Come home to Jesus - he's got satellite TV!

Dog Meat?

Dogs First Tamed in China -- To Be Food?
John Roach for National Geographic News, September 4, 2009
Wolves were domesticated no more than 16,300 years ago in southern China, a new genetic analysis suggests—and it's possible the canines were tamed to be livestock, not pets, the study author speculates...

Click here for the whole article.

Interesting article, but that one bit of speculation doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Cows and goats, for example, take in things we can't eat and turn them into something we can. Dogs, on the other hand, eat meat. It's kind of inefficient to breed something specifically as a food supply when you're going to have to share your own meals with it. Sure, people did and do eat dogs, but it's quite a leap from there to say that this was the primary reason for domesticating them.

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Gen Con Forever

I've recently come home from yet another Gen Con. Tom does a pretty good job of summing up our adventures in his blog, so I'll leave most of that to him. And I have a public photo album on Facebook with the best of the pictures I took. I just wanted to say that I love this con more every year. It's really an amazing event. A whole clump of downtown Indianapolis - several blocks at least - is transformed for four days (and then some) into a village of gamers. Local restaurants and bars have even started putting up banners and getting their staff to wear costumes for the event.

Just being in the crowd is quite a feeling. Normally I hate crowds. Anyone who's known me long enough has watched me duck and weave desperately through a crowd, abandoning slower friends and family like they were luggage that was about to explode. Gen Con is different. I don't know if it's because the thrill of being there overrides my anxiety or just that these wandering geeks are my people, but I'm perfectly happy to shuffle through a crowd if I'm anywhere near Gen Con. This is also where I catch up with a lot of the friends that I don't see much of. Heck, it's where I met some of them.

I love to play games anywhere. Sometimes a board game grabs me, but mostly I go to conventions for role-playing games. It's great to sit down in a circle of completely unfamiliar minds and build a world together. This is not like hanging out with writers. Writers have to be meticulous designers, keeping in mind the complexities of story structure and the always-growing list of trite and otherwise verboten elements. Gamers just want an engaging world to play in, where things like "over the top" and even "derivative" are selling points more often than criticisms. This is happening all over the place at Gen Con, spilling right out of the scheduled rooms and onto any unoccupied table.

There are, of course, all the other reasons people go to the big cons: huge exhibit halls and movies and seminars and parties and zombies and industry insiders and so on. Don't take my dismissive tone the wrong way, because I love all that stuff. I just don't have a lot to say about it.

I remain torn on whether I prefer to stay at the Stone Soup Inn or a place downtown. I love the Stone Soup Inn, and the long walk is good for me. I just load up what I need in a backpack and I'm set for the day. For 2007 we got a place that was fairly close, and for 2008 we were right in the middle of the village of gamers, and that was great. Nice to be able to make trips back to the room on a whim, and not have to allow for a forty-five minute walk. It was also nice to stay late and not worry about the walk back. But I do love the Stone Soup, and this year the distance didn't trip me up much.

Next year I'm planning to run the whole sixteen hours or whatever it takes to get the free badge; partly for the free badge and partly because I've been getting into running stuff at conventions so much lately that I think it'll be a fun challenge. I've got two planned so far. I'll probably just run those two adventures several times. The first is for the planned POW! release event, "Aqua Teen Hunger Force at the Mountains of Madness." The other will be a Qalidar True20 one in which time travelers hunt down a fugitive at Gygax's famous Keep on the Borderlands. I don't have a title for that one yet, but you can expect to find the words "keep" and "borderlands" in there somewhere. I'd love to run a Peryton RPG one as well, but this True20 adventure will demand a bit more preparation than usual and I don't want to overdo it. We'll see.

Barely out of Gen Con 2009 and we're already scheming for 2010. See what I mean about this con?

Previous Gen Con Write-Ups:

• Gen Con 2004
• Gen Con 2005 (Tom)
• Picture: Rocketmen vs. the Saucers (from Gen Con 2006)
• Gen Con 2006 (Tom)
• Gen Con 2007 (Tom)
• Gen Con 2008 (Tom)

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Funny Things Overheard at the Office

1. "It won't give me the CD back."

His Name is Robert Paulson

Space Monkey: But Sir, in Project Mayhem we have no names!
Narrator: This is a man, and he has a name: Robert Paulson. He's dead now because of us. Do you understand that?
Another Space Monkey: I understand. In death, a member of Project Mayhem has a name. His name is Robert Paulson.
Space Monkeys: (chanting) His name is Robert Paulson...
Narrator: Stop it.
Space Monkeys: (chanting) His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson...
Narrator: Shut up! This is all over with!
Space Monkeys: His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson...

If you've ever had to deal with creative writing students, or anyone eager to be accepted into the literary community, this scene from the movie Fight Club might seem familiar to you. Take what might once have been a handy bit of advice, generalize it beyond all meaning, and turn it into a religion. Then escape into the real world and trot around like a drug-sniffing dog, digging through story after story for a forbidden phrase, blind to the larger context or the rhythm of the sentence, and point dutifully until Master tells you how clever you are. Repeat forever.

Most of these literary space monkeys can show you a few pages of paper tiger examples, complete with sanitized alternatives. But even the best rule is only an approximation. The

You know what? This is a waste of time. I probably only got into this rant because I wanted to put off working on something important that I should have already finished. Here's the short version: don't be seduced by simple truths.

I can't believe I almost wrote an essay about writing.

Yeesh.

Origins 2009

We packed up and headed out for Columbus Friday afternoon. The con had been going since Wednesday, but we were just in for the weekend on this one. Our big gaming event has always been Gen Con Indy. That’s the one where we take time off work and go all out. But anyway, Origins is relatively close and is obviously a big deal, so off we go.

We did some ad hoc navigation and found our way to a Holiday Inn about a mile from the convention center, got settled there, and hoofed our way over to sign up for Origins. We got our badges, found Mandy and Steve (and Rick and Mike) in short order, had some dinner at the market, and re-acquainted ourselves with the “Big Bar” at the Hyatt. Went back to the hotel to chill, Tom limping along behind. I stayed up a bit to make the pre-gens for my Peryton RPG adventure and then we both crashed.

Saturday, we made our way down to the Convention Center again in plenty of time to have a look around, have lunch and have a few drinks before our events started at two. Narcissist that I am, I had to find where my stuff was displayed in the exhibit hall, and spotted our logo in a Studio 2 ad in the program. Tom went off to run “Song of the Songhai” for WHAP and I went to my own event.

I showed up at my Peryton RPG table to find Mandy, Steve, and a walk-in whose name I can’t remember. I wish I could, because his halfling wizard/berserker, Rabrell Pepperdane, was hilarious. We were just getting to the character distribution when another couple (Cathryn and John) showed up looking for a game, so I got to hand out all my pre-gen characters for once. Everyone named their character and came up with some background, giving us Sir Dirk (Steve’s human templar), Marlo (Mandy’s human fighter/mystic), Athena (Cathryn’s elf rogue), Lao (John’s orc fighter), and the aforementioned Rabrell Pepperdane.

It was, for me, one of the best Peryton RPG convention sessions ever. Of course, I can’t speak for the players, but I like to think that I wouldn’t have enjoyed running it so much if they hadn’t been engaged and having a good time as well. They only encountered a few of the horrors in my cursed village before making a run for the wizard’s tower, so they missed a lot of my background hooks, but at least the stuff they saw got them spooked enough to want to do that. Rabrell managed to find uses for several pieces of the junk I saddled him with, especially the garden spade and the block of cheese, but he never got up the nerve to consult his captive demon. Unfortunately, Rabrell’s player had to leave before they got to the tower.

In the tower, they fought some melting demons and a little intra-party conflict that had been brewing for a while came to a head. The argument was over the trustworthiness of the boy they had rescued back in the village. I don’t want to give too much away because we’re publishing this one eventually, but the kid was being tied up, sliced at, yanked out of the path of orc-spears, and repeatedly grilled for information. Luckily, Lao found time to wander up through the glowing rift into the Phlogiston and figure out how to put things right.

I was really pleased with the way the mechanics served the role-playing and the story in this session, and found that the removal of “alignment” (a change in the upcoming Revised Edition) didn’t unravel the fabric of society or anything. Of course, good players can make a lot of things work well, and I had a table full of those.

So anyway, the session ended with victory for the heroes. Some other stuff happened at the convention. I think we went out to eat, had some cocktails, and played Tunnels & Trolls or Yahtzee or something else with a lot of d6’s. We must have driven home at some point. Whatever. But man, that Peryton RPG game rocked!

Other, less important details are covered in Tom's write-up.

Brain Mapping of Tools

I'm sure most people can think of anecdotes of the "extension of your arm" experience, but it's cool to see some real evidence behind it.  Seeing this kind of adaptability gives me hope that the human brain might grow up some day, after all.

Tools are 'temporary body parts'
BBC News

The brain represents tools as extensions to the body, according to researchers writing in Current Biology. After the use of a grasping tool, participants asked to grasp an object with their own hands did so more slowly and sluggishly. Blindfolded participants also overestimated the length of their tool-using arm after the exercise. The research seems to confirm a century-old hypothesis that the brain models tools as parts of the body...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8112873.stm