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. 
MozPong, how I have missed you!
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.
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
