multi-dimensional

A back cover and potential pitch for Left Coast

2012-01-16T18:39:00.000+13:00

Thoughts?

What I'd like to play at Kapcon next weekend

2012-01-15T17:21:00.000+13:00

Next weekend I'll be teaching and playtesting games at Kapcon, Wellington's best two days of gaming. Because of that, I won't have a chance to play many of the awesome games that are on offer. So I thought I'd look through the timetable and imagine an alternate timeline where I'm not busy - I'm just playing.

Here are the games I think'll be great:

Session 1
These Beasts Have Maiden Faces: Ivan runs Agon, the game of Greek warriors and demi-gods competing for glory.
The Mountain Witch: Russell (who I don't think I've met) runs a game of Ronin, travelling together to the castle of the Mountain Witch, to claim the bounty in his head.

Session 2
White Rabbit: Karen is one of the most interesting game designers in New Zealand, and the word from the playtest reports of White Rabbit are very good.

Session 3
A Romantic Mystery (Hot Guys Making Out): Frank is running a session of Ben Lehman's HGMO, which by all accounts I've read is a gem of a game.

Session 4:
Freemarket: Russell again, running Luke and Jared's spectacular-sounding game of transhumans creating cool stuff in a post-scarcity reputation-based economy.

Session 5:
Love of Money: Dale has a great rep for running games.
CASE LAMBENT WITCH: IdiotSavant running a Charles Stross inspired Cthulhu game sounds like a blast to me.

Session 6:
I'd probably rest or head into the Games on Demand room where Steve from the prime timeline could run one of the following games for me

Left Coast: my game-in-playtest about science fiction authors in 1970s California struggling with madness, money troubles, and an alien invasion slowly encroaching into their lives.
Spione: In cold-war Berlin, truth is a weapon ... and the people you trust are the ones most likely to betray you.
Microscope: a game where you create an epic history in 3 hours
Umlaut: Heavy Metal! The very name drips with power and hairspray. Long of hair and tight of pants, play warriors on the stage of history, wielding your axes and mikes as your metal bands compete for fame and fortune
Monsterhearts: a game of supernatural romance, where you play teenage monsters toying with each other
My Life with Master: I'll be playtesting my scenario, My Life with the Snakes of Dr Oserlinde (which I'll be publishing later this year)

Now downloading Louis CK's new special

2012-01-08T16:12:00.000+13:00

It feels great to be paying an artist directly for their work. And the way he's set up his site for you to buy it is great. It's got an authentic "I am a human" tone; its privacy policy is pre-set to 'I won't spam you', and it gives you four downloads of the special.

'Hilarious' was really good, and I'm looking forward to checking this new one out.

My project for the holidays: learn to edit by editing Monster of the Week

2011-12-25T14:28:00.000+13:00

Mike's hired me to edit his game, Monster of the Week. It's exciting (because I've had a lot of fun editing and giving unsolicited feedback on games before).

It's also a completely new work process for me. I've peer reviewed and edited 10 page briefings and given overviews of novels before. However, it feels a little different to actually be working 'on the clock'. I'm being paid for about 10-12 hours of editing time, and I want to give Mike value for money.

At the moment, I think the best approach is to treat this in the same way I treated all the feedback I've received for Left Coast: I've read through the rules for Monster of the Week, making notes as I go. Now I'm going to create a mind-map of those notes and choose which of the issues I've identified are the most fundamental ones - the ones that'll make the biggest differences to the book. That's where I'll focus my efforts to start with - not on a line-by-line proof-read, but on a 'how could we present this information so that it feels like it's in the right place'.

I think my feedback (at this level) is going to feel more like the starting point for a conversation than a list of instructions to follow.

Collapse! A game about transitioning through peak oil

2011-12-25T12:47:00.000+13:00

Writing games to help us imagine what life may be like after a massive social change is a design space I'm interested in exploring. Dave Pollard is designing a boardgame at the moment that looks interesting:

Collapse! The Game: Early draft

via Energy Bulletin - by kristinsponsler on 12/22/11

Some of you are aware that I have been working on a cooperative board game called Collapse! designed to help people learn and practice grassroots community-building and preparing locally for the various crises that may precede civilization's collapse. I've finally got a first outline draft of the game, and decided to share it with the world before I go any further. Here are the rules and some images of the game equipment that I have developed thus far, along with a list of what I still have to do to complete the game's development.

You can read more and give feedback to Dave directly on his blog: here.

2011 has been a good year for gaming for me. What's it been like for you?

2011-12-15T18:50:00.000+13:00

Reflecting on what I've achieved in 2011 in game design and playing - here's what's been going on for me:

Reading Steven Pressfield's The War of Art and feeding its insights about overcoming creative blocks into every area of my creative life, including gaming.
Participating in the second Festival of Flawless Victory, re-kickstarting my design of Left Coast.
Overcoming my fears of playtesting and getting feedback on my own games.
Working with Paul Czege, Jonathan Walton, Luke Walker, and Alasdair Sinclair on a convention scenario for My Life with Master.
Playing and giving feedback on McDaldno's Monsterhearts (the game of twisted supernatural romance).
Running and getting my first professional RPG editing gig on Mike Sands' Monster of the Week (the game of kick-ass monster hunting).
Finishing an epic Apocalypse World game and feeling like I'd learn three years worth of lessons about playing a protagonist.
Becoming better friends with the people I play with.
Being part of informally developing a supportive group of playtesters and game designers in Wellington, New Zealand.
Working hard on a honed, simplified, and signficantly revised version of Left Coast - to publish early next year.

What about you?

What would happen if there was a by-election in Epsom and National won?

2011-12-11T15:09:00.003+13:00

Let's say, for some reason, John Banks was unable to serve a full term as MP for Epsom. A by-election is held and a National candidate, rather than an ACT candidate wins.

According to my calculations at http://www.elections.org.nz/calculator/index.html (and using these results) this creates a Parliament of 121 seats, and the following blocs of parties:

National + United = 60
Green + Labour + Mana = 50
Maori = 3
New Zealand First = 8

That immediately creates some exciting options for coalitions and re-negotiation of confidence and supply agreements.

It would also take rhetorically take off the table everything that National and ACT agreed to in their confidence and supply agreement.

Is that right? Am I missing anything in my workings-out?

EDITED TO ADD: Graeme Edgeler posts about an even more intricate version of this type of scenario, here. Extrapolating from his post, it seems that ACT would not disappear from Parliament after this result:

[A] policy decision was taken that finality was more important than proportionality, and the possibility that an election petition (or by-election) could change multiple seats (e.g. by removing a party from Parliament because it no longer passed the one seat threshold) months after an election was thought to be the greater evil.

Should you tell the people playtesting your game what you're looking for (before you start playing)?

2011-12-09T12:30:00.003+13:00

@drbunnyhops said (in my previous post) she was thinking about having some questions for people to consider while they play - but she wondered if that'd be too distracting.

I don't have enough experience with this to know for sure. The act of playtesting is almost always a sign that you're not sure how the game will play or if it works yet. It's pretty useful to admit that to everyone who's playing, right up front. Given that, it probably can't hurt to focus your playtesters' minds - perhaps by telling them about a couple of areas you’re interested in or that you think are weak

But there's another school of thought, which Ben Lehman articulated in his post: 'Playtesting: Stop'

Decide what you need playtested. Think small. Start with the absolute bare minimum rules your game needs to achieve its goals. Identify the top 1-3 things you need tested. Ignore everything else. Create scenarios that will allow playtesters to focus and test these top priorities.

Design your scenarios so what you’re testing isn’t obvious to the playtesters. Your scenario might be, “create a character” but what you’re specifically testing is “how long does it take”, “is stat allocation frustrating”, “does character creation give the GM enough information to design an adventure.” Don’t tell your playtesters what you are actually playtesting.

Take caution that your scenario doesn’t influence your playtesters actions. Don’t ask leading questions or make leading statements. If you want to test “how long does this take”, in your scenario, don’t say “character creation is super fast”. Don’t influence!

Recording my latest Left Coast playtest could be the best game-writing decision I ever made

2011-12-05T19:15:00.001+13:00

Mike, Simon and I played Left Coast last Sunday, and I decided to record it all on my cellphone. I'd taken a crack at simplifying the rules after the Scottish playtest (conducted by Gregor, Malcolm and Per) identified that the game had a lot of over-complicated and potentially unfun or game-breaking procedures in it.

Last Sunday's game was fun, and we all pointed out even more places where simplification was needed. In Simon's words, it's got an inspired setting and a functional core, but its overly-fussy mechanics are working against the laid-back vibe I want the game to help create. So: edits! However, reviewing the audio file has revealed a whole bunch of stuff that we didn't articulate and that I'm working on now. I think this next draft of the game is going to be far cleaner and simpler, with two radical changes that I'm looking forward to testing out.

Anyway, for my own future reference, here's what I'm doing with the audio recording:

listen to the whole thing, logging the conversation by recording the timecode where interesting comments occur
identify moments that (in hindsight) are unacknowledged examples of procedural clunkiness and clunky procedures
review this log and create a mind-map of the comments that seem to obviously group together (into categories like 'Simple Edits', 'Playtester Questions', 'Radical Ideas')
listen to the logged points that don't seem obvious, and put them on the mind-map too
use the recording to adjust the rules to reflect how I explain them in person
identify examples of play

Is Breaking Bad about putting more and more pressure on ordinary people?

2011-11-28T20:57:00.000+13:00

Because if that's it's thing - having to make decisions under lots of pressure, and those decisions leading to terrible consequences and even more terrible decisions that need to be made - then I can see how (a) it becomes a great but tough watch, like Mike said, and (b) how, after a few seasons, it might be difficult to find a plausible, satisfying way to wrap up the show. However, it's great to see the writers keep re-focusing the responsibility back onto Walt, any time it looks like he's going to run away from making a choice.

And the show has won a lot of credit from me by making Walt's wife (Skylar) a character who takes smart, completely-believable actions. It gives me confidence that eventually the whole cast are going to be well-motivated and interesting.

About Breaking Bad's visual style

2011-11-28T07:17:00.000+13:00

I'd describe it as sympathetic but impersonal. The camera (and the script) treats Walt, his family, and Captain Cook as people it likes, but there's also with a degree of distance: for instance, when Walt's lying unconscious on the carwash floor, or the Captain's in the car with his former cooking-partner, Emilio. I got the impression that anyone could die at any point, and the camera would just be happy to watch it happen and then keep recording what happens next.

A good tone for this sort of low-crime show to hit.

OK, Breaking Bad is off to a good start.

2011-11-27T21:32:00.000+13:00

It's done a fantastic job of creating characters who are either sympathetic or memorable assholes, and it's doing the 'reasonably smart people trying to figure out the logistics of committing crime', which is totally my favourite genre. But most impressive of all, the pilot episode did an outstanding job of conveying Walt White's complex thought processes and making the decisions he makes believable entirely via subtext and performance - no need to resort to voice-overs, clumsy commentary by other characters, or on-the-nose speeches.

Looking forward to Episode 2.

I'm working on a plan to deal with all the feedback on my Philip K. Dick game (Left Coast)

2011-10-10T17:38:00.001+13:00

One of the things I only recently realised about creative projects is how much crap builds up around me while I'm writing them: it's like I excrete pages of notes and scraps of paper filled with random ideas and shower-inspired insights.

My first great leap forward in writing organisation was to put all of these into a folder marked "Next Draft". My second great leap forward was to actually look at them.

It's that process of looking at the notes that helps me make decisions about what's in and what's out: what insights have stuck and still ring true, and which insights have helped me move on to a deeper understanding of the project but are no longer relevant.

As I mentioned in my previous post (How would you process feedback on something you've written), I'm working out how to apply all the feedback I've received for Left Coast, my game about science fiction authors. I put all of these notes onto a one-page mind-map, so that I can get a sense of how much there is to do, and what themes have emerged from the feedback. The mind-maps for Left Coast is filled with people's observations from playing and reading the game, and it's also got a section called 'Big Questions' - which is about challenging myself to go deeper into the feedback and test my assumptions.

The other thing I'm doing (and have been doing for a while now, to great effect) is I write a 'Future Vision' of what I want this stage of the project to end up like. This gives me a concrete end-point, which in turn forces me to stop and publish it rather than constantly rework it. The Future Vision for Left Coast looks like this:

I’ve published a massively simplified version of Left Coast that contains radically culled procedures for play and which clearly explains who does what (and when). This version is designed and written to inspire people to play, so it contains plenty of example NPCs, story seeds (and anything else I think is necessary for this ‘half-done’ draft).

The game is laid out cleanly (with my Times New Roman layout). It’s divided into five sections: i) brief intro to game and some playtesting advice, ii) an ‘inspirational’ essay, iii) how to create PCs and setting, iv) how to play, and v) an afterword.

What I do this is write out where I am right now, and (vitally) I keep adjusting this 'Present Reality' every time I make changes. The Present reality for Left Coast, as at 10 October 2011, looks like this:

I’ve decided to write this draft for ‘my’ group initially, rather than for wider publication: my suspicion is I’ll get more done this way.

Having added all the feedback to my mind-map, I now need to think about what needs to be done and prioritise it. Now that I’ve saved the rules summary onto my desktop, I suspect the simplest way forward is to run through my Rules Summary two or three times, adjusting it based on the mind-map of feedback, my marked up rules summary, and my marked up rules - and then review where I am.

So, I need to start that process by putting the mind-map right in front of me and tackling point after point.

… Then I can comb through the expanded rules for material for the ‘essay’ (which may be unnecessary for this ‘me’ draft).

I should probably organize a one-afternoon long playtest with Simon, hopefully Mike, and Sophie for November.

I need to ID all the ‘vibey’ stuff in the main rules, strip it out of the procedures and put it into an ‘essay’ about how you play Left Coast and why you’d want to play it. I’ll put the rules summary stuff after that. I also think that having four sample characters, each with four or five hooky options for NPCs in their ratings will be a good thing to do.

It needs a table of contents, and I need to look at the Guide to Writing Free RPGs for some advice.

(This process of having a Future Vision and adjusting your Present Reality comes from a fascinating book called How to Make Your Dreams Come True by Mark Foster. It's a free download, and worth a read.)

How would you process feedback on something you've written?

2011-10-04T19:51:00.000+13:00

I'm writing a game called Left Coast, where you play science-fiction authors teetering on the brink of sanity. In July, I pulled together my notes and created a draft that I thought would be fine for others to play. Since then, I've received feedback from:

- Wayne, who's read it
- Simon, who's read it
- various commentators on Story Games
- Mike, who I playtested it with
- various commentators on the Forge
- Malcolm, Gregor and Per, who have playtested it without me

That's a lot of feedback (which has all been stored in my 'Left Coast - Next Draft' folder). Now I have to pull it all together and make some decisions about what it all means.

First, I'm reading through it all and looking for any feedback that almost everyone seems to be giving me. Usually I get overwhelmed by the thought of doing that, so I'm converting the feedback into a mind-map, so I can group similar comments and observations together.

It's already obvious, just from working through feedback from the first five people, that the game is still too complicated: I've layered on so many procedures, and 'mandatory elements' and 'things to keep in mind', that people are having to spend all their time trying to figure out how to make the game work (rather than finding out whether the game actually does work).

So I have two next steps: simplify as much of the procedures as I can, while digging deeper to see if there's anything fundamental that's lying underneath the feedback: stuff that's non-obvious but is actually the 'real' work that needs to be done.

What about you? How do you process all the information when you get lots of feedback about one of your projects?

Links of Interest

2011-09-29T08:23:00.007+13:00

Pig vs Dragon, improving Google, Cloudflare makes censorship easy, Facebook fixes crazy surveillance flaw, Modern Pulp, "Goverments don't rule the world; Goldman Sachs does." The Occupation of Wall Street, how to kill an aircraft carrier

I'm now looking forward to this movie.

Staring at the cave bear straight in the eyes: mass movements and decision taking in modern society | Energy Bulletin: Ugo Bardi discusses how to create societal change, and makes a good point about how the availability of information via the internet - information that can be readily disseminated and critiqued by a community - plays in to the formation of mass movements based on solid rationales.

Search engines are evolving rapidly and the ways they work today will be obsolete soon. What we need is structuring the Web in such a way that searches will be more likely to return high quality information rather than poor quality information. So far, this kind of structuring doesn't exist; just think how the best quality information we have, peer reviewed scientific journals, exist mainly behind paywalls and as a consequence are not available for decision makers.

iSucker: Big Brother Internet Culture - By Yasha Levine - The eXiled: Cloudflare sounds like a company worth keeping an eye on. It says it monitors nearly 1/5 of all Internet visits, but ...

CloudFlare doesn’t just passively monitor internet traffic: [it] works like a dynamic firewall to selectively block traffic from sources it deems to be “hostile”. ... The whole point of CloudFlare is to restrict access to websites from specific locations/IP addresses on the fly, without notifying or bothering the website owner with the details.

And here is an added bonus for the paranoid: Because CloudFlare partially caches websites and delivers them to web surfers via its own servers, the company also has the power to serve up redacted versions of the content to specific users. CloudFlare is perfect: it can implement censorship on the fly, without anyone getting wise to it.

As Yasha Levine says, "It all boils down to a question of trust: do you trust a shady company with known intel/law enforcement connections to make these decisions?"

Nik Cubrilovic Blog - Facebook Fixes Logout Issue, Explains Cookies: Kinda self-explanatory, but the negatives on this story seemed to have meme-legs, so it's probably worth reporting on how Facebook's addressed the problem

"I wrote a post two days ago about privacy issues with the Facebook logout procedure which could lead to your subsequent web requests to third-party sites that integrate Facebook widgets being identifiable and linked back to your real account. Over the course of the past 48 hours since that post was published we have researched the issue further and have been in constant contact with Facebook on working out solutions and clarifying behavior on the site."

I've started a thread on rpg.net to try and figure out what are the modern-day equivalents of 1930s pulp stories (think Raiders of the Lost Ark): [Setting Riff] Modern Pulp

This comment from a trader about the realities of the global economic meltdown may be monstrous, but it's also (a) rare to see someone speak so candidly, and (b) strangely altruistic in the way he's trying to help people think about how to behave in a down market / crash:

It is, however, possible this is a hoax (despite the BBC fact-checking).

Occupy Wall Street | NYC Protest for American Revolution: The Occupation of Wall Street is another exciting citizen movement, and apparently it's spread to Boston, Chicago and San Francisco.

Here's Michael Moore addressing the crowd using a technique I'd never heard of ('The People's Mic):

The War Nerd: China Joins the Yacht Club - By Gary Brecher - The eXiled: Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, discusses the implications of China's acquisition of an aircraft carrier

"It’s about national pride, not military usefulness. The Chinese [have come up with] a real weapon that totally neutralizes the US carrier fleet, a weapon that could sink all 11 of the US carriers in a few minutes, ... a long-range ballistic missile specifically designed to kill carriers and other oversized surface targets. This missile, the DF-21, has a 900 mile range and drops down on the carrier from directly above.

There's more links of interest (John Paul on rugby, Helen's poetry, the Emissions Trading Scheme) at my Google Reader Shared Items page.

Want to make a submission on the video surveillance bill?

2011-09-28T17:02:00.000+13:00

It's easy. Takes about 5 minutes.

First, go here: Parliamentary Submission Form.

Then explain your submission. It can be dead simple - just "I oppose the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill, and request that it not be passed in its present form." You can find some good discussions about it here: Andrew Geddis.

No Right Turn's submission is here: Submission.

Here's mine:

I oppose the Video Camera Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill, and request that it not be passed in its present form.

The retrospective component of the Bill appears to contradict two principles inherent in the rule of law:

(1) that there will be certainty in how a law is applied
(2) that laws will not be changed in order to benefit those who are in a position change the laws

These two principles can certainly be said to be in effect in the numerous cases said to be affected by the Supreme Court's recent ruling. The issues surrounding warrantless surveillances conducted due to a perceived urgency or danger have been identified since 2007, and are well known to the Police (see Hodgkinson v R [2010] NZCA 457, where the Crown conceded that a search warrant does not lawfully authorise the trespassory installation of a camera).

Prosecutions affected by the Supreme Court's recent ruling have proceeded with the understanding that if the alleged illegal activity is serious enough, then illegally-obtained surveillance footage is admissible. This has provided both 'certainty' and an appropriate balance on warrantless surveillance conducted by the police.

To change this using the proposed Bill removes a valuable check on police power.

Given this, I see no need to pass the Video Surveillance (Temporary Measures) Bill in its present form, and recommend that the Search and Surveillance Bill is passed in the next term of government.

In the meantime, police prosecutions involving warrantless surveillance should be allowed to stand or fall based on the particular merits of each case.

How would you write an adventure for Dr Who?

2011-09-28T10:00:00.000+13:00

We recently playtested an adventure that Morgue's writing for the Dr Who role-playing game. After our game, I gave a little bit of thought to how Dr Who stories work. Here are the tropes I've identified - can you think of anything else?

TYPES OF DR WHO ADVENTURES

A Threat (or Threatening Situation): ala 'Midnight', where you're stuck in a frozen train with a monster, or 'Blink'.

A Plot: where you have a bunch of ideas for a cool sequence of events (basically a railroad/tunnel of fun scenario).

A Mystery: where you have to get to the bottom of something weird. 'The Girl in the Fireplace' would be a good example of this.

A Relationship Web: there's a whole bunch of complicated inter-personal stuff going on, that the Doctor et al stumble in to (I'm thinking of 'Vengeance on Varos' or your adventure, Morgue). This is often related to ...

... A Moral Crime: Like 'Vengeance on Varos' again, there is something unconscionable (by our standards) happening, and it will permanently remain this way unless someone intervenes. These moral crimes have 'People in Power', 'Victims', and (possibly) a 'Resistance'. All the people involved will want the Doctor or the companions to do something (much like in Dogs in the Vineyard).

SETTINGS FOR DR WHO ADVENTURES

When I thought about it, Dr Who stories seem to be set in one of these arenas:

- Earth's past (with or without an alien component)

- Earth's present (usually with an alien component)

- Humanity's future (either on Earth or off-world, usually with an alien component)

- An alien environment (it usually doesn't matter *when* this is set)

Jenni wrote more about our game, here: Playing established characters.

Links of Interest

2011-09-15T12:00:00.012+12:00

Making Kickstarter rock, defending the Net from viruses, Michael Moore hires Navy SEALs, You are on The Global Frequency

Story Games - Kickstarter/IndieGoGo, RPGs and You: This Story Games thread starts by asking a few simple questions about peoples' experiences with Kickstarter (where people contribute money to fund projects they're interested in, and if the project earns enough money it goes ahead). Those questions elicit a variety of perspective, all of which are pretty damn fascinating. By the end of it, you'll have a heap of ideas about how to use Kickstarter. (For extra credit, check out Daniel Solis' ideas about how to use Kickstarter.)

Mikko Hypponen: Fighting viruses, defending the net | Video on TED.com: This talk inspired me with one major plot idea for the New Thing, but it's also a really entertaining history of computer viruses, and an insight into how modern organised crime works and is (ineffectively) policed at an international level.

Michael Moore: I was the most hated man in America | Books | The Guardian: Michael Moore tells a story from his new book, about what happened to him after his Oscar acceptance speech in 2003 denouncing President Bush's invasion of Iraq.

"I got the call some days later from the security agency.

"We need to tell you that the police have in custody a man who was planning to blow up your house. You're in no danger now."

I got very quiet. I tried to process what I just heard: I'm … in … no … danger … now. For me, it was the final straw. I broke down. My wife was already in her own state of despair over the loss of the life we used to have. I asked myself again: what had I done to deserve this? Made a movie? A movie led someone to want to blow up my home? What happened to writing a letter to the editor?"

Watch Global Frequency Part 1 Online - VideoSurf Video Search: I've been hoping to watch the pilot for Global Frequency for five years, ... and now I can tick that off my list. This adaptation of Warren Ellis' crowd-sourced version of Thunderbirds where everyone in the world has the potential to be called up at any time to save the world from disaster is (a) a bit patchy and low-budget, and (b) really true to the optimism and potential of the original comics.

How my Film Festival turned out (I liked 6.5 out of my 7 films)

2011-09-03T15:33:00.000+12:00

Cave of Forgotten Dreams:

What I said before the film: I've always wanted to see the paintings in Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc, and a 3D tour guided by Werner Herzog seems like my best bet to achieve this dream.

My take: A thought-provoking, poetic, slightly challenging guide through the cave paintings of early cro-magnons. The experience was so vivid that a few times I totally drifted off and imagined what it would have been like to have lived 35,000 years ago. I'll definitely see this again.

Recommended to: John-Paul

13 Assassins:

What I said before the film: Takeshi Miike does a samurai film that's better than his best film? That's some hype I need to check out for myself.

My take: This film has a great set-up that examines how duty and honour collide with morality, when you serve a really loathsome villain who happens to be related to the Emperor. I was a fan of how most of the movie unfolded, but I felt the start of the epic final battle was far too comic-book (in the sense of being detached from a sense of reality). However, that soon faded and that final action sequence was a really brutal and satisfying series of slugfests and murders.

Recommended to: Pearce (who has surely already seen it), Chuck, Dean, Keane, Wayne.

Taxi Driver:

What I said before the film: I really disliked this the first time I saw it, but I suspect I completely missed the point. Seeing a restored print in 35mm seems like the best way to determine what I think of it.

My take: A great portrayal of a place and time (1970s New York), and of the mind and POV of a mentally unstable man.

In fact, it made me think about how effective the script-writer and the editor can be in a highly-POV based movie: selecting what to show the viewer and what emphasis to place on it. Nearly every scene contained an element of sex, race, or violence that reinforced Travis' world-view.

As for that ending: Scorsese is on the record as saying it's literal, that Travis survives and is hailed as a hero (but that he'll probably do it again, and next time he won't be so lucky). I don't think the film supports that, though: when I look at the trouble Travis caused the presidential campaign on three separate occasions, I can't believe that Cybill Sheppard would treat him the way she does at the end - and if I can't believe that, then it undermines the reality of the ending for me.

Recommended to: ... a hard call. Perhaps Jennifer, given that it's a landmark 70s movie.

Another Earth:

What I said before the film: Seeing the trailer after Sundance sold me on the tone it looks like this film's going for: introspective, melancholic science-fiction.

(This trailer contains spoilers, but they're so good that I think it's worth watching.)

My take: Far more of an indie movie than a science-fiction film. It's maybe 95% indie to 5% science fiction. In its indie A-plot, Another Earth focuses on two wounded people - one of them trying to find a reason to live; the other trying to atone. However, its B-plot (of a second identical Earth suddenly appearing in the night sky) contains four spectacular scenes.

All the way through watching this, I thought the film had another gear that it was going to shift into, a gear involving spaceships and Michael Bay-esque slo-mo training montages. Instead the film goes in a radically different direction - one that I enjoyed just as much because it was so true to the characters.

The film's premise makes a promise to the viewer, and Another Earth totally delivers on that promise. It delivers on it in such an understated way that I was still having realisations about its implications a day later. The ending strongly implies that Brit Marling (who's fantastic as both a script-writer and an actor, and I hope we see a lot more of her) has really been (and will continue to be) a hero, and that her choices involving William Mapother's character were right for a lot of reasons.

Recommended to: Chris

Martha Marcy May Marlene:

What I said before the film: my must-see of the festival due to the subject matter: a young woman trying to leave a cult.

My take: Aaaahhhh. High expectations - you almost always screw with me. Yes, this is a fantastic film, at least for the first hour. It's subtle, it feels psychologically accurate, and John Hawkes (as the cult leader) and Elizabeth Olsen (as the newest member of the cult) give great performances where you completely understand everything they're doing without needing to spell it out with dialogue.

The script also uses an flashback structure that immediately gets us into interesting situations in both the present day and the past. Another benefit of the structure is that it allows Olsen's character to make some really inexplicable, potentially audience-alienating decisions which then get explained and well-motivated later on when we see the same situations repeated with other characters.

The film has a major flaw, though, that meant I increasingly couldn't buy into it. The major relationship in the present-day story is between Olsen and her big sister (Sarah Paulson). There's a lot of good material in there: a sense of history and emotional baggage between the two of them, which is only aggravated by Olsen's refusal to explain what happened to her. But the problem is that the structure of most of their scenes together is identical - Big Sister tries to find out what happened, Little Sister blocks her, Big Sister gets increasingly frustrated.

I found myself rewriting that aspect of the film as I watched it (never a good sign). In my rewrite, the older sister is more proactive in trying to find out what had happened; she tries different techniques and approaches to opening her sister up. She wouldn't necessarily need to succeed, and I'd keep all of the other pressures in the older sister's life that are stressing her out, ... but making the older sister smarter and more focused makes her an antagonist for Olsen (and makes her silence even more meaningful).

Recommended to: Luke, Debbie, Matt, Svend, Morgue, Mike, Sophie and Simon (if you want to re-capture some of that Phoenix or Apocalypse World vibe.)

Troll Hunter:

What I said before the film: Actually, I'm a little suspicious of this one. I fear that a mocumentary about troll disposal experts in Scandanavia might actually be a little too silly to be good, but I'm prepared to take a chance on it.

My take: So much fun. The film makes the masterful decision to play things pretty conventionally for a long long time, making it a character study/surveillance of a weirdo recluse ... and then, when things start to get into potentially silly territory, the film leavens it at every stage with touches of horror, suspense, and pathos. And some pretty cool action sequences.

Recommended to: Gino

Overall: I give the 2011 New Zealand International Film Festival a 6.5 out of 7.

If everyone on Earth had the same income, we’d each have US$10,000 p.a.

2011-09-02T07:54:00.000+12:00

To respond to climate change, we’ll need to reduce our standard of living, and consumption of energy and resources. To figure out a starting point for what that would look like, I tried to calculate what it would mean if everyone on Earth had the same income. My conclusion: we’d each have US$10,000 to live on each year.

Eaarth, by Bill McKibben, argues that Earth’s climate has already been affected by climate change: effectively, we are now living on a new planet. The new world we live on looks similar to Earth but its climate is far harsher, and prone to more extreme and damaging weather conditions.(*)

(*) Living in Wellington last month, I found

that argument persuasive.

McKibben says that to respond to climate change, we’ll need to reduce our consumption of energy and resources. This will lead to a general reduction in standards of living (including less travel, less disposable consumer goods, and more use of locally grown food and locally generated energy).

But for me, McKibben’s vision of what that standard of living would involve raised a question the book didn’t answer:

What would it look like if everyone on Earth had the same, equal standard of living?

I had no idea about how to go about finding this out. A little bit of Wikipedia-searching led me to the concept of GDP based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), which I think involves the following steps:

calculate the final value of all goods and services produced within a country in a given year
adjusted that value so it’s being calculated in terms of being able to by the same goods and services in other countries
divide that result by the average (or mid-year) population for the same year,

According to the CIA World fact book (via wikipedia), the total global GDP (PPP) in 2010 was US$74 trillion.

If you divide the results of GDP evenly amongst all the people alive on Earth, everyone should get US$10,000 each.(**)

(**) This is my best guess, until I figure out

a better way of calculating this.

We all know that standards of living are distributed completely unevenly across the world, and the developing world has extreme levels of poverty.

About a billion people earn live on about $360 every year (less than $1 a day).(***)
About 5.5 billion people (80% of the human race) lives on less than $10 a day ($3,600 pa)
The average American lives on $130 a day ($47,500 pa)

(***) Figures sourced from Wikipedia

and the World Bank.

But even that figure for average American income is deceptive. The average doesn’t convey how deeply unevenly the wealth is spread around, as it’s distorted by the massive wealth held by a few thousand billionaires in the USA. While the bottom 40% of the US population hold just 0.3% of its wealth, the top 20% of American households own 85% of its privately held wealth.

Let’s let Jon Stewart explain it:

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

World of Class Warfare - The Poor's Free Ride Is Over

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

So, leading on from that …

If we, as a global civilisation, have to:

a) reduce our energy consumption by 90 percent, and

b) use financial incentives like the Emissions Trading Scheme, carbon taxes, and increasingly scarce and expensive resources to modify behaviour ...

... then what’s to stop the top 1 to 20 percent of wealth-holders from just buying their way out of it and maintaining their lifestyle?

I don't have a good answer for that.

An excellent interview with Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat

2011-08-25T21:24:00.001+12:00

Alan Sepinwall asks some thought-provoking questions, including why he like to tell Who stories that centre around the Doctor meeting someone when they're a child, and revisiting them through the course of their life:

Moffat: "The series has always been the story of how the companion changes, not how the Doctor changes. The Doctor doesn't change very much. That's always the story."

Sepinwall: "So the childhood meeting is just an easy way to illustrate that, rather than revisiting a former companion years later?"

Moffat: "I like things that force the Doctor to address that he's aging much more slowly than everyone else. I think that's interesting, whether you do it in the simple, cartoony way of him missing an entire growing up, or just seeing Amy and Rory. They're getting married, getting a house, while the Doctor is remaining fundamentally the same, while they grow up around him. Which is why he tries to get out of their lives. It's too hard. "

The full interview is here: Interview: Doctor Who showrunner Steven Moffat on Amy, River, Rory and more - HitFix.com: "

'via Blog this'

Making a submission on the Mt Vic flyover takes 15 seconds. The deadline's tomorrow

2011-08-25T12:40:00.002+12:00

I just made a submission to the Wellington City Council (my first!) about the proposed massive roading and construction projects that are planned around Mt Victoria, through the tunnel and at the start of Haitaitai. If you're interested or concerned about this issue (and pressed for time), I'd encourage you to submit using the Green Party submission form, which takes about 15 seconds to complete (and then tell people about it).

You can also customise it or make your own independent submission. Here's mine:

I am opposed to the two proposed alterations to the Cobham Drive to Buckle Street transport network.

The basis for my opposition is my assessment that the pattern of private transport usage will not continue to increase (as it has in previous decades). Several international authorities have reported that the price of oil will soon rise, due to the demand for it exceeding the capacity to provide it:

* The International Energy Agency's 2010 World Energy Outlook [1] noted that conventional crude oil production peaked in 2006.

* A report from the US military's Joint Forces Command [2], warned that surplus oil production capacity could disappear by 2012 and there could be serious shortages by 2015 (with significant economic impacts).

As these reports project an operating environment of increasing petrol costs, I conclude that the demand for widened roads will decrease over the next 10 years.

I would prefer this roading and infrastructure funding to be invested in increasing the availability of sustainable public transport (to match an increasing demand).

Footnotes:
[1] 2010 World Energy Outlook Executive Summary: http://www.worldenergyoutlook.org/docs/weo2010/WEO2010_ES_English.pdf
[2] Joint Operating Environment 2010 Report:
http://www.peakoil.net/files/JOE2010.pdf

If I buy a second computer, will I waste less time?

2011-08-25T07:52:00.001+12:00

Seth Godin suggested a way to maximise the amount of productive work I do that's really gotten me thinking: buy a second computer to do all my procrastinatey stuff on (such as flash games, twitter and facebook, and culling my google reader feed).

In accordance with Seth's philosophy of creating ideas that spread, I'm going to selectively quote from his post (Are you making something?):

Let's define work, for a moment, as something you create that has a lasting value in the market. More and more, we're finding it easy to get engaged with activities that feel like work, but aren't.

One reason for this confusion is that we're often using precisely the same device to do our work as we are to distract ourselves from our work.

Hence this proposal: The two-device solution

Only use your computer for work.

Have a second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, web commenting, online shopping, networking... (no need to have an argument here about [what constitutes work and what doesn't] ... draw a line, any line.... If you don't like the results from that line, draw a new line).

Now, when you pick up the iPad, you can say to yourself, "break time." And if you find yourself taking a lot of that break time, you've just learned something important.

Seth's argument seems reasonable - but it's really:

a) making me wrestle with my frugality and desire to reduce the amount of resources I use

b) retriggering my compulsive desire to buy a tablet.

If you believed in climate change, would you engage in civil disobedience? #tarsands

2011-08-24T12:33:00.000+12:00

This week, concerned citizens are protesting outside the White House to prevent the extraction and transport of tar sands from Canada. This protest could represent the start of a shift in the mindsets of people who are concerned about climate change: a shift towards making it acceptable and expected for us to engage in civil disobedience and passive resistance (in order to change the behaviour of politicians and corporations).

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how the London riots may have spread so effectively because disaffected and unemployed people saw that rioting was something that people like them did. In other words, being able to riot became an acceptable part of the way they saw themselves.

There's currently a two week protest involving passive resistance and civil disobedience occurring outside the White House. One of the organisers, Bill McKibben writes, in a Washington Post editorial (A watershed moment for Obama on climate change - The Washington Post):

Already, more than a thousand people have signed up to be arrested over two weeks beginning Aug. 20 — the biggest display of civil disobedience in the environmental movement in decades and one of the largest nonviolent direct actions since the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle back before Sept. 11.

This is exactly what identity decisions involve: people who share a strong enough belief create an expectation amongst each other about what sort of behaviour is appropriate for people who have that belief. As those expectations become more publicised, the belief (and expectations) have the opportunity to spread.

McKibben describes the belief here:

The issue is simple: We want the president to block construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would carry oil from the tar sands of northern Alberta down to the Gulf of Mexico. We have, not surprisingly, concerns about potential spills and environmental degradation from construction of the pipeline. But those tar sands are also the second-largest pool of carbon in the atmosphere, behind only the oil fields of Saudi Arabia. If we tap into them in a big way, NASA climatologist James Hansen explained in a paper issued this summer, the emissions would mean it’s “essentially game over” for the climate.

I note that these protests haven't gotten much media coverage yet. I'm fascinated to see what happens if they do.

You can view some interviews with the protesters here:

The #londonriots have made it socially acceptable to riot now. At least every once in a while.

2011-08-17T12:24:00.119+12:00

Rioting isn't a rational decision. It's an identity decision based on what you believe people like you would do. People in England have changed their beliefs about rioting. Seeing people similar to themselves doing it caused the rioting to spread in the way it did.

The upshot: It’s now OK to riot. At least every once in a while.

How to believe it's OK to riot

I like to think that I make rational decisions, where I weigh up the pros and cons of doing something before I take action.

But there’s another theory that explains how I decide whether to do something: that before I take action I consult an ideal self-image and ask myself:

What would someone like me do in this situation?

No reasons, no accounting for what’s in my best interests, no concern for consequences.

Just: Is this something a person like me would do?

And despite the fact that I like to think I make rational decisions, I’ve seen evidence that I often make ‘identity decisions’. Some recent examples:

Lots of my friends were linking to Penny Red's article about the riots, ‘Panic on the streets of London’, so I decided to read it – and now I’m linking to it too.
People on a politics blog I lurk on became actively commenting about how ignoring a regular commentator’s posts was improving their reading experience, so I began ignoring him too (and found my reading experience marginally improved, but felt guilty I was succumbing to some sort of peer pressure / ostracism)

Identity decisions can explain a lot about the way the riots in

England

spread they way they did. To over-simplify, the thought process of a potential rioter would go: I’m watching people like me riot. … People like me riot.

It's okay for people like me to riot.

How to spread the belief that it's OK to riot

The second contributing factor to the spread of the riots is here: Scientists discover tipping point for the spread of ideas

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always (and rapidly) be adopted by the majority of the society. …

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. “In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks.”

“As agents of change start to convince more and more people, the situation begins to change,” Sreenivasan said. “People begin to question their own views at first and then completely adopt the new view to spread it even further….”

If you’re making an identity decision, you’re more likely to do something if you think people like you would do it:

People like me riot. People who are young, frustrated, or bored … we riot.

That’s a fairly precise population to spread a belief through. And it helped that this belief was being transmitted 24 hours a day on TV, radio, and every form of social media available.

You can see a demonstration of these two things combining here:

To use some of my ten-dollar words, the boundary of what is permissible has been expanded.

But really: It’s now OK to riot. At least every once in a while.

At the moment, this may be a temporary belief. If it becomes entrenched, though, the default way that people respond to situations of frustration, boredom, or to having persistent, intractable social problems that have been created over decades being ignored by authorities may change fundamentally. The key quote from Penny Red:

In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

"Yes," said the young man. "You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?"

"Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you."

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

A final aside

It’s important to point out that I’m not commenting on the underlying reasons for why the riots happened – just why they spread. To take one final quote from Penny Red’s post:

Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school.

I'm who Penny Red is talking about. I haven't watched much footage or read much commentary about the reasons for the riots. I don't live in England and I have a privileged upbringing. From my point of view, it seems there are AT LEAST seven conflicting or collaborating explanations circulating about why people wanted to riot:

A reaction to police mishandling of a shooting
Disrespect for authority after corruption scandals affecting politicians, the police and the media
Resentment from austerity imposed on the poor while the rich get away with benefiting from crashing the global financial system
Decades of joblessness and destruction of community
A permissive society
People have always rioted
Rioting gains attention where peaceful demonstrations have failed
Opportunists taking advantage to loot or cause chaos

This post is not commenting on that.

Ask yourself this: Have you meddled with the primal forces of the universe lately?

2011-08-07T18:10:00.001+12:00

Network is an amazing script and an amazing movie. Reading this article at Daily Kos (Daily Kos: "Network" and Our Current Epistemic Crisis) reminded me of my favourite moment in a film filled with great speeches, great silences, and amazing performances.

Fair warning: this is a massive spoiler - not in terms of plot but in terms of the film's emotional flow.

Newscaster Howard Beale has been giving a series of riveting, rabble-rousing speeches on his TV show. Ratings are soaring.

During one speech, he rips into a take-over deal where a Saudi Arabian conglomerate will buy out the TV network he works for. The chair of the company that owns the network, Arthur Jensen, asks Howard to meet him and discuss Howard's latest speech.

http://youtu.be/7sySuIXG_IM

Watch the video. It's about 5 minutes long. Here's the transcript:

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back!

It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples.

There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.

It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy.

There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.

The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime.

And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.

Eaarth: 11 ways to prepare for, adapt to, and live with climate change

2011-08-07T16:02:00.001+12:00

We need to build the architecture for the world that comes next, says Bill McKibben, in his book Eaarth. He's talking about the fact that pretty fundamental changes are already happening in Earth's climate, and that we need to do what we can to limit that damage.

The 'architecture' McKibben is talking about are the social and economic changes that we're going to need to make in the way we live our lives on a world that's not longer quite as supportive or forgiving of us. It's the shift from a culture of growth, huge scales, speed and the search for new-ness to a culture that's durable and stable. In McKibben's words:

The economy that has defined our Western world is like a racehorse, fleet and showy, bred for speed, with narrow, tapered legs; tap it on the haunch, and it accelerates down the back stretch. But don't put it on the track where the rain has turned things muddy; know that even a small bump in its path will break its stride and quite likely snap that thin and speedy leg.

The racehorse, like our economy, has been optimised for one thing only: pure burning swiftness.
What we need to do, even while we're in the saddle, is transform our racehorse into a workhorse - into something dependable, even-tempered, long-lasting, uncomplaining. Won't go fast, will go long; won't win the laurel, will carry the day.

The high praise for a workhorse is "she's steady." "She can pull." We're talking walk or trot or jog, not canter or gallop.

Our time has been marked by ever-increasing speed - paddle-wheeler to locomotive to aireplane to rocket, Model T to Formula 1.

Can you imagine slower?

McKibben makes the case that we need a slower, more durable and robust economy, one that's more local and community focused by exploring how the international systems we use to get our fuel and food are now 'too big to fail' ... which means they're too big, because they're basically guaranteed to fail quite a few times over the next 15 years, and the shocks for us each time that happens are going to be painful.

These are messages that I've heard a few times before. The difference is that now I'm on a kick to convert the stuff I read (especially ideas with huge implications) into specific practical actions that I can take. (*)

* Obviously, I'm doing that with the idea that if other

people also do it to then it adds up to something.

11 ways to live with and adapt to climate change

The basic ideas that McKibben puts forth are that we need to massively drop our energy consumption and put less stress on our food supply (by being able to make up any shortfalls ourselves).

Extrapolating from the stuff he talks about in the second haalf of Eaarth, I've come up with some initial steps I'll need to take in the short term and the medium term (none of them should be particularly surprising). I'm going to add to this plan as I keep reading about this stuff.

In the short-term:

Switch all of the light bulbs in my apartment to energy efficient bulbs: either LED or CFLs (Welcome to RightLight.govt.nz | rightlight.govt.nz)

Increase the amount of vegetarian meals I eat during the week by one. I'm already eating one or two, and I feel like I can comfortably push that up to two or three meals a week.

Start gardening (even the tiniest amount). This isn't a skill I'm comfortable with but it seems smart to start thinking about it.

Downsize and declutter. I cannot thank Jennifer enough for breaking me of my pack-rat habit. By owning less stuff (that's more precious to me), I can actually find the things I want. Incidentally, I can also live in a smaller place which is (a) cheaper, and (b) easier to insulate and heat.

Make sure that the power company we're using doesn't use coal as a source of energy. Investigation and possible switching companies is required.

Join a group like 350.org or Coal Action Network (Coal Action Network Aotearoa | leave it in the ground). Actively campaigning against the use of coal in energy generation is starting to seem like a very very effective use of time and money (but I'll be investigating this more).

Wherever possible, car pool or use public transport. I'm also keen to get a bike.

In the medium term:

Start moving towards energy self-sufficiency (or at least generating part of the energy I need, myself). Solar-powered hot water seems to be a pretty established technology.

Look at solar panels more general, and check out the state of wind-generators.

In the longer term:

McKibben picks de-urbanisation as becoming a growing trend. I need to keep an eye on the costs and benefits of living in particular locations, and be prepared to shift lifestyles slightly if required - for instance, move to the country or flatting/living communally again.

Investigate (or instigate) schemes to establish communally owned power generators.

Previous posts about Eaarth
multi-dimensional: Eaarth: A first look at our new planet
multi-dimensional: Eaarth: the problem with climate change is the little things

Eaarth: the problem with climate change is the little things

2011-08-03T13:50:00.000+12:00

I'm about to dive into the third part of Eaarth - Bill McKibben's appraisal of the current state of climate change, how the Earth has already changed, and how we might have to adapt and change our lifestyles in response. Part 3 is all about that issue, but before I go there I just wanted to note two thoughts that McKibben has repeatedly emphasised in the first half of his book.

1. Climate change has already happened

McKibben describes how almost all commentators on climate change talk about how we have to do something or else our children and our grandchildren will face the consequences of our inaction. It's a powerful emotional and moral argument, but McKibben says it's bullshit. The time for action was 20 years ago: we are the children and grandchildren who are facing the consequences of inaction.

2. Infrastructure is going to be a big problem

In Part 2 of Eaarth, McKibben describes the many ways in which our civilisation is butting up against our planet's limits. He wrote this in 2009/2010, and the recession is very much part of the landscape of the book. With limited money, decisions about how to prioritise spending are going to become more and more painful. We're not just talking about building a series of barriers to protect Venice or the Netherlands, or the repairs to New Orleans or the reconstruction of Haiti after it was hit by four hurricanes in a row. It's the little things: like flooding causes burst pipes and collapsed bridges, so a country's transport budget has to get split between emergency repairs and road maintenance. That if powerful storms hit with increasing regularity and force, and keep blowing the roof off your building, eventually your insurance premiums are going to go up.

This is a book filled with little details, human-level stories, and extracts from recent news articles that have pretty huge implications. I'm finding it fascinating

Eaarth: A first look at our new planet

2011-08-02T08:20:00.000+12:00

There's a reason Bill McKibben's book 'eaarth' has an extra 'a' in the title.(*) He wants to vividly demonstrate that climate change has already happened. He's saying that we now live on a new planet, Eaarth: a planet that looks superficially similar to the Earth we grew up on but one that's becoming an increasingly hostile place to support human life.

(*) McKibbon is the founder of 350.org, which advocates

that the safe level of carbon in the Earth's atmosphere

is 350 parts per million (ppm). Above that level,

and the effects of global warming become more

and more likely to be activated.(**)

(**) Our atmosphere's already at 391 ppm.

McKibben wants to make the point that "the planet on which our civilisation evolved no longer exists", and that we've travelled to our new planet propelled by a huge burst of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide. McKibben spend the first chapter of his book demonstrating the increasingly hostile environment of our new planet by quoting news article after news article. I've reproduced three of the ones that hit home hardest with me, here:

Maldives May Relocate Due to Global Warming: "Mohamed Nasheed, the island nation’s new president, has announced a plan to buy a new homeland, just in case his sinking country completely disappears."

Kiribati Islanders Seek Land to Buy as Rising Seas Threaten - Bloomberg: "Kiribati, a Pacific island-nation in danger of being submerged because of global warming, may purchase land elsewhere to relocate its people, President Anote Tong said"

No more drought: it's a 'permanent dry' - Climate Watch - theage.com.au: "DROUGHT will become a redundant term as Australia plans for a permanently drier future, according to the nation's urban water industries chief.

And climate experts yesterday predicted the present drought would continue, signalling a cruel summer for farmers and sparking fears of higher food prices.

'The urban water industry has decided the inflows of the past will never return,' Water Services Association of Australia executive director Ross Young said. 'We are trying to avoid the term 'drought' and saying this is the new reality.'"

Even the IMF is starting to get peak oil « The Standard: "Like the warning from the American military — by 2015 there are likely to be “serious shortages” in oil supply. Like the warnings from the German military, Lloyds of London, the IEA and others (reviewed in a report from our own Parliamentary library). Now we can add the IMF to the list:

WSJ: IMF: “Increased Scarcity” Ahead For Oil Markets

Governments should brace for “increased scarcity” in global oil markets and the risk of additional sharp price spikes in the coming years, the International Monetary Fund warned Thursday. …"

It's fascinating stuff, and I'm looking forward to reading and digging into this more. Next up, McKibben's going to examine the various ways in which we've exceeded the limitations of our planet, and then he's going to talk about a new economic model.

You might want to check out this really excellent (20 minute) talk by Naomi Klein, too. She takes the BP Gulf of Mexico oil spill as her starting point, and discusses how and why people can fail to make wise long-term decisions.

A possible future for Avalon Studios

2011-07-30T20:25:00.000+12:00

"TVNZ announced in April that it planned to sell Avalon studio in 2013. Its Good Morning breakfast show will move to Auckland early next year, threatening up to 12 fulltime positions and contracted workers.

Lower Hutt Mayor Ray Wallace said he was worried not enough was being done to sell Avalon while it was still fully equipped.

'I made it quite clear that the community was not happy about the sale, but if it was going to be sold then it needed to be sold as an ongoing concern, not as an empty warehouse.'"

MP fears Avalon will be sold as empty shell | Stuff.co.nz:

Reading that article made me think about this excellent talk from TED.com: Retrofitting Suburbia, which is all about communities taking back abandoned malls, office buildings and car-parks and repurposing them for their town or suburbs benefit. It's about 17 minutes long, and an interesting glimpse into a possible future.

My Film Festival

2011-07-27T15:09:00.000+12:00

I love how everyone's film festival experience is completely different. I read Dan Slevin's Preview: 2011 Film Festival, and there's almost no overlap between us (except for an architecture doco that's on my C-list).

Anyway, tickets have been bought, and here's what I'm definitely going to:

Cave of Forgotten Dreams: I've always wanted to see the paintings in Chauvet-Pont-D'Arc, and a 3D tour guided by Werner Herzog seems like my best bet to achieve this dream.

13 Assassins: Takeshi Miike does a samurai film that's better than his best film? That's some hype I need to check out for myself.

Taxi Driver: I really disliked this the first time I saw it, but I suspect I completely missed the point. Seeing a restored print in 35mm seems like the best way to determine what I think of it.

Another Earth: Seeing the trailer after Sundance sold me on the tone it looks like this film's going for: introspective, melancholic science-fiction.

Troll Hunter: Actually, I'm a little suspicious of this one. I fear that a mocumentary about troll disposal experts in Scandanavia might actually be a little too silly to be good, but I'm prepared to take a chance on it.

And I'm also intending to go to these daytime sessions:

Martha Marcy May Marlene: my must-see of the festival due to the subject matter: a young woman trying to leave a cult.

Metropolis: Just like with Greed, you only get a few chances to see classics on the big screen. I'm going to take this one.

Long Range Thinking: Links of interest

2011-07-09T07:27:00.001+12:00

Some links about long-range thinking ...

Bill Ford: A future beyond traffic gridlock | Video on TED.com

This is a pretty interesting talk. Bill Ford is representing the Ford motor company - but he's also doing a good job of talking about a zero-emission private transport system where individual vehicles are highly networked (for maximum fuel and travel-time efficiency).

I'd love to see an equivalent talk about the future of shared transportation.

The Earth Is Full - NYTimes.com:

Thomas Friedman's op-ed makes for a good read about how economic and environmental red-lining are going to force changes in the way we live.

"We are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once.

While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity."

The most powerful climate video you’ll see all week | Grist

A combination of this op-ed by Bill McKibben (350.org) with footage of extreme weather events. My response: as a civilisation, the first world has had about 250 years of benefits, abundance, and growth from the Industrial Revolution. I'm thinking it's about time for us to start sucking up the consequences of that for the next 250 years, which is going to involve some pretty fundamental changes in what we want and how we behave.

World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists - Climate Change, Environment - The Independent

This article is from November 2009 (pre-Copenhagen). I need to do some research about what's happening now.

The exponential function : James Shaw:

James pointed me towards this video, in which Albert Bartlett, Professor Emeritus of the Department of Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder, notes that, “the greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”"

The trouble with predicting climate change:

University of Bristol Earth scientist Paul Valdes argues that climate change is best understood as a series of 'tipping points' rather than gradual, incremental shifts.

I'll be blogging more about this once I've finished digesting Dr James Hansen's 'Storms of my Grandchildren'.

How to play Apocalypse World

2011-07-07T13:20:00.003+12:00

I'm teaching myself how to use a new presentation tool called prezi. Here's something I made: some advice on how to play a game called Apocalypse World.

How to play Apocalypse World on Prezi

YouTube - ‪Wolvesblade Episode One: The Magical Forest‬‏

2011-07-06T17:40:00.000+12:00

YouTube - ‪Wolvesblade Episode One: The Magical Forest‬‏: ""

You deserve the opportunity to make up your own mind about the Kiwi lo-fi bogan fantasy genre.

How to run Nicotine Girls

2011-06-20T20:13:00.000+12:00

If Dungeons and Dragons is the Jerry Bruckheimer version of roleplaying games, Nicotine Girls is the indie movie version, co-directed by Todd Haynes and Christine Jeffs.

Nicotine Girls is a game written by Paul Czege, and it's about teenage girls with minimum-wage jobs who are looking for happiness. Keeping with the film analogy, the archetypal game of Nicotine Girls would be like Ghost World. The most extreme version I can think of would be Winter's Bone. You can find the rules here: http://www.halfmeme.com/nicotinegirls.html (they're like 1.5 pages long)

A couple of months ago I wrote some play advice for this game, which you can find here:

Story Games - Ideas for how to run Nicotine Girls

Hollywood's Secret Superhero universe

2011-06-18T10:53:00.001+12:00

This thread on Story Games(*) reminds me that, for the three years, I feel like Hollywood has secretly been building a rival superhero universe to compete with Marvel and DC.

(*) Story Games - Heeeeeeeey...what about AW Supers?:

THE FILMS

PUSH has got the psychic abilities covered.

JUMPER gives us teleporters.

NEXT was actually a pretty cool film about a precognitive superhero (albeit a film whose script has an extremely weird ending - it resolves the hero's emotional and psychological dilemma, but leaves the external threat superficially unresolved. It's weird. Weird.)

LIMITLESS sets up a cool backdrop to the world where super-intelligent masterminds affect everything, acting in their own, not necessarily altruistic, interests.

... and maybe HANCOCK, which I enjoyed and gives us two *super* superheroes.

They're all movies that are kinda flawed, but also filled with really interesting ideas. I may have my next sequence of films to watch lined up.

Developing a game. Ward X: a supernatural drama about forensic medicine

2011-06-06T17:09:00.002+12:00

It's a world where supernatural medical conditions like vampirism and zombification are common-place ...

... but the elite medical team on Ward X aren’t interested in anything like that. An outbreak of lycanthropy is like the common cold to them: obvious to diagnose, easy to treat, and therefore boring.

Ward X only gets involved with the really unusual and difficult-to-diagnose supernatural afflictions: rogue curses, spectral parasites, exotic monsterism and the like.

Can you solve the case?

Reinterpreting 'Friday'

2011-03-21T13:49:00.000+13:00

I don't think 'Friday' is the worst song ever written - I just think Rebecca Black has done a pretty bad version of it. The video below illustrates my point: I don't want to hear parodies of this song; I want to hear interpretations. (In particular, I want to hear Nicki Minaj's take on it. I hope that's coming.)

Left Coast: Interior Art

2011-02-25T18:46:00.000+13:00

Got a couple of pictures I've been playing around with in Photoshop tonight.

What I've been up to: Left Coast

2011-02-17T17:19:00.001+13:00

(Draft 1)

Holiday

2011-01-14T18:56:00.000+13:00

As expected, January is kicking my arse. There's a lot on, including some really interesting script-editing gigs and a fun rewrite of one of my projects.

So I'm on blog-holiday for a few weeks. See you in February-ish.

TV: Supernatural (as an anime)

2011-01-06T10:00:00.002+13:00

New Supernatural Anime trailer rolls out the old Impala:

I can't believe how I've gone from disliking the idea of anime to being stoked that Supernatural has been turned into one. (I think Fruits Basket was my gateway drug.) Anyway, the monster of the week styles of Supernatural and anime seem like a great fit. Here's the trailer:

TV: The Walking Dead (Season 1)

2011-01-02T08:16:00.000+13:00

Just finished watching Season 1 of The Walking Dead, Frank Darabont's adaptation of Robert Kirkman's comic series about the survivors of a zombie apocalypse.

What immediately struck me is how the TV series, right from the pilot episode, homes in on the thematic heart that took the comics 30 or 40 issues to slowly unveil: the idea that the cost of surviving in a brutal world filled with cannibalistic monsters is that we will eventually become monsters ourselves. One of the strengths of the Walking Dead (TV and comics) is in showing the struggle between 'the urge to be decent and civilised' and the easy but slippery slope of solving problems pragmatically, which leads to characters struggling with callousness and evil.

The whole series has a nice slow pace to it that reflects the comics source material. I watched it a bit critically to begin with, wondering if it would live up to my expectations and fondness for the comics. That was particularly true for Andrew Lincoln, the actor playing lead character Rick Grimes. But a moment about halfway through the pilot - where Rick grieves for the loss of his family - completely sold me on Lincoln's performance, and from then on I completely cared about Rick's quest to find answers and hope (I'm being ambiguous about the plot to avoid spoilers).

To begin with, the TV series eases viewers into the world of zombies. It ends episodes with lighter moments to give viewers a reason to tune back in; it plays out basic zombie-siege scenarios to show how this sort of world works. It also introduces some broadly drawn characters to hate, some characters to care but be suspicious about and delivers some big emotional moments.

And, about halfway through the season it destabilises the status quo, one of the comics' signature moves. It's around this point that the sense of loss of our normal world starts to be felt keenly: the people we'll miss, the luxuries we no longer have, and the absence of authority to solve problems or maintain social norms.

And then, finally, the show demonstrates what being a zombie really means. It shows us essential scenes of characters accepting death and ends with a final episode that feels little forced but effectively removes hope that 'Authority' will save the day (of course, it takes an hour to do this whereas the opening of Zombieland achieves the same effect in 30 seconds). I agree with elements of Alan Sepinwall's review, that the episode sets up some excellent interpersonal stuff between Rick, Shane and Lori that's going to explode soon, and that:

there is no cure coming, no savior. There is only [the survivors], and their wits and resourcefulness and whatever weapons and shelter they can obtain or build. Their hope can't continue to be that this nightmare goes away one day; now the best they can dream of is finding a way to keep living inside the nightmare. And that's a very tough mindset for these characters to have to embrace, and a fine starting point for the longer second season.

I'm looking forward to watching it.

9 Ways to Make the Right Decision (from Goodlife Zen)

2010-12-29T11:48:00.001+13:00

Over the last couple of days, I've had to make a moderately-sized decision about how to spend the next month or so. Juggling all the variables involved got so confusing that I did an internet search on how to make decisions, and found this excellent article: 9 Ways to Make the Right Decision | Goodlife Zen

It's a guest post by Patrick Burg, a neuroscientist who writes about the biology of everyday life at veryevolved.com. He has nine suggestions, that don't have to be followed in any particular order - and I found that what he says in the article is actually true: just doing the steps that appealed to me, in no particular order, really worked. So, here are 5 of the 9 suggestions I found particularly useful:

1. Listen to your instincts but don’t let them boss you around.

Write down your gut reaction to the problem. What are you feeling? But then dig deeper:

Ask “why did I think that?” or “why do I feel that way?”

2. List your alternatives.

Write down every option you have for the decision you’re making, get it out of your head and spend some quality time on each one."

3. Rephrase the question.

Whatever problem you have, try writing it down in three or four different ways. Forcing yourself to think about the problem in different ways makes it easier to come up with different solutions.

4. Anticipate history.

Remember what happened last time you were in a similar situation. Go slow and be critical with your recall – beware of only remembering your wins vs. your misses.

6. Think of this as a test.

The human brain is not isolated – it’s hard wired to function in social situations with our peers. The upshot of this is that we devote a lot of time and energy to working in groups and maintaining friends and our status. Imagine that you’re going to be graded for the decision you’re making and you will automatically pay more attention to the process. Write down why you made your decision and follow this by thinking: “This is an exam. I’m handing this in, and I won’t get another chance to change it. Others will see it and grade my logic”. Doing this makes you more likely to examine the “why” of what you’re doing and weed out poorly made plans.

There are more tips at the original article: 9 Ways to Make the Right Decision | Goodlife Zen

Long Range Thinking: How to save the world

2010-12-25T19:46:00.043+13:00

Merry Christmas! The previous post talked about nine 'boundaries' that we have to keep the world operating inside, to first avoid environmental collapse and then to keep Earth on a stable footing. Several of these boundaries are affected by population pressure.

For the first time while watching TED.com, I saw conceptual links between three different presentations. It was very cool, because (watched in sequence) they give a clear argument and solution to stabilising world population at around nine billion people.

First up, Hans Rosling sets the stage by illustrating that an increase to nine billion is inevitable (barring nuclear war or massive die-backs). And he does it in a way that's low-tech and convincing.

After that, the obvious question is how do we lower or stabilise the birth rate? Hans Rosling makes a good case for educating women being the key.

Finally, this presentation by Sugata Mitra lays out a low-cost, resource-light way of spreading education into the areas of the world that really need it. His thesis: let children educate themselves. Warning: this presentation is wicked.

I'm going to be on the look out now for more talks that lay out simple solutions to these nine boundaries:

- climate change
- ozone levels
- ocean acidification
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- freshwater use
- rate of biodiversity loss
- changes in land use
- air pollution
- chemical pollution

Long Range Thinking: Ready for the most exciting phase in human history?

2010-12-21T18:10:00.028+13:00

This TED presentation is a must-see: it makes dealing with climate change and related problems seem achievable, and the presenter (Johan Rockstrom) delivers a fantastically engaging first half presentation via an inflatable globe and some unconventional stage moves, before moving into an assertive, more pragmatic second half.

He makes the case that this will be the most exciting 30 years in human history, as we undergo an unprecendented social and economic transformation in order to make the Earth a viable, ongoing business proposition for 9 billion people.

Rockstrom lists nine parameters (or 'safety fences') that humanity has to operate within. Basically, he sets out an owner's guide to operating the Earth. Those parameters are:

- climate change
- ozone levels
- ocean acidification
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- freshwater use
- rate of biodiversity loss
- changes in land use
- air pollution
- chemical pollution

Rockstrom identifies three of these parameters as having already passed into the danger zone:

- climate change
- levels of nitrogen and phosphorus
- rate of biodiversity loss

By setting parameters that we have to operate within, and identifying the ones that urgently need to be dealt with, Rockstrom makes dealing with climate change and its related problems seem achievable.

Highly recommended (and a hat-tip to Hot Topic, where I first saw this presentation on the quadruple squeeze.)

Books: October to November

2010-12-17T19:59:00.001+13:00

During this time period I started to realise that not every book was worth blogging about; so, rather than a comprehensive list, these book posts are moving more towards some edited highlights.

Kashmir is a screenplay about three specialists hunting down Osama bin Laden. An enjoyable, fast read. Probably still available at scriptshadow, if you want to google for it.

After watching Surrogates, the Bruce Willis movie about people who stay at home and live their lives through remote drones that look like them, I felt like I needed more exploration of that idea. Kil'n People by David Brin is a noir version of the story (rather than an action-adventure), and it contains both a twisty mystery, great uses of the first person narrator, and a lot of excellent ideas about what would happen if you could clone yourself, live 5 different lives, and then reabsorb the memories of those clones. I was a little disapointed with the mysticism that ended the book, but (overall) a good read.

The Ask and the Answer is the sequel to The Knife of Never Letting Go. As I mentioned last time, I was resisting reading this, but Jenni told me that the book shifted from a single narrator to alternating between two points of view. That (plus the third POV she hinted would be introduced in the third book) was enough to get me reading it again. The Ask and Answer was great at getting me to like the characters again, but in terms of plotting it became a little bit plodding and event-based (this happened then this happened) without any real sense of meaning behind the events. I stopped reading it twice because I almost lost sympathy with the main male character; the author deliberately pushes the line here. However, the story built to an excellent finale.

The sequel, Monsters of Men, is just excellent. Definitely the best of the series; flipping between three different points of view means that the plot is advanced without the annoying 'knock the protagonist out' tricks of the first book. There are cliffhangers with nearly every chapter, and I'm a sucker for battle scenes of mass combat - the ambushes and strategies - which this book definitely delivers.

Overall, this Chaos Walking series has a great payoff but it was definitely a struggle for me to get there.

Exegisis is a short little science fiction tale about an artificial intelligence sending emails to its creator. An ok, fast read with one or two moments of genuine insight about how the world might 'look' to an AI.

How to Make it All Work is about looking at your life from a high-level perspective, setting goals and how to recognise when you're heading in the 'right' direction for you. I'm still figuring out how to apply stuff from this book; I think it'll be up for a re-read in a few months.

The Race is the second book by Richard North Patterson I've read this year. He's got a thing for writing well-researched thrillers which I approve of. This one is about a Republican presidential primary: overall, the story felt a little familiar to me, having watched Seasons 6 and 7 of The West Wing and followed the last few US elections and mid-terms fairly closely, but it's got a great final act (set at the Republican convention, illustrating the wheelings and dealings that go on). It's also interesting in that the book addresses the internal contradictions and unstable alliances between the different social groups that make up the Republican party (or at least did, pre-Tea Party).

While the first two books of Jessica Amanda Salmondson's Tomoe Gozen trilogy are fun, they didn't really move me. Her stories about a doomed female samurai have quite a bit to say about honour and feminism, but they felt a little disposable. The third book, Thousand Shrine Warrior, is infused with a melancholy mood and Tomoe becomes part of a fascinating moral dilemma: each person that Tomoe is forced to kill in order to save her life is actually part of a grander plan of revenge. That sense of doom and the awareness that violence only made the problem worse lifted this book into Yojimbo style territory. While the ending felt too easy, to me, I would love to read more Tomoe adventures (and I'd definitely want to see a film of this particular story).

Top Writing Tips

2010-12-13T20:35:00.000+13:00

Here’s my top writing tip: visualise the person reading your article; they’re busy, suffering from information overload, and will skim read your article. Your reader wants to know why it's worth their time to keep reading.

To keep them reading, here are two more writing tips (each with a couple of suggestions):

Spend 50% of your writing time planning your article

+ Make sure you define the article’s purpose: To convince? To inform? To entertain? …

+ Do a brain-dump or mind-map of everything you want to write about in this article.

+ Summarise your post or article into four short bullet points before you start.

Make your article easy to read and understand

+ Put your main point at the front; don’t make the reader work to discover your magnificent conclusion (assume they’ll quit reading before they reach the end of your article).

+ Say what you want to say using the simplest but most precise words possible.

(Tips condensed down from a course I did a few years ago.)

The Have Done List: November

2010-12-09T18:17:00.011+13:00

Played Apocalypse World

Read Two Bear Mambo (Joe Lansdale), The Race (Richard North Patterson), Tomoe Gozen and The Golden Naginate (Jessica Amanda Salmonsen), The Four Hour Work Week (Timothy Ferris), a bunch of Elric stories and most of Billy's new book.

digitised my CD collection

made a tough decision about my writing future

watched Jennifer's Body (it's suprisingly good)

brainstormed a national advertising campaign

help create answers for a Parliamentary Question

watched as the end of that chain of answers led to the resignation of 'my' Minister

handed in a film funding proposal for 2011

went to Apollo 13: Mission Control, where I was interviewed by Walter Cronkite and seized control of Mission Control (best interactive theatre experience ever)

Building a Habit: Using the net less

2010-12-05T14:40:00.007+13:00

What I became aware of was that using the internet had become a habit: something I didn't think too much about, I just sat down and surfed (at home, at work). Sometimes an hour would pass and I snap out of my netdaze and wonder what I'd been doing.

That's an hour of my life I could've been doing something with. And each of those hours could be multiplied by several times every weeks.

It wasn't just the big hour-long blocks of my life that I was concerned were slipping away. There were the 'five minutes' here, the 'ten minutes' there. The "I'll just check one thing" net-checks that spiralled out of control until I'd find myself on a website dedicated to the covers of 1970s science fiction novels with no real idea of how I'd gotten there.

My time is valuable ... and I needed to make myself understand that. So I decided to apply some basic reward and punishment strategies to my internet use. The reward was money (effectively, pocket money I'd give myself to spend on anything I wanted - guilt-free) and the punishment was working extra time at work, unpaid.

I started by giving myself a certain number of checks per day; I tried to make this number quite large, so it'd be easy to achieve. So I started with giving myself 10 trips to the internet every day. Not only that, but I decided to be generous: checking the internet at lunch-time and between 7pm and 7.30pm would be ‘free’. They wouldn't count against my 10 trip limit.

I also introduced 'penalty zones', times when using the internet counts for double. For the first hour after I wake up, between 10 and 11, and between 3 and 4; these are the times when I really want to be working on my own stuff.

After two weeks, I dropped down from 10 internet visits per day to 9 (and then kept dropping it every two weeks after that). That's when the tension really began. I started feeling the limitation, but I also started to feel the habit breaking.

I discovered two things about myself through doing this:

+ a lot of my internet time is ego-driven; I'm checking to see if anyone's replied to a post I've made, or to an email.
+ I completely under-estimated the perniciousness of 'just wanted to check just one thing', that impulse to google a random piece of information and then be led astray into the glorious and seductive wilderness of the internet.

I'm at 5 internet visits a day now, and I'm going to keep it at that level for a while to consolidate the habit. This feels like a behavior I'm going to have to manage for the rest of my life, because I suspect it'll be very easy for the browsing and googling to slowly creep up if I don't pay attention to it.

Doing this has felt good though - I definitely have more disposable time, and I've been feeling less stressed.

How to get things done: Stop getting things done!

2010-12-01T10:10:00.003+13:00

One piece of advice about setting up a system to get things done (GTD) more efficiently: be prepared to experience a combination of ‘adrenaline from *doing* stuff’ and ‘feeling overwhelmed by the amount of stuff you have to do’. I’ve experienced this twice now: the first time I set up my GTD system, and just last month (when I radically simplified it).

Both times, I was left feeling stressed by the amount of stuff I’d taken on.

Which reveals one of the secrets to this whole GTD system: be careful about what you take on and decide to do. Taking an inventory of all of your commitments will reveal exactly how much stuff you feel obligated to finish and achieve.

Last year I read a book called Margin, which described the feeling of free time in your life as the white margin around the pages of a book. The more stuff you pack into your life, the less margin you have, the less freedom to relax, unwind, contemplate.

If you want margin, you’ve got to push back against obligations:

+ push some of them into your ‘Someday/Maybe’ list rather than doing them right now

+ drop some of them (or renegotiate to do them later)

+ take a break from using this system; just vege out for a day or two.

My mind, at least, is not designed to be productive all the time. It needs ebbs and flows. Being aware that sometimes you don’t need to get things done is key to this.

In that spirit, I was originally going to end this series of posts with an offer to help people who are interested in this stuff set up their own GTD systems. Instead, if you’re interested in this stuff, let me know and we can discuss it sometime.

In the meantime, ‘How to Get Things Done’ is available from the library (and from me); you can also read the Simple Dollar’s review of How to Get Things Done.

How to get things done: Review everything at least once a week

2010-11-27T20:57:00.000+13:00

Now you’ve got your organizational system set up, and it includes:

a lists of projects you want to tackle
a way of reminding yourself about things that are coming up (your calendar, a tickler file)
a list of next actions to take

But this isn’t the sort of thing you do once and then forget about it. You’ll always be having new ‘stuff’ coming in: emails, appointments, news that ranges from surprising (your mum’s in town) to life-changing (your flat is being sold).

The trick, then, is to set aside an hour or two every week to catch up on everything that’s new in your life. You’ll have to review that new stuff (and look over your existing obligations and items on your to-do list). The idea behind this weekly review is to make sure that you know everything that’s going on in your life; the consequence of that is that you’ll feel confident that the things you’re deciding to do right now are the best possible uses of your time.

I’ve come across a couple of philosophies about what to do with the realizations that come out of your weekly review: they boil down to (a) schedule fixed amounts of time into your calendar to deal with particular issues or projects, or (b) rely on checking your to-do list to figure out what your next action should be.

I’ve tried (a) for a while, especially in a work context, but at the moment I’m more a fan of (b) … playing things a little looser is feeling both easier to maintain and easier to adapt to changing situations.

There’s a couple of deeper level reviews that you can do as well; the only one I’ll mention in any detail is that after I finish my two ‘New Things’ – the projects that I’m especially focusing on at the moment, I review my projects lists and goals for the year, to decide what my new New Things should be.

How to Get Things Done: List out all your projects

2010-11-23T08:45:00.048+13:00

This is the third of four posts about How to Get Things Done, a book by Dave Allen that shows you how to set up a system to feel more on top of everything in your life.

Today I want to talk about the one element of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system that I resisted for years: having a complete list of all of the projects you want to do.(*) Through a combination of OOS/RSI and scattering information about my projects in handwritten notes spread through 10 different manilla folders, I found it really difficult to review everything that was going on in my life, or that I wanted to do.

* Allen defines a project as anything that

needs more than 2 actions to complete.

My series of posts on 'The New Thing' started to change my mind though. I've come to the conclusion that I can really only consider two things at any time as being my main priorities. What I needed to do was figure out how to present all of my commitments and things I wanted to do so that I could easily choose what to focus on. Here's what I've done (and this is still a work-in-progress, liable to be refined) ...

Two massive Word documents: Vital and Wild

I decided to divide my projects into two categories. First, there are the things I consider to be vital; they're either urgent, necessary, or they feel essential to my growth as a person. Second, there are the things I'd like to do, the wild and crazy ideas I've had, the things I'm not sure about yet, the goals that once seemed really inspiring but now I'm left a little bit cold by them.

What I've done is created two Word documents (one called 'Vital' and one called 'Wildcards') and put very brief descriptions of each project into them, like this:

Buy a new cellphone (*)
Digitise my CD collection

The (*) indicates that that project has some supporting material attached to it; sometimes I write down some notes or brainstorm some ideas about a project, and I want to keep it for when I finally start to work on it. I store these in two manilla folders in my filing cabinet (one for 'Vital' and one for 'Wildcards').

Sometimes I'll write down the next action I want to take with the project, just as a prompt:

Learn how to edit on Adobe Premiere: ask Norman for footage

I'm storing these files in Dropbox (and I should totally set up a project to figure out how to make the files automatically sync every time I make a change).

A list of the projects I'm actively working on

Out of all of those possible projects, there are going to be somewhere between 8 to 100 that I'm working on at any one time.(*) I record these in a notebook I've set specifically aside for my list of 'Active Projects'.

* 'Up to 100' is Allen's number; so far

I've found it sets between 5 to 20.

Each of these Active Projects has a manilla folder filled with all the supporting material I need for them, and I store these in a separate drawer of my filing cabinet, for easy access.

As part of my Weekly Review (which I'll talk about in the next post), I make sure that there's at least one item in my to-do list that tells me the next action I need to take for each project.

Why am I going to all this trouble? It's simply so I can feel like I'm aware of everything I've got responsibility for and I can easily spot if anything's falling between the cracks. The end result is simply that I feel on top of stuff, and I'm confident that I'm moving stuff forward and finishing things.

Focus on two things

Finally, to make sure I'm making progress, I choose two things and work on them for 20 minutes first thing in the morning, and first thing when I get home. Mark Forster calls this the 'current initiative', and I've found it a great technique.

Only once I've completed both of those 'things' do I choose what to do next.

One more post. In this one, I'll talk about how I use all this stuff (the Weekly Review, which I mentioned above).

Apollo 13: Mission Control is a must see

2010-11-22T16:26:00.003+13:00

I am still recovering from how good a time I had at Apollo 13: Mission Control on Saturday night. This is a play at Downstage recreating the Apollo 13 disaster: audience members play members of Mission Control and have to perform vital tasks throughout the night in order to bring the astronauts back home again safely (I’ll talk a bit more about this merging between being an audience member and a performer in a few paragraphs).

Here’s who I think should go see this: Jenni, Lee, Norman, Luke, Sam, Matt, Debz, Mike Sands, Bryn, Jacqui, Karen, Malcolm, Donna, Sophie, Simon Shuker and anyone else who thinks it might be quite cool to pretend to be part of Mission Control for a couple of hours.

Without going into spoilers, I totally got to be a hero during the course of the evening: identifying a potential danger on the ship; representing Mission Control during a TV interview with Walter Cronkite, and (eventually) taking charge of Mission Control itself for about 5 minutes – which meant I was spotlighted on stage with about 200 people watching me as I averted a complete and total meltdown.

(Actually, I just re-read that paragraph and I reckon there are spoilers in there, so ... inviso-texted).

Fracking brilliant.

The Audience / Performer Split

Talking about it with Jennifer afterwards made me aware of something I hadn’t considered about attending an ‘interactive theatre experience’.(*) She said that she never forgot that she was an audience member, watching a performance. I, on the other hand, really got into it; I took my role as Guidance Comms Officer really seriously and totally brought in to the drama of the mission.

(*) It’s basically a LARP.

In some ways, it’s like the observation that people play games for different reasons: some people play to hang out with their friends; some people play to win; in the case of role-playing games, some people play to stay in-character while others play to construct a challenging story.

Your reason for being there and what you want out of it will give you a completely different experience from someone sitting right beside you who’s there for different reasons.

In my case, taking it seriously and buying in to the reality of the show had the benefit of getting me “into character”, so that when I was chosen to take part in a live interview on TV with Walter Cronkite(invisotext), I was totally in the zone and able to entertain the audience with my answers. I also, seriously, wanted to win: I have no idea if you can ‘fail’ Apollo 13, but I wanted to do everything we could to help it succeed; in effect I was trying to clock the performance.

Digging in to why it was so good

I had no idea, when I arrived at Downstage, that I was going to have one of the best creative experiences of my year to date. I expected to have heaps of fun, and I fully intended to get into it as much as I could … but to have it affect me this much?

So, it’s resonating but I’m not sure why. There are a lot of different factors at play here: my life of science-fiction and space flight; taking charge in a crisis; being in the spotlight; acting; a bit of improve and script-writing.

It seems important to me to dig into this a bit deeper to try and figure out exactly why I’m so stoked by this. If anyone wants to help me figure it out, please feel free to ask questions in the comments.

Some advice to myself

2010-11-20T08:45:00.001+13:00

I’ve just handed in an application for a NZFC Talent Award (one of the goals I set myself earlier in the year when I was posting about the New Thing). It’s at moments like this that it’s easy to rest on my laurels (n. an honour won, in a field or achievement).(*)

(*) I thought it meant ‘arse’.

But: working on the assumption that the future is, you know, whimsical, here’s some advice I gave someone earlier this year; hopefully I can take it too:

If you're interested in applying for this Talent Award again, my advice would be to start writing for it now. It will come around sooner than you think, and your projects will be much stronger if you've developed them for 6 months.

2.

I'd also suggest actually working on your projects, developing them (and making some of them). That’ll strengthen the case for giving you an award next year.

3.

Get your ideas to peer reviewers early. My suggestion: in your head, make the deadline two months earlier than it actually is. That'll give you a chance to really reflect on and incorporate any feedback you're given.

I have follow-up goals from making this application; I’ve decided not to share them (taking on board that advice about how telling other people about your goals – as if you’ve already achieve them - makes you less likely to do them). But things are moving.

How to Get Things Done: Write Everything Down

2010-11-19T17:32:00.050+13:00

I'm talking about How to Get Things Done, a book by Dave Allen that changed my life by showing me how to set up a system that captures everything that's going on in my life, helps me figure out where it all fits, and then gives me a way to prioritise what to do next.

Capture everything

If you're like me, you have a crapload of stuff going on in your life: things to write; people to see; obligations to fulfil; (hopefully) holidays to plan; kids to raise; emails to send; bills to pay; and more, and more, and more ...

The theory behind the Getting Things Done (GTD) system is that you need to write everything down and review it. Writing it down means you've gotten it out of your head. If you've gotten the idea out of your head and you can trust yourself to review it, then your brain becomes a lot calmer and stops thinking about the idea over and over again.

I've had this happen to me many times when I can't sleep because I'm thinking about something. If I just take the time to turn on the light and write it down, I usually find I pop off to sleep five or ten minutes later.

If you've known me for a while, you'll know that I write everything down in a hipster pda that I carry around everywhere. This is why - I want to capture every idea and look at it later to see if it's worthwhile or something I want to commit to doing.

Here's how to build a hipster pda:

cut up a bunch of paper or get a bunch of 3"x5" ﬁle cards
clip them together with a binder clip
there is no step 3

There are other sources of information I have to collect from as well:

my intray
emails
texts and phone messages
meetings and conversations

Organise Everything

Once you've captured everything, the next step in the GTD system is to figure out where it goes. Is it something you should do right away? Is it something you need to think about for a while? Is it a project, and if so is it urgent or more something you might do someday?

There's a place for everything in the system, and How to Get Things Done goes into quite a bit of detail about how to set up a filing system, use a calendar, and set up something called a tickler file (which effectively allows you to 'post' things to yourself):

Every item you've captured will go somewhere: into your to-do list; into a list of actual or potential projects; into your calendar; into the trash.

Next up, I want to talk about those project lists - because that's something I resisted doing for years ... and I was wrong.

How to Get Things Done: What's the Next Action?

2010-11-15T17:13:00.045+13:00

There's an observation in my previous post about economics that really sticks with me: most people are too busy dealing with the day-to-day tasks in their life to lift their heads up every once in a while and see the bigger picture. I've certainly felt like that, and its that feeling - coupled with setting up a new organisational system at my work - that's motivated me to talk about one of the books that really literally changed my life.

How to Get Things Done by Dave Allen is a book that - at its most basic level - is about how to set up a filing system. But really its about how to set up a system that captures everything that's going on in your life, helps you consider where it all fits, and then gives you tools and routines to help you prioritise what to do next.

I've been using it since 2005, and I only now feel like I'm beginning to apply some of the deeper lessons from it (and that's after doing some extra reading and thinking about it).

What I'd like to do in the next few posts is talk about the basics of the version of the system I use. Perhaps it'll be helpful; most of it will probably be similar to (or an extension of) things you're already doing.

The Next Action List

Over the last few years, I have shifted to a single to-do list, which captures everything that's going on in my life.

However: the items on this to-do list are all written using one of two basic principles of the Getting Things Done (GTD) system; each item describe, in very specific terms, the next physical action I need to do. For instance, it doesn't say:

Sell spare clothes to the Costume Cave.

Instead it says:

Call Costume Cave (385-9682)

The item before that might have said:

Google 'Costume Cave' and find out phone number.

The other basic principle is that if an item can be done in under 2 minutes, do it then and there. You'll make more progress, and it'll be easier and faster than writing it down and revisiting it.

I've tried a lot of systems for organising my to-do lists but the best version I've found is called 'Autofocus', developed by productivity expert Mark Forster. There's an online demonstration of how it works, here.

Essentially, I have one to-do list stored in a 1B5 notebook. In the next post, I'll talk about how things get into that notebook.

Books: April to June

2010-11-11T11:41:00.004+13:00

The Knife of Never Letting Go is the first in a trilogy of young adult novels. It should be right up my alley (which is a reference that seems much more relevant to me now that I've moved to an apartment in an alleyway): the series is set on a world that's been colonised by people from Earth, who have had a nasty conflict with the indigenous species, and as a result been infected with a disease that has given everybody uncontrollable telepathy. Coupled with that, the protagonist is trying to escape from the village he lives in, a village populated only by men, most of whom are homicidal patriarchal fascists.

But the book really bugged me. While the author made me care about the main character, he also stuck strongly to a first person POV coupled with a few 'unreliable narrator' tricks. As a result, I felt cheated by the frequency with which information was withheld that the main character knew (or should know), and annoyed at how often the author had to knock the main character out in order to advance the plot.

I've been on the fence about trilogies for many years now - reluctant to read them because for the most part I think they're padding. At the end of Knife, I decided not to read the next two books in the series: while the main character was trapped, indebted to the men he'd spent the whole book trying to escape - an army of men who'd just taken over the whole planet - I wasn't particularly interested in how he would get out of this situation. I just expected he would, and felt no obligation to read two more books to find out how it happened.

It took a few months, but Jenni changed my mind about this (more to come in the next book review post) ...

Reading Knife also reinforced my hatred of modern dust jackets on books. Sure, the design work that goes into a contemporary book is top notch, but I swear that the blurbs give away plot spoilers up to about page 200. It's infuriating.

Jenni lent me What's the Worst that Could Happen? It's her novel about a super-hero whose power is that she can see the worst case scenario for every course of action. I enjoyed reading it, and quickly saw the potential in it. Jenni blogged about our feedback session.

Then I organised a trans-humanist science-fiction death match. I got out two books from the library, read the first chapter of each and then chose which one to continue.

I chose Newton's Wake by Ken McLeod because its Scottish protagonist seemed to have more of an edge. It's a fairly interesting soap opera about the aftermath of a war with AIs and first contact with a distant colony, but by the end, the story was a little confusing and felt like a failure.

Then, when I switched back to Glasshouse by Charles Stross, I was impressed by how smart it was. Our hero needs to go into the 30th century equivalent of witness protection. He signs up for an experiment to recreate 20th century society, where our social and moral codes are enforced by a points system. Things quickly deteriorate as the experiment's participants decide to play to win (and ignore the fact that there's a darker agenda going on). A great examination of how our culture ticks, and a tight little thriller.

In my last book review, I mentioned that there was a book that scared me. Kindred by Octavia Butler is it. It's the story of an African-American woman from the 1970s who's thrown back in time about 150 years to the Antebellum South. What I realised is that I can watch trashy horror films and read Thomas Ligotti short stories all I like, but this story - about this character who seemed very real and very human, thrust into absolutely the worst environment for her - well, this story didn't feel safe. After the first two chapters, I had no idea where it was going or how far it could go, and I ended up putting it down.

I switched, instead, to The Bohr Maker, a science-fiction novel about nano-technology, that felt ... superficial to me in comparison to Kindred (which I was still thinking about). The story follows two protagonists - well, one of them's mostly just a character who things happen to for the majority of the book, and the other is so unsympathetic that I wouldn't have been unhappy to see him/it fail entirely. Perhaps that's a good technique ... it certainly kept the outcome I wanted the book to have alive and in question for me, but made The Bohr Maker a bit of a tough read

Afterwards, I went back to Kindred, and read another two or three chapters. Just when I thought it was settling into a predictable groove, Butler threw a massive curveball into the situation, one that I found very compelling.

After reading to see how that resolved, I had to decompress for a while. I ripped through Roadside Picnic by Stanislaw Lem. My memories of this have faded now, but I found this a tight, fast read infused with melancholy and a sense of transcendence. Actually: recommended. It felt like good Philip K. Dick.

Finally, I finished Kindred and was satisfied with how it all wrapped up. If you're familiar with the RPG Steal Away Jordan, Kindred is one of the media inspirations for that game.

The Sparrow is a definite contender for the best book I've read this year. It's a first contact story: humanity has picked up radio broadcasts of music from the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. The story follows (and deals with the aftermath of) an expedition funded by Jesuit priests to Rakhat, the world that is sending the music. What struck me most about this story was its sense of humour, the lightness of touch and sense of truth in its characterisations and the way it deals with issues of guilt, celibacy, the nature of God and faith - all wrapped in a vivid writing style. Jenni, Helen R: you might like this one.

The Have Done List: September to October

2010-11-07T04:17:00.004+13:00

Here's some stuff I've done in the last month and a half that I think's notable:

defriended a couple of people on Facebook (if you're reading this, you're unlikely to be one of them)
gave feedback on Jenni's novel
asked Matt if he would digitise episodes of lovebites for me (which he very kindly did)
decluttered, massively
got an exciting comment about people who are interested in playtesting Left Coast
got good feedback from Jenni about my feedback on her novel
bought a desk and assembled it myself
broke a desk
went on holiday
stayed reasonably dry in the middle of a three day storm
re-learned how to build a fire
introduced Jennifer to story games
cleared all of my emails (believe me, this is a big thing!)
fixed a desk
broke a filing cabinet
threw a temper tantrum (which fixed the filing cabinet)
set up an filing system at work
deposited 20 boxes of emails and script notes from the lovebites TV series at the Film Archive (closure, baby! Yeah!)
learned how to give effective feedback in a personal/non-literary context (Describe when it occured; Describe exactly and objectively what happened; Explain the impact it had on you).
Decided to write a scholarship application in 24 hours
Had a lot of fun with Jennifer on Halloween weekend, including becoming a raving fan of the pies at Sweet Mother's Kitchen
Inspired mcdaldno to write more of his game: Monsterhearts.

Characters need a "Thing"

2010-11-03T12:32:00.012+13:00

While reading Scriptshadow's review of 'Retreat', a Dead Calm-esque thriller on an isolated island, I came across a great little insight. (One of the great things about Scriptshadow's review format is the little insight at the end of each review; quite often there's something that sticks with me.)

Anyway, this idea is relevant to the work I want to do on Left Coast, making the supporting characters that surround the lead character as real and pro-active as possible.

[E]very character should have a “thing” going on.

Everybody’s got a “thing.” My friend Dan’s thing is that he’s obsessed with women, to the point where it’s ruined a marriage and a couple of other great relationships he’s had. My friend Claire’s thing is that she refuses to rely on other people for help. She has to do everything herself, even when at times it’s impossible.

Kate’s thing [in this script] is that she can’t forgive her husband for putting his work before her.

Think about all the friends in your life. You can probably break all of them down into having that one “thing” that identifies them. This “thing” is what you use your screenplay to explore. Sure this [script's] concept is about a deadly virus that could potentially end human existence. But really this script is about a woman trying to come to terms with what her husband did to her, forgive him, and move on.

OPost Optionsnce you identify what your main character’s “thing” is, you can use your screenplay to explore it. If you’re not doing that, I got news for you, you’re going to have a hard time writing a good screenplay.

"A meaningful prosperity": Changing the economic system

2010-10-30T18:07:00.026+13:00

I found this 20 minute talk by Tim Jackson about the limits of growth in our economic system to be worthwhile. Essentially, it's a clear explanation of how we could handle a global population of nine billion people all wanting a 'good', 'Western' lifestyle.

The talk points out the intersection between economics and the desire for novelty, which leads to resources being used to create new, shiny consumer goods.(*)

(*) Like iPads, which I'm still restraining myself from buying.

When Jackson couples this observation with a discussion of the levels of consumer debt leading into the financial crisis, he comes up with this pithy summary:

This is a story about us, people being persuaded to spend money we don't have on things we don't need to create impressions that won't last on people we don't care about.

There's lots more to this talk, but the thing that really stuck out to me as relevant to the idea of developing our long range thinking is the observation that we're too busy taking care of the small-scale, day-to-day stuff to deal with the bigger picture or more intractable problems.

The Long News

2010-10-26T18:43:00.001+13:00

A three minute talk about gaining some perspective on world events.

www.longnews.org

The deep dive

2010-10-22T21:23:00.025+13:00

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of giving Jenni some feedback on her most recent novel. Towards the end of our session, I tried a technique that I'd heard about in a governance seminar last month; it's called a 'deep dive', and all it involves is taking the time to dig into one particular issue, asking questions about and exploring its various facets (without having a particular agenda or wanting a particular outcome), and seeing what emerges.

For Jenni's novel, I asked her about the various ways she - as the author - had used 'anger' in her novel. It's a bit of a recurring motif, and it's something I have a particular interest in; The Limit is all about anger, and in fact writing The Limit taught me a lot about dealing with anger in my own life. That one question revealed a lot of things to me that weren't clear from my reading: in particular, the use of anger as one of the stages of grieving, and the repressed anger of the novel's love interest.

Pretty much all of the stuff that came out of our wandering conversation during this deep dive, I was able to think of ways to apply to the rewrite of the novel, hopefully strengthening the elements that Jenni already has in there.

It's not a technique that I'd do very often; maybe once every couple of script meetings; but I think the deep dive has a real place at the writers' table.

The Hobbit: What's next?

2010-10-22T11:47:00.000+13:00

OK, so there’s a lot of stuff going on with the Hobbit right now. Drawing on your knowledge, what are the factors that are involved in this? What’s worth further investigation?

Some ideas to start this off:

- Tax breaks

- Actors’ Equity

- SAG (the US Actors guild)

(This is a test post, published by email.)

Getting under my skin

2010-10-18T21:58:00.001+13:00

I've recently watched all three Jason Bourne movies, and the process of trying to figure out what I liked about them made me dig a little bit deeper into my own tastes. I've been inspired by Jesse Burneko's post 'Examine your source material'; he talks about examining the things we read and watch, and trying to articulate what it is about them that really speaks to us:

[T]here’s a gap between simply what one enjoys and what actually speaks to one on a personal deep inspirational level.

So I ask you, look at your media. Draw that line in the sand. What have you enjoyed vs. what has gotten really and truly under your skin and into your heart?

Articulating the difference between what I enjoy and what gets under my skin has been pretty useful. See, I enjoy action sequences, and gunfights, and space battles, and complicated brain-boggling mysteries.

With the Bourne movies, I felt that each of them was better than the last in terms of action ... but it's the first one that has the most kick for me. Jason Bourne's dilemma of whether - even with amnesia - he can transcend being the killer that he used to be, whether he can stop sliding back into being an assassin holds a lot of appeal for me. While the action sequences in the next two movies are exciting, that theme of trying of trying to not be a bad person, holding on to your new identity is only sporadically dealt with.

And actually it's that question that really attracted me to Lost in the first season; when the survivors crash-land on the island, no-one knows who they were in their previous pre-crash lives; they have the opportunity to start fresh, to try and transcend their own instincts and habits and flaws ... if they want to. At a deeper level, this is about people trying to change and being dragged down by their own pasts.

Another book that really speaks to me is Marooned in Realtime, a murder mystery set fifty million years in the future, when there are only a few thousand human beings left alive, and the death of any one person is a real threat to the survival of the species. In the same way, I realise that it's those stakes that really appeal to me about Battlestar Galactica: sure, there's space battles and mysteries about the cylons, but the thing that always gets me in that show is Laura Roslin keeping a tally on her whiteboard of the number of humans left alive. It drives home the stakes of the show, and the fact that murder, mutiny and civil war have a cost; you may get what you want, or gain power, but at the cost of jeopardising the survival of humanity.

One final example: I love the first Harry Potter book - to me it's a great examination of a child who's lost everything and who's been alone and misunderstood his whole life finally having the opportunity to make friends with people. The subsequent books, where friendships are tested, and the movies, where friendships are assumed and where Harry Potter is kind of presented as a kid who not only deserves this sort of success but is actually kind of totally entitled to it, leaves me cold.

I'm sure there's more, but it's late and that's a start. What about you? If you dug deep into the things you love, the things that you keep coming back to and that feed your soul, what would you find?

Music: March

2010-10-14T08:00:00.001+13:00

I fell in love with Spoon's Mystery Zone a little bit - bouncy, catchy. Here's a live version:

I'm becoming a fan of LCD Soundsystem. Time to get away is a nice taste of nerd funk:

Oh yeah. I road-tripped up to Auckland to watch The Pixies peform Doolittle and a cross-albums encore. Frank Black is oddly disconnected from the audience, Kim Deal rocks. Gigantic was great, but from listening to the Pixies in the car on the way up, this song stands out:

Finally became curious enough to check out a few Lady Gaga videos. My conclusions:
- Bad Romance is a good song
- the costume design in the videos is so aggressively NOW that it feels dated already. But it's way more interesting than either Paris Hilton or Taylor Swift, so I cannot wait for the Gaga imitators to arrive
- I'm fascinated by the financials of the Lady Gaga business; who earns the money?
- She seems like she's a strong contender for being a pop star with some longevity
- She can't dance, as evidenced by Telephone (youtube it if you want; it's 10 minutes long)

However, watching Telephone reminded me to check out Beyonce's Single Ladies - in the interests of triggering Helen's ear-worm again, here's the vid:

And, fuck it, here's Gigantic. Go the Pixies!

RPG: Playtesting so I want to keep writing

2010-10-10T11:24:00.001+13:00

Hey, it's 10/10/10 today. That's worth commenting on!

Over the last couple of months, during spare-time, I've been writing little bits of Left Coast (my game about slightly crazy science fiction authors in 1960s California). The writing's been going fine, but I've also been thinking about what the next stage of playtesting will be.

Playtesting, for those who don't know it, is like redrafting a script or an essay but for games. You write a draft of a game, play it with some friends, and then figure out whether the game created the sort of fun you wanted it to create. If not, change some rules, change your approach, strip the game back and start again until you get it delivering the consistent fun you want.

It's a process I enjoy but something's been bugging me about it recently; this quote from Ron Edwards helped me articulate what I think the first step in my playtesting process needs to be:

My current thinking is that in earliest playtesting, people should be participating "for love," with less emphasis on breaking or even evaluating mechanics. I find feedback of this kind to be disruptive and demoralizing, including oh-so-helpful advice about how to write anything.

My concern at this stage is best served by addressing Color, i.e. the sort of imagery and flashy-stuff that characterizes the game (which may or may not include a specific setting and/or fixed characters); and Reward, i.e., whatever it is that I as the designer want to be the point and most fun about the system.

I've found out the hard way that including people not committed to these things, at this stage, can stop a project in its tracks.

So, less emphasis on mechanics and getting the rules 'right'; more emphasis on fun, being inspired to continue writing, brainstorming what the game could be.

This ties into my previous post, On Giving Feedback; again it's a quote from the Forge, which I'm finding to be a valuable resource for thinking about how to lead a productive creative life:

What I need is feedback that puts energy into my efforts. What I need is feedback that helps me see the full elephant, to understand the meaning of the whole beast that has yet only a crude shape under my mortal hands.

I am already scrutinous and critical enough of my creative efforts. What I need is feedback that strips away the bullshit that's holding me back, empowers and armors me against the certain doubts and contrary notions of others, and gives me energy and momentum.

The Hobbit: Wingnut vs Unions (Round 2)

2010-10-09T16:32:00.000+13:00

Oops! This should have auto-posted days ago, but it's been stuck in my Drafts folder. I'll post it now, and I've scheduled some more posts to appear while I'm on holiday. See you next weekend!

There have been some further exchanges of press releases and articles in the Peter Jackson/Wingnut Films vs the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) battle for hearts and minds. In my Round 1 post, I focused on breaking down the initial press releases between the two organisations. In Round 2, I want to look at the analyses and comments from The Standard and Kiwiblog to see whether viewing the issue through a more political lens can throw some light on things.

First, though, I might try and summarise my current understanding of the positions of both parties. This is definitely a work in progress and I don't guarantee its accuracy; part of why I'm writing these posts is to try and figure out exactly what is going on here.

The MEAA is representing its New Zealand subsidiary, NZ Actors' Equity. The MEAA's negotiations are intended to provide actors in the production of the Hobbit with access to residuals (dividends) from the film's distribution. Providing residuals for actors appearing in a production is standard international practice. As 'Anonymous' pointed out in the comments to my previous post (and I'm paraphrasing), the New Zealand contract would also give people the protections of employment law (such as minimum wage, right to challenge dismissal etc).

Wingnut Films (through the public face of Peter Jackson) takes the position that the MEAA is no longer a legal entity as it was struck off the Ministry of Economic Development’s (MED) Register of Incorporated Societies last week (source: Screen Hub, via Kiwiblog). Because it's no longer a legal entity, it can't be negotiated with (*).

* Which ignores the fact, if I've got the timeline correct, that

MEAA was a legal entity in NZ when it issued its August 17 letter.

Wingnut states that if they hire an actor who is a member of SAG (the American-based actors' guild), they honour the provisions in the SAG contract dealing with residuals. Their press release also states:

For the Hobbit, Warner Brothers have agreed to create a separate pot of profit participation, which will be divided up amongst non-SAG actors who are cast in the film. This was not done because of any pressure from Guilds or Unions - it was actually Warners doing the decent thing, and New Zealand and Australian actors will be the principle beneficiaries. SAG members have their pot, and non-SAG members now have theirs.

Finally, Wingnut is also positioning this as a fight for the survival of the New Zealand film industry (or at least its ability to attract big-budget overseas productions to film on location here).

A particular point of contention seems to be the number / percentage of New Zealand actors that are represented by this union. As Svend pointed out in the previous post's comments, there's a standard figure of 80-90 actors, with the initial Wingnut press release estimating the available pool of NZ actors as between 1000 and 2000. An alternative calculation, here, indicates that 588 people identified their occupation as 'actor' in the 2006 census, and the initial Wingnut press release estimates the membership of NZ Actors' Equity as being between 100-200 actors.

There's an attributed quote over at Russell Brown's Hard News post about this that might shed some light on this issue:

"John Barnett told me he suspected the union let its registration lapse (by failing to file reports for the last three years) to avoid having to reveal the size of its membership." (opinion)

And there's one question I still want to know the answer to is, "How much would employing unionised actors with contracts that give them residuals cost The Hobbit production?"

Anyway. On with my cutting and pasting of other people's posts on this subject. IrishBill at The Standard has a nice summary of a particular perspective on the issue ('Union boycotts Jackson'):

I’ve known quite a few film workers over the years, workers who were happy to work long hours for bugger all money when the industry was in its infancy simply because there wasn’t much money about and they were getting valuable experience.

But nowadays the industry has established itself, there’s clearly enough money for Jackson to have his own private jet and international stars are here shooting on a regular basis.

The thing is the terms and conditions haven’t changed – film workers are still being paid peanuts, being treated as independent contractors to avoid employment law, missing out on royalties and being blacklisted if they dare to complain.

...

The man with the $68m private jet and the castle and the millions of dollars of vintage aeroplanes and the knighthood says the union is greedy because it wants a fair deal for its members. And it’s not a matter of him keeping sub-standard work conditions, it’s a matter of national importance!

Digging through the comments thread for insights produced the following not-necessarily-verified observations:

There were actors in LOTR who were unable to profit properly from their use in the film (for money made from licensing products bearing their image) because there are no effective collective agreeements here.
Since 2006 NZ Actors’ Equity has been an ‘autonomous’ branch of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance and has been an affiliate member of the Council of Trade Unions under its MEAA name. It was struck off the Ministry of Economic Development’s Register of Incorporated Societies last week under its registered name of Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance.It is therefore an unregistered union under the Employment Relations Act and is therefore legally unable to negotiate a collective agreement for its members. It’s also illegal for Peter Jackson to enter into negotiations with them for the same reason.
You get the impression that there is some pretty significant blacklisting goes on inside the industry. The only real way of fighting that is to do it collectively.
As far as I know there’s been debate for quite a while about the relative lack of unionisation of Kiwis working in the international film and TV industry in NZ (for crews as well as cast). It has been argued that one of the advantages is that things get done quicker because there’s less job demarcation, meaning the crew don’t need to wait for the person/s with the allocated job title to get something done. But the disadvantage is insufficient protections for workers.
It’s not Aussies telling us what to do at all .... The MEAA is the union for actors and similar workers in Australia, who have had a formal alliance with our version here for some time. They act on behalf of our actors at their request, not by way of an imposition.
These actors are employed as independent contractors, which means they have no collective bargaining rights, no rights to holidays, minimum wages etc. It\’s a great way to avoid employment obligations and the reason why Jackson can claim that NZ law doesn\’t allow them to collectively negotiate. Of course, there’s a way around it : they could be employed as employees and then there wouldn\’t be any argument about their right to negotiate.

A comment in a subsequent post at the Standard provides a little bit of historical context

On Campbell Live just now, Bruce Hopkins (actor in Hercules, Xena, LOTR), threw some light on the Jackson-actors’ union issue. It seems it goes back to some time in the 90s when the Nats deregulated unions, and set a minimum limit on the number of members needed to form a union. The actors’ didn’t have enough members to be a union & have tried attaching themselves to other unions in the past. But this wasn’t very satisfactory because they were attached to unions they had nothing in common with. So, then a key leader put out a call for a union to affiliate with in Melbourne, and MEA responded.

So, basically, they have a history of not being able to negotiate bottom-line conditions of employment. This issue pre-dates LOTR. And Kiwi actors are about the only ones in the world who haven’t been able to negotiate a basic agreement.

... which was contested in a subsequent comment:

I think Bruce should stick to the acting (which he’s rather good at) because his history is FUBAR. He might start by asking someone at the CTU to send him a copy of the Employment Relations Act – which was passed by the Fifth Labour Government.

More interesting opinions, this time from Russell Brown at Hard News:

The present unrest seems to have begun with this letter last October from the US-based Screen Actors Guild, which reiterates the SAG's Global Rule One and states that a New Zealand or Australian performer must be covered by either a SAG or an MEAA agreement to work on a New Zealand production.

The conspiracy theory, which I heard yesterday from one producer, is that the SAG is looking to protect its own members by preventing so-called "runaway productions" in Australia and New Zealand. They've succeeded in Australia, the theory goes, and now they're turning to New Zealand.

And finally, Gordon Campbell summarises the 'employee' versus 'independent contractor' dynamic nicely in his post at scoop.co.nz. I'm going to excerpt large chunks of it here, because (again) I think it helps build a broader historical context for what's going on:

According to Spada (the NZ producers association), it is against the law to enter a collective agreement with the ‘independent contractors’ that comprise the sector, and industry practice has been known to everyone (and set out in the so-called industry ‘Pink Book’) for the past 15 years.

This is a debatable version of history. In reality, the people insisting that the sector is comprised of ‘independent contractors’ are the producers themselves. The Jackson productions have been instrumental in fostering that climate – and yet now, if you believe Spada, they feel bound by a situation that enables them to require workers to manage their own tax affairs, arrange their own insurance, and qualify for no penalty rates for working at night, or on weekends or public holidays?

Conspicuously, Spada has failed to mention the case of James Bryson, an ‘independent contractor’ on LOTR who duly signed papers to that effect. After he was dismissed, Bryson asked the courts to enable him to pursue a personal grievance case. Despite the existing paperwork that Bryson had signed, the lower court found – and this was later backed up by the Supreme Court – that the determining factor was the reality of the employment situation, and not the paperwork. Bryson, the courts decided, was really in an employee situation – and thus, he could use the personal grievance mechanisms available to him under our industrial law.

That’s very relevant to the current dispute. Because it means that if the employment situation really is an employee one in most or all respects, the mechanisms open to employees – such as collective bargaining – should be available. This leaves Jackson with at least a couple of options. He could volunteer to waive the demand that the people he hires accept the (arguably, bogus) status of ‘independent contractor’ and start treating his workers onset as what many of them would seem to be in practice : namely, employees. Or short of that – he could recognise that the contractors can negotiate collectively with his Three Foot Seven company over conditions on The Hobbit – and this, arguably, can be done legally if done openly, and without the aim of carrying out wage and price fixing within a negotiated market.

OK, there's lots of lots of links and extracted comments and quotes there. What are your thoughts on the above? I'm going to mull over it for a while, and try and bring it all together after I get back from my holiday. In the meantime, I'll be setting the blog to auto-post some book and music reviews.

Books: March to April

2010-10-06T22:38:00.000+13:00

While I've lost track of some of the books I've read during the last couple of months, but that's been compensated for by the introduction of a new system for getting books out that's paying great dividends: I read reviews of books that sound interesting; type them into a file on my phone; by the time I get to the library to get something out, I've forgotten the exact plot of the book so I choose something at random, get it out without reading the back cover (which I've found usually contains massive spoilers for up to 200 pages of a book), and then read it with a completely fresh eye.

Going into books blind has been fun!

Lost for books to read, I pulled a Roger Zelazny novel that I've owned for years out my 'To Read' bookshelf. Turns out it was the second book in a series, but it had a pretty good recap of events in it. I was about 80 pages in when I realised that I'd be going to the library the next day and getting out the other four books in the series.

Zelazny's 'Ambert' quintet is fun, smart high fantasy with a taste of Moorcockian surreality ... but most of all, it's a noir. The third book, Sign of the Unicorn, is basically a series of flashbacks explaining backstories (and in some cases, twisted motivations) of the lead character's family members. Later in this post, I'm going to be talking about my dislike of trilogies and series, but this was good. Like, 'finishing one of the books every night' good.

Declare is the first Tim Powers novel I've read. What starts as a reasonably normal Le Carre-esque Cold War spy thriller slowly becomes an alternate-history biography of Kim Philby and a textbook study of how to slowly reveal a complicated mythology. Like a Clive Barker novel by way of John Le Carre, it inspired me to immediately get out another Tim Powers: Last Call - a story about a gambler who once lost a very important game of poker, and is now about to pay the price for it.

Gino: Read Last Call. Anyone else, if you're interested in the Tarot, the story of the Fisher King, or stories that feel like 80s style Clive Barker with less gruesomeness and less misanthropy, check it out too.

Pearce bought a copy of Life's Lottery by Kim Newman, which I immediately seized from him and read three times over the next three nights. This is the literary Choose Your Own Adventure novel I've always wanted to read. A story where the main character changes his very personality based on the choices you make. The story covers about 40 years, centring around Thatherite and Blarite Britain, was constantly riveting and insightful ... and I still feel like I haven't tapped all of its depths. It was also a great deal more magical realist (and violent) than I expected, with a fantastic authorial voices that sometimes talks directly to the reader (and sometimes passes judgement on you).

(Great to see that my propensity for cheating at Choose Your Own Adventure books is undiminished; at one point I think I had four fingers stuck in various pages so that I could try out various alternatives.)

After waking up from a dream in which I had bought a roleplaying game about a city under the ocean, I decided to read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. First thing that surprised me: it was in the children's section of the library. Second thing: it's effectively the 1860s version of hard sci-fi. Jules Verne seems to be striving to make every detail seems as plausible as possible based on the science and engineering capabilities of the time. Third thing: it's kinda boring. The book is mostly a travelogue that spends very little time fleshing out its characters, and the big incidents of the book are separated by many pages worth of descriptions of fish.

While reading this, I struggled to see how you could adapt this into a feature film for the 21st century. Surely the sense of wonder about the undersea world has been lost. I didn't get to see Oceans at the Film Festival (which might have changed my mind), but it sounds like I happily avoid the narrator-rage that people experienced in listening to Pierce Brosnan for 84 minutes.

How to Get Rich was a fun non-fiction read about how to be an entrepreneur. Unsparing in its description of the prices you'd have to pay in order to be rich, and filled with a lot of wisdom. Along with the Four Hour Work Week, this is one I think I'm going to have to re-read.

Next post, why I finished The Knife of Never Letting Go (the first book in a trilogy), and didn't feel the need to read the rest of the series; and a book that scared me.

The Hobbit: Wingnut vs Unions (Round 1)

2010-09-28T04:46:00.002+13:00

I feel like the current negotiation-by-press release between Peter Jackson/Wingnut Films and the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance is worth some closer analysis.

What I thought I'd do is have a look at the bigger blog posts and press releases I can find, and extract facts and negotiating positions from them. Going into this, I don't have a strong opinion about the outcome; I'd say my default attitude is that I think unions are a useful and sometimes necessary counter-balance to the power held by an employer.

I think what I'll do is start with the stuff.co.nz article where I first read about this: Jackson fights to save Hobbit. Here are the first two paragraphs:

Sir Peter Jackson says he is fighting to save The Hobbit films, thousands of jobs and the New Zealand film industry in the face of a threatened actors' boycott orchestrated by an "Australian bully boy" union.

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA) says Hollywood stars Sir Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett and Hugo Weaving support a boycott of the film because actors may be employed on inferior non-union contracts.

I'll try breaking down the rest of this article into 'verifiable facts',(*) 'opinions' and 'leverage' (for a negotiation).

* Just because a fact is 'verifiable' doesn't mean I've verified it. It just

means someone's making a claim that could be fact-checked.

Jackson said he was a "very proud and loyal member" of three Hollywood unions (verifiable fact)
[Jackson is] "not anti-union in the slightest". (opinion)
He always honoured actors' union conditions if they were union members (verifiable fact/opinion)

These first three points are presenting Peter Jackson as a reasonable individual to negotiate with.

"An Australian bully-boy [is trying] to gain a foothold in this country's film industry. They want greater membership, since they get to increase their bank balance." (opinion)
"I feel growing anger at the way this tiny minority is endangering a project that hundreds of people have worked on over the last two years, and the thousands about to be employed for the next four years, [and] the hundreds of millions of Warner Brothers dollars that is about to be spent in our economy." (opinion/leverage)
Losing The Hobbit would leave New Zealand "humiliated on the world stage" (opinion/leverage)
"Warners would take a financial hit that would cause other studios to steer clear of New Zealand", Jackson said. (leverage)
"If The Hobbit goes east [East Europe in fact], look forward to a long, dry, big-budget movie drought in this country. (leverage)
"We have done better in recent years with attracting overseas movies and the Australians would like a greater slice of the pie, which begins with them using The Hobbit to gain control of our film industry." (opinion)

Jackson presents the MEAA's demands as a financial entity muscling in on New Zealand, operating purely for profit and power, and simultaneously trying to ruin the NZ film industry (a long, dry, big-budget movie drought) and 'gain control of our film industry'. These quotes also use quite a bit of emotive language ('anger', 'humiliated', and a general tone of fear).

The interesting thing that struck me about this section was the idea that Warners would be spending hundreds of millions of dollars on this project in New Zealand. The natural question to ask is, "How much would allowing unionised actors to work on the Hobbit cost the production?"

The International Federation of Actors, which represents the world's seven major actors unions and actors in 100 countries, has told members not to act in The Hobbit until they get a union contract.(verifiable fact)
MEAA national director Simon Whipp said "all performers" were concerned about the lack of standard union contracts for the US$150 million (NZ$204m) two-part Hobbit films.(verifiable fact/opinion/leverage)
"We have spoken to all the performers who have been approached, or are rumoured to be involved in, the production and all have expressed strong support [for the boycott]."(leverage)

The article summarises the problems with a lack of union contracts as leading "to concern about whether The Hobbit producers would pay fees contained in a standard union contract, such as payments from DVD sales and video rentals."

"Those are the things all of us are concerned about and differentiate New Zealand, from a performer's perspective, from working almost anywhere else in the English-speaking world."(verifiable fact)

Support for Peter Jackson's position comes from South Pacific Pictures chief executive John Barnett

Barnett says the Australian union's claims are duplicitous and inaccurate and made by an organisation with no legal standing in New Zealand."The MEAA has been struck off the register (of NZ incorporated societies) for failing to file any reports in the last three years, which is one reason that the production company can't enter into any agreement with it. (verifiable fact)
The claim that actors were at the mercy of production companies was a complete misrepresentation as there were absolute guarantees about working conditions which had been in place for the past 15-20 years. (verifiable fact)

Now I'm wondering what the absolute guarantees are that Barnett has mentioned.

At this point, I think it'd be a good idea to find the MEAA's original press release at scoop.co.nz. The press release itself is simply advising members of international actors guilds not to accept work on The Hobbit, which it categorises as a non-union production. The press release links to a 'Hobbit Factsheet', which links to a series of letters written to Wingnut and then to MGM and New Line.

The first letter,'Re: ENGAGEMENT OF PERFORMERS ON THE HOBBIT', contains the following points:

For some time it has been a concern for performers around the world that our colleagues working in New Zealand are not being engaged on union negotiated agreements. (opinion)

The letter goes on to state:

Recently, The International Federation of Actors (FIA) became aware that the production of “The Hobbit” intends to hire performers under non-union contracts.

For this reason FIA, at its most recent meeting, unanimously passed the following motion:

“Resolved, that the International Federation of Actors urges each of its affiliates to adopt instructions to their members that no member of any FIA affiliate will agree to act in the theatrical feature film “The Hobbit” until such time as the producer has entered into a collective bargaining agreement with the Media Entertainment & Arts Alliance for production in New Zealand providing for satisfactory terms and conditions for all performers employed on the production”.

FIA therefore encourages you to meet immediately with representatives of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance in order to reach an agreement covering all performers engaged on this production.

Given the bluntness with which this position is stated, I can see why Jackson might have reacted by categorising the MEAA's approach as bullying.

The second letter restates the position:

We would encourage you to meet with representatives of the Media Entertainment & Arts
Alliance (MEAA) as soon as possible. In the interim we are advising our members to refuse to sign contracts for this production until they receive confirmation from us that a satisfactory resolution has been reached with MEAA. (leverage)

The MEAA's 'Hobbit Factsheet' summarises the position since the letters were sent:

The producers, through their lawyers, have refused to negotiate with the union. (verifiable fact)
The producers claim it would be unlawful (and a breach of New Zealand competition laws) for the
producer to enter into an agreement with the union covering the engagement of performers on the
production. (verifiable fact)
The Alliance has obtained legal advice that there are a variety of lawful means which could be used to
establish the minimum wages, working conditions and residuals for performers on the production.(verifiable fact)

This difference of opinion - whether it's legal for the union and the producer to enter into an agreement - seems like something that's either (a) easy and obvious to resolve, or (b) liable to end up working its way up to the Court of Appeal over the course of three to four years before a judgment is issued.

The producers have indicated that, notwithstanding the request to meet and discuss the terms of
engagement of performers on the production, they intend to make imminent offers to performers. (verifiable fact)
In addition, they have now advised that they propose to pay some performers “residuals” on the
production. These residuals are significantly less than the Alliance’s usual agreements in every respect.
The producers have offered 2% of distributors gross receipts to commence for exploitations 2 years after the first US theatrical release of the film. However, it is unclear on what they would be based (for
example what about sales which occur before the 2 years relating to use after the two year period), how these residuals would be divided between the performers and how they would be enforceable.
It is not clear which performers may be offered this arrangement. (verifiable fact/opinion)
Under all Alliance agreements all performers are entitled to share in residual payments and there is no
uncertainty about how each performer’s share is calculated or about enforceability. (verifiable fact/opinion)
The producers have advised they do not intend to negotiate with the union. Consequently the usual
provisions of the New Zealand contract would apply. These include a provision which permit the
producer to terminate the contract at any time without obligation to pay out the performer’s contract.
This provision could also be used to justify non-payment of any residual obligation which may have been agreed above (even after the performer has performed all their work on the film and even if the
performer’s work is used in the film). This clause alone makes the residual offer above meaningless. (verifiable fact/leverage)

To summarise (hopefully reasonable accurately), the MEAA says that Wingnut are about to start contracting actors, offering them residuals (" a payment made to the performer in a creative work for subsequent screenings of the work") that are at less-than-standard rates. The New Zealand contracts (*) can be terminated at any point, even after the performer's finished filming and their performance is included in the finished product; the termination of that contract means the producers don't have any obligation to pay residuals.

* It's unclear (but I'm assuming that) the contracts referred to in

the final bullet-point are the ones intended for just New Zealand

actors, rather that for every actor (New Zealand and international).

If that's accurate, it seems like a hell of a loophole to have in your contract. Even if you assume the company you're working for will act completely in good faith and not screw you over, it still seems like an avoidable risk.

Next up, I'll have a look at the left and right wing analyses of this from The Standard and Kiwiblog. I'll also check through Peter Jackson's actual press release to see if there's any further nuance that the Dominion Post/Stuff article missed out, and through the CTU's press release.

The Have Done List: April to September

2010-09-24T18:18:00.001+12:00

Here's some of what I've been up to for the last 6 months:

borrowed CDs from the library for the first time in 20 years
listened to MIA
gave feedback on Blowback - a new game about spies by Elizabeth Shoemaker
discovered a new author (Tim Powers) and read two of his books.
rented Rec 2, one hella-crazy zombie film
sent Bad Family off for peer review
finished a series of posts about the New Thing
got slightly sick
rescued a yellow-feathered sparrow from a cat, nursed it back to health and watched it fly away
won speed dating
went to roller derby
got stressed at work
managed a complicated cross-government data-entry project with slight political ramifications
starting writing a project I care about
managed a creative disagreement
met a great woman
Gave feedback on Jenni's novel
pitched Workplace Bully to Sean
lead a series of team meetings based on what I've learned from Made to Stick
gained confidence
started re-learning to cook (one of my 12 goals in 2 years)
wrote a pitch for Workplace Bully and got great feedback on it
had a heart-to-heart with a co-wo
moved into a new flat (and it is great)
ate a pistachio and chocolate twirl from Simply Paris
cooked tofu for the first time
went on a weekend away
started working on a new feature film storyline
figured out how to play Apocalypse World

Things are good. Blogging will sort-of resume while I get my life back into balance after shifting flats.

Books: February to March

2010-08-24T21:47:00.000+12:00

The Iliad occupied most of February. I worked my way through two translations: the funny, pulpy Rieu, and the beautifully written Fagles. It's an impressive war story with a surprising focus not on the beginning or end of the war, but on the showdown between Hector and Achilles. It makes me keen to read the 7-part graphic novel Age of Bronze that tells the story of the war from Paris' dream to the post-Trojan Horse slaughter.

The Hunger Games started off as a ho-hum rip-off of Battle Royale and a third of the way through the book became utterly gripping due to a single character reveal. Vivid, tough, brutal and the sequel (coming up in a few paragraphs) is even better.

I read the script for Tell No One, an adaptation of a Harlen Coben novel. A fast tight read with that thriller plot arc: amazing hook, great second act where you have no idea what's going on, and then a conventional finale. Conventional, but with strong emotional pay-offs.

It makes me think about Se7en, which follows a similar structure but whose finale transcends the conventions through some magical combination of simplicity, implication and acting. However, I've always been taken with the idea that the true ending to Se7en involves David obeying John Doe's instructions: becoming Wrath, conducting the execution, and then - in full view of the camera - blowing his own brains out.

I know that version of the movie could never have been made in 1995, but there's such a dramatic purity (and relentless logic) to that ending that I can't help reshooting it in my head (heh) every time I watch it.

Bully In Sight is an English book about bullying. A little bit of research for Workplace Bully, natch.

The Complete Indigo Prime - in my mind, Indigo Prime is a classic 2000AD serial, riffing off of Sapphire and Steel, and creating an amazing story about reality engineers saving the universe. Turns out that it's far crazier, patchier and more incoherent than I ever remembered, and that I read far less of it than I thought. Nice long story arc involving Jack the Ripper and a time-travelling train, though.

Catching Fire is the sequel to The Hunger Games, which is basically a version of Battle Royale (teenagers fight to the death in the wilderness for the amusement of spectators) in post-apocalyptic America, with a fair bit of class warfare thrown in for good measure. It took me a while to warm up to the Hunger Games, but Catching Fire was excellent - mostly because it completely defied my expectations about how it would play out.

If it's the obligation of the writer to find the way forward that you didn't expect but realise makes perfect sense, then Susan Collins definitely fulfilled her obligation to me. I won't say I'm a raving fan, but I am very much looking forward to Mockingjay.

Shafts of Strife was published as a comic in the Listener in the 80s. I can remember the beginning and the end but had no idea it told such a tight little story.

I followed that up with Aliens vs Pooh, courtesy of Mr Morgue.

The Complete Persepolis is a lovely story about a girl growing up in Iran, that contains an unexpected detour into another country that I found delightful, funny, boring, off-topic and ultimately moving. It's odd to read an autobiography that straddles the line between finding a deeper meaning in the author's life, and just being a series of events that happened.

Dark Days is the sequel to the graphic novel 30 Days of Night. It didn't leave much of an impression on me, except that there were some good action sequences.

On giving feedback

2010-08-20T18:52:00.000+12:00

This quote by Paul Czege, author of My Life With Master, contains a nugget of such concentrated wisdom that I wanted to share it all with you. Let's discuss feedback:

Many years ago, years before I ever found my creative medium in RPG design, I dated a quite intelligent woman. I would show her my fictions and nonfictions and tell her about my ideas. And she would provide constructive criticism, upon which I could base improvements. Because, of course, the world ignores works which aren't excellent. That, or it rides roughshod upon them with cruel hooves.

There is a great deal of generally accepted wisdom about the value of constructive criticism that I now believe is bullshit. The institution of "constructive criticism" in creative communities is born of anxious, self-serving neuroticism and white-knuckled paternalism.

Danielle taught me that I need none of it. It does nothing but keep me from wielding the full force of my creative powers. What I need is feedback that puts energy into my efforts. What I need is feedback that helps me see the full elephant, to understand the meaning of the whole beast that has yet only a crude shape under my mortal hands. I am already scrutinous and critical enough of my creative efforts. What I need is feedback that strips away the bullshit that's holding me back, empowers and armors me against the certain doubts and contrary notions of others, and gives me energy and momentum.

Look at this game you have, find the love you have for it, and instead of criticism give it the feedback it really needs.

The keys, for me, is 'feedback that puts energy into my efforts' and 'feedback that helps me understand the meaning' of the thing I've created: the implications I haven't drawn out and what it can potentially become.

There's an uneasy course to navigate here, between telling someone what you would do with their idea vs. telling them what you think their idea could be, but done well you can be a valuable member of a creator's support team.

There are a couple of other relevant posts to check out on this topic:

+ Seth Godin uses his graph-fu to explain the value of the green dot (someone who's cheering us on, showing how great it will be when we finish and share our creations with our audience)

+ Alex Epstein talks about great feedback here. He emphasises the importance of developing your own 'giving feedback' skills.

So I open the floor to you. Tips for giving good feedback? What sort of feedback do you prefer? Do these quotes and articles strike something in you like they did for me?

Workplace Bully: Public debut

2010-08-16T20:00:00.000+12:00

Just pitched Workplace Bully to Sean. This is a big improvement for me: with The Limit the gap between thinking about the story and pitching it was about two years. With this it's been ... ah, ... less. Like maybe six months since first thinking about it, and about a week since first starting to work on it.

Pitching, as ever, remains difficult for me. This was my first time describing the whole story to someone else. I prefaced it by explaining that, and asking Sean to keep a lookout (while I pitched) for the emotional flow of the story. Were there any odd or inexplicable character decisions? Any big leaps where things didn't make sense.

The pitch was a bit of a conversation, a bit of recitation (from my outline), and a bit of discovery (I figured out a few scenes while explaining the story). Sean and I also know each other pretty well - he felt comfortable asking questions about things that were unclear to him. I felt comfortable pausing to write things down. To an outside observer, it would have seemed very stop-n-start, but for us it was like hitting pause on a movie, and then getting right back into the story.

Two big discoveries from pitching it

First, this marked the beginning of the story's transition from a bunch of related scenes to something coherent, with themes and a structure. The conversation with Sean really drew out a few big points, including how epic the confrontation between the two main characters in this story really is.

Second, we examined the emotional logic behind one of the characters deciding to fight back. It felt facile to me as I pitched it, and it felt an odd transition to Sean as he listened. Together we were able to really dig in to what was going on for the character at that point. This is some of my favourite writing work - to figure out all the implications of the plot event on a character and then determine how they'd really react to it ... and what that means.

Now it's time to absorb the rest of his feedback and get to work on refining my outline so that it's readable. There's much work to be done, but I'm on the right track.

Workplace Bully: It begins

2010-08-12T06:59:00.000+12:00

Workplace Bully was the New Thing that gathered the most comments back when I was blogging about my next projects. I've spent the last couple of months researching and thinking about what could happen when you're bullied.

Rather than take extensive notes, I turned each idea or interesting-fact-from-the-research into an episode idea (describing each idea in a sentence). That gave me about 200 ideas ... and out of that research, some insights into the characters and what I want to do with the show have emerged.

I've found that I've been a little torn between my original conception of creating Workplace Bully as a webseries and discovering the story along the way vs. outlining the whole thing for an upcoming Film Commission thing. That tension has brought back some of my old fears about writing, but I seem to be dealing with it this time by breaking each stage of outlining in small, quickly-and-easily achieveable steps.

My big goal was to create an outline of the story that I could show to my first audience of readers (Sean, Andrew, Chris).

First step was to take those 200 scenes and identify the main emotional beats - the moments and decisions that make me care about the characters and the story I'm watching. With that done, I culled even further ... and identified what I called the 'keystone' beats: the absolutely essential moments in the script. There are seven of them.

The order for those 'keystone' beats was pretty clear, but on their own they don't make a story. Now I had to take the main emotional beats and use them to create a flow of events between each of those keystone beats. This took a bit of doing; after refining my first crack at it, I took a day to just reflect on the story and what I considered to be the core of it.

Finding the core of a script or a story, figuring out what it's about, is something that I constantly refine through doing a project. Here's what I think is the core for Workplace Bully, at the moment: it's the story of an ordinary woman who has to become a hero. That captures the sense of the everyday setting of the story coupled with the epic nature of the struggle that I want.

Now I've refined the story a little more based on that. With previous projects I might have kept going on this for days. Now I'm going to pitch it to Sean as soon as I can. Get his feedback, restructure it and get a very rough written outline to Andrew and Chris (if they're willing) as soon as I can.

Back once again

2010-08-08T18:59:00.000+12:00

After two months of relentless work-crazy, I'm finally getting a chance to relax, think and blog again. Oh, and write: an update of the New Thing is coming.

After that, some book reviews and my thoughts on the Peter Jackson review of the New Zealand Film Commission.

What have you been up to?

The New Thing: In Closing

2010-06-22T18:30:00.002+12:00

When I started this series of New Thing posts I simply wanted to find out whether any of my ideas had an audience, but I very quickly realised that your questions (and my focus on answering them) was helping me get a feel for each project. At the same time as we were discussing each pitch, I explored each idea, and now I've got a good sense of what needs to happen next. There are 2.5 projects I want to dig into further(*), and 1.5 projects that I realise now are more for fun (and can slip a little down my to-do list).

(*) I'll go into details about those, below.

Another thing I didn't realise when I started was how much I'd appreciate people getting involved in and commenting on each project. Your comments continuously surprised me (people wanting a female bully, the positive reaction to Artificial, Matt disliking the narrator of my excerpt from Left Coast). My conclusion is that discussing your projects is good - enthusiasm is good and criticism is also good (and not as off-putting as I feared I might find it). So, thank you very much for all your thoughts and feedback.

The big lesson for next time - because I do think I'll do this again - is to handle the online conversation more carefully. I made an effort to answer everyone's comments and questions - which forced me to pay attention to what was really being said, and to think about each project in more detail. However, I failed to be as interactive as I wanted to be - due to some privacy concerns, I stopped auto-linking each post on Facebook, and I didn't follow twitter as much as I wanted to (... and I'm not exactly sure why I didn't). I also have to be careful to not suffer from blogger's syndrome - to not to let the buzz of getting really involved in answering questions (and discussing the ideas) to substitute for working on the idea

What's next

Workplace Bully is definitely one of the projects to dig into further (and I want to thank everyone for their enthusiastic and challenging comments about it). During the last month I've been researching and outlining it, specifically trying to get an idea of how the second half of the story might work. Turns out there's a danger that I could write it so that it's too plotty rather than about the characters (Billy's 'educational video' effect). The next step is to explore its ideas and develop its plot.

Artificial wasn't as easy to write as I'd hoped. I am going to have to sit down with it for a ... fortnight? a month? and investigate it further. This is an idea I like, but I could easily see myself abandoning it if I don't think it's worth working through the Dip on it.

As for The Orphans, I love the characters, I made good progress on outlining the story and I'm desperate to know how it all turns out. I'm just not sure if it's a movie, and I'm not sure if I will want to take it any further once I've finished outlining it. For the moment, I'm gunna consign it to PLAY!

Finally, Left Coast. Judging from the number of idea-bombs that exploded in my brain while I was thinking about this, I believe can be a good game. From what I can tell, the effort I need to put in to making it something that others can playtest is reasonably small. I think if I dedicated a couple of weeks to it, I could get it into shape.

So, from here I'm going to concentrate on getting outlines together for Workplace Bully, Artificial, and one other idea (which I'll hopefully confirm with the people involved in the next three weeks). In the downtime from doing that, I'll work on a rough-n-dirty playtestable draft of Left Coast for me and others to have fun with. The outlines, though, are definitely the main priority.

Left Coast: Why I write

2010-06-20T16:31:00.000+12:00

I wanted to pull out a couple of comments from the previous post about Left Coast. A asked:

I think the question is what do you want to do? What are your priorities? Cash? The widest possible audience? Creative satisfaction? And what would be the opportunity cost of prioritizing this project?

And then Karen asked:

If you do this, do you think you'd learn enough from the process to make it worthwhile anyway? (Whether it succeeds or fails in attracting a wider audience/making money/being an awesome creative endeavour or however you are measuring it... I reckon any experience you learn from is worthwhile in some sense)

These are excellent questions. And complicated - Sean has a whole blog devoted to examining his answers to them. I had a discussion with J recently that helped me start to answer the first of A's questions, about my priorities. Two of the big reasons I write are 'to realise a project's potential' and 'for the sense of creative engagement'.

I love the satisfaction of taking a project to its conclusion and making it the best it can be. Oddly, as I've noted before, this sense of satisfaction seems to be completely independent of the size of the project. A script I've been working on for seven years gives me the same buzz as feeling like I've written a blog post that clearly articulates what I'm trying to say. The only difference is in the amount of complexity that the project has or the amount of layers it contains, which changes how satisfying it is to revisit something. So I write to finish things, but also to revisit them and see that they've lived up to their potential.

In this case, writing a game is interesting because the amount of times I can revisit it and experience it is probably higher than with a TV series or script.

I also value the sense of total mental engagement that I have when I'm creating something. A combination of puzzle-solving, intense visualisation, feeling deeply about characters who don't exist, and discovering the core of an idea (then figuring out how to express it). That sense of engagement is like crack for me ... in that I find it addictive and rewarding, rather than rendering me a non-viable member of society.

So, to flip to Karen's question: I do think I would learn enough from the process of writing Left Coast to justify doing it. I think it's an interesting game and one I want to play, and it contains a whole bunch of ideas (about who is actually telling the story) that I want to work out how to execute. It's also about characters I care about. Writing the game would be a chance to apply some experiences from writing Bad Family, as well.

... Yes. I would learn enough from writing (and especially from playtesting Left Coast) to make it worthwhile.

But it's A's question about opportunity cost that really hits home. I have something I want to work on now that has a hard deadline of October this year. That'll involve working up three projects for a Film Commission scholarship. Anything else I do will have to fit around that. For the meantime, then, Left Coast will probably fit into the category of things I play around with during the breaks between those three projects.

Hiatus

2010-06-16T11:30:00.000+12:00

Just a quick note: I'll be taking a couple of days off blogging. Got quite a few things on, and my hands are a little strained.

Still keen to do posts answering a few of the comments: A and Karen's questions about why I write, and Simon's questions about what the characters 'do' in Left Coast.

In the meantime, consider this an open thread. Talk about anything, but here's something to get you started: what's the next project *you* want to do?

Left Coast: A day in the life of a writer

2010-06-14T17:59:00.001+12:00

Here's a little something I wrote up for Left Coast, my game about drug-addled science fiction writers struggling to write their books.

A Left Coast Life

6 am. Can't sleep.

6.07 am. Baby wakes up screaming.

6.30 am. Wash baby poo off hands.

7.34 am. Score.

8.40am. Sit down to write.

8.43am. Breakfast.

9.04am. Sit down to write.

9.11am. Tidy room.

9.15 am. Blink.

Sometime. Sit down to write.

Afternoon. Blank.

2.14pm. Realise I’ve been staring at a wall for a long time.

2.15pm. Wash unidentified brown substance off own hands.

2.something. Blank.

4pm. Driving north.

4.23pm. Coffee with the gang.

5.05pm. Steal TV back from Eddie.

6.10pm. Pick up more nappies. For baby.

6.11pm. Score.

6.13pm. Phone dealer.

6.15pm. Phone dealer.

6.16pm. Phone dealer.

7.48pm. Party with dealer & the gang.

8.09pm. Replace smashed painting with vase of flowers picked from front lawn.

1am. Where am I?

1.02am. Call wife.

2am. Walk 5 miles back to home.

2.50am. Scribble short story idea on borrowed napkin from diner.

4am. Write on front porch while drinking beer and ignoring screams of baby.

New Thing: Left Coast

2010-06-11T07:49:00.000+12:00

Five years ago I wrote a role-playing game called Left Coast, in which you play science fiction authors living in a dreamy, drug-addled version of 1960s and 1970s California. The game is about trying to help these authors balance their family obligations with writing a novel, and hopefully doing that before they go insane.

Not only was Left Coast a lot of fun to work on, it also won an award and still has people who like it today. As far as I'm concerned, that's success ... but it's a form of success that brings up two questions for me:

First, is something worth writing if its audience will probably be intensely passionate but small?

Because the thing is: there's an audience for Left Coast. Like I said, there are people who still bring it up in conversation five years later. There are people who've volunteered to playtest it. Let me restate: five years after I wrote it, people are volunteering to play my game, and encouraging me to finish it. That is amazing.

And shouldn't I capitalise on that?

I feel churlish making the following calculation (like I'm scanning a free iPad for spyware), but I find myself balancing that audience enthusiasm against the numbers of people likely to like, play, and buy the finished game and against the effort involved in finishing it.

In fact, this is the first project I've mentioned here where I think Seth Godin's 'viral idea' post really applies. Let's say I execute Left Coast perfectly - I create a game that's fun to play and lives up to its potential, and I publish it in either (a) an attractive format, or (b) for free. Let's say the game reaches a bunch of people through the enthusiasm and evangelism of the people who already like it, and through whatever marketing efforts I make to reach more people who are into the sorts of things that Left Coast is about.

How many people will that second generation of people tell? Will the number of people who know about the game expand exponentially or will it flatten off? I'm fascinated by and uncertain about this. I know Malc's told Joe, who's into it. Jesse talked about it at Story Games a little bit (with no prompting from me).

My gut says that a game about sci-fi authors trying to write novels while they deal with weird shit that's either the result of them going insane or might be an alien invasion from an alternate dimension is an idea that (by its very nature) will have a small but intensely enthusiastic group of supporters: it's not people who play games, ... it's people who play role-playing games, and who are interested in the lives of drug-addled science fiction authors.

But ...

... that logic apply to every single RPG ever written on every single subject ...

... my gut instinct could be completely wrong.

So, really, let's rephrase my first question and ask: Does this game sound interesting to you?

Second question is: Am I into it?

Let's say that I shouldn't be concerned with how wide-spread the appeal of Left Coast is. As a creator, surely the only thing that matters is whether I'm excited by it?

That question, that phrasing, is the whole point of the New Thing. Am I excited by it?

Well, I like Left Coast. Even though I'm wondering if it's the best use of my time, I do want to make it better because it's a game I want to play.

So let's figure out what 'make it better' entails.

I think Left Coast's got the potential to be a pretty weird and awesome game. At the moment, it has a good process for setting up a bunch of eccentric characters who are involved in difficult relationships with the authors and for creating some conspiracies for the authors to become involved with. But while the set-up's fine, the process of playing the game, of generating conflicts and stories, is not so much sorted out.

Talking with Joe Murphy (who's keen to playtest Left Coast) about this, he gave me an insight into what needs to happen next:

I don't know if it'd help, but don't worry about producing a finished game. Literally, don't concern yourself with that. Just produce something that works enough that we can poke at it at the table and see where the system doesn't work.

This is similar to the Pixar philosophy of sharing your unfinished work as soon as possible. Rather than be terrified that something doesn't work, playtest as soon as possible. Joe continues by saying:

Try to create something that allows you to at least paper over the cracks in the system with fun roleplaying. Left Coast [has] such a strong premise that I've no doubt charitable groups would give it a shot and paper over the cracks.

So, for Left Coast to take a step forward in the next three to six months, I'd need to create a version of the rules that other people could playtest. That'd involve:

revising the game based on the notes I took and the feedback I received from the previous playtest
running a one-off playtest specifically to test and break the new scene framing mechanisms (and to brainstorm new ones)
starting a discussion about scene framing (perhaps on The Forge, or Google Wave)
running a second playtest (either a one-off or a 'fresh start' using setting and characters from playtest one
producing a draft of an unfinished game that "works enough" so that Joe, Malc, et al, can poke at it at the table and see where the system doesn't work.

Beyond that, success for Left Coast would involve publishing it in a format that evokes its subject matter, and it being a game that's not only fun but it also clearly explains how to play it. I'd also find out how to tell the audience for this game that it exists. ... And 'Wild Success' would be for Left Coast to be popular, to reach a dedicated audience, and for it to have decent word of mouth

I'm interested in your thoughts. What does this sound like to you: Interesting? Worthwhile? What's your assessment of the effort vs. the reward?

Games: March to June

2010-06-07T17:50:00.001+12:00

Here's some game-related stuff that I've been into over the last couple of months:

ImmorTall is a lovely little Flash game with an simple interface (move left or right) that forces you into some tragic choices.

Air Pressure is a gentle, ever-so-slightly depressing Flash game about a break-up.

Mike gave me a copy of Sorceror and Sword, a supplement for Sorceror which focuses on the pulp fantasy Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Elric (among others). It's an inspiring book - in the sense that it inspires me to want to run games using it, and it provides a methodology for creating stories in a fantasy setting without getting bogged down in pre-planning an epic story for a seven-year campaign.

Continuity is my favourite Flash game in a long time - a combination of platformer and sliding puzzle. Have a go. The first level should only take you a few seconds to work through.

Shade was a nice little Twilight Zone styled piece of interactive fiction. When in doubt, consult your to-do list!

I gave a little bit of feedback on Love in the Time of Seid by Jason Morningstar and Matthjis Holter and Blowback by Elizabeth Shoemaker. Providing feedback on games I'm excited about is one of my favourite things about my game design hobby.

Love in the Time of Seid is a game set in a royal court that creates a situation filled will the potential for betrayal and love (of both the doomed and true varities). It relies on a few simple rules (and no dice) to draw out the players' creativity in creating scenes, and to make them challenge each other to go deeper into the scenes (in order to create a story that matters).

Blowback is a spy game to create stories much like you'd see in Burn Notice (highly competent spies trapped in suburbia). The basic ideas of mission planning and how to handle the big conspiracy are excellent, and I'm looking forward to reading the next draft.

Rock Band and Singstar continue to be the greatest games ever created. Pure fun encoded onto a disc. Singstar, in particular, constantly surprises me with its ability to keep me playing until midnight.

I've enjoyed this Minesweeper variant, which crosses Mindsweeper with a D&D-esque reward system of 'levelling up' in order to tackle tougher squares. I also enjoyed Warp Shot - it's like golf, with gravity wells and Portal-esque wormholes.

I also attended two sessions at Day of Games, a day-long convention where people rock up, choose a game they're interested in, and play for a couple of hours. I ran Poison'd, Vincent Baker's game about pirates for Malc, Donna and Karen (with Mark, who showed up about 15 minutes after we'd created characters). This is the second time I've run it with really fun results. The game is slightly internet-notorious for encouraging the players to make nasty, pervese, and sexually reprehensible dramatic choices. What I realised during this play of it is that players engage with (or veer away from) that sexual and violent content as they're comfortable with. In particular, the game has a few questions in its character creation section that I consider to be like the safety on a handgun. If you ask questions about whether the characters have committed particular sins, then you're taking the safety off, which in terms of this game means that you can expect those sexually violent behaviours to be part of the story of the game. But you can equally leave those particular sins off your list of questions, which - I think - creates a safer environment (useful, if you're not sure about the comfort levels of the group you're playing with).

Day of Games also gave me the opportunity to playtest two fantasy games by Simon Carryer. On Mighty Thews is pulp fantasy with a (as we played it) ironic, light-hearted attitude (think Fritz Lieber's Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, ... with dashes of Elric and Conan thrown in there too). Simon's other game (which I shall not name here because I don't want the google hits) is fantastic - he describes it as D&D ... if it had been invented by David Cronenberg. Still very much in development and in need of rules that distinguish it from old-school D&D dungeon crawls, it's a great mix of a grim mood, character classes that examine gender roles in a primitive society, and biological horror (of which I want to see much much more). I expect this to be an unsettling hit once it's completed.

I've also played and finished a seven session game of Bliss Stage, which I think will have to be a separate post. Great fun, though. Creatively challenging, and also socially challenging as I got to know and respect the playstyles of some people I haven't played much with. I thoroughly recommend Bliss Stage, and I think I'll be taking some design lessons from it and applying them to my own games.

New Thing: The Orphans

2010-06-05T10:57:00.001+12:00

So, when I was a kid I loved watching scary shows on TV ... and I had a nice give-and-take relationship with Mum and Dad about it:

Doctor Who: no problems; I could watch as much as I want
Sapphire and Steel: they let me stay up late, and then were pretty kind and low-key with the 'I told you so' after it had finished and I was in bed freaking out about plagues and men hiding in photographs
The Andromeda Strain: had to sneak into the living room at my grandparents' house and hide behind the couch watching it without anybody noticing.

For the last two years, I've been working on a ghost story for kids. A horror movie for kids, really. That's my goal: to create something that just slightly too scary for my target audience to handle, and thus begin the cycle again.

The Orphans is a little bit Sapphire and Steel and a little bit Silent Hill. A bunch of pre-teenagers live in with their parents in an old building that's been renovated into a bunch of apartments. One day the kids wake up and their parents are gone. As in missing, with no trace of them.

When the children try to leave the building they find that the doors won't open, the windows won't break and the walls can't be cut through. No-one outside can hear them or seems to notice them at all. The children are trapped.

And that's when the ghosts start showing up.

The Orphans mixes in a whole bunch of different influences: Lord of the Flies, my nightmares about Victorian orphanages, bodysnatchers, and a bit of survival horror.

For me the cool thing about it is that I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I've been outlining it, for fun, for about a year - coming back to it whenever I get some free time, and discovering what happens in the next bit of the story. At the moment, I'm trying to decide exactly how unhappily it's going to end; it's definitely not a safe movie.

As a feature film, I have a feeling that it'll look slightly animated - like Waking Life, or this trailer for Mars:

MARS - The Movie [HD Trailer] from Geoff Marslett on Vimeo.

The next step (in the next three to six months) would be to finish the outline and see if this is a story I want to take any further.

A reasonable success would be to write a draft of the script.

The wild and outrageous success would be to get enough funding to make the movie (and make it live up to its potential), so that it scares one 9-12 year old child hiding behind the couch and gets them in to horror movies.

Handwriting recognition

2010-06-05T10:21:00.000+12:00

I've decided to try out some handwriting recognition software. In fact, this post has been constructed using it. I have borrowed a tablet, and downloaded a free trial of a package called 'ritepen'.

For the most part, it is good. It recognises nearly every word I enter. Correcting words is slower but not too painful. The biggest problem's adjusting toT. the interface: it is not entirely like like writing words on paper - it's, slower and ghtchiev(asthePc pauses to register what's happening. ) The fact that I'm concentrating on how to use the interface means the way I express myself i s ...stunted, and this simple post has taken 20 minutes to compose.

It's getting easier to use, but more practice is required. The verdict so far: It's cool, but not fun.

New Thing: Artificial

2010-05-30T08:47:00.000+12:00

Why hasn't anyone written a 'good' AI movie before? We've seen lots of films where creepy artificial intelligences stalk and kill people via food processors (and a few reasonably famous films about AIs using humans as batteries). But not so much with exploring the idea that humans creating another form of sentient life might be a good thing. It's all Frankenstein and dystopias and the dark future. Well, how about having a bright future?

So I want to write that story and I think I've got a way to do it.

Artificial is a low-budget science fiction film - and, in an attempt to not lose a quarter of my readers with that statement, it's got a modern-day, real-world setting and a strong focus on characters.

In fact it's a love story. I didn't realise this when I first came up with for Artificial; I thought it was going to be about the changes that happen to society once AIs are released into the wild, and about the philosophical clash between two computer programmers - one who's optimistic about the future vs. one who's pessimistic, suspicious, and vigilant about what will happen when their team creates an artificial intelligence. Both these women have strong relationships with the AI (one respectful; the other, darkly glowering and paranoid).

If I were a cleverer writer, I'd make the love story be between the AI and the paranoid pessimist. But I'm after something much simpler I'm afraid - and between the story of an optimistic programmer and her impossible yet deepening love for the million lines of code contained inside a metal box, the clash of the whole human race's hopes and fears playing out in microcosm between the optimistic and the pessimistic programmers, *and* a story (that feels mythic) about the creation of a race of artificial intelligences ... well, with all of that I'm feeling like this will be a fun script to write.

How does this sound to you? Is it something you've seen before? (I'm fairly sure there are novels about it, but not movies - as far as I'm aware). Express your thoughts!

(And if you're interested in more, I have heavily inspired by this article by David Brin.)

Workplace Bully: Wrapping Up

2010-05-29T10:44:00.000+12:00

I think it's time to wrap up this first New Thing; tomorrow I'll post the pitch for the second New Thing. It's a love story.

Thank you for all your help and insights during this. I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you, in particular, for sharing your insights about when this has actually happened to you.

I've been doing more reading on bullying recently (John Clarke's 'Working with Monsters', an excellent book with a strong focus on the psychology of the bully). It's been a good source of inspiration for things that could happen in this story of the conflict between the bully and their target. It's also helped me start to take the 'step forward' that this project needs in order to convince me that it's worth doing - there's a sub-text running through it that I've identified, a sub-text that (for me) represents the true horror in this particular story of bullying:

The Bully is destroying the Target's reputation. The Bully is manipulating the situation so that the Target looks incompentent and angry. The Bully is creating an identity for the Target with is unfair, but which unfortunately is backed up by facts that the Bully has engineered ... and by changes in the Target's personality (which are totally the result of the Bully's behaviour).

I love this idea that the Bully is warping the reality of the workplace, creating an environment in which the Target is perceived as the bad guy. That will really inform my outlining work as I keep exploring this project.

All right! Time to do a little more wrap-up research on this. I'll post the next New Thing tomorrow morning.