Poised over springtime pools...

Hi there!

I'm home from work sick today, but even with a head full of snot, I feel the need to post this.

If you know CA Sizemore and like him, I invite you to send in a donation for him. He came home to find that his wife has died today and the Podcaster Tribe is banding together to try and give him some support.

CA is budding writer and podcast listener living in Phoenix, AZ. I feel terrible for him. This is the sort of thing that could happen to any of us, but especially those of us who have partners who aren't in the best of health.

The money is going to be spent on giftcards for CA and a memorial flower arrangement.

The link below is provided for those wishing to contribute.

OK, so last night when I was going out to get the Katarina from the train, there was this dog outside.

It was a very friendly dog, tail wagging, ribs showing, we hadn't seen her around here before.

Poor puppy! We called Animal Control to see if they can come out and figure out who her owners are.

She was gone this morning but she did manage to drag a dessicated opossum corpse to our front lawn. A love offering? A threat? A taunt? Who knows.

Now, tonight, I gotta deal with the Mr. Possum Corpse.

Lovely.

I wonder if I have a shovel.

I know all of you are probably taking the day off on this day, this auspicious day. fossilapostle's birthday, of course! How could I have forgotten? I am going to have to fight the traffic through the parades and other happenings (the giant paper-mache d20 is probably going to block the streets around the Square again), when I should be at home on this day!

Today's the day you can all make a donation to Bequest or perhaps review other parts of his fantastic gaming advocacy site - including the RL D&D Spells (OMGZ!!) or the Young Person's Adventure League.

And maybe later unwind while listening to episodes of The Escapistcast which is his podcast on Gaming Advocacy and to The Square One Podcast, which is the one I do with him about new roleplayers!

Well, I hope all the rest of you enjoy your day and especially to the honoree, fossilapostle! May there be many happy returns Mr. Walton!

( Happy First of NSFW May! )

Happy birthday Hope! Many happy returns upon the day!

Love,

Sam

Judd, happy birthday, many happy returns, and I hope you have a rockin time this weekend!

I had a great time this weekend. hopeevey came to visit. Each night, we had some kind of roleplaying fun. Friday night was an experiment into Prime Time Adventures, which went OK but was kind of flailing around for a bit. And she made up a Burning Wheel Character, which by itself is a pretty intense thing to do. Then Saturday we played our Cora-Ni freeform game, which resulted in a story that was VERY much like a French farce. I really loved it.

Then last night we picked up the thread of that game but didn't get too much farther, but, I hope, we can pick up the game again another time.

Saturday, we got to walk around downtown Decatur, which was lovely. Then Sunday was Stone Mountain (or, as my daughter used to say, "Stone Mount-nin") where we did some letterboxing. I heartily recommend letterboxing as a means of both getting exercise and keeping one's mind engaged.

Hope's visit was awesome. I already miss her. She is wonderful.

Last night at Spelman College, I got to attend Julia Bond Ellingboe's talk about the game "Steal Away Jordan." It was really cool watching Julia introduce people to a whole new world of games they never had heard of.

What was even more impressive was the demo of her game. A lot didn't "click" about the game until I got the demo, and now I really get what this game is about and how much fun it could be.

Thanks, Julia, for a lovely evening!


EDIT: if you want to listen to her talk, it is available as a MP3 download by going to this site: http://bearsgrove.com/actual-play-recordings/

Burning Wheel. Cool game. I'm reading it. I'm trying to wrap my widdle bear brain around it. It's interesting. I would like to take some of the doods who hang out at the D&D Meet-Up and get them to play, just so I could work it out, give me some experiential learning time.

I thought that I was going to have a full, complete game by spending $26 for the main book and the character burner book. But turns out, I gotta buy the Monster Burner book too. And then there's Burning Empires. And the Asian game. Wow! Well, I do want to support the industry. But dayam!

I figure I'll just wing it if I need the Monster Burner and I get some gamers demanding to play...

I gotta say, though, the $26.00 was well spent on the first two books: they're good quality, with a great index and not-bad binding.

I guess I just didn't know I needed to buy MB too. Makes me wish they had a "All three books slipcover edition."

Anyway, off to do some more reading!

Once again, I ran SOTC at con. It was a lot of fun, both times. But, I gotta say, it is SO LONG to make characters. I'm just going to start putting together pre-made characters, at least with maybe like the first two sets of aspects done. Phase One and Phase Two pre-made. Skills already chosen? I dunno.

Once again, I notice that the game really plays extremely fast and friendly and people playing really, really enjoy it. I am almost certain that if I had copies to sell, I could've sold 'em all.

Thanks, Evil Hat!

This being an Anime con, there were two Ninjas, a Shinto Priest, and a Samurai. I also noticed that I had gamers of color at my table more often than I have had at other conventions. That was a welcome change! It is not easy to shoehorn some things into SOTC, but I just shrugged my shoulders and let 'em try.

Most original character has to go to a guy who was Billy the Kid's illegitimate son who had been taken in by Dr. Gatling as a ward, and trained in gunsmithery. Whose nemesis was the soul of Jesse James in the body of a Chicago mobster. Now THAT was cool.

Also, let's see, a person named "Lady Apollo" who's primary power was that she was FRICKIN' RICH!

And a fellow who had stumbled into a mad scientist mind-taping experiment and was kind of a jack of all trades due to the fact that he had "absorbed" the knowledge and personalities of all the people who had been taped.

All in all, a fun time. But I gotta solve the chargen problem.

OK, so I finally got to play Mortal Coil.

I know that I screwed up the game according to the rules. I got to the character generation part of things, and I am farely certain that I did character generation right. But play....I screwed play up something fierce, I'm fairly certain.

I really need to play with people who are willing to wait while I work through things, but that's boring.

Anyway, I had a lot of fiddly bits to play with - Action pools, Power Pools, Magic Pools, Passion Pools, and so I just kinda winged it.

So I had a group of absolute newbie gamers. And they were OK with playing Mortal Coil, but they didn't know Gaiman. They didn't know Neverwhere. They didn't know American Gods. They didn't know Buffy the Vampire Slayer

I'm screwed.

So I say, OK, what turns you on? What do you like?

Reality TV.

OK. How about we do something where you RP yourselves, only you're in a reality TV show and you have some magical powers?

OK.

So we do the theme document.

Setting: Survivor Island
Tone: Modern Japanese Horror with some weird Reality TV tropes in it. Think "Most Dangerous Game" + "The Ring"

Magical rules:

Jumping: some people can jump really far. Like, superhumanly far. Like, almost flying. And they can land without damaging themselves.
Cost: you're tired after doing it

Additional rule for Jumping: you can carry two people with you, but then you pass out for an hour after landing.

Mind Control: some people can control minds. Cost is: they can use Will to resist, and it costs you 1 Magic point to try it.

Climbing: Some people can climb up sheer surfaces by turning their fingers, briefly, into piton-like finger-shaped force-beams. The cost for this is free, unless you have unusually intense surfaces, which case it costs 1 magic point.

Water Bender: Some people can control water that is present in the environment. Cost: 1 magic point, plus in certain situations a Will conflict.

Demons: There are demons who possess people. Cost: you can resist demons if they try to take you over, and they can't manifest full-body.

Demon Portals: There are portals that allow demons to come through. Cost: but pure natural water will destroy them.

Demon Senses: Some people can sense demonic power. Cost: It is,however, indistinct, so you'd best do a Grace conflict to find the demon.

Rosetta Stone: Some people can have instantaneous knowledge of written language. Limit: but it cannot translate spoken language.

What was really neat is looking at the player's character sheets and seeing the flags.

One person had Passion of Love: food

Two people had a Cooking Faculty

So guess what? One of the big Challenges in the "reality TV" part of the game was an IRON CHEF competition!

"You must satisfy The Dragon, by cooking him a FEAST!" The Dragon was this big, hulking warrior.

That's a first for me. The players loved it, though!

I was surprised at how quickly they totally abandoned any semblence of morality. They just started killing people who had been possessed!

I guess that was the Japanese Horror Movie part of it.

In the end, the pure maiden destroyed the portal to hell with rain, they were all whisked away by the producer of the TV show, and forced to sign Non Disclosure Agreements before they could get their prize winnings.

I really should have put some Morality Magic rules in there, but it is only just now occuring to me.

Anyway, i had a great time and I hope to do it better next time.

Because I got to play Mortal Coil, I count MomoCon a success in the Sambear department.

This weekend is MomoCon, at the Georgia Tech Student Center.

Momocon should get ya there.

It's fwee. (Free)

You can go, and you don't have to pay.

Free.

And I will be there as a guest.

(Which just means I have a magical pass that gets me into the green room)

(Did I mention the convention is Free?)

And I will be running story games there.

I won't charge for that either.

Story games like: Dogs in the Vineyard, Mortal Coil, Cat, The Roach, Prime Time Adventures, Spirit of the Centureeeee (reee reee reee)!

I also have a panel about writing for RPGs.

Come and see me. Game with me. Otherwise, I will be lonely.

You should find it easy to find me. Because I will be the one, in the RPG gaming area, running games.

Playing in a few, maybe even.

Seriously, if you want to make plans, then post a commenty thing here and I will correspond with you.

when we picked the first fairchild free trade banana

my mother showed me pictures once
how these curved boats used to
hold up baby's fists of ice cream
served cherries on top of floating clouds

not believing her, i could not be
excited about these strangely curved
creations grown not from shoots
(because that is how they went away)

but from free seeds given freely;
what we could plant, we did
and the grown-ups were excited
always smiling and looking at me

and maybe they were sad
at seeing not one yellow one
come from the stalk
but i found each one a riot

a bunch with tough skin
you could throw into a boat
purple, blue, orange, evergreen
(the sweetest were pink)

sad because before,
I hear,
they only had yellow ones

***

no cavandish

you cannot be serious
calling our love a cavandish

no, I will be your
gros michel; tough,
tender, sweet,
and nearly extinct



***
for more information about bananas, check out this podcast: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=19097412

Word.

It's called "podgasm."

A podgasm is where you are listening to a podcast and suddenly, without warning, someone mentions you or speaks back to your concern directly. It usually only happens to podcasters, although it could happen to listeners who are frequent contributors to podcasts.

For example,

I had a podgasm twice yesterday. Once was listening to The Plitone Revisionist, Episodes 5 and hearing Paul address my request to be called "a Revisionist" instead of "A Plitonite." I suspect that as his fame increases, there may be those who better identify with Plitonites, but I am myself more in the Revisionist camp. This could point to a deep schism in his fandom!

But Podgasm! When I heard him mention me.

Another podgasm yesterday was in listening to http://www.12vtheater.com/2008/02/09/down-the-road-part-5-severance-concluded/ 12 Volt Theatre. But don't start there. Start with his first podcast and listen up to there. At any rate, Jack Jaffee mentioned me and that made me smile for a full 10 minutes.

Jack's story is very effective, written with a great deal of lovely texture. It is impressionistic rather than realistic; his narrative structure allows him to cut his word count to the bone. He can take us to another scene, another vista with a one or two-word intro, so that it almost seems like poetry. His influences seem to be Harlan Ellison, Peter Straub, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Neil Gaiman. He is fearless about creating a world not rooted in any one time, but definitively American. He is clearly tapping into a wealth of life experiences from his time on the road as a trucker. His wife, Theresa's voice is silky and provocative, calling you to pay attention and wrapping you up in her spell; sweetness and light with a cold knife waiting.

So, yeah. Good stuff.

Podgasms are very egotistical I suppose, the equivelent of ego-surfing in a search engine, but the best podgasms are ones that happen without warning or expectation.

Makes me want to give unto others, as well.

This is similar to Wikigasm, which is that lovely, wriggly feeling you get when you create a link on a wiki page that has already been created, only you didn't know it yet been created. Kind of esoteric, but quite lovely fun.

http://thesixtyone.com rocks my socks.

Here's why: I can hear lots and lots of new acoustic music, and I get to put a modicum of influence behind my opinion to push music I really like up the ladder to be found by other people.

Enjoy, please, and add me as a friend or something. I'm Sambearpoet there.

thesixtyone.com/sambearpoet