Confluence

The band Atrina lives again! Here is their new website, where you can still download a bunch of their mp3s.

Marina Bychkova, who makes the most beautiful porcelain dolls in the world, has re-done her website. And her fans have started a forum for discussing her dolls and posting their own photos of dolls that they’ve bought. There’s also a Flickr group.

The fantasy webcomic Juathuur has a sequel, Gatecrash.

Cool stuff I have recently read or seen:

Books:
Glasshouse by Charles Stross — sf novel set in a world where human identities can easily be backed up and restored, psychosurgery can alter memories and identities, and the world is recovering from a war over identity-editing — the precise circumstances of which are unknown, because they have been edited out of the consciousness of the survivors.
A Shadow in Summer by Daniel Abraham (through Tor’s free e-book offer) — fantasy novel; pseudo-oriental setting; very cool worldbuilding, characterisation and magic system. The cities of a coastal empire are kept in power by their andat — ideas made flesh which are created and enslaved by Poets. Each andat has a power tied to the concept that it represents, and since andat disappear when their Poets die and it is very difficult to re-bind them, all the obvious ideas have been used up, and the existing andat have rather specific abilities. The book opens with a young man receiving a somewhat cliched harsh monastic education which is supposed to lead to Poethood after the appropriate trials by fire. In a pleasant break from the way this story usually goes, he rapidly rejects this as a cruel and misguided way of life, and runs away to find his fortune elsewhere. And then interesting things happen. There is an ensemble cast of interconnected protagonists, one of whom is an old lady. The best Tor e-book so far, I think.

Manga:
Naoki Urasawa! He is awesome! I have now read all of his manga that I have been able to get my hands on:

Monster — psychological horror mystery set in 90s Germany. A young surgeon saves the life of a little boy who has been shot in the head under mysterious circumstances. Many years later, he discovers that the boy is a psychopathic serial killer — and is framed for some of his murders. He sets out to track him down.
20th Century Boys (last chapter here) — sci-fi mystery set in Japan and other Asian countries during the 60s, the modern day and the future. In the modern day, a mysterious cult is gaining political power, and seems to be behind a number of sinister events. A young man realises that Friend, the mysterious leader of the cult, must have been in his close-knit group of friends in the 60s. But who is it?
Pluto — sci-fi murder mystery with robots, based on an Astroboy story. Very reminiscent of Asimov. Ongoing.

Later I found some other manga which are almost as good:

Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura — it’s about Vikings! A young Danish boy has joined the mercenary band of the ruthless, cunning man who killed his father — and performs dangerous missions for his nemesis in exchange for opportunities to duel him to the death. This all happens against the backdrop of various historical Viking invasions of Britain. Ongoing.
Ressentiment by Kengo Hanazawa — it’s about an unattractive loser who gives up on real women and immerses himself in a virtual dating sim. Then weird things start to happen. This doesn’t sound very good, but it actually is — it’s played completely straight, and for every scene which could be construed as cute girl fanservice, there’s a hairy, flabby man showing way too much skin as a counterbalance. There’s a crunchy cyberpunk-y plot, which has so far not made me want to stab myself with a fork, and I normally dislike cyberpunk. Ongoing.

Movies:
Children of Men — dystopia done very well.
Survive Style 5+ — this movie is bizarre and awesome, and has a really good soundtrack.

Series:
The Lost Room — a miniseries which has frequently been described to me as “very Unknown Armies”. It’s quite good, although major things are left unresolved at the end, probably in anticipation of a TV series extension. I thought the second episode had a few really creepy moments (subtle Lovecraftian horror; the kind with unnatural geometry, not the kind with tentacles).
ETA: Rome (season 1) — Backstabbing! Togas! Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo! Colourful expletives! Equal-opportunity nudity! Ciarán Hinds is hawt; it’s a pity that Caesar’s demise at the end of the season is historically inevitable. Best semi-historical series evar!

The third running of Appoinment at Atropos, our sci-fi LARP, happened on the 19th. Here are some photos.

I am always pleasantly surprised by the alien costumes. The physical descriptions of the aliens are deliberately left vague, because getting four people to dress up as matching aliens is difficult enough without more specific requirements. So we just throw some facepaint and make-up at the relevant players at the beginning of the briefing, and let them make something up. This year the Kar-Shan had bright blue skin and hair which faded to white with age. In the playtest they had gills, and in the second running they had two pairs of eyes.

A full PDF copy of this LARP will be going up on its page in the CLAWs library, but I have to fix up the special ability cards first.

Because we suddenly have a huge pool of female roleplayers again, it looked like we weren’t going to find enough men for this running — so we made four of the male characters gender-swappable. This is where writing the LARP in pmwiki really came in handy: I set up some variables in the config and replaced all the pronouns and other gendered words referring to those characters with placeholders, and we can now swap the gender of the characters by setting some variables on a wiki page. I think I will make this into a more generic recipe and submit it to the pmwiki cookbook.

This does make it more difficult to provide a PDF, since there are 256 possible gender combinations. I guess we’ll put up a maximally male and maximally female version, and take custom orders.

Having all the gender-swappable and gender-neutral characters makes the LARP much less of a casting nightmare than completely fixed-gender LARPs. Especially when looking for emergency last-minute replacements.

I am slowly working on a sequel/prequel, set in a seedy bar in a mining colony and populated by dubious semi-criminal characters. It would be the antithesis of Atropos’s epic politics. I like the universe, and I want to do more stuff with it — and it will be easier to write a second LARP in it because I won’t have to do all the background information from scratch.

Now I just need to think of another SF book title to parody.

Now that I have a computer which still has all of its teeth and is good for something other than yelling “You damn kids! Get off my lawn!”*, I have set up Basilisk II, the 68k Mac emulator (when I upgrade to Hardy I will also try SheepShaver, the PowerPC emulator). It’s running MacOS 8.0, the highest version of the operating system that Basilisk will support, and is using a Quadra ROM.

MacOS 8 is prehistoric, and the emulator keeps hanging — I’m hoping that with a bit more research I’ll be able to optimise the settings and make it stop doing that . Why did I bother doing this at all? Mostly so that I could once again play the finest Breakout clone in the history of human civilisation: Akira Nagamatsu and Shizue Mouri’s MozPong.

Instead of a paddle, you have a small boy with a big head. Instead of a ball, you have “Butasan”, which seems to be a tiny flying pig (I only solved this mystery ten minutes ago, with the awesome power of Google. I always thought it was some kind of clay bottle!). Instead of bricks, you have eggs — when you break them, chickens fall out and you have to catch them for points. Some eggs contain extra Butasan, and there are also bombs (which explode). Every now and then, a dinosaur called Josephine walks onto the screen and tries to hug you, thereby preventing you from getting to your Butasan (or chickens). You get rid of her by hitting her with the Butasan and running over her while she’s down. Catching lots of chickens gives you random bonuses — most of them just give you more points, but some have interesting special effects.

This game is made of win. It makes the whole emulator setup worth it. There is apparently also a Windows port, which you may find more convenient if you’re already running the OS of Evil.

Other favourites I am looking forward to playing are Maniac (a cross between Pacman and hangman), Blobbo Lite (a puzzle game) and Bill the Demon (a gruesome little platform game) — which I will review properly at a later stage.

* Its RAM is an order of magnitude larger than that of my old computer. This means that I can now actually run things that normal people run — even all at the same time.

Photography

Here are some photos from the trip to Vogelgat. I don’t have a telescopic lens; all those close-ups of small animals are the result of a lot of determined sneaking.

Here’s a photo of new! improved! paper mache Cthulhu. I revamped him for orientation week, and boy, was I sick of paper mache by the end.

Moving Pictures

Farscape is awesome, and you should watch it. The first season, while kind of cool, is not really representative of what the series later becomes. It really comes into its own when the longer story arcs start. The first and second seasons have a couple of really awful filler episodes; I think the third and fourth seasons are the best. John Crichton becomes remarkably less annoying — I remember spending the whole of the first season wanting to stab him — although his epic wormhole subplot drags on a bit and ends up dominating the entire series. Had the series not been cancelled, it would perhaps have moved onto the Nebari after the conclusion of the Peacekeeper-Scarran war. This will probably never happen (apparently some short webisodes are due to be released this year, but they’re likely to be far-future sequels). It makes me sad in my pants.

The Peacekeeper Wars, the two-part miniseries made to wrap up the final season’s loose ends, is rather depressing to watch. It’s clear that a season’s worth of plot has been compressed into a much smaller space, and this is not a good thing. The plot is very rushed, some parts of it are not convincing because so little time is spent developing them, and some characters just walk on screen, wave and disappear (or hang around in the background with no dialogue). I believe that there was a two year gap before PKW was filmed, and this also shows — some of the acting is a bit off. It’s worth watching for completeness, and there are little moments of coolness — but don’t expect much, and be aware that it might drive you to drink if you recently watched season four and loved it.

Something entirely different, which is also awesome and should be watched by you, is Samurai Fiction, Nakano Hiroyuki’s samurai comedy.

Interactive Entertainments

If you’re a member of CLAWs, and you wrote a module or LARP that one time (or multiple times), please contribute to the latest attempt at an online catalogue/library, which I describe here. I have added By The Rivers Dark, my and Hodgestar’s most recent Dragonfire module, which you are welcome to download and play. I hope to add our two LARPs and several older modules soon (or later, in the case of modules which have to be extracted from the jaws of an obscure proprietary file format).

Last weekend I went hiking with Hodgestar, Hodgestar’s Mom and Neil in the Vogelgat nature reserve near Hermanus. It’s lovely — isolated, almost entirely empty of people (it’s a private reserve with a limited membership), and full of fynbos and frogs. I have photos, which I should upload. There are several little huts where you can stay overnight; we stayed at Leopard Camp.

I have new hiking boots, which made my hiking experience a lot more pleasant than the previous one. Getting them was a bit of an adventure; they were a hurried, last-minute purchase, and the first pair I got did not fit as well at home as it seemed to in the shop and had to be exchanged. The second pair is really as waterproof as advertised, and very comfortable. I have ended up with a men’s size 8; I see that shoe sizes are exactly as reliable as clothing sizes.

I have read Grass, which is really good. I am currently reading the third Digger book (after work while waiting for Hodgestar) and His Dark Materials (at home, because it is borrowed (thanks, Katherine!)).

HDM is a lot better than the movie. All the bizarre and inexplicable things that happen in the movie happen for logical reasons in the first book. It also has an actual ending, which is a great improvement. Part of the movie’s incomprehensibility can be blamed directly on the scriptwriters’ removal of all overt religious references — since a key element of the plot (why everyone is so upset about Dust) hinges on a purely religious concept. Seriously, how did they think that they could just take that bit out, and have the whole thing still make sense? Yeah, they do sort of allude to it, but no satisfactory explanation is given.

Is this an “atheist” series? Uh, not so much, except possibly in the eyes of people who conflate atheism with criticism of religious institutions and their teachings, or with “hatred of god”, that notorious strawman belief system I’m not entirely sure can actually be found in the wild (except in isolated individuals who aren’t very sane). The books are certainly scathingly critical of the Catholic Church, which is presented as a Bad Guy throughout, and it looks like god very much exists in the setting and is turning out to be some kind of supernatural villain.

I will reserve final judgement on the series until I’ve finished the last book, but so far it’s OK, and a fun, quick read. Most people seem to find the second book a bit dull; I think I agree. The switch in protagonists is a bit jarring. I don’t find Will Parry very likeable, especially in comparison to Lyra.

At work I have installed Ubuntu Gutsy on my MacBook Pro. Almost everything worked out of the box (although there’s a lot of functionality I’ve never tried out), but I had to upgrade to the Hardy kernel to get sleep to work. Now I’m installing Debian Etch in a VM (using KVM/Qemu). So far, so good.

Hodgestar and I got ourselves a data projector for Christmas. It’s very nice. And now I’m off to watch Farscape.

ETA: I forgot — I have bought Creatures of Rokugan and Emerald Empire (recent L5R 3rd Edition sourcebooks). I haven’t had much time to read them yet, but they look pretty good. CoR is a bit dry and lacking in pictures and explanations, and both books unfortunately suffer from AEG’s usual proofreading issues, but EE looks like a really awesome setting resource. The bit I did manage to read finally clarifies the issue of meat-eating in Rokugani society, and I’m hoping for a resolution of the leather stupidity as well. Vassal families have finally been updated! (Of course, I reserve the right to ignore some of this information utterly if it josses my campaign.) The book has lots of wonderful in-character commentary in the form of extracts from the diary of Doji Barahime, a snarky Crane Clan courtier.

So far, I have used the vouchers I got for Christmas to buy Robin Hobb’s Farseer Trilogy and Sherri S.Tepper’s Grass. I just finished the trilogy, and it was very enjoyable — I’ll be getting the rest of her books. I had read a sample of her writing in the Legends II anthology, which is why I got all three books of the first trilogy in one go. I’m saving my last voucher for the latest Mammoth Book of Best New SF, which is bound to show up at a bookshop near me sooner or later.

We had a Japanese food party for our two L5R games. The sushi was surprisingly filling, so I didn’t make a tempura course.

I have made many fruit smoothies and one pesto with my new blender.

New Year’s Eve was kind of anticlimactic; there were a lot of last-minute changes to our party plans. We spent the actual new year at one party, briefly visited another one, and went home to sleep. I guess the novelty of staying up stupidly late wears off when you keep accidentally doing it without the need for a special occasion.

On the first we helped a friend move, and saw her kittens, which are lovely and fluffy. Then we saw I Am Legend, which was OK. I would like to read the book, which sounds better.

Tomorrow is the first day of my new job, as a programmer for the Karoo Array Telescope. Hooray!

I’ve read all the Elfen Lied that has been scanlated so far. I gave up on Bleach during a particularly dull and pointless fight scene (of which, unfortunately, there are many). Now I am reading Death Note (sociopathic high school student finds magic notebook which can be used to kill people) and 20th Century Boys (some kind of near-future sci-fi mystery with a plot woven through several time periods in the lives of a group of friends).

I went up and down Table Mountain on Wednesday in bad shoes. Now parts of my legs don’t work, and I have four different unpleasant skin conditions (if you include mild sunburn). Hopefully I will soon feel better. Going up the mountain through India Venster was quite a lot of fun (actual rock climbing, minus vertigo — yay!); going down Platteklip Gorge — not so much.

My computer is having cooling problems. I had to replace the power supply fan. The only 80mm fan left in all of Canal Walk was one that is neon green and red and lights up with little UV LEDs. It does not, however, have colour-coded cables. Since the fan replacement involved splicing I had to do some swapping around, so now the bling-bling fan is the main case fan and I can see it through my tower case’s side window. The actual replacement was a bit exciting: what kind of idiot manufacturer makes a power supply you can open up, and then glues an important component to the fan — the component most likely to fail and also the only one a home user is likely to try to replace? Honestly. I had to pry it off with a screwdriver; nothing exploded, so I guess I didn’t damage it.

Today the machine hung again; I reversed the side fan to make air flow through the case better, and we shall see. I have room for at least two more fans.

I hope you are having a good miscellaneous holiday; mine has been pretty good so far. Representative selection of presents: nice shirt, blender, book vouchers and a pretty elf man on a horse.

• It contains 300% more disturbing wrongness than the anime.
• It is a lot more coherent than the anime, and has more crunchy plot — which is good, because the crunchy plot is the best part.
• Yuka is a complete psycho.
• I now know why this manga will never officially be published in a Western, English-speaking country. They’d have to chop half of it out.
• The intermittent blatant fanservice is completely out of sync with the tone of the rest of the manga. It’s like seeing a Bollywood dance sequence in the middle of a documentary about cancer.
• Reading it in parallel to Bleach is a bizarre experience; they’re almost completely antithetical to each other.
• It’s really amusing imagining a poink sound effect every time someone’s head pops off (the fact that this happens often enough to be a noteworthy recurring theme should tell you something about the manga).
• People keep almost-but-not-quite dying. It’s ridiculous. I no longer bother feeling sad when long-time characters appear to peg it; unless there’s a body, and the head is separate from it and lying 20 metres away, they’re definitely not actually dead.
• It’s got a lot more interesting now that it’s moved beyond where the anime (abruptly) ended off.

Went to see it last night with Hodgestar. My verdict: meh.

It seemed overly allegorical in patches (OK, here we have not the Catholic Church at all trying to suppress this mysterious tangible representation of “knowledge” and “free will”, which we’re not actually going to explain adequately in the movie…), the plot was very choppy, and the whole thing felt very thin. It didn’t help that they apparently moved the climax of the first book to the beginning of the second movie, or that they changed screenwriters three times (away from Tom Stoppard, and twice to the same guy).

I wouldn’t mind reading the book, if someone’s got it; from the summary it sounds a lot more coherent. I think it would be unfair of me to dismiss it on the basis of the movie’s average-ness.

Well, at least the armoured bears were cool. Mmm, ass-kicking armoured bears.

Also, Daniel Craig is cute and bearded and Eva Green is pretty. But Eva Green is barely in the movie.