Amber Quotes

Just doing a dump of quotes that I kept during our last Amber campaign:

"So, the plan is to sneak into the castle and find Dworkin. If he looks trapped, free him. If he's having tea and crumpets, kill him." -- Andre

"You're going to hell." -- Psalm... just about every five minutes.

"Okay, I will trust in Uncle Brand." -- Jeremy
[jumping out of chair:] "I WON! I WON!" -- GM

"You'd have to open your legs a bit wider for an old man like me." -- Dworkin, to Andre.

"I just have to say, that's the boldest thing I've ever done in a role-playing game." -- Jeremy
"What, sleeping with Fiona?" -- Sarah

"Since Brand is dead, I put him down." -- Andre.

"The Pattern is Dworkin's brain. ...Like, on fucking drugs." -- Prince Random

"Exactly how many Hellmaids have you 'parlayed' with?!?" -- Todd, to Psalm

"Here's my plan: 1) save the universe. 2) Deal with Freeman. 3) Figure out Random. 4) Go insane and plant corn." -- Andre.

Best one of the game:
"I jump off the stairs [of Tir-na-Nogth]." -- Liam/Psalm
"Wait, do you know what happens?" -- Sarah
"Sure: gravity pulls me down... but I have Dierdre's trump!" -- Liam
"You'd better hope she's out of her coma!" -- Rob
"Wait, she's in a fucking COMA?!?" -- Liam, who had missed the previous session...

"The only way Freeman will survive is through his sperm!" -- Todd

"...When we're done, we can finally put Oberon, Brand, and Freeman to rest." -- Andre (Freeman wasn't dead.)

"So, Todd's trump suddenly turns into a pressurized hose, spraying water that knocks Todd down, lands a few feet away and continues to spray like a geyser." -- GM
"I point it at the primal pattern." -- Rob, seeing the blood all over the Pattern
"Wait, NO!!!" -- Rob, realizing that's BLOOD ON THE PATTERN

"You see Lewella swimming downward, going deeper and deeper..." --GM
"Lewella, are you near a doctor?" -- Todd

"What harm could Freeman do? He was outmaneuvered by a horse!" -- Lewella

"Give me my souls!" -- Baby demon
[pointing his pistols:] "Come'n take em, ye lil twat!" -- Psalm

"Who told you that?" -- Psalm, to Florimel
"Freeman's man..." -- Flora
"The bald guy with the cats?" -- Psalm

"After all the good work we've done here with the flamethrowers, I think this is a safer place!" -- Flora

"...Like Zen, for example. Complete and utter bullshit, and yet it exists in almost every world." -- Ygg

"I'm afraid I have to disagree with you on that..." -- Andre
"What, you like your nipples?" -- Ygg
"Yes."
"But why? You're male--they are completely useless! What purpose do they serve?"
"They give pleasure."
"Please demonstrate!"

"Todd's gone mad, destroyed Ygg. Chaos winning!" -- Andre's update to Corwin

...And those were perhaps Andre's last words. ;)

Amber Campaign Idea

Wouldn't it be interesting to play in a post-apocalyptic Amber game?

Brand won. The others couldn't stop him. Reality has been re-shaped in his image. Of course, the elder Amberites are still all around: Brand would want to gloat. But here's the rub: Ygg has moved, and now its the Amberites that cannot cross the boundary between the realms.

Some of the Amberites have managed to find love--or at least momentary pleasures of flesh--in the demented reality created by Brand. Some children have come of it. ...And the children, it seems, do not have the curse of their parents: Ygg is no boundary for them.

Now, with the aid of the elders, the younger generation begins making forays into Brand's Golden Circle, to learn what they can of the fate of the multiverse and, hopefully, find a way to reverse it.

New Powers:

Shadow Pattern. Because there is no "true" pattern to walk, the grandchildren of Amber will receive their ability to move through shadow from their parents, by walking a pattern in their parent's mind, through a strong psychic link. Their ability to shape shadow using this power is greatly reduced, however. With this ability, the user still has the power to affect probability, but only one small effect at a time--all other factors change independently. Thus, if the player chooses to make a pistol appear on the tabletop, he may inadvertently also change the color of the sky. This power also acts like an involuntary Shadow Trail: if reality changes around a user of this power, they will be pulled along with the change. (This is to ensure that one player's changes never isolate them from the other players unless they have significant geographical distance.)

Trump. The players may not take Trump powers: Brand has complete control of Trump, so using it would immediately alert him, and likely result in their immediate death. The Elders have taught their children to fear Trump absolutely.

Shadow Dispersal. Brand was clever, but not quite clever enough to completely erase the Pattern's predecessor, the Unicorn. She is now working, in secret, to restore order to the universe, and to this end has developed a power that momentarily disperses shadow around the user, then "reinserts" the user in shadow in the presence of another, named possessor of Shadow Dispersal. It takes about 30 seconds of concentration to create the dispersal, during which no other actions may be taken and the user must remain stationary. (This allows players to rejoin after being separated). As a lesser effect, the user can create a miniature void in her mind, with which she may communicate to another user of Shadow Dispersal. (And, of course, this replaces Trump as a method of keeping players in touch with one another.)

Sorcery and Conjuration. These powers should be easier to use: in Brand's multiverse, magic is more uniform.

Power Words. Same.

Smoker Rant

I don't like getting into quibbles on the internet. ...Yet somehow, I found myself replying to a post by a friend of a friend: he was complaining about the strong anti-smoker's movement. I felt compelled to point out that he's whining only for the sake of whining: part of being a smoker is being shunned by others, that's part of the "appeal".

I shouldn't have said anything. He's playing his role, and anti-smokers are playing theirs. It's all integrated and expected behavior.

For the record:

1. I am a non-smoker.
2. My entire family has smoked at some point or another.
3. I do not give smokers nasty looks, with one exception (5, below).
4. I do not complain when smokers smoke around me.
5. The exception is smokers who do not dispose of their butts. The world is not your fucking ashtray. If you throw your cigarette on the ground while I'm around, I will give you shit for it. It makes me see red.
6. I do not believe smoking should be banned. People have the right, BUT...
7. I do appreciate no-smoking areas. A lot.
   

Thrown Down in the Dojo

With the release of Dojo 1.0, I thought it was time to pick up that particular torch, and add it to our project. It's quite sexy, what it can do.

So I spent the morning trying to get Rails to choke down the include tags (which, if you Google it, you'll see is non-trivial). Once that was working, I goofed around with a few forms, then abandoned the idea.

Yes, abandoned it.

According to Firebug, my load times on any particular page went from 281ms to over 2.1 seconds.

It sure does look cool, though. And if we end up creating some big Ajaxy page, where the user sits and doesn't leave, then I'll whip it out again. But in the meantime, it goes against the grain of what we're doing and is clearly too heavyweight.

Maybe someday I'll get back in the dojo.

Dammit, W

I made the mistake of getting sucked into a post about the "War" in Iraq. I only read two comments, but that was enough to get me fuming.

Perhaps I'm alone in so-thinking, but even if there WERE WMD in Iraq, I don't think that gave us the right to invade. Clear and Present Danger doesn't mean "carrying a big gun", it means pointing it at us.

It takes courage not to preemptively strike. I have that courage. Do you?

President Bush

A coworker of mine has a Republican Party calendar hanging in his room. He's quite liberal: he has it there to post silly thought-bubbles over the pictures.

Nevertheless, I found myself staring at it just moments ago and fuming.

Do I hate Bush?

Not really. It's more of a pity thing. I find his core views so fundamentally flawed that he feels more like a misguided child to me than the ill-meaning power-monger that most people take him for.

Nevertheless, the calendar was making me angry because they portray him as something super-human. People smiling and laughing and waiting to shake his hands, to touch him.

I strongly dislike this aspect of power. People are people, even the powerful ones, and I consider it a tremendous flaw that we put popular people up to another level of expectations.

I feel I may be alone in so-thinking, but I truly wish our world's leaders had a healthy level of humility, and their followers more reasonable expectations of them. It breeds dishonesty to think they are "better people".

ColdFusion: '(unknown)' is not a valid path.

This is a stupid error I got from our CF server today: it caused quite a headache.

The solution was simple (and yet inane): ODBC was trying to point to mounted drive, and the server didn't have a user logged in.

Yes, we should be pointing to a //fully/qualified/directory instead of a mapped drive. It's not my server. ;) ...It just affected my code, so I got in trouble for it.

And, yes, we still use ColdFusion around here over Ruby sometimes. I don't like it, either.

Hey, Shortstuff

Two revelations: first, reading long posts is a deterrent to keeping up with blogs. Second, as much as I have disdain for soundbytes as news, I do prefer shorter, elegant statements to rants and babble.

As a result, I will attempt to write shorter, more succinct posts on this blog.

On Sketching... and Other Passtimes

I spent about four hours today sketching.

Not drawing, mind you. Sketching. In fact, I would say that today, I learned the difference between the two, and I am here to tell you: sketching is harder than drawing.

This is, of course, counter-intuitive. One would think that the rapid nature of sketching loans itself to greater sloppiness, and therefore the results are less prone to overt error. I can't exactly say that "the opposite is true", but close enough! In drawing, you are rendering what you see. I'm reasonably capable of doing that. In sketching, you're trying to... I don't really know... capture... or interpret what you see.

Truth be told, I'm working from a book called "Life Drawing", which, in addition to being a suitable substitute for soft porn, seems to be an excellent guide to learning the art of sketching. The very first exercise (apart from making lines on the paper to "get a feel for it", uh-huh) is something they call "rhythm and curve". I spent about two hours on that one alone... and each attempt is supposed to take three minutes. (Granted, I made about 20 attempts, but I was obviously still going over.) The idea is to capture a figure in as few curves (no S-curves) as possible.

This is much (much) harder than it sounds! I finally got it "right" after much tribulation. The bad news, aside from the time it took, is that it got me... frustrated. I was literally growling and rolling my eyes and heaving big sighs and coming this --> <-- close to snapping at family members for no good reason.

I have noticed that my response to frustration is one of two things: walk away and never think about it again, or dig a trench and refuse to leave until the problem is solved. I (clearly) chose the latter... and in this case (indeed, most cases), I am glad I did. I cannot claim that anything I ended up drawing was worth keeping (thus, no link to flickr or the like)... The second exercise, which I was all to happy to switch to, was "circling"... reducing everything to the most basic shapes (usually circles), just to get the placement and proportions right. That I did much better at, and rather enjoyed... though I must admit, I'm more of a "tone" guy than a "line" guy, and often found myself circling areas of shadow rather than shapes, which the exercise called for.

After that, I took a moment to browse back through my older stuff. Instead of seeming "somehow wrong", the errors seemed much clearer: the eye in this profile was too far forward and too small; the left side of that face was drawn too wide... things like that.

All this definitely put me in a drawing mood, and I spent the remainder of the day attempting to make sketches of whatever possible, wherever possible. ...Most of them while finishing off Season 2 of Star Gate: SG1. And there I have another observation: trying to sketch from television is really hard. The whole "MTV" thing is too prevalent: it is very, very, very difficult to get enough usable information about a subject in a second or less... even if they keep cutting back to it periodically--the other shots interfere with one's memory. This didn't keep me from trying, however... and nothing good (visually) came of it. But I can say that I was enjoying myself at that point. As with going through old sketches, I could "see" what was wrong, and had at least some idea of how to correct them--often failing at that, but it still felt like I was making progress.

...And when the missus stepped out to go to the bathroom, the 'pause' allowed me to do some longer (albeit "short", in the vocabulary of sketching--3 minutes, tops) studies. And those tended to suck far less.

The most significant thing to come out of this is that I feel like I've tripped some switch in my head: it feels to me like becoming "an artist", whatever that means, is now inevitable. I'm seeing things differently, and drawing (sketching?) is no longer arduous, but intriguing. Almost addictive.

That, and I burned through probably 40 pages of sketchbooks, and dulled four pencils at least three times each. : )

Drawing is not my only obsesssion at the moment. On Thursday (I was home sick), I wrote a new Rails application for my role-playing game. That was fun. And today I watched a video on RSpec for test-driven development, which I feel like I will be adopting this month, painful as that will be. In my spare time, I'm learning "Contact Sign", which is like a watered-down version of American Sign Language, and I am really enjoying that. I've tried to learn sign at least three times before, but this time it seems to really be clicking. ...I also picked up some audio courses for Spanish (it's about time to learn the damn language, which I actually have some hope of using around here)... AND I've written two new songs. ...Well... one new song, and some scaffolding for a second, which needs major revision. Lastly, I've ripped through more than half of the "Psytrance" collection I recently acquired... several days worth of music, in all: I'm trying to whittle it down to the 1/8th that doesn't suck. : )

In short, keeping very busy. ...But really enjoying myself, on the whole.

Larger (and smaller) Than Life

A co-worker just pointed me to Ron Mueck's sculpture.

Wow.

Sucky weekend

1. My dog had a seizure on Saturday. She's okay now... we find out more on Friday, when she sees the vet.
2. My house was broken into on Sunday. I lost all of my electronics; my wife lost half of her DVDs (she had over 700) and jewlery.

I'm kind of pissed off, as a result.

For Posterity...

As I've mentioned in the past few posts (or so), I am a fan of Shpongle. Shpongle is, as a quick search would turn up, Simon Posford. It only recently occurred to me that he might have other pseudonyms, though... and indeed he does! (I count 31.)

This news is both good and bad. Good, in that I have plenty of music to explore, now. Bad, in that his music generally isn't cheap. On Amazon, some albums were for sale (used only) at $50.

It dawned on me that my wife has an iPod, and thus can buy songs at a buck a pop ($10 for an album). So tonight, I goaded her into buying two of them (this and that). I am presently listening to A Flock of Bleeps. ...and cursing myself that I didn't do this earlier.

Shit.

This may sound a bit silly, but I do think Posford is a modern-day Mozart. Unconventional, brilliant, and a visionary. If I believed in the whole reincarnation thing... : )

Well, this should keep me satisfied for a few months.

In other news, the newest programmer at work managed to convince the other two programmers that we should really be writing as much as possible in Ruby (and Rails, secondarily). So this past week, I started "training" the others, kinda. It seems to be well-received. As a result, I spent a good 20 hours this week in Aptana. I also released my port of... uhhh... well, it would take a long time to explain it, but basically, my "main application"... which was originally written in ColdFusion (and I daresay there have been only a handful of CF programs as complex as this one). I only got it running Thursday night, and Friday was fraught with "gotchas". But there's something very different about Ruby code, and I wasn't at all stressed by it, as I might be even in Perl. The code is fairly clear. Clean. Approachable. I don't worry about problems: they can all be solved quickly and with minimal pain.

I'm a fan.

M-kay. It's past midnight here (I spent the last few hours composing), and that's way too late for me. Bedtime, new Posford music or not!