Robin D. Laws
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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "robin_d_laws" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
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09:20 am
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The Birds
View series to date here.
Tags: the birds
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11:30 am
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Also Repressed: The Inevitability Of Senescence and Death
There is some puzzlement, perhaps even consternation, in pundit land and the blogosphere that the poll numbers in the Presidential race haven't budged much since Obama became the presumptive Dem nominee. McCain has been sputtering from gaffe to gaffe. Obama’s Magical Mystery Tour continues to inspire rapturous coverage. Why doesn’t this change anything?
The answer is one that any political junkie knows, but can’t bring himself to assimilate: anyone interested enough politics to be closely following the day-to-day coverage in July has already made up his or her mind. They’re committed to one of the two broad cultural proclivities we call political parties. (And if you’re in the tiny corps of people who belong to one tribe but are thinking of crossing over, you’re probably not going to ford that mental Rubicon until the very last moment.)
Commentators, pros and ams alike, must repress this basic fact, because its corollary is that nothing they’re doing now matters. But barring a seismic event of the dead girl or live goat magnitude, you’re not going to see much movement until 1) the conventions (whose bumps are often temporary) and 2) the debates and 3) that fateful day in November when the curious gestalt entity called the American voter decides if, even with a 13% wrong track number, it can violate its deeply ingrained iconic values to vote for the smart guy over the fighter pilot.
Tags: politics hut
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09:20 am
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Miller Time
The as-yet-unnamed 4E campaign has pulled a Barney Miller. It has taken on a tone and content rather different than envisioned in the pilot.
As mentioned previously, I began the game by asking the players to envision two distinct outcomes of their possible character arcs. As several sessions of play went by, devoted to learning the combat system, I got a hankering to introduce some of this promised characterization into the mix. Presented with PC casualties of the playtesting process (I still have no idea how I assigned such high damage values to those creatures, honest) I decided to tie in their free resurrections to story arcs proposed by a couple of the other players. The paladin’s destiny may be as savior of his people from their undead overlords—or as an anti-savior who becomes like the creatures he’s sworn to fight. The wizard/ranger quests for arcane knowledge, which may consume her if plumbed without moral guidance. So the wizard got a legendary book, which she was able to use to bring back the rogue and fighter from the dead in unorthodox fashion. These two now register as undead and have acquired a minor allergy to radiant damage. The group now quests to lift the taint of undeath from their comrades.
In the meantime, the characters have taken a swerve toward the picaresque. Told that they can only resolve the undeath issue by confronting their destinies, the characters have elected to find a short cut. The paladin is proving himself other than an typically jerky paladin—he’s an atypical jerky paladin, prone to panicked exclamations and more interested in his burgeoning livestock business than his legendary fate.
In part the back-to-the-dungeon vibe has prompted the group to nostalgically embrace the comic irresponsibility of D&D games of yore. The early focus on combats and learning the rules has also permitted the group to drift back to its preference for playing their characters as amusingly inept.
When an unexpected dynamic arises in play, I say accept the dynamic. So for the moment at least, the accent will be on misadventure. We’ll see if the characters come out the other side of this older and wiser, eventually shifting back to epic mode, or if the campaign is headed permanently into Vancian territory.
Tags: 4e, d&d, gaming hut
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10:50 am
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TV Round Up
Roger Ebert, already sidelined by illness, and his co-host Richard Roeper are departing the At the Movies review show after failing to come to contract terms with its owner, Disney. Ebert had already been withholding rights to the trademarked “Two Thumbs Up” from them for several months. Disney has announced plans to replace Roeper and permanent fill-in Michael Phillips with two younger critics, Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz. Lyons is a second generation critic; Mankiewicz descends from a storied clan of Hollywood writers. As they pursue a younger demographic, the suits at Disney are no doubt secretly thinking that the new guys will enthusiastically recommend all the crap blockbusters and ignore those stupid small and subtitled films that only cineastes care about. Critics have a way of growing into the job, though—as Roeper has over the years. He started as positively cringeworthy, but expanded his horizons, becoming especially loose and confident during Ebert’s convalescence. Phillips I’ve never warmed too, though. He’s a tougher critic than either Ebert or Roeper, who actually tend to support any halfway decent popcorn flick. Phillips’ higher bar would be a positive if only he backed up his headmasterish judgments with argument or example. Without having seen the new guys, I hold out hope that they’ll eventually disappoint the suits and do more than cheerlead for the publicity machine.
Roeper and Phillips, possibly in conjunction with Ebert, are shopping a new show to interested parties.
In police procedural news, Chris Noth is leaving Law and Order: Criminal Intent. This time he seems to be departing the L&O franchise voluntarily. Replacing him in the swapped-off lead role is Jeff Goldblum, who was very cool in the short-lived cop show Raines. Now he and alternate lead Vincent D’Onofrio can engage in an epic weird-off. I look forward to the battle of the off-kilter line readings.
And finally, the second season of Mad Men starts this Sunday on AMC. Now that The Wire is off the air, this is unquestionably the best series on American TV. Like The Sopranos and Deadwood, it gets much of its charge from its portrayal of an exotic milieu—in this case, New York ad agencies in the alien era of the early sixties. What distinguishes it from those shows is the slippery, elusive structures of its individual episodes. It abandons the classic model of establish A story, establish B story, develop A and B stories, wrap up B story, wrap up A story to weave surprising narratives that reveal themselves only in retrospect as part of a cohesive whole. If you haven't gone there yet, rent the first season pronto and queue up the second on your recording device of choice.
Tags: cinema hut, television hut
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09:20 am
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The Birds
View series to date here.
Tags: the birds
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09:20 am
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Mutant City Blues Sample Chapter
Simon Rogers of Pelgrane Press has announced that Mutant City Blues will be available at Gen Con, in the form of a 60-copy special softcover advance edition. The standard non-collectible edition will be available later in the year. In the meantime, a sample chapter covering police procedure for the Heightened Crimes Investigative Unit is available now, in what is theoretically an unlimited number of electronic copies.
Tags: gaming hut, gumshoe, mutant city blues, self-promotion
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09:20 am
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Perils Of Literal Translation
I bet the name of this restaurant sounds perfectly natural in Chinese.
Tags: photos, signage
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09:20 am
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Ripped From the Spam Filter
![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) muskrat_john takes note of the weird new trend of spam subject lines with disturbing fake headlines. His list of recent examples includes:
Britney in coma, feared dead
Tornado in New York destroys city
Democrats withdraw Obama from Race
Angelina Jolie Dies in Miscarriage
This one showed up in my spam filter the other day:
Clinton Found Hanged In Bedroom
Not sure which Clinton they’re performing electronic voodoo on here. The bedroom reference makes me think Bill. But the overall theme of harm wished against women might indicate Hillary as the target.
This perfectly fits the modus operandi of The Esoterrorists, who conspire to make magic rituals easier to perform by increasing the levels of cognitive dissonance in the world. The general distress evoked by the headlines is a sure sign of their involvement. Also useful to their aims are the simply confusing examples, like one announcing the demise of an already deceased celebrity:
James Brown dies of heart attack
Only one question remains: how to fully convert this into an adventure seed. The agents might be sent to locate and neutralize the highly fortified server farm where the spam originates. Or perhaps they investigate the usual spate of creature-related murders, only to find that they’ve been summoned as guard dogs for the servers.
Tags: cognitive dissonance, esoterrorists, gaming hut, ripped from the headlines
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09:20 am
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The Birds
View series to date here.
Tags: the birds
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11:16 am
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Yes, This Is a Game Design Question
A query for non-North American readers: how readily available are M&Ms candies in your part of the world?
Tags: blegs, gaming hut
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09:20 am
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Wanted: A Case Study In Action
Wanted blows up real good. Also, it is very Feng Shui. It does a better job than other recent blockbuster action flicks of integrating its action sequences into the drama. Where most movies of its type hammer home their themes with leaden obviousness (if they have them at all), Wanted keeps you guessing. Is it going to maintain its apparent paean to lunatic patriarchal values, or subvert them? It draws on the seemingly inexhaustible well of Arthurian myth without lapsing into hero worship or woolly mysticism. Especially noteworthy is its twist on that elemental genre staple, the training sequence, presenting it as an exercise in brutal indoctrination.
None of these elements would matter much if the action didn’t deliver. Timur Bekmambetov shows the mastery of spatial relationships that is key to a great action sequence. The directors who can really do this always keep you oriented, putting you inside the geography of the scene. When the viewers instinctively know where they are, the movement acquires impact and suspense. You see this in John Woo, Yuen Woo-Ping, Stephen Spielberg, Michael Mann, Brian DePalma and even the Coen Brothers. (We don’t think of the Coens as action directors but check out the hotel shootout or dog chase in No Country For Old Men, or even the cartoony clashes of Raising Arizona.) The bullet-bending gimmick in Wanted wouldn’t work without a strong spatial sense. We have to be able to compare both the ordinary and the crazy gun-fu version of the trajectories in order to be impressed.
Compare this to the fight sequences in Hellboy II, which are merely okay despite their elaborate setups and solid choreography. Here the axis whips around from one quick cut to the next without regard to spatial values. We are not inside the action, but buzzing around it, like ADD-afflicted fruit flies.
Tags: cinema hut, feng shui
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05:35 pm
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Brisbane Wrap
On my last day in Brisbane I caught the big ticket exhibit at the Gallery Of Modern Art, Picasso and His Collection. Not unusually, Pablo Picasso accumulated the works of other artists either as reference, as a canny collector, and as the recipient of gifts from members of his circle. This show takes highlights of his collection, willed to the French government for the benefit of young artists, and juxtaposes them with the Picasso works they influenced. So not only do you get some arresting Picasso canvases, sculptures and prints, but also pieces by Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Dali, Ernst, Braque, Henri Rousseau, and many more.
Some of the most charming works are doodles and cartoons Picasso and friends made casually for one another. Picasso and Cocteau drew caricatures of each other and of other collaborators in a Sergei Diaghilev ballet production. Their simple immediacy personalizes these icons of modernism—and they’re wonderful, masterful drawings, to boot.
All of the Brisbanites I talked to about my museum-crawling plans mentioned the Picasso show, but only a few of them had seen it. Locals, don’t forget to check it out while you’ve still got it.
I meant to keep going and check out the Queensland Art Gallery’s retrospective of Sidney Nolan, a major figure in Australian art I was unfamiliar with. Well, my unfamiliarity continues, as my body decided to stage a necessary rebellion and send me back to the hotel for napping, brain shutdown and general taking it easy. After all the excitement of the convention and exploring a new place, a night of packing and watching Simpsons episodes on my laptop seemed like the height of crazy luxury.
I'm now back safe and sound back in Toronto, much to the dismay of my confused body clock...
Thanks again to Gen Con Oz for inviting me to Brisbane, and to my many hosts and minders for taking such good care of me while I was there. If any of my industry peeps are lucky enough to wangle an invite, you have no choice but to say yes.
Tags: gen con oz, museums, on the road, visual art
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07:04 pm
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We Still Have Much To Learn About Sea Snakes
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — I love me some museum, and the city of Brisbane is ready to oblige with an entire complex of monolithic cultural structures clustered together a few blocks from the convention centre.
First up is the Queensland Museum, which divides its focus between natural and social history. The main section I wanted to check out was the space dedicated to the state’s aboriginal and Torres Island peoples. Its primary emphasis is on the devastating effect of Western settlement on both cultures and the ongoing struggle for political autonomy and land rights. This is an important story to tell, one that all too frequently parallels that of first nations and Inuit peoples in Canada. For example, both governments separated kids from parents to place them in government or church-run schools meant to assimilate them into the dominant culture, with disastrous results. The Canadian federal government issued its formal apology for this policy just a few weeks ago. The parallels aren’t exact: the Canadian government didn’t, for example, coerce indigenous peoples into menial or domestic labor and then embezzle their pay.
I wanted this exhibit to be larger, so it could also grant more space to these cultures’ pre-contact conditions, to the extent that they can be reconstructed. It may well be that there is even less known about pre-Contact Australian cultures than in North America.
Many of the exhibits in the Queensland Museum are showing their age a bit, but I got the basic grounding in the place I’ve been visiting all week. Now I can regale folks back home with information about sapphire mining, burrowing cockroaches, and the macadamia nut.
I had to copy down my favorite phrase of descriptive text: “Residents swam in the river, [catching] fish and buglies (yabbies).” You know, I was confused about what a buglie was, but now that you explained that it was a yabbie, we’re good to go.
A special exhibit delved into subject matter truly alien and incomprehensible: a celebration of rugby. I zipped through that at top speed to go look at boomerangs. As I passed through, I did learn that there was a local conflict here called the Special League War. I gather that this terrible struggle claimed thousands of lives.
Still on the indigenous theme, the State Library was showing a collection of Edward Curtis’ early 20th century photographs of North American native peoples. Curtis is treated with distaste by modern anthropologists for romanticizing and directing his subjects. He also occasionally adds anachronistic and/or manufactured props and costumes, so that his images are tantalizingly dramatic and completely unreliable as a source of information. Here Curtis’ photos are juxtaposed against a number of baldly dehumanizing period photos of aborigines, underling the comparative sympathy and undeniable beauty of his pictures.
I just wish they’d been given better display conditions. The photos were already framed under glass, and then placed behind another layer of thick display glass. This faced the back of the library and its lovely view of a highway overpass. It was tough to see the photos without reflections of the cityscape or one’s own image overlaid onto them by the doubled reflections.
Also cool: a show of artists’ books (ultra-limited editions, altered books and the like), also at the Library, and at a private gallery/cafe space named RAW, an exhibit of compellingly future-shocky photo collages from young mainland Chinese artists. Check ‘em out, Brisbanites.
Tags: indigenous peoples, museums, on the road, visual art
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09:20 am
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The Birds
View series to date here.
Tags: the birds
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07:31 pm
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Gen Con Oz, The Thrilling Conclusion
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — The Robin’s Laws Of Good Gamemastering panel is scheduled for 9 AM on a Sunday morning, so I expect congoers to do the sensible thing and sleep in instead. The mere demands of exhaustion on the human body can’t keep an Aussie gamer down—the room fills completely at nine on the dot. The classic questions are posed: balancing player tastes, how to allow players to keep secrets when you’re using cutaways, whether it is appropriate to stretch players out of their taste boundaries. Credit goes to Luke Swadling for the most specific question I’ve ever been asked. (Paraphrasing.) “We were starting a new campaign and really liked how it was going. Early on I introduced a dog into the storyline, and that started everyone joking that they knew the dog was going to get it. Right a member of the group got a phone call telling him that his dog had been run over by a car and killed. Now that it’s three years later, do you think we should try to restart the campaign, or just leave it alone?”
My final panel, with Stephen Dedman, is Movies Worth Stealing From. We start by speaking in general terms about the long tradition of borrowed plot elements in film and literature. I suggest that GMs learn to steal structure rather than outward detail or plot incident, allowing them to disguise their influences with new details. Then we reel off movie recommendations ranging from the core classics to the latest cool obscurities. Names of films and directors will be familiar to regular visitors to the cinema hut.
After a final signing and chatting session, my duties at Gen Con Oz are done. Congratulations to Ian Houlihan and his team for an amazing job launching a very ambitious event. Word has it that they got the attendance numbers they wanted and are planning to do it again next year. Thanks to convention staff, volunteers, panelists and attendees for making me feel so welcome. I'll remember Gen Con Oz for its great mix of fan-run spirit and professional execution. My job is performed in isolation, and at cons like this I get to feel like I’m borrowing a new circle of friends for the week. The opportunity to be reminded that people out there do read, play, and know the work is an enormous blessing—an essential fuel that keeps me going when I get climb back into the writing chair and find myself looking at a blank screen yet again.
Rather than fly out immediately, I’m going to stick around the area for Monday and Tuesday to check out the museums in the nearby cultural district on the river.
[Edited to correct my confusion of Aussie gamers. Apologies to Luke and Nathan for mixing you up.]
Tags: cinema hut, gaming hut, on the road
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08:35 pm
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Gen Con Oz, Day Three
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — Saturday was the make or break day, attendance-wise. Would the unusually high preregistration numbers be matched with enough walk-in trade to make the show work? Looks like they did very well, with aisles bustling and a lobby full of folks heading through the purchase and badge queues.
The day began with Tracy and Laura Hickman’s signature event, the legendary Killer Breakfast, recalibrated for a stellar line-up of Aussie victims. They’ve been doing this at flagship Gen Con for years: a mass participation event in which players are given old school D&D characters and troop up on stage to sit on a table to be subjected to Tracy’s very funny and viciously adversarial DMing. The only certitude is that your character will hilariously die. If you can vamp entertainingly, you can postpone the inevitable for a while. Tracy and Laura unfurl the showmanship—there’s video, prizes, mini-games... They even sing! Normally I would run at maximum speed away from any threatened singing of well-known songs rewritten with parody fandom lyrics (sorry, filkers) but the Hickmans really sell it. Here at Gen Con Oz the event was spotlighted as a show highlight, literally center stage in the middle of the hall.
Both of my seminars today were old reliables, garnering the expected strong attendance. Late morning was Freelancing: the Next Step, along with Aussie writers Kyla Ward and Steve Darlington. As always, I tried to lay out the tough realities of the field without being completely discouraging.
Early afternoon was Peter Adkison and I for What’s Going On In Gaming, a.k.a. State Of the Gaming Industry. Naturally the debut of 4E and its effect on the cyclical RPG category gave us a natural starting point. Peter’s history as past and present game company CEO and Gen Con poobah gives him a wide perspective from which to prognosticate. His thoughts on the coming revolution in electronic game components were alone worth the price of admission. If there had been a price, that is.
Nathan Russell, who took part in the indie panel on Day One, kindly slipped me a copy of his Space Rat: the Jack Cosmos Adventure Game. I’m tempted to describe it as the game for people who found Macho Women With Guns insufficiently ironic. The game presupposes a nonexistent entertainment property and then prompts you to emulate its tropes. Space Rat, a rodent analog of Futurama’s Zap Branigan and is an icon of cheesy 70s novels and a TV series. He is an NPC; you play the bevy of scantily-clad, pulchritudinous space girlfriends who, in competing for his shiftless affections, actually do all the work in successfully completing his assignments. With modest conceptual fiddling Space Rat looks like it could be serve as the basis for Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen Adventures: the Roleplaying Game.
In other news, I have been presented with several additional explanations of the difference between a latte and a flat white. Charmingly, no two of them seem to agree exactly, leading me to conclude that the Australians don’t know what they’re going to get when they order coffee, either.
Tags: gaming hut, gen con oz, on the road
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06:16 pm
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Gen Con Oz, Day Two
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA —My schedule kicked off with a packed panel entitled Philosophy Of Game Design, with Steve Darlington and Peter Adkison (who slid into place at about ten minutes in, having all but literally come straight from the airport.) A replacement moderator had been appointed just a few moments before start time, which had me sweating a bit. As a general rule, the more abstract the seminar topic, the more desperately the panelists require a moderator to direct the initial discussion. Philosophy of game design could take us just about anywhere, but it’s a rare enough topic that I don’t have a standard five minute starting spiel in pocket to get the ball rolling. Anyhow, we quickly threw to audience questions and dealt with such issues as convergences between tabletop and computer gaming, the role of marketing in game design, and the virtues of designing resolution systems that express a game’s central idea.
It was midway through this panel that I used up my entire quota on the word “paradigm.” The Friday morning is very early in the show to burn through it completely. In my defense, I will say that I am on a lot of panels here.
This was followed by another hour of signing/chatting in the guest area. I was worried that the signing schedule was over-ambitious but in fact I had folks to talk with for pretty close to the whole time. The con area doesn’t really have a pub or other social locus so the signing ritual (whether or not any signing is actually involved) gives attendees their only real chance to stop by for one-on-one chit-chat with the guests.
Later in the afternoon came the Q&A with Robin event. This had a smaller turnout than previous seminars, but that was good, in that everyone got the chance to ask a question, and could sit close enough that it felt more like a conversation than a one-way communication. I fielded some general gamemastering-type questions as well as specific queries on GUMSHOE and HeroQuest. We did a compare-and-contrast of Feng Shui mooks versus 4E minions, and traced the influence of the indie movement on the new D&D.
Peter blew into town intent on playing Gray Ranks, which he’d been turned onto at Origins. So after a very nice Turkish dinner (mmm. baby octopus) we rounded up a couple of additional volunteers and explored this GMless game of teenage Polish partisans during the doomed uprising against the Nazis in the waning years of WWII. A show like this, without the networking responsibilities Gen Con Indy entails, provides a rare opportunity to actually play a game with industry cronies. There is no more devoted fan of the indie scene than Peter. His enthusiasm for Gray Ranks helped propel us through any jet-lag related confusion over the intricate interlocking rules structures designer Jason Morningstar employs to drive its collaborative narrative.
Tags: 4e, gaming hut, gen con oz, gumshoe, heroquest
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07:38 pm
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Gen Con Oz, Day One
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — In founding Gen Con Oz, impresario Ian Houlihan undertakes a bold entrepreneurial stroke. The flagship show expanded incrementally over many years, paralleling the growth of hobby gaming as a whole. Although Ian has run other shows before, Gen Con Oz starts its life as a mammoth event — or is meant to. If they get the attendance numbers they’re hoping for, it starts its history as the third biggest adventure gaming show in the world. Advance registration bodes well. Now it all hangs on walk-in numbers.
The entire event takes place in one cavernous hall (or two halls with the dividers removed, to be precise): dealer’s hall, tables areas for RPGs, CCGs, wargames and minis, signing tables, theater for screenings, and seminar rooms. The latter two are carved from the floor with rod and curtain. Some seminars take place in rooms on an upper level, which look down on the rest of the hall.
An ingenious solution to the “everything in one hall” dilemma is provided in the form of confessional booths, each containing a single roleplaying table. Other roleplaying events, like the RPGA and Indie Explosion events, occur out on the floor, sacrificing privacy and sound-proofing in furtherance of their proselytizing missions.
The Thursday attendees seem dwarfed in number by the size of the play hall. On the other hand, word is that all of the RPG sessions were fully booked. Seminar attendance was gratifyingly full. Panel attendance can be swingy from one convention to the next, and as guest you don’t want to let down the side by attracting only a handful of diehards.
First up was Building A Better Fight Scene, with Stephen Dedman and Adam Windsor. We talked about sprucing up fights by providing tactical goals beyond overcoming the enemy and giving the PCs an emotional stake in the action. Also discussed were techniques for keeping the action moving, and how to make provisional adjudications to move rules arguments out of fight time to the post-game wrap-up. My favorite question required us to recall our top RPG and movie fight scenes. For the latter I picked two Chow Yun Fat classics: the hospital shootout in Hardboiled for sheer sustained tempo, and the confrontation with Zhang Ziyi on the bamboo trees in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, as an example of a fight scene that expresses character drama.
My second panel was a survey of the indie scene with Andrew Smith, Nathan Russell, and Michael Wenman where we named titles of interest and looked at stuff that could be stolen and incorporated into more traditional games. I gave my wish list for the future of the scene, which I think is spinning its wheels a bit after a long period of incredible creative fertility. Basically I’d love to see a focus on content over form, with more emphasis on what the story is over the new gimmick that encourages you to tell it.
I’m making partial headway in figuring out the local terms for the various staple coffee drinks. Although the cafés almost always have espresso machines, asking for a double espresso results in puzzlement and requires further explanation. The first time I ordered without realizing that the lingo was different and was instead served a long black — what I would call an Americano. There’s a short black, too, and it took until today to order a double espresso and be told, “We call that a short black here.” Last night at dinner I asked for a decaf and was asked if a flat white would suffice. What the heck, I thought, let’s explore. When it arrived, the flat white very much seemed to be a latte. Thing is, the menu also offered lattes and cappuccinos along with the flat white. I asked the waiter to clue me in. Turns out a flat white is exactly like a latte, except that a flat white is served in a cup, whereas the latte comes in a glass. How could I have possibly been confused by that?
Tags: gaming hut, gen con oz, on the road
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06:31 pm
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The Gecko Scandal, On the Other Hand, Involves a Literal Gecko
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA — News crawls generate cognitive dissonance at the best of times. When you’re traveling and don’t get the references, they’re even more cryptic. A morning show crawl referring to a local “iguana scandal” evokes a range of intriguing possibilities. Imagine my disappointment when I Google the phrase and discover that the scandal does not revolve around an actual iguana but is instead a dust-up over a politician’s misbehavior at a nightclub called Iguanas.
One of my goals for the trip was to finally crack the secret of a mimicked Aussie accent. This is a challenge for anyone whose repertoire of funny voices is built on a bedrock of Python. Python Australian is basically Eric Idle’s regular voice, much louder. Now that I am immersed in the true source, the mission progresses acceptably. Not to the point where I will demonstrate it to genuine Australians, mind you. The secret, along with the swerving vowels, lies in the uptalking. So far, though, the holy grail of the Aussie accent eludes me still: I can’t quite nail all three vowels in the word “no.”
Wednesday is given over to unscheduled poking around. The third day of an overseas con trip is usually when the Big Crash occurs, so the day is designed assuming an epic nap in the middle.
I swing by the convention centre to grab my badge. The place is ginormous, and could easily swallow the Indy facility. Gen Con Oz will take up one of three or four massive halls. An international poultry conference is in full swing in the adjacent hall. A conference regarding poultry, not for poultry, in case you were worried.
This son of the snowbank is still trying to wrap his head around sub-tropical winter. In the early afternoon, a tour of the city’s post-Expo riverfront area takes me past a manufactured beach, where bikini-clad maidens roast in the sun. But when five o’clock comes, night falls hard. Minutes later, and it’s time to switch the hotel air conditioning unit to its heat setting. Yet I think during my walk I may have gotten a sunburn on the tops of my feet -- through the weave in the fabric of my socks. Whether this is due to proximity to the equator, or because the rays of the winter sun come at you all sneaky and sideways, is a question I leave to the meteorologists in the house.
That was yesterday. After posting this, I’m off to the very first Gen Con Australia. Full report tomorrow!
Tags: cognitive dissonance, gen con oz, on the road
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06:58 pm
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Canada Day At the Australia Zoo
Whenever I go to a new city, I check out the attitude of the man in the “walk” signal, as a general indicator of its overall zeitgeist. In Milwaukee, the walk signal man is hunched and oppressed. London’s man, if I recall him correctly, is stolidly obedient. (Or maybe that’s the “don’t walk” man.) In Toronto, he is brisk and ready to go. Indy’s guy is jaunty and pleased to be a Midwesterner. Here in Brisbane, the man moves forward with a sense of cautious purpose. He knows where he’s going but does not want you to think he’s headed there with undue haste. Also, he’s an optimistic shade of green.
Fact I was unsurprised by: when you order lamb biryani, it’s much better than the lamb in the biryani back home.
Basic geographical fact I should not have been surprised by, but nonetheless am: if it’s winter in Australia, that means the sun sets around 5 pm. Warm temperatures + early evening nightfall = Robin’s ability to accurately guess the time is completely shot.
Today I am provided with a most excellent minder in the person of Kevin Powe, who drives me north of the city to Australia Zoo. (The Hickmans are meant to go, too, but due to a communications snafu do not know the plan. I hope they have not missed their opportunity to behold slumbering wombats.) It’s Canada Day, and Kevin helps me celebrate the spirit of my own homeland by periodically apologizing for no reason. (Although this raises the epistemological question of whether it is in fact Canada Day if back home it is isn’t July 1st yet.)
Australia Zoo is the facility developed by the late television personality Steve Irwin from humble beginnings as a roadside reptile attraction run by his parents. Crocodiles, koalas, kangaroos, wombats, dingos and cassowaries calmly grant audience to the punters from the comfort of their large, clean enclosures. In the snake house, the many venomous serpents laze about, confident in their supremacy, as their non-toxic cousins slither and wriggle for their share of attention. Tasmanian devils lope in demented circles around their pens, waiting in vain for their transformation into miniature tornadoes.
The place hovers in a state of paradox between a modestly sized modern zoological facility and a kitschy celebration of Irwin’s celebrity. Eerily absent is any acknowledgement that something really bad happened to Steve Irwin. One is encouraged to pose with pictures of him, buy his action figures, and read info signs written in shouty Irwin-ese as if he is still with us. His nearly 10 year old daughter, Bindi, groomed to take his place in the family business, makes prominent appearances in signage and merchandising. The gift shop’s most disturbing item is a picture of the little girl smiling and giving double thumbs up, over the legend, “I want to be just like Daddy.”
Tags: gen con oz, on the road
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