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Apr. 5th, 2013 02:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Greenwick's North Korea round up: greenwick.livejournal.com/197005.html?mode=reply&style=mine#
"The North Korean people are not stupid or evil. Don't judge them. Judge the people making the decisions, not the people who are trying to survive, and be glad you don't have to navigate the life they do."
* Yet more Christian domestic terrorists pile on the death threats in the hopes of denying women access to health care. Brave women continue to stand up for what's right.:
* North Carolina Republicans are trying to put in a poll tax to prevent college students from voting as part of their attempt to dismantle Democracy:
* The brave Fast food strikers and MLK at the sanitation worker strike in Memphis:
* Guantanamo Hunger Strike:
* Roger Ebert is dead of cancer at seventy. Siskel and Ebert were the Burt and Ernie of movie reviews. I watched the show nearly all my growing up (My parents started watching when the show first came to our area and I watched with them. Their debates appealed to my family as we also loved analyzing books and movies. Our discussions were friendlier than the early years of Siskel and Ebert, but the dynamic made sense to us. As a teen, I once did a Siskel and Ebert skit in French camp where we reviewed them movies we'd seen in class and ended with a choreographed fist fight. I still smile, remembering it). Mr.Ebert was ubiquitous and I loved watching him and Siskel and then Roper dissect and argue about the merits and flaws of films all the way up until he went off the air. I have huge respect for his principled call for the media to stop treating mass murderer like celebrities with theme songs and the rest. Since the cancer took his voice, I have thought often about that, what it must have felt like to be silenced completely, and to later have only the computer voice, drained of it's richness. He poured that richness onto the page, but I know something about silence and I the thought of his silence haunted me. I was aware of his failing health, and though his death wasn't exactly a surprise, it sure does feel like a loss to know his cranky ass isn't somewhere pouring out snark.
Another little piece of my childhood died with him and he will be missed.
* Some obits and commentaries for Mr. Ebert are under the cut:
* The actual statistics measuring the Republican Disconnect from objective reality:
* Colbert weighs in on some incredibly offensive things Jeremy Irons said about marriage equality:
This is incredibly disappointing to me given how I felt about Brideshead Revisited as a tween.
* Colbert on the BRAIN Initiative:
* "A one word explanation of why the slippery slope argument men marrying goats and adults marrying children is not going to be a result of marriage equality:" greenwick.livejournal.com/197159.html?style=mine
* I have begun the process of prepping to GM in Ernest. I've brainstormed a bunch of hooks, started recording details I'm likely to need, and started the massive process of composting data. What do I mean by composting? I pour in all sorts of historical detail, folklore, character studies, myth. I periodically stir the mess and keep pouring in new stuff and reminders of old stuff and through a chaotic process of connection ad intuition, all sorts of strange things pour out. I need a lot of plot hooks and compost to grow a game. This is because my GM style is extremely interactive and improvisational. For sure I have plot and often intricate politics, but these are like the bare melody in jazz, around which the players an I build wild improvisations, startling descants, and strange bridges to other tunes. I have rules like, "Give me at least a week's warning if you wan to travel to another country, so I can build some things for you to do there." I expect the players to express things their characters want to do so I can better tailor opportunities to them. I do often horrific things to the characters, and am a big fan of giving players all the rope they could ever want to hang themselves and then heaping consequences to their actions onto them. Some of the most powerful passages come from the unexpected collision of player desires with unusual results. The composting process can look bizarre. A weird variety of books accumulate all over my apartment: serious histories, children's books, game world background material. My terse notes in my idiosyncratic handwriting forming anchors to strange souring cathedrals of thought full of humor, whimsey, and startling cruelty. I am still fascinated by the alchemy of gaming group micro cultures, the way players, characters, setting, and GM style create customs and rituals and ways of interacting that shift over time with personnel changes. I love watching the accretion of habits and rituals, the way the players themselves pass on group quirks to new members, the special magic of group storytelling and in jokes. Much like my teaching style, my hands on the reins are very light. I only want the bare minimum of control I need to keep the whole mess moving and functional, the best moments in gaming like teaching are the ones not planned and one needs to leave space for pleasant surprises and be ready to run when they pop up. I've known railroaders who plan each moment and I find their process as alien as they likely find mine.
I think of my Mother's delight on discovering a "volunteer tomato" patch grown up from the garden compost one Summer. I feel that way whenever the players and I together grow something rich and strange in a completely unanticipated way.
* I have been struggling with how to explain the "Princess Academy" to y'all. Some of you have likely stopped reading already because of the title, and that's a shame. This book is clever and subversive. My best description of it likely won't make you want to read it either. It's a book about girls saving themselves. It's a book about how intelligence, education, and collective action can right injustices. See? It sounds dull, doesn't it? But it's not. The prose style is surprisingly poetic and the world is very rich and well drawn. It is more Anne of Green Gables than the fairy tale setting you are likely imagining, and the girls in the academy are tough, hard working mountain girls who've known real starvation and grief, not the pampered princesses you likely pictured from the title. My library copy had abstract forms of girls walking, some together and some separate, dwarfed by their mountain. I think this makes more sense than the covers they show in the review I'm linking you. Why? Because the Mountain is a character in the book, and the book is about learning to bridge the spaces between people made by assumptions and preconceptions. It's about the power that determined people can have when they work together. The writing is more Middle Grade than YA proper, but I think this story is compelling and important. As I struggled so hard trying to explain how I felt about the book and why, I'm linking you the Slatebreakers review which will likely be more help. http://slatebreakers.com/2012/09/10/review-princess-academy-and-palace-of-stone-by-shannon-hale/
* I wrote this in response to a lady wanting to know why people pick graveyard scents on the BPAL forum:
I experience the more complicated blends as scent poems. They evoke a series of emotional and visual images that change over time as various elements amp or effervesce. The more simple scents are more like haiku, high impact with only a few lines or scents to draw an image or prevoke an emotional response.
I now have a whole box of scent poems evoking places, each unique and powerful and fascinating. i open a bottle and it's cold stone, fresh turned earth, nitre and moss. I think of Bill and I at the graveyard where Poe is buried in Baltimore in the fall on 1988 and Fall of 1989. I think of the Halloween tours, but also going over the wall at night and talking amoung the graves about philosophy and poetry, the walls enc;losing us and hiding us from the city.
A poem in a bottle unfolding in time.
"The North Korean people are not stupid or evil. Don't judge them. Judge the people making the decisions, not the people who are trying to survive, and be glad you don't have to navigate the life they do."
* Yet more Christian domestic terrorists pile on the death threats in the hopes of denying women access to health care. Brave women continue to stand up for what's right.:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* North Carolina Republicans are trying to put in a poll tax to prevent college students from voting as part of their attempt to dismantle Democracy:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* The brave Fast food strikers and MLK at the sanitation worker strike in Memphis:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Guantanamo Hunger Strike:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Roger Ebert is dead of cancer at seventy. Siskel and Ebert were the Burt and Ernie of movie reviews. I watched the show nearly all my growing up (My parents started watching when the show first came to our area and I watched with them. Their debates appealed to my family as we also loved analyzing books and movies. Our discussions were friendlier than the early years of Siskel and Ebert, but the dynamic made sense to us. As a teen, I once did a Siskel and Ebert skit in French camp where we reviewed them movies we'd seen in class and ended with a choreographed fist fight. I still smile, remembering it). Mr.Ebert was ubiquitous and I loved watching him and Siskel and then Roper dissect and argue about the merits and flaws of films all the way up until he went off the air. I have huge respect for his principled call for the media to stop treating mass murderer like celebrities with theme songs and the rest. Since the cancer took his voice, I have thought often about that, what it must have felt like to be silenced completely, and to later have only the computer voice, drained of it's richness. He poured that richness onto the page, but I know something about silence and I the thought of his silence haunted me. I was aware of his failing health, and though his death wasn't exactly a surprise, it sure does feel like a loss to know his cranky ass isn't somewhere pouring out snark.
Another little piece of my childhood died with him and he will be missed.
* Some obits and commentaries for Mr. Ebert are under the cut:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* The actual statistics measuring the Republican Disconnect from objective reality:
Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
* Colbert weighs in on some incredibly offensive things Jeremy Irons said about marriage equality:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive
This is incredibly disappointing to me given how I felt about Brideshead Revisited as a tween.
* Colbert on the BRAIN Initiative:
The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Indecision Political Humor,Video Archive
* "A one word explanation of why the slippery slope argument men marrying goats and adults marrying children is not going to be a result of marriage equality:" greenwick.livejournal.com/197159.html?style=mine
* I have begun the process of prepping to GM in Ernest. I've brainstormed a bunch of hooks, started recording details I'm likely to need, and started the massive process of composting data. What do I mean by composting? I pour in all sorts of historical detail, folklore, character studies, myth. I periodically stir the mess and keep pouring in new stuff and reminders of old stuff and through a chaotic process of connection ad intuition, all sorts of strange things pour out. I need a lot of plot hooks and compost to grow a game. This is because my GM style is extremely interactive and improvisational. For sure I have plot and often intricate politics, but these are like the bare melody in jazz, around which the players an I build wild improvisations, startling descants, and strange bridges to other tunes. I have rules like, "Give me at least a week's warning if you wan to travel to another country, so I can build some things for you to do there." I expect the players to express things their characters want to do so I can better tailor opportunities to them. I do often horrific things to the characters, and am a big fan of giving players all the rope they could ever want to hang themselves and then heaping consequences to their actions onto them. Some of the most powerful passages come from the unexpected collision of player desires with unusual results. The composting process can look bizarre. A weird variety of books accumulate all over my apartment: serious histories, children's books, game world background material. My terse notes in my idiosyncratic handwriting forming anchors to strange souring cathedrals of thought full of humor, whimsey, and startling cruelty. I am still fascinated by the alchemy of gaming group micro cultures, the way players, characters, setting, and GM style create customs and rituals and ways of interacting that shift over time with personnel changes. I love watching the accretion of habits and rituals, the way the players themselves pass on group quirks to new members, the special magic of group storytelling and in jokes. Much like my teaching style, my hands on the reins are very light. I only want the bare minimum of control I need to keep the whole mess moving and functional, the best moments in gaming like teaching are the ones not planned and one needs to leave space for pleasant surprises and be ready to run when they pop up. I've known railroaders who plan each moment and I find their process as alien as they likely find mine.
I think of my Mother's delight on discovering a "volunteer tomato" patch grown up from the garden compost one Summer. I feel that way whenever the players and I together grow something rich and strange in a completely unanticipated way.
* I have been struggling with how to explain the "Princess Academy" to y'all. Some of you have likely stopped reading already because of the title, and that's a shame. This book is clever and subversive. My best description of it likely won't make you want to read it either. It's a book about girls saving themselves. It's a book about how intelligence, education, and collective action can right injustices. See? It sounds dull, doesn't it? But it's not. The prose style is surprisingly poetic and the world is very rich and well drawn. It is more Anne of Green Gables than the fairy tale setting you are likely imagining, and the girls in the academy are tough, hard working mountain girls who've known real starvation and grief, not the pampered princesses you likely pictured from the title. My library copy had abstract forms of girls walking, some together and some separate, dwarfed by their mountain. I think this makes more sense than the covers they show in the review I'm linking you. Why? Because the Mountain is a character in the book, and the book is about learning to bridge the spaces between people made by assumptions and preconceptions. It's about the power that determined people can have when they work together. The writing is more Middle Grade than YA proper, but I think this story is compelling and important. As I struggled so hard trying to explain how I felt about the book and why, I'm linking you the Slatebreakers review which will likely be more help. http://slatebreakers.com/2012/09/10/review-princess-academy-and-palace-of-stone-by-shannon-hale/
* I wrote this in response to a lady wanting to know why people pick graveyard scents on the BPAL forum:
I experience the more complicated blends as scent poems. They evoke a series of emotional and visual images that change over time as various elements amp or effervesce. The more simple scents are more like haiku, high impact with only a few lines or scents to draw an image or prevoke an emotional response.
I now have a whole box of scent poems evoking places, each unique and powerful and fascinating. i open a bottle and it's cold stone, fresh turned earth, nitre and moss. I think of Bill and I at the graveyard where Poe is buried in Baltimore in the fall on 1988 and Fall of 1989. I think of the Halloween tours, but also going over the wall at night and talking amoung the graves about philosophy and poetry, the walls enc;losing us and hiding us from the city.
A poem in a bottle unfolding in time.