Facebook: Signing up and playing defence

So I recently joined Facebook. Apparently everyone who does this comes up with a justification for it. Mine's that I'm extremely lazy, and I want to keep track of keep in touch with friends overseas with minimal effort.

The thing that scares me about Facecrack Facebook is variable reinforcement. The problem is that there isn't something new on Facebook every time I check; things update randomly, so that I feel I need to keep checking in to see if anything's changed - and I'm rewarded by that often enough that pretty soon I started looking at it whenever the urge takes me. That, alone, would erode my willpower ... but couple it with the fact that people might be responding to something I wrote about myself, and pretty soon checking Facebook becomes the most important thing I have to do. And I have to do it right now.

I realised most of that going into making this decision. Possessing the ... unique character traits that I do, I did a lot of research about Facebook before signing up - trying to figure out how to stop myself from wasting as much time on it as I could. That hasn't been successful at all, but I figured I'd share what I discovered here.

But I also want to know your tips and tricks for using Facebook. How do you set it up? What are your suggestions for minimising procrastination? I need your help!

The most useful I've done is create lists, grouping my friends into different areas. For instance, I've got separate groups for university friends, people I've met, online people, Australia, and Auckland. By dragging those groups up above Status Updates and News Feeds, I can make them the first thing I see when I log on.

(You can create lists by going to the menu on the left of the home page, clicking more, and creating a new list. The process is straightforward from there.)

Next I changed my privacy settings so I wasn't searchable via google, or viewable by anyone other than friends. Not quite sure why I did that, but it felt right. Check this article for more details on privacy.

The most important decision I made was "No games. Ever ever ever." If they show up in my feed, I hide notifications about them. Facebook games would destroy my life.

In order to not get enticed onto the site all the time, I initially turned off all email notifications for everything. No emails whenever someone becomes my friend, or posts something to something I've written about. But, in some way I can't articulate yet, I think that's a mistake. What I need to figure out how to optimise my use of notifications. I want the emails I get to satisfy my Facebook desires and discourage me going on it so often. Perhaps I should change the settings so that they email me only when someone has posted updates to statuses I've commented on?

I try to remember to use the hosts file to block facebook when I'm working. There's a how-to here, but essentially I need to open a .txt file in your computer, enter:

127.0.0.1 www.facebook.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com

and I win. It means that I can't open that website anymore.

I've also read that you shouldn't poke, so I don't.

So those are my tips. What about yours? As I said: I need your help!

Left Coast: The First Playtest

Back in 2005, I wrote a game called Left Coast, where you play science-fiction authors in 1970s California who are all struggling to write novels and hide your growing insanities from your families. It's a quirky, funny setting with a very clear target audience - and until last Sunday no-one had ever played it.

What that meant is that I had an idealised version of the game in my head. I was pretty confident I knew what sort of stuff would happen, what sort of fun would be had, and what problems would emerge. I was making a lot of assumptions, and the process on playing and testing the game on Sunday was really a process of challenging those assumptions.

I thought that setting creation would be fun and easy, and that the characters would wander around hanging out and having conflicts naturally emerge. What really happened was that setting creation (which involves brainstorming a sprawling relationship map) was fun but slow, and when we started to play, it wasn't at all clear what should happen in a scene. Additionally, I became disturbed that:

+ the game lacked subtext
+ there was no process for turning the stuff in the setting's relationship map into scenes
+ there was no sense of what the characters should do.

(You can find a previous thread discussing this game, here.)

In this post, I'm going to briefly describe the characters and setting Simon and Malcolm created, and give an equally brief description of the two scenes we played through. After that, there's a short list of the huge issues that this playtest threw up for me. I'm hoping that Simon and Malcolm will join in with their thoughts on the playtest, so I can see it from their point of view.

In other words, I don't have a clear 'goal' for this playtest report yet. What I'd like to do is gather some impressions and mull the experience over. (Also: I'm not actively working on Left Coast yet. My current aim is to finish Bad Family by the end of the year and then start thinking about what's next. The opportunity to play Left Coast is an important part of that.)

Characters and Setting

Characters in Left Coast are defined by the type of author they are, a first or middle initial, a significant relationship, and a goal. Malcolm created K. Joshua Fresnel, a Jewish right-wing idealogue whose dog 'Benito' talks to him. Fresnel's goal was to find someone to put on 'Traktofaktori!', the musical satire of communism that he wrote while locked up in a psychiatric facility.

Simon came up with Richard H. Long, a hack and a pervert (think: your worst sterotyped assumptions about the author of the Gor novels) whose most significant relationship is with his feminist daughter. Long's goal was to find a publisher for his serious novel, 'The Wandering Years'.

Setting design consists of brainstorming elements to do with Family, Money, Nuttiness, and Alien activity. This was a fun but problematic stage of the game, but we came up with elements such as Behind (an alternate reality), Karl Hickenlooper (editor of 'Stories from Beyond'), Rabbi Schlomo Troutmann (who Fresnel owes money too), and Richard Nixon.

Scenes

We played out two scenes - one for each author. I was disappointed in myself (as GM) during both of them. Primarily because the game doesn't provide a way to turn all of this interesting setting material that the players are excited by into scenes.

However, there were also problems in:

+ identifying conflicts (and whether conflicts, in fact, need to exist)
+ what to roll when the conflict doesn't fit into one of the existing arenas (Family, Money, Nuttiness, and Alien), and
+ taking a 'Californian' approach to scene selection - leaving what dice to roll undefined until the conflict is clarified.

I'll let Malcolm and Simon talk about the specifics of what happened in their scenes if they want to. The short version is that both scenes were supposed to be about the author taking a step towards their goal only to have someone interfere with that. As a GM, I felt I was being pretty clumsy about introducing an obstacle/NPC into the scene, and that things felt increasingly adrift as the scenes went on.

The Big List

I took notes throughout the playtest, and afterwards the three of us spent quite a bit of time debriefing. I tried to identify some of the fundamental issues that I'm going to need to address if this game is going to end up working. I've ordered these so that the issues I think are most important come first ...


What is Left Coast about? What's its subtext?
The major thing that threw me during the game was while Simon very reasonably started to explore what the first conflict in the first scene was actually about. We were talking about whether there was stakes-setting in this game, the free-and-clear phase in Sorceror and IIEE. And all of a sudden, Simon asked, "What is this game about?" Which completely threw me - it's a question I don't have an answer to; it's a question I've usually needed to play a game a couple of times before I start having an answer to it.

Related to this was that in the two scenes we played, the game lacked subtext. There was no story going on underneath the events we were playing out; there were no NPCs with hidden motivations; there were no conflicts or agendas pushing back against what the authors wanted; and there was no sense of significance or resonance to the events we were playing. That felt like a problem to me; the game felt hollow.

What's the situation? What do the characters do?
Left Coast seems to be a game with a strong idea of who the characters are and a clear setting (in fact, I felt all three of us were a little bit in love with the setting - I certainly am). The game just lacks a situation that combines the characters and the setting together.

When Simon and Malcolm pressed me on what the characters do, I thought about it for a while and then said, "They try to form meaningful relationships." I'm not sure if that's 100% right; I need to think on it more.

Why do you have conflicts?
When do you hve them and what do they resolve?
The main reason I pushed for conflicts was that they are the way of introducing more stuff into the setting. They're also a way for the PCs to advance towards their ratings. But that's not an answer to the question of 'Why do you have conflicts?' It's got to be more than just me as a GM putting obstacles in front of the characters, doesnt' it?

How can I make it easier to GM? How do you turn the piece of paper with all the setting elements written on it into scenes and conflicts?

How can I make setting creation flow smoother?
It needs to be more fun. It needs to be faster. This was probably the area of the game we discussed the most, and had the most ideas about. Starting points to explore include: reducing the number of facts each player has to create; introducing elements via playing out scenes with them; using Apocalypse World's technique of 'walking around the setting' during the first session, just to set everything up.

Should I amalgamate the Nuttiness and Alien ratings?
These two ratings felt like they covered similar terrain - imaginative, weird stuff in the setting. In addition, 'Alien' is supposed to be about abductions, UFOs, government conspiracies, invasions, etc. When we were playing, it felt like that was locking down the subject matter of the game too much; as the person who'd written the game, I'd pre-decided what the weird elements of the setting where going to be - and that didn't interest me when we sat down to play it.

Poker: Time to quit

Maybe you know that I've been going through a phase of learning to play poker. Well, I recently realised that it's become a cul-de-sac; playing poker has reached a certain level of reward for me, and spending more time on it is probably not going to increase the satisfaction I get out of it.

How do I know that? Well, I've just gotten two books on poker strategy out of the library and have started studying them. They've confirmed for me that there's no way I'm ever going to be the best in the world at poker - all I want to do is achieve a certain level of local competence, and unlock the next level in my cellphone poker game.

Once I've done those two things, I'm going to massively ease back on my efforts to study and play poker. However, this has made me realise I'm interested in learning a little bit more about probability.

In the meantime, I'll use this post to record what I've learned from reading these books:

• You have to give your consent if you want to lose money in poker. That's why going all in can be a terrible move. Sure it'll intimidate a lot of people, but it's also totally risky if you're called on it by someone with a better hand or no idea what they're doing.
  
  
• The objective is to stay in for as long as possible - the fewer the number of players, the easier it will be to bluff and have better cards than they do. To achieve this, all you need to do is win money equal to the big and little blind ever hand.
  
  
• Don't call. Don't let your opponents see your cards for free. Raise or fold. And remember that the people who stay in after you raise probably have a strong hand.
  
  
• You must have high start cards to win (AA, KK, QQ, AK, or AQ) - you should strongly consider not folding on these hands. If you're feeling like taking a chance, then you can play moderate starting hands like (K-10, Q-10, J-10, J-9, or 10-9). You can also play anything with an ace in it - however, from A-9 down to A-4, only play if the cards are the same suit.
  
  
• Don't count on the Flop improving your hand. It usually won't. The chances of the Flop not giving you a pair are about 68%. In addition, if a card that's higher than the ones you're holding hits the Flop ... consider folding.
  
  
• The hardest players to beat are the patient players.

Supernatural: Season 4

Supernatural, the show about two brothers beating the crap out of monsters every week, got darker and more interesting through Seasons 3 and 4.

Season 3 dealt with Sam and Dean Winchester trying to simultaneously fight an army of demons that had been unleashed on earth, and figure out a way to evade a particularly nasty deal with the devil. I actually liked Season 3's storyline a lot (especially its character arc for Dean) and thought it would have benefitted from the writers compensating for the season being cut short by the writers' strike by delivering many more character-centred episodes.

As it was, Season 3 contained many what I call 'bookend' episodes - a character issue is presented in a scene at the start of the show, the events of that episode's hunt unfold (with maybe an occasional reference to that character issue), and then in a dramatic scene at the end (usually a conversation between the two brothers in their car) the issue is progressed or resolved. That structure felt very unsatisfying, and only the fact that many Season 3 episodes were FRACKING GREAT (Mystery Spot, Jus in Bello, A Very Supernatural Christmas) compensated for it.

Season 4, however, changed all this. Rather focusing episodes around a monster of the week, the writers started breaking stories by deciding on the issue in the brothers' relationship they wanted to showcase, figuring out the emotional beats of that story, and then designing a monster around that. As a result the show began to feel like it was drawing from the best work of Freaks and Geeks and Everwood, as well as any number of monster of the week series.

Even the bookend episodes are better (as a result of this change). Take something like Episode 4, which deals with Dean's suspicions about Sam's blood, and the question of whether people can choose to not be a monster gets strongly. That issue gets set up at the start, and the writers take quite a long time establishing it, until we really feel it. And then that issue is not only present in the monster, but addressed in actual scenes between the brothers during the episode. Sure, it's pretty on the nose, but it's also satisfying.

The tone of the show has become darker, a bit more sombre. There are still wisecracks, but taking itself more seriously. And it's more satisfying as a result.

The show grows stronger and more interesting throughout the season. By halfway through, I felt it had become a dark, funny, slightly morally complex war story. By the end of the season, I felt it was teaching me how to write TV - treating its characters with respect while being unafraid to damage them, and exploring exactly how much series mythology and continuity the show could stand.

Whereas Seasons 1, 2, and 3 had ... patchy episodes, Season 4 is pretty much strong across the board. In fact, the episode 'The Monster at the End of This Book', manages to combine hilarious entertainment with an such an unbelievable amount of meta (while being vital to the show's mythology) that I'm going to use it as a touchstone for the series I'm currently developing.

Grades so far:

Season 1: B- (except for the finale, which is an A+)
Season 2: B+
Season 3: B (but contains a couple of A+ episodes)
Season 4: A

Crafty Screenwriting: Summary

Back in August I took a little dip into Alex Epstein's book 'Crafty Screenwriting'. I was looking to see if it had anything to add to the ideas about how to create stories that I'd been reading in 'Presentation Zen' and 'The Elements of Persuasion'.

It was another case of doing three blog posts and not much synthesising of the ideas. So I thought I'd start to rectify that by doing a summary of my summary of 'Crafty Screenwriting'. While there's a lot in the book that I didn't cover, I did write about hooks, pitching, and the elements of a story.

Hooks
A Hook is a brief description of your story that intrigues the audience into wanting to know more.

I keep reading about reducing your story or presentation down to its core idea, to a single catchy phrase. There's a reason for this: we all have multiple demands placed on our attention every day, so how do you cut through the noise and make someone pay attention to you?

You have to make them want to know what happens next.

Hooks make people want to see how things turn out. That means they're simple, intriguing, and a fresh idea.

Pitching
For as long as possible, DON'T write your story down. Instead, actually tell it to people.

That's the best way to find out if your hook or story works. Tell it out loud, over and over again, to whoever will listen. See what people respond to. And because you're not writing it down, you can see what bits of your story are memorable and stick in your head - and at the same time, you can hear when YOU get bored or confused while telling it.

Telling your story to everyone forces you to create a story that's so simple, clear and logical that you can remember it.

Here are three questions to think about while you're telling your story:

1. Is your listener interested in your hook at all? If not, then (a) rephrase it and try again, or (b) come up with a better idea.
2. What does it remind them of? Check these other, similar stories out.
3. What do they tell you? They may have ideas and criticisms. Listen to them. Even if they're off-base, you'll find out what sort of things they expected to hear or see when you told them your pitch.

Writing it down 'freezes' your story, making you reluctant to make big or necessary changes to it. Writing it down also makes it easy to overlook your story's flaws.

And if the idea of telling someone your story completely freaks you out, you can:

• tell it to yourself
• write down the basic beats of the story on cards, mix the cards up, and try to put them back together in the right order
• (... or my favourite) write your story down. Hide those pages. Rewrite it again from memory. Hide those pages. Repeat.

The Elements of a Story
Here's the summary of what Crafty Screenwriting says are the elements that make up a compelling story:

A MAIN character
... who has a GOAL that we (the audience) care about.
... The main character is RISKING a lot
... and they have at least one but ideally three basic OBSTACLES in their way:

1. An External Antagonist or Obstacle: We have to care about the antagonists, even if they're an obstacle (like crossing the Antarctic)
2. An Intimate Opponent: Someone on the main character's side who is working at cross-purposes to them.
3. A Tragic or Comic Flaw (A Psychological Opponent):

Main characters can be unlikeable, but we do have to care about what happens to them. There are a few things that could make us care:

• their situation is familiar to us
• we want to walk in their shoes
• we find them fascinating and want to know what they'll do next
• they're caught in a dilemma and we want to know how they'll resolve it (Tony Soprano trying to negotiate between the pressures of his criminal life and his family life - which is also a 'family situation: job vs. family)

We need to care about the character's goal, whether it's internal (psychological, emotional) or external (save the world, fall in love). A person may be a jerk, but if we can admire or get behind their goal, then we can root for them as a protagonist.

NB: Characters without goals lead to stories without drama.

The main character is risking something; they have something to lose that is worth caring about.

What makes us care about that possibility of that loss? This is what I've extrapolated from Crafty Screenwriting: The hero (who's someone we care about because we identify with them or want to be with them) is now at risk of being transformed, harmed, or losing something vital to their life. They are in play; the thing that they are risking is (essentially) something that's core to their identify.

The hero is at risk of being changed, fundamentally and for the worse.

Movies: August to October

My Neighbour Totoro really deserves the warm fondness that Jenni and Svend use when they talk about it. To me, it felt like an essential film in building up my understanding of Japanese fairytales and its spirit world. There is also a scene at a bus stop which plays out an incredibly audacious intersection between our normal world and the spirit world; the whole movie slowly, plausibly builds up the idea of spirit creatures living in the forest ... but this scene is simply incredible in the way it matter-of-factly brings Totoro in the lives of the main characters.

Bruno is pretty much a masterpiece of script writing. Much like Raiders of the Lost Ark, it features a protagonist who believes he's competent but who fails at every single turn. Bruno has an outer motivation of becoming a celebrity and an inner motivation of finding true love - and the film brings both of those motivations (and Bruno's dominant character trait of outrageous hyper-homosexuality) together for a draw-dropping climax. The only problem for me was that I felt many of the comedic set-pieces featured people who were in on the joke. So, the script = great; the candid camera stuff veered between okay and freaking brilliant. I now want to check out Borat.

Desperation adapts a very large Stephen King novel into a tele-movie. That means a TV budget, so instead of an actor like Terence Stamp or 1980s Peter O'Toole playing Johnny Marinnville, you have Tom Skerrit. Which, I admit, is an interesting choice. The film feels forced, in that typical Mick Garris way, with lots of extreme camera angles and stupid jump scares (a slot machine that pours blood? Really? He didn't get enough of that bullshit when he had the cash register ring up 'No Sale' in the mini-series version of The Shining?). In fact, by about halfway through I felt that Desperation was taking its visual cues from a Resident Evil game, rather than 100 years of cinematography.

On the plus side, Desperation's score has a simple memorable main theme, and it contains a couple of great flashbacks and an amazing establishing shot of the mine at the story's centre. Overall, though, I felt it rushed through the emotions of the book: there were quite a few instances where I didn't feel for the characters, or where the story moved along so fast that it was hard to follow. Also, this is a story that is very much about God ... and unfortunately God's presence in the film felt cosmetic to me, rather than heavy and urgent. All-in-all, I think this one is ready for a smarter version with a slightly bigger budget.

Weird thing about that music - it reminds me a lot of the theme from Moon; there are a lot of interesting parallels that I lack the vocabulary to describe accurately. Here's the first 10 minutes of Desperation (the music is in the first minute thirty):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXVIwB6Gi_8

(There's no embed for this, unfortunately.) Now, here's the trailer for Moon - and beware! Spoilers. If you haven't seen Moon yet, I wouldn't watch this.

District 9 is great fun. Mostly an excellent film, with frequent moments of awesome and occasional bursts of greatness. Warning: Contains action, aliens, robots, racists and an extremely funny pig. My favourite thing about the film was the inexorable escalation of violence between the different factions as the movie pushed its way towards the end - there was a great moment where I realised, "But if they do that, then the Nigerians would have to do this, and that would mean the MNU would have to respond like this ... oh shit!" Cue an extremely satisfying finale to an impressive film.




Coraline was remarkably more subdued than I expected. For most of the movie I didn't quite feel a sense of excitement about the magical other world that Coraline was exploring - possibly because, for me, her real world seemed just as interesting, and possibly because the script didn't build up the sense of wonder and awe for me. However, once the battle of wills really started between Coraline and her Other Mother, I was seriously into it - the talking cat, the small world, vampire dogs ... it all worked for me. But the end result was a smaller, more intimate film than I was expecting. And the 3D was definitely not essential to the experience.

After three viewings, The Godfather finally worked for me. Perhaps I needed a break of a decade, and to watch The Sopranos and The Wire, but now I can see exactly how influential it is and more importantly how simple and clear the story is: after two introductory sequences (meeting the family at the wedding, seeing how the Corleones operate in Hollywood) the story deals with the implications of a single decision to say no to a man with powerful backers. I cannot wait to watch Part II.

Jenni and Lee arranged a screening of Hopeless. I had a blast watching it for the first time in about three years - I'm now pretty confident about the audience response to the film - the slow build, the scattershot laughs and then the second half of the film jelling more and more. It's funny looking back on it; Hopeless is about young, insecure characters who don't really know how to talk to each other or be in relationships. The film is similarly a little insecure - dashing around the place and aiming to amuse. Which it does ... but watching it, I can't help feeling that we should have gone for the dramatic throat a bit more: that it's not Richard who Phil makes his confession about but rather the guy standing next to him; that Ben actually declares that he loves Maryann (rather than that he loves her as a friend). And it's only in retrospect that I can see the movie seriously pulses with suggestions of bisexuality and polyamorous relationships - that would've been some seriously awesome stuff to explore.

I watched the last hour of Southland Tales, and then the next day watched the whole thing. I'd actually kind of recommend this - knowing where the movie's going eased me into putting up with how it gets there. It kind of feels like Strange Days as directed by Terry Gilliam and written by someone from the 1980s influenced by Repo Man and Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. The film sprawls and the script doesn't really make it easy to let the audience in on what's going on, instead preferring to consistently make an odder choice than you'd expect. But the use of the screenplay inside the film to represent fate, and the ultimate destinies of the characters ... well, I found they moved me on my one and half-th viewing.

Stardust is like a darker, more epic version of the Princess Bride. Slightly less witty, more episodic and possessing more protagonists to keep track of. I recommend it though - it was a good reminder for me of how powerful fantasy can be in delivering an emotional kick.

Goal-setting: 12 Things in 2 Years

I've been setting goals for a long time now, and I've used lots of techniques to articulate and arrange them - stuff like a list of 50 things to do before you die, and making them S.M.A.R.T (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timebound).

It's all good, and I made some scattershot progress on them over the decade and a half I've been doing it. But nothing to blog about.

A couple of years ago, I ran across the idea of creating a list of 101 things to do in 1001 days. Immediately I got excited by that and started putting all of the goals I was most interested in onto this list, grouping them by category, figuring out the stuff I was most interested in. Being the sort of person I am, I also put "Finish my list of 101 things in 1001 days" onto my list to get the satisfaction of ticking it off.

For a long time (between six months and a year) I used this list during my weekly sit-down where I review what's going on in my life. I'd tick things off, figure out what to do next. But I was vaguely dissatisfied with it, and I had no idea why.

Clicking around aimlessly on the internet as I often do, I found a site called 43things.com, which is a goal-setting community where you make a list of 43 things you want to achieve. "Eureka," cried the organisation part of my brain. "That's what's wrong. 101 things is too intimidating for me. It feels unachievable, demotivating and hard to select my next goal from. What I need to do is create a list of 43 thi --"

Wait.

That was another part of my brain speaking up. It realised that if I could cut the list down to 43 items, then I could make it any number I wanted. I could choose a number of items and a timeframe that was right for me. I wanted it to have a bit of alliteration, so 12 things in 2 years became the immediate front-runner.

12 things is an amount I can keep track of. Two years is a decent period of time to do it.

Now the trickier thing was what 12 items to choose.

I'd recently finished doing a life review (which maybe I'll talk about later, but it's basically a series of questions designed to help you see what's going well and what you need to work on). A couple of the items from that review stood out as things as things I needed to fix or work on urgently. So they went on the list.

Next I had a look at the things I needed to get done and was already in the process of doing: getting my full license, setting up a retirement plan, pay off my student loan. Easy (but freaking meaningful) achievements; they went on the list.

Finally I looked at my list of 101 Things and the two folders I have that are filled with other goals. What I was looking for were goals that would make me feel like I was getting closer to being the person I want to be. Stuff like 'Learn to dance', and 'Learn 500 words of Te Reo and 100 basic phrases'.

Now I had my list of 12 items, and a deadline of 18 April 2011 to do them in. Next I had to decide how to deal with the fact that my life will change over the next two years and that some things might become redundant or other more urgent goals might emerge.

I decide to use the concept of the 'Will Do' list:

• All 12 items are things that I'm committed to doing.
• To avoid feeling overloaded, I can't add new items to the list; in fact, I drew a big black line under the list to emphasise that.
• If I decide to drop something, I highlight it but I do NOT add a new item in its place. That way the list gradually keeps going down; I want to make this easy on myself.

I figured that there would be urgent or crisis goals that I'll need to deal with over the next two years, but that I would treat this list as a touchstone to keep returning to, to keep me on the right path.

So far I've completed two goals, and have made significant progress on five more. As I complete each one, it gives me more time and energy to focus on the remaining ones.

That's it. That's my goal-setting system as at 2009. What about you? What's yours? (And if you've got any questions, just ask.)