha. Yeah what the fuck. She hasn't touched he blog for months on end and all the sudden she tosses out 80 posts in 3 days. I want to write some direct replies to her stuff because some of her stuff warrents it and it is fun. Also I want to do some spin off posts of her stuff.

2) Catch up with Serial Shorts. I might do that tonight, but I really want to lie down.

3) Write some mother fucking fiction. This shouldn't be hard. Girl and the Jester meet the King of Pain (fake one not the real one) GO!

4) Girl and the Jester have a picnic with Death and the Devil there that is two scenes + a whole outline and more of Ben's story. Don't be an asshole.

5) All sorts of news articles I want to post and comment on. One is a christian church burning a whole bunch of bibles, and the other is a retirement community trying to evict a 6 year old girl. Yeah this is shit you can't miss.

6) Do peliminary reading for post modern fetish project. I need at the very least chapter 1 of precession of the simulacrum and 1000 Platueas, also prolly the masochism book will come in handy. Good thing I didn't throw my copy away...even though it is its own ecosystem at the moment

7)Oh advice for evan as to how to generate traffic.

8)...profit

9) Finnish up project X. I have no idea what the mental holdup with that is but jesus this one shouldn't be hard. I want it in the mail by the 31st.

and okay my strength is starting to give out and I am extra not feeling good so I am going to go play dynasty warriors or something.

God Devouring Stance

I like that phrase. Yeah yeah it is very exalted but I don't give a damn. Or should I say fuck I don't paticularly care.

I was going to write something else and a little bit of fiction but damnit it is really cold in books a million and I don't feel like going back out to my car to get something warm to wear. Jesus I think it is colder in here than it is outside. Also my hands are dry and that makes me ever so slightly annoyed. Alrighty, lets go foward a bit.

So I was going to write about some of the frustrations I was having with the world around me. So many people rail against the government but they won't lift a hand to help improve anything. If they do lift a hand it is usualy to lash out against the government instead of working to make things better.

People love to talk about the poor like they are one unified whole instead of a clump of individuals who are bound together by nothing more than ecconomic circumstances which is the flimsiest of ties. I hear it all the time, poor people are the noble workers who are beaten down by the system, and then I'll hear someone else saying that they are all lazy incompetent morons I hear that their violence is justified, and that they both deserve and don't deserve handouts. Of course no one thinks of the poor as more than one thing. Nope the poor is unified, we are the poor, we will assimilate. Poooooor. It is a bunch of crap and I really hate it when people talk about the poor as singular and solvable. They are people and their various situations are as varied as they are.

Then the objectification of women in porn. God that bugs me. Like there are no men in porn what so ever. Or that male on male porn isn't just as objectifying. Then there is porn where objectification is part of the fetish, like in certain bdsm pornography. So when we talk only about the poor poor women, compleatly ignoring everything else it starts to raise my hackles.

Then there is the bdsm community in general. Jesus god what the hell is wrong with most of these people? Yeah so I like to recieve and occationally give signifigant ammounts of abuse. I would like to wear something other than those retarded leatherdaddy harnesses.

But then I see things that give me hope. Some one was talking about GRUE a bondange festival up in New England somewhere. The guy was happy to of been there, and in awe of all the things he still had left to learn. His new interest has become speed bondage, which I admit is something I've always had in the back of my head as something I want to do and something I would love to learn about. It is pretty neat sounding. In case you don't know it is basicly tying someone down who isn't 100% passive. It is an essential skill for the Dom with a bratty sub. Or at least it should be.

I love bondage. I love it deep down to the bottom of my soul. I love the knots, the ritual, the relationship that comes along with it, and all the other things. I love how complex it is. There is so much to learn, and yet...yet... I've done so very little of it. Which is horribly sad. Oh well they is plenty of time to fix that. Anyway my hands are numb and I really feel doing something else, tonight is a good reading night or something like that. I have De Sade's Vallet waiting for me which is pretty exciting.

15 Minuts to Launch

I have 15 minuts left of lunch and I am unsure of what to write about. Something I'm sure. Of course I am having a hard time deciding what I feel like doing tonight. I am going to go writting, that is a specific given. I am not sure what I am going to write about though. I need to do a couple of chunks of Sasha's letter so I'll do a bit of that. Then I am thinking I might work on a chunk of fiction written. I need to do that more. Not just for getting ready for next month, but just in general...you know forever. It uses a diffrent part of my brain that doesn't ordinarly get used. It helps me think better essentially. I've been doing more reading which is good, and plenty of analytical thinking, more of which needs to make it here I'm thinking. More of it which just needs to make it to paper. I write very slowly though, and lots of this is for just pure old enjoyment so I am not sure where things are going to fall from there.

Mostly though I need more organization when I am doing big projects. I need to take big projects and start working with them in managable chunks do more outlines and such. That's the big issue. I can't work on something. Either pick it up, finnish it in one go or I put it down and never pick it up again. That's gotta change just because it does. As a result I think I am going to go back to the OC/Politics thing, start getting down into the grit of it. I'm glad I sat on it for so long. It had its roots set in some unpleasentness and I was using that to work through it. Now that I've worked through it and gotten over the unpleasentness I can set all of that aside and begin fresh. For example the OC has become infinitely more important than the politics. But I really need to define where the politics begin and where the church ends. Also I need to make sure that polygamous relationships are included within politics. They are important to me.

Well my 15 minuts are up.

Sometimes I wonder. Will they tell stories of me after I'm gone?

Fishsticks and Doves

My brain is slowly shutting down due to lack of sleep and now lack of food because I forgot to get lunch. The food thing I can fix but the sleep thing will require time. It sucked 3am rolled around and I was still wired, so I watched a round table religious discussion. It was fucking bad ass and there will be more on it later. At that point it became 4am and I was still wired. I tried just going to bed anyway. The sun was well on its way up before my brain finally released its stranglehold on consiouseness and let me sleep. It is a bossy little organ that brain is.

So any attempt to be coherent is going to fail. I am also going to write fiction tonight because it is important to establish with mr. brain/body combination that I am tired is no fucking excuse. That and I wanna.

So the round table discussion! HERE WATCH IT http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s2695716.htm. It is a good solid hour long with very little filler or breaks within the action. It also brings me back to something I was saying earlyer this year. In the discussion the Atheist and the Islamic guy both sort of charged around the discussion and they just plain old ran over anyone who got in their way. The atheist did it by keeping the conversation as grounded as possible and refusing to give ground on core physical problems that religion does a poor job in dealing with, and the islamic guy flattened people by coming at every question from a diffrent angle than expected and demolishing everyone around him with raw intelegence backed up by eloquence. By the end of the discussion the catholic guy was more or less cowering in his chair now really saying anything, and the other christians were struggling to maintain any sort of ground. It saddens me because religion and intelegence do not have to be mutually exclusive. The Islamic guy prooved that beyond a doubt. Christianitiy just really needs to get on the ball and start understanding the bible instead of throwing it around.

Its funny because the islamic guy called out many followers of islam for failing to do that. Lastly the show is australian so just about everyone had a neat accent.

Okay new topic! So last night I finished up Feverhead. What a wonderful little book! It is only a hundred pages, it is rip roaring fun, and you all should read if you have the chance.

Segueing from that into something else I wanna talk about. I realized last night I've started having a hard time transitioning from one activity to another. Last night it was horrible. Granted last night was really weird so I don't know if that counts. Anyway yeah, inbetween every activity I did there was 15 minuts to a half an hour where I just did nothing. I don't know what it is. It isn't like I didn't get anything done yesterday or stuff like that. To the contrary, I read a good 50 pages of Feverhead, got to lvl 25 in dungeon fighters, watched red cliff, picked up a little bit around the house, showered, downloaded a few things I needed... it is just that inbetween every thing I did, there was just this plain old void of shit where I kinda sat there and just stared into space.

Sooooo... I dunno. It is distressing though and now that I have identified it as a problem I am going to relentlessly hunt it down and obliterate it from my life forever. By forever I mean temporarly. What will actually happen is that I will fix the problem then little by little I will slip back into my old habit until I decide that it is a problem again and fix it. Oh well that's fine with me really.

In other news I kinda want the Captin America Omnibus. I can get it off of amazon for like 40 bucks, and that is a pretty good deal for an 800 page oversized comic book that I can kill people with. It is also close to 50% off which is also pretty snazzy. I dunno though there is also the Jason Arron Ghost Rider run and Alan Moore is flooding the world with expensive books again. So it is a tough choice. You know what is sad though? Hellboy just consistenly doesn't make the list. The thing is I love hellboy. I love it to death. It has occult awesomeness, nazis, and a genuinely creative cast of characters which are just plain neat. However, at the end of the day they are just to god damned expensive, and they provide just to little comic. I mean hellboy is already high on action, low on dense phoilosphical writting or beautiful prose. He does not wax poetic, nor does he muck about in a pile of whys and wherefores. No it all just happens. Maybe this changes with some of the latter arcs but damn. Some of the earlyer ones just simply don't have enough content o be any sort of value, especially when comapared to other similarly priced books. This is something I always find sad.

Oh well okay I am going to scamper.

Once Again Onto the Breech part 2!!!

Creating an exhaustive list of disruptive player types and combonations is both fiddly and unproductive. There is really no other reason to do it other than there are people who just obsessively like to make lists about things.

What is important to notice about the list I made is that there is an antagonistic relationship between the player and the rules themselves. This, I think is of absolute critical importance. Because the crux of the antagonism comes between the player and the rules then there is the belief that there is a sort of equal footing between the players. Everyone can indeed become a power gamer or a rule lawyer. It isn't really that hard, except for the part where you sell your soul.

What throws a monkey wrench into the entire works is the GM. The gm is the avatar of the rules. He is allowed to break them, bend them, fudge them, ignore them, and there is hardly a mainstream rule book on the market that doesn't give the gm the express permission to alter something s/he doesn't like. So all the sudden the power gamer comes onto shaky ground, the rule lawyer gets out his big book of argumentations and they get to work. Here is where the role player extrodinair and the goof ball also really start to shine.

The supposedly inherent disjunction between the GM and the players doesn't excist. The disjunction is then created by the rules themselves, and the agression twords the gm is created as a sort of proxy argument.

As a result plot interference, killing of NPCs, raping of bar maids, dismembering of corpses, grave robbing, and everything Mr. Welch is no longer allowed to do, is a result of testing out the human component that comes along with the rules. Is the gm going to use the rules to dick us over, how much freedom do we actually have, how well does he know the game background, if I make him laugh will he let me pass the role (in paranoia you do!), how much argueing can he take before he gives in and lets me have my way... et cetera. All of these questions and thousands more usually end up taking the place of the actual important question, which is how would my charecter respond in this situation considering his place in the world.

I can pretty much guarantee that it isn't kill the king.

So having come to this rather brilliant realization, what can be done about all of this? Well first step is to moderate gm behavioure but my lunch is over and tonight I think I want to write fiction so I'll get back to it later.

5 hours later and I'm back!

Unlike last post which makes a decent little unit all on its own this one clearly isn't finnished yet. So lets get on to it.

First and foremost, the most visable part of the equation is the GM's reaction to the pressure the players put upon him in reaction to the rules. Most game master sections devote quite a bit of atension to how to properly run a game and diffrent amounts of advice, all of which is useful to varying degrees. It is, after all, the gm's adherence to the rules that gives or takes away power to certain types of different players.

Lets go past that real quick and get into forge terminology. The forge, along with some of the other independent games that surround it take a different view than moderating GM behavior. Instead they seek out to clearly define the GMs role, limit it, and in some cases they all but remove the gm from the equation. This presents an interesting approch to the problem of the rules/gm//player conflict but ultimatly I think it fails to deal with the actual problems inherent within the player rule divide.

Lets start with the idea that "System Matters" which is an essay by Ron Edwards. To be honest it has always bugged me and it is the ultimate reason why I am here tonight typing about it. The idea that the way to solve all game play problems is to have games that have specific systems. The system will be tailored made to the deisred game play.

I believe that this works to a point. But it isn't the end all be all of rpg design. It doesn't matter how well you design a system a disruptive player will still be disruptive, an uncreative player will still be uncreative. It doens't matter if the game is D20 ad&d with all source books available, or something as tightly regulated as My Life With Master. The disruptive player problem is still unsolved because there is a fundamental disjunction between the players, the rules, and the gms interpretation of the rules.

The solution, it isn't so much a radical change to the way gming works, or even a removal of the gm. Instead game developers, paticularly independent ones should be focusing on better system based forms of conuication between the players and the gm. This along with better comminication in the charecter generation process and campain set up will help turn around the vast majority of the in game problems that the players suffer from.

K NOW I am finally on the right fucking track. I'll do some more of this later.

Once Again onto the Breech

I actually wanted to write a little bit of fiction but I want to spend longer than a half hour on it. So I am going to go do something else.

Last night I totally failed at writing about the contract between GMs and their players. This is mostly due to a poor approach to the problem.

So lets start with some of the basic problems.

The Rules of Fear Syndrome- Lets say you are going to play 3.5 for the first time and you've never really been exposed to dungeons and dragons before. At some point you are going to make a series of realizations. There is a book full of things that give you examples of things you can or can not do with your new pretend charecter. There are a lot of rules for combat and, they are somewhat boggling depsite the fact that everyone else tells you that it is really easy to pick up. Then that person is going to see that the GM has his own book that is full of all sorts of things, and another book full of things that want to kill you.

I've observed that there seems to be a sort of instinctual understanding that the players are expected to play a major part in the story. And they want to, why the hell else would they be there? So they want their character to be good. Because there is a whole book full of monsters over there and a GM who isn't afraid to use them. When the gm starts to narrate the opening lines of the game all the sudden? This shit becomes real. There is a desire to do well.

How each player handles that desire is what will eventually define the cohesivness of the group. Fer instance:

The rules lawyer- In trying to know all the rules at the same time, and by twisting those rules as much as possible he seeks to wrest away as much power from the GM as humanly possible in order to keep his stop as a protagonist.

Power Gamer- A close cousin of the rules lawyer and the two share pleantly of overlap. Power gamers use the rules to make perfectly legitimat charecters who are capable of dealing with threats that should be impossible at their level.

Goofball- The kid who wants to suceed, doesn't know how, so he shoots for comic relief instead because it becomes much easier to have no investment in anything when nothing is taken seriously.

Deer In the Headlights- These players I've seen alot of. They freeze up, don't really know what to do, and take a back seat while the others determine the action. Sometimes these players will turn into something else. Sometimes they just stay locked in place.

The Role Player Extraordinaire!- These people are weird. They will do everything they can in charecter to ensure that they never have to pick up and roll the dice ever. They will give thousands of arguments both in game and out of game as to why they should just be able to role play out the situation instead of just rolling the damn dice.

The Critic- These are pople who kinda sit back and heckle just about everything the gm does until the get the exact game they want.

To be perfectly fair I've been both the critic and the goofball. There are more of course but this covers, in a broad sense, the diffrent play modes inherent in D&D along with the various extreams players will take these modes.

To be fair...

I typed up something else for most of lunch and now I only have less than 20 minuts left. I suppose I could just do something else but I don't feel like finishing A Void, starting The Feaverhead, or reading Time. I like Time and all but not today. I think I need to give politics a rest. I want to refocus my atensions back onto lit theory and stuff like that. It is been awhile since I've really done stuff like that. Politics is neat but it is sort of all encompassing. There really isn't to much of a middle ground with it.

I remeber I had this same issue when my teacher wanted me to join the foresnics team and I turned her down. I told her that I had time issues and that I simply wasn't willing to spend that much time with it. I am starting to come up against that now. Like the whole Isreal/Palistine thing. Forming an educated opinion of that was going to take weeks if not months. It is such a multifaced problem that coming to even a partial understanding of it would take forever and it always changing.

Oh well. So yeah! Lit theory though I have all sorts of fucking opinions on it and I am good at it. So I am going to refocus on that for a bit. This means I am going back to reading multiple things at the same time and prolly updating less. OH and I want to do some more of that RPG theory thing, it is exciting to me. I might do that tonight! I dunno okay werk time even though I dun't wanna.

It's now 3:30am

I'm not sleepy which is strange because I should be about now. I'm not though. Ah well. So recently I've been feeling really creative. Not in the writting sense of the word but in the building shit with my hands sense.

Currently it is manifested itself in two ways. One I am not going to talk about because I don't feel like it. The other is I really want some ties. Ties are neat, and they make me look sharp. The problem is that my ties are normally mono colored, and they don't really reflect me. I mean sure sure I wear a red shirt, black tie, and look fabulous but it doesn't really capture me really all that well. So I've turned to custom ties. I found a place on the interwebs that will make me a custom tie for 30 bucks. All things considered that isn't so bad. I mean I only really need two or so. So right now I am kicking around designs seeing what will work and what won't. I really want a tie that features the katana wielding nun from hellsing ultimate. It looks like this:

I think my desires might be impossible though considering how long and skinny the tie is and how square that image is. I was going to mess around with it in photoshop tomarrow and see if I can get it to where it will fit in the tie template without looking like total ass. Somehow I don't think it is going to happen but it will certainly become the focus of my atension and there will be much creative swearing going on.

Or just me shouting fuck a lot who knows.

I definatly know that I am going to get something from visitor Q. There is a black screen with white kanji that asks, "Have you ever been hit on the head with a rock"? Fucking priceless. Since the way they write is handily vertical that is totally going on a tie. It is one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite movies. I also think it will look really snazzy.

There are some other things I am kicking around but those are the two things I would gladly pay a lump sum of money for to have on a tie. Especially the visitor Q thing, that is totally going to happen and I am really excited about it.

Taking a screen shot from a dvd on your pc used to be bitchy though. I figgured it out once though which means I can figgure it out again. It will just take time. I could do the calligraphy myself but that involves a scanner, and that just is a huge pain in the ass. Speaking of caliigraphy I think it is high time I started doing chinese caligraphy again. This means 2-3 things.

1) I need a table. Well I've needed a table for awhile now. I am a big man, I take up big spaces. So I need a mofoing table.

2) Time. This can be made. By video games. For now at least.

3)...nope looks like it was just two things. OH BOTTLED INK! Cause while I appreciate the meditative uses that grinding my own has, it sucks.

I stopped doing it primarily because I was doing the kanji wrong. See there is a specific order in which you make the strokes. I didn't know this when I started. I just messed around with the brushes and was drawing some kanji I got from a english to chinese translation page. When I tried to go back and relearn it the right way I found that my brain was stuck and that it really didn't want to. Stupid brain. So I had to shelve it. I figgured I'd pull it out later when I had forgotten everything I had learned and start again.

Number three now needs some explanation cause I just added something.

See I am not really much of a traditionalist I generaly and genuinly have no problems ignoring traditions when I think they are restrictive or silly. I think it comes from being left handed. I've had a life time of watching people do something one way, and then being told that their way won't work for me and I just need to figgure out my own path. That is how I roll and I am pretty good at it. Chinese caligraphy is diffrent though. The kanji is formed in such a way so that the whole thing fits together better. THe ink traditionaly comes in sticks, and you put some water on a grinding stone and you slowly and paciently grind out some ink. It is supposed to give you time to think of what you are going to be saying and to give you a chance to reflect on the task ahead. Believe it or not it works amazingly well. Still when I am just trying to do some practise strokes to get a few kanji into my muscle memory it is not helpful. AND so I need some bottled ink. I wish I thought of that while I was at hobby lobby today.

Man I had the strangest time trying to buy an exacto knife. You would think that is something target would have? I mean everyone needs an exacto knife they are amazing. Apparently not though. Oh well. Alrighty now it is 4 and I should at least lie down and make a show of being asleep. Hopefully I can lull my body into a false sense of sleepyness. Stupid body.

September In Review

This is something new I want to start doing. At the end of the month I kinda want to review the previouse month just to see any trends in my writting and stuff like that. I dunno it seems fun and I am in the mood to do it so here it goes.

Last month I published 10 blogs.

Which adds up to just a little over 12 pages of text. I know this cause I copied it into microsoft word out of curiosity!

The vast majority were about politcs.

It was a relativly light month idea/concept wise. I think mostly because I was pretty intently reading.

High point of the month was the health care trilogy

Low point of the month? Eh I dunno all the other posts were pretty average so I guess the rest of the month really. Fuck the average.

I'm going to do August here too because why not.

10 blog entires!

the majority were devoted to politics

3 devoted to theory, and two to my theory

14 pages of text Nice!

High point, expounding on my theory a little bit.

Low Point, the whole migrain doctor thing. Man that sucked.

G/N/S frantic fun time

If you take the r out of frantic the word becomes 75% more fun to say! True fact. It is Saturday night and there are all sorts of people at books a million. They should all be somewhere else having well protected sex with willing partners. See I don't hate the world! When I want people to go away I wish nice things on them sometimes. Oh yeah the title. So I want to do a series of blogs on RPG theory and I figgure I'll start with the gran daddy of all rpg theory and move on from there.

G/N/S theory stands for gamist/Narrativist/simulationist and it is a representation of the three primary modes of gaming that rpg gamers both experience and propigate. I have lots to say on the subject including my desire to branch off on my own. However, before I do so I am going to summerize the GNS stance here because most people grossly misread it and go off into crazy town when they do so. CRAZY TOWN I tell you. So I think it is important to establish what I mean when I say GNS. Oh yeah I am going to be reffrencing D&D a lot in this post. For our purposes I am reffering to 3.5 and under.

For thous who are actually curiouse and would like to follow this the original theory is here. Okay so now that I've reduced my audience to 1 I can keep going! I owe the GNS a lot. Most of my skills at GMing were developed because of my understanding of the theory. It helped me to understand the underlying flaw of mainstream rpgs and what I can do to help mitigate thous flaws and for that I am more than grateful. But it isn't perfect so lets get a basic list of terms down then rocket off on our own.

Schizophrenic Game Play:

Originaly used as a descriptor for dungeons and dragons, but I tend to broaden the definition to include the vast majority of mainstream games. SGP comes from the sort of open ended view that D&D takes to its desighn process. D&D can be played in any one of three modes and as a result player expectations from each other as well as their gms can be easily misconstrued without massive communication before hand between both the players and the gm. In your average game this communication doesn't really take place ever. Who knows why something to do with human group dynamics. In an attempt to identify the problems with D&D, the GNS model was developed. Most D&D games don't strictly fall into any one aspect of the GNS model but instead they have a blend of two elements with the third taking a distant seat.

G stands for Gamism. Gamist games are sometimes called, rather disparagingly, roll playing instead of role playing. They focus more on the rules elements provided by the games. Gamist games tend to use all the rule books, the battle mat is present, and well the rpg is run more like a board game than a game proper. There is a whole lot more to it but it gets highly nuanced and rather silly. Right now gamism stands for pretty much for what it sounds like it means. Skill roles instead of roleplaying it out blah blah blah. It isn't a bad way to play really. Grab a dungeon modual and a few friends and it makes for a fun evening. It is the inherent confilict between gamism and narrativism that causes the majority of the problems. Gamism is often times reffered to as dismissivly, this isn't fair it is a compleatly valid mode of game play. One important thing that we need to do is to seperate the players from the play mode. 90% of all dooshbag players I met were people who liked to use the rules of the game to their advantage when playing rather than you know the setting or something like that.

N stands for narrativism. N is where most of the games that are written over at the forge come from. It is exalted on high as the prefered mode of role playing. It is also my prefered mode of ropleplaying but that has nothing to do with it. Narrativist game play focuses more on the story. In a D&D game the rules would take more of a back seat, some combats would be a more loosely based affair and and the players would be expected to be in charecter more. Again it isn't all its cracked up to be. Sometimes it is nice to just roll dice and kill things. The amount of contiuned creativity required for naravist game play is pretty intense and not every role player is capable of it. It is definatly something you work up to. Still it is neat. In general narravists and gamists are at odds mostly because of a personality thing. Gamists work long and hard knowing the ins and outs of all the rules and sometimes they get testy when someone just talks thier way through a situation without roleplaying it. This mode of game play can lead to sevear railroading by the gm. It can also lead to a couple of creative players dominating the game while the gamist kids sit back and wait for combat to start.

S stands for Simulationist. Or as it is better known, that other thing. Simulationist isn't really a most of play so much as it is a by product of play. This is especially true in D&D. It also the most poorly defined of the GNS three. It even gets its own essay by Mr. Edwards and you know what? It is a terrible disorganized mess. It is also something that isn't really directly adressed very often and unlike the other two terms it doesn't really mean what it sounds like. Okay here we go. Simulationist gameplay are all those little things in RPGs that try to simulate life and realism. It is like the rules for starvation in D&D. Or that combat is broken into 3 second intervals called turns and that in order for combat to take place unfettered it needs to do so in a 5 foot by 5 foot square. It is the modification for the dice rolls that you make when you are fighting in an area smaller than that square. It is the rules for building, and maintaining a fortress. Oh here is a good one it is pages upon pages full of gear that all have carefully calculated weights so as to not go over the charecter's encumberance. I think I am being clear. It is a slipery motherfucking topic. But I think I got it down.

Okay!

So those are the basics.

By codifying the three main modes of gameplay we can begin to adress what it is that goes wrong during so many sessions of D&D or Shadowrun, or White Wolf, and hopefully come up with a more hollisic, satisfying gaming experience. I find that it works best when you don't take the whole system to seriously. Some GNS followers are postivly militant and about their adherence. They have their heads stuffed full of vocabulary and concepts that they only half understand, and that drives them crazy. For example you can't mention a thread on RPG.net about alternative fantasy gaming with someone barging in and making all these bizzare claims about the GNS.

To be fair though the GNS is a pretty specific attack against D&D so it does make sense, but hey lots of D&D games suck when they don't have to so...whatcha gonna do?

So stop worrying and use as much or as little as the theory as nessisary. I see it more as a list of problems than solutions.

HERE IS WHY!

Okay first things first. Roleplaying game theory is a relativly new thing, it is also a relativly small thing and it ignores one major elephant in the room. There is both a gm as well as players. Any coherent theory needs to adress the fact that both of these entities excist...and hrm I don't really know how to finnish this sentence so that it is both clever and logical so you get this stream of words instead. The GNS system is dominated by one important idea that kinda lurks behind all others. And this is:

The System Matters. This is where my basic split between the GNS starts! Okay the idea behind system matters is this: D&D is, more than less, an open ended system. The number of diffrent types of stories you can tell, the types ways you can play, they are infinate. Its part of the beauty of the game system and I would say it is a definate factor in its longevity. However! This comes at a price. Everyone comes to a table thinking D&D is one thing. Over the course of a few game sessions the vision of what D&D is, is kinda hammered out an a social contract is formed. Or not. I mean these things do happen. More often than not in fact. The idea behind the system mattering is that by applying the GNS theory to the game desighn process, we can eliminate schizophrentic game play before it has a chance to manifest. As a result most games that come out of the GNS camp tend to be very specific.

Sorcerer is a game where the players have entered into an agreement with a demon in exchange for power. The demon is not a benighn entity and it messes with things, it also has needs of its own which must be met. You can not play sorcerer without demons.

My Life With Master is a game where you and the other players play the equivalent of Igor, or Amiadab if you know your Hawthorn. You have to play a servant. You need to make moral choices, hell there are even win loss conditions. The game play will follow a predifined path and it will end in one of 4 ways. Man when I put it like that this game sounds horrible. It is one of the most brilliant pieces of game design ever.

There are some other examples. I plan on tinkering with these concepts a whole lot more. What I plan on doing is finding some free downloadable games that really encapsulate these ideas. But that will take awhile. Its been a long time since I've been involved in the indie rpg scene 2003 specifcally.

I just spent 15 minuts trying and all I got were broken links and dead ends. So I am going to have to select from a crop of newer games. ANYWAY. The main problem behind these games is that they really like to remove the gm from the picture. In My Life With Master, the flow of the story and the out come of the events are dictated by both system and dice rolls. It is mearly up to the gm to fill in the blanks. The gm and the player negotiate before hand how the scene plays out and certain elements of the out come, such as items the player is garenteed to remain in control of. Heck the gm isn't even allowed to come up with his own master. Instead it is a colaberative effort between the gm and the players to create a master that everyone is happy with.

I would like to take this moment to reiterate that I truely love my life with master. It does, however, take the game mostly out of the hands of the gm and place it in a community center shared by everyone. However, to be fair My Life with Master is a highly exparamental, and awesome game.

It makes for a good example though because it is the ultimate example of system mattering. The actions of the players are sevearly curtailed, and as a result there is a simple system for everything and everything is in its place.

Okay I need to take a break from this for a bit. It is a lot of thinking and organization I just did and I feel my self switching gears but I nned to make a good transition and a break from this post. IE Start with a new post.

I don't really want to clutter up my GNS summary post with to many of my own ideas. I would rather like to present the theory in a more non threatening form stripped away of a lot of extraneouse ideas that have come up because the theory has failed to really adress the inherent diffrences between a gm and the players.

You Know What? Never Mind

So originally this was going to be a blog post about the palistine & isralie conflict. But I have a head ache! So I don't feel like doing something complicated and hard. So instead I am going to go talk about all the little things.

Little thing 1: It is almost november! Well okay specifically it is a month away from november. November is a slightly big deal because it is national novel writing month. YAY! I plan on participating. I was participating last year too and I was moving a long at a pretty decent clip when all the sudden my palm pilot lost a huge chunk of my novel. That sucked. It sucked hard. It is actually the reason why I am sitting there typing this out on my baby laptop now instead of the palm pilot. It was nice for just utterly pointless text generation but it had zero abilities to edit, or format. It also was just kinda a pain in the ass, and well occationally it would eat my writting like it did during last years NANO. So now that I have a baby lap top and will I am going to participate this year too. I am thinking of making a speperate blog for it. From now until then I plan on writting lots of neat little micro fiction, and some other things just to flex some of my more useful muscles. I might also do some rpg campain plot layouts just to get those muscles working again too. At any rate I am in a state of preparedness... and pain. Man those two things don't work out.

Little Thing 2: Fuck you .MKV format. Fuck you in your shit spewing mouth deep and hard. Seriously, throat rape. That is what you deserve. So what's teh problem? Well sometimes .mkv files won't render subtitles correctly so they get cut off at the edges. Seriously cut off though, at least 6-10 charecters, which is a decent amount of words. It is annoying to me and it makes some things unwatchable. The thing is that the files play perfectly on the computer, and it all looks okay in the preview window...it is just during the actual burning process. So I am not sure what to do. I'll be turning to the forums sometime soon I am going to try converting to AMV first then doing it. I might also try breaking the mkv files into both a video file with a seperate subtitle file. Alternatly I could just buy the fucking animes in question. Gurren Lagan would be worth the money but Hare+Guu is not. So who knows.

Little Thing 3: There is this MMO I've been playing called Dungeon Fighter. It is fucking rad. http://dungeonfighter.nexon.net/ Look there is a link! Essentially it is a side scrolling brawler in an mmo format. So far I really really like it. It is extrodinarly repetative but there is just somehting about side scrolling brawlers that make me really happy. Not only that but this game seems to under stand what it is that makes side scrolling brawlers a fuck of a lot of fun. Now if only they would get off their asses and start banning all the gold farmers and what not we can ger things underway! The thing about the game though is that people come at with a complealty wrong sense of scale. I mean seriously, you long on clear a couple of dungeons, maybe pvp a lil bit, then go do something else. It isn't really something you play for hours on end. Oh well whatever I like it.

Little Thing 4: I don't usually write about my personal life here very much. But when I went to go visit Sasha this last couple of days she got thrown out of her house and I had to spend all sorts of time helping her move and such. It was sad and slightly stressful bu we got it all taken care of. There is something to be said about our problem solving abilities. That something definatly involves staying out of our way because heaven help you if we unite against you.

Little Thing 5: Well never mind lunch is just about over. Scribblenauts rocks, I haven't tried the new Kingdom Hearts, I want to play Victoria but there aren't enough hours in the day and I am addicted to dungeon fighters, and I am trying to get Gurren Lagan to burn right.

Little Thing 6: No seriously go see Gurren Lagan.

Little Thing 7: Dear Hellsing. Seriously? Are you dragonball fucking Z? Stop waxing poetic and mother fucking get on with it. Ultimate Hellsing my overly pasty white ass needs a kissing.