Oh, look. A terrible news article about a subculture.
So the M&G did an article on ICON, the recent gaming convention up in Jo’burg. It’s about as awful as you would expect, only worse. It makes it sound as if all the women were walking around in revealing outfits with their tits falling out, and that the main attraction of the con to women is the possibility of attracting a horde of desperate nerds no matter how shy or unconventionally attractive they are. Not, you know, participation in any of the games, or the purchase of cool toys; those are for the smelly man-children running around and whacking each other with rubber swords.
Here’s where you can read this wonder of modern journalism in all its glory. Use of latex and bleach is recommended if you have a gentle and sensitive nature or are allergic to fail.
Since I appear to be kind of half maybe possibly not actually logged in to the website, and I have no idea whether it’s eaten my comment, and if it hasn’t eaten my comment it has almost certainly eaten the paragraph breaks in my comment, thus rendering it unreadable, here it is again:
This is yet another “quirky human interest” article written by a clueless mainstream journalist who briefly encounters a subculture and then regurgitates a hopelessly confused mess of whatever they found most memorable. But it’s a lot worse than average.
I came here expecting to get a bit annoyed about the conflation of LARPing with the SCA, or the portrayal of all LARPing as MEAD-style boffer LARPing. But the horrible and sensationalist gender stereotypes on display here kind of eclipse the geeky details.
I disagree that the article helps any of the hobbies it features. It tells men “these subcultures welcome sexist jerks” and tells women “stay far away from here unless you would enjoy wading through a cesspit of sexist jerks”.
I was there, I wore normal clothes (like a lot of other women there, who I guess were not exciting or exotic enough to be mentioned), I had a great geeky time and nobody was rude to me. But if all I knew about ICON came from this article, I would avoid it like the plague.
I know women who dress up at cons, sometimes in revealing outfits, satirically and non-satirically. I know a lot of the women from the T&A RPG team. I may have to agree to disagree with them about the feminist implications of dressing up in revealing outfits at cons, but that’s a whole other post — and on the whole I think they should wear whatever the hell they want and not be assumed to be wearing it for the benefit of dudely eyeballs. Our differences of opinion notwithstanding, I think it’s safe to say that the satirical element went so far over the reporter’s head it may have ended up in that giant football dirigible floating over the city.
(In non-ranty post-ICON news, I have giant blisters on my hands from screwing my giant alien’s legs in, but it was so worth it. It looks totally badass. 
)
P.S. The really annoying thing about this is that in South Africa roleplaying isn’t that male-dominated anymore. OK, maybe the nationwide roleplaying diaspora — all those tiny cells of friends who have played AD&D all by themselves since high school and never talk to other roleplayers — is male-dominated, but the larger communities centered on e.g. ICON or CLAWs at UCT are full of women and have been for over a decade. And they’re not just “girlfriends and sisters”; they write LARPs and modules and organise things and come to conventions every year. Anyone who doesn’t recognise that is seriously misrepresenting the community.
Forever Bubble
Finished all the levels in the default Frozen Bubble levelset? Run out of custom levels from the interwebs? Random levels too boring? Making levels too hard? Sounds like you need Forever Bubble — what I made on Tuesday night instead of working.
Randomly generate pretty levels — for ever! Run it with --help to see all the options. You need the argparse and networkx python modules, and obviously python. It should work on any *NIX. The Frozen Bubble levels directory needs to exist if you want to save there. Patches, ports and comments welcome. If you generate a particularly awesome level, paste it into a comment; maybe I’ll compile a “greatest hits” levelset.
Unserious post is unserious
There’s too much Serious Business on my front page! Something must be done.
You should buy Machinarium; it is an awesome indie point-and-click adventure game about robots. It has really pretty art, and versions for Windows, Mac and Linux. (It’s written in flash, and the standalone flash player for Linux is really grotty, but everything worked for me after I followed some helpful instructions on the forum. Run the executable with G_SLICE=always-malloc … to prevent random segfaults, and turn off full screen mode straight away or mouse control will go wonky.) You can play a demo at the site to see if you like it. The full version is a 350MB download. It’s only $20 for at least a day’s worth of playing (if you’re the kind of person who will stay up until 4AM obsessively trying to finish it), and comes with absolutely no DRM — which I think is worth supporting.
Better late than never
I’m about to upload my photos of our Dragonfire LARP, which happened only two months ago. This is still less laggy than Hodgestar’s birthday party. In order to upload the photos I am upgrading digikam, so that I can use a non-faily flickr upload plugin. In order to upgrade digikam I need to upgrade the rest of KDE from the kubuntu-backports PPA — this is currently chugging away in the background.
I have embarked on an epic sewing project — making myself and Hodgestar medieval Japanese outfits for Here Be Dragons, the annual SCA away weekend event which is about a month away. I’m making this (except with a maroon hakama because the shop had no red linen) and this kind of thing (except black, because that’s the colour of the hakama Hodgestar already has).
The nice thing about Japanese clothing is that it’s mostly a whole lot of rectangles. The only tricky part of the kimono-type garment is the collar. I think I’ve been having problems because my seams are tiny and all the instructions on the interwebs assume that you’re going to leave enormous seam allowances — so my collars are too wide and too high up on the body and need to be re-sewn. I need to test this theory out on the two very nearly finished kosode I’ve just made. The reason I’m writing a rambly blog post and not sewing right now is that V:TES players have taken over the lounge table.
After a very long wait, my kalahari.net book order arrived, and here is my loot:
- The Never Ending Sacrifice by Una McCormack — it’s a DS9 tie-in novel; don’t judge me. I first read Una McCormack’s fanfiction during one of my previous love affairs with Deep Space Nine, and her pro fiction is just as good. This is a stand-alone story about a minor canon character.
- Worlds of Star Trek Deep Space Nine: Cardassia and Andor (purchased for the Cardassia half, also by Una McCormack; I’m leaving the other half for later) — also good, but (obviously) shorter.
- Kimono: Fashioning Culture by Lisa Dalby — a well-regarded reference book about the history of kimono.
- Seed to Harvest by Octavia E. Butler — a collected edition of the entire Patternist series, except for one instalment Butler really didn’t like. Haven’t read it yet.
- Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand by Samuel R. Delany — currently reading. It’s slow going, because of the unusual language, but I’m enjoying it.
- Zombies Calling by Faith Erin Hicks — a fun, short zombie comic. Not much to the plot, but I really like Hicks’ art. (If she sounds familiar, it’s because she did Demonology 101.)
Recently discovered webcomics:
The upgrade has become unexpectedly exciting — I’ve hit some kind of packaging bug. I guess the photos will have to wait a bit longer. :/
LARPage and other news
We ran Grove of Fallen Leaves again — outside among actual trees again for the first time since the playtest. It really makes a huge difference to the atmosphere. Thanks to Akika for providing the garden and NPCing the dryad. 
We recruited four new LARPers, who were all very good, and ended up with a strong cast. All in all, it was a pretty good running, although it got a bit cold by the end and I completely forgot to take photos (I am told that other people took photos, however).
Toothpastedealer is down here from the US, and he brought me the Black Dossier (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen vol. 2.5). It is very cool. I also have a crapload of books (without pictures); I am currently reading Hunter’s Run (which was written by Daniel Abraham, Gardner Dozois and George R. R. Martin — two of my favourite writers and my favourite SF editor — and therefore cannot possibly not be awesome).
Hodgestar and I are in the middle of Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I love this show.
I think I said I would write some kind of LARP for Dragonfire. I still don’t know what it is. I am suddenly inspired to write a serious political LARP set in the D&D fantasy universe — with the assumption that alignment doesn’t exist, and that the craziest evil antics attributed to societies like the Drow and the Yuan-ti are dirty human and elven propaganda. The D&D universe is fundamentally very silly, and this is completely not what I was planning to write a LARP about earlier this year, and it is thus completely unsurprising that it’s a million times more appealing right now than my carefully planned gritty SF idea. I blame Goblins.
Atropos Photos and Afterthoughts
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.
After Dragonfire
It’s weird not having a looming writing deadline. Now we have a looming overseas holiday deadline instead.
Dragonfire was quite good. Grove of Fallen Leaves ran without any further disasters, but had a rather dire ending (you paranoid LARPers)!
We missed the Saturday morning session, sleeping late and getting our module printed. We weren’t expecting to play in the afternoon module, but were persuaded at the last minute.
On Sunday, I unexpectedly DMed both sessions. I won Best DM for Beth’s Cthulhu module; w00t! I didn’t get to see much of our module being run, but Hodgestar was watching, and I got the executive summaries afterwards.
Radish: resurrection
If you are ever tempted to buy radishes even though they’re slightly dodgy, and by the time you get home they’re all soft and icky, trim the leaves a bit, dump them in a bowl of cold water (the radishes, not the leaves), and leave them to stand for a few hours. Osmosis for the win!
In other news, Dragonfire is pretty damn nigh. Be there, or you suck! We have successfully playtested our module, By the Rivers Dark*, and I hope to finish the corrections tonight. Grove of Fallen Leaves is all fixed up, character sheets were sent out weeks ago, everyone seems to have got them, and all that remains is the petrifying anxiety that something will go terribly wrong at the last minute (zomg zomg LARP stress zomg)**.
* Our last fantasy module was called Brothers in Arms. We initially considered sticking to the Dire Straits theme, but Calling Elvis just didn’t seem appropriate.
** It did; we’ve had two day-before-the-LARP replacements. One player fell ill unexpectedly; the other had an incredibly feeble excuse.
Food and cat
Today we went to the Good Food and Wine Festival. Purchase highlight: shiitake mushroom chutney. It’s really good.
Last night I randomly remembered a cute little DOS game about a cat that I played whenever I visited some of my parents’ friends. I played it obsessively while I was there, and was always miffed when it was time to leave. Now, thanks to the awesome power of the Internets and a DOS emulator called dosbox, I can play Alley Cat as much as I want in the comfort of my own home. In the interests of ensuring that everyone else wastes as much time as I know I will, I heartily recommend this game. The download is about 32k.
Buy someone a cow
Recent Tweets
- @firstfallen I like option 4 too. Option two is also nice, but kind of busy.
- Twitter, you are making me sad in my pants. Fix your damn RSS feeds or stop linking to them. http://tinyurl.com/2apmyjv
- @AnnaMalczyk It wasn't hard -- wasn't actually using it for anything. Stupid LJ crossposting feature was final straw. Do not want! D:
- Or not so much. Now exploring these possibilities: http://tinyurl.com/382w9kg
- http://topsy.com FTW; actually seems to have access to full Twitter history.
- @TheRiver I'm following these instructions; don't know how "complete" this is: http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account
- I just nuked my Facebook account. When the boat anchor starts biting your ankles, it's time to let go.
- @firstfallen I don't think you're being oversensitive. Waiting would have cost little and been worth a lot. They chose to be dicks about it.
- @firstfallen They all deserve to be summoned to a compulsory team-building workshop on Christmas Eve. :P
- I think encasing the whole block in this tree would make the street look much better. Cut window and door holes. http://tinyurl.com/2vjhg3m
