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What the Gentleman Saw

Eileene borrowed a documentary video on pornography, subtitled “the Secret History of Civilization.” She’s cautioned me that the last couple episodes are pretty dull, but the first two, and especially the first, have been informative and hilarious.

It begins with a discussion of the sexually explicit art of Pompeii, and especially on its discovery by Victorians. The mental image of watching the initial excitement among these upright scholars turn to surprise, then distress, then horror, as they continued to uncover room after room of, of…smut! is hilarious.

So great was the horror of these Victorian gentlemen that they engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the truth: archaeological treasures were sealed away in back rooms at the museum, and only those with the highest and purest of credentials were allowed to examine them, or even know the rooms existed. They would deliberately give incomplete descriptions, and deliberately draw inaccurate facsimiles, of anything deemed inappropriate lest someone learn the dreadful secret. Bad scholarship.

Some of the experts interviewed for the show talked about why phallic statues, etc., were so horrifying to the Victorians as a matter of self-identity. Nineteenth-century Europe considered itself the rightful inheritor of Greco-Roman virtue; if the Greeks and Romans were so abominably sinful, what did that say about modern Europe? Best not to let anyone know Europe’s secret shame, or at least make sure that unsophisticated minds didn’t leap to the wrong conclusions. And I’m sure that attitude played a role.

But more experts talked about the sexually explicit artifacts as a perceived threat to social order, in a way that has a greater ring of truth. Upper-class and upper-middle-class adult males, who comprised the entirety of the archaeological community by virtue of having the leisure to pursue it, considered anyone outside that exalted group—base laborers, fragile women, children, savage non-Europeans as literally and irredeemably inferior. The lower classes and others simply couldn’t handle exposure to sexual images; their bestial natures, barely repressed as it is by strict social convention, would simply burst out and society would collapse. Hiding statues of Pan screwing a she-goat wasn’t about sex; it was about power. The gentry had a good thing going; best to maintain the ruling class’s image of rectitude and entitlement, and ensure that the underclasses weren’t exposed to ideas that might upset the apple cart, even at the expense of those very same intellectual pursuits that “proved” a natural superiority. A dedication to Truth, in archaeology or eslewhere, was less important than the appearance of dedication to Truth and similar virtues.

In the end, the prudes lost the battle, and pornography escaped into the hands of the common man (At least into the hand that isn’t otherwise occupied—ba-dum! Ksssh!), so it’s safe to laugh at the gentlemen turning an anxious green in Pompeii. But some of the harm they did remains with us, so we can’t laugh too hard. It reminds me a lot of the medieval church’s attitude toward vernacular translation of the bible: if you let the laity read it, they might get ideas of their own. Best to keep them ignorant and obedient, even at the expense of actually spreading God’s word.

2011 06 28 mdlake Atheism & Religion
Politics
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Hooky

First day of actual vacation. Yes, school ended Friday, but I’d have Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. This is real vacation, and I’m going to take the day for myself. I’m not gonna write, and you can’t make me.

2011 06 27 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Lessons High and Low

School is out at long last. Gargantuan confetti in the form of notebook paper litters the halls, grades are being withheld from students who haven’t returned their textbooks, and nobody’s bothering to take attendance. I’d say it’s time to take stock of my kids’ grades, and what that says about my performance, but honestly I’ve been doing that all semester.

First observation: too many failures. Martin tells me not to take it personally: half of those are chronic truants, not students to whom I couldn’t make myself understandable, and I didn’t underperform the school generally, and he correctly insists that I’d consider one failure too many. So what? “As good as the rest of the teachers in the school” isn’t much of an achievement; Barringer is widely recognized as a bad school, a failing school, a target for reform, effective or merely draconian. And one failure is one failure too many. Intellectually, I can accept the wisdom of recognizing that a lot of students’ performance is beyond our control; emotionally, I’m a first year teacher—I still feel on some level that a room full of beaming A students is possible, and that failing to meet that fantasy is somehow my fault.

Second observation: grades began rather low in the semester, then rose sharply. I cite two causes, neither of which Martin doubts. Most of these students weren’t prepared for the current material, so dragging them up to speed was tough. I don’t have much control over that. I also suspect it took a while—too long—for students to get used to my eccentricities. Gotta work on my presentation, learn to couch lessons in more accessible terms without abandoning the technical terms they need to know. Gotta learn to speak more simply, less precisely.

(Technically, there are three causes to the rising curve in grades: I also refuse to compromise on grading standards. It’s a lot easier to match or exceed the school average, or the NCLB requirements, if you fudge the borderline cases. And I’m not. Never mind the ETSB; if kids can’t pass my test, their education needs reform. But since I refuse to budge on that point, I’m not citing it as a lesson to be learned.)

So the certificate will come, and it’s down to grubbing for a job in a very bad market. But today, I will celebrate: I will get home and crack open a cold beer.

2011 06 24 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Health Hazard

We got joggers in this neck of the woods, and now that summer’s here, we’ve got ’em in large numbers. And those fuckers insist on jogging in the street. This morning, I passed three jogging abreast on a major residential artery. Last week I nearly saw one hit by a car bouncing off a particularly deep pothole.

Perhaps you’ve heard of New Jersey traffic. Last I heard—a study about ten years old—Jersey topped the list of the most aggressive drivers. Number one. It’s a lousy environment for joggers who like to play chicken with traffic. It’s also a lousy environment for drivers trying not to kill the bastards, especially if we want to avoid the potholes, too, which sprout like mushrooms after a rain and doubly so under current budget pressures.

Jogging in the street is dangerous. Joggers are pedestrians. They belong on the sidewalk. Cars on street, joggers on sidewalk. Simple.

Wassamatter? Sidewalks are uneven? Bad for jogging? Go to one of our many parks. We’ve got two suitable parks within an easy walk of my house, and a suitable park within ten minutes’ drive of any residential area I know. Going to the park is inconvenient? So is swerving around you twerps. So is hip replacement surgery. So is the insurance risk both jogger and driver take—the jogger willingly, the driver unwillingly. Now get your Nikes the fuck. Off. The road.

2011 06 23 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Good Bad Weird

Got a chance to see The Good, the Bad, the Weird, which I shall henceforth call GBW, tonight. Somehow I’d stumbled across a trailer a year or two ago, and we decided to see it, but never got around to it, and then it was gone. I consoled myself with Joe’s observation that the movie was not as silly as the trailer would have you believe..and had little else to say about it. But a DVD copy turned up at the library, so we got a second chance.

GBW is a madcap treasure hunt set in a nebulously anachronistic Manchuria sometime more-or-less around 1940. The three principle figures are a lone bounty hunter (the good), a treacherous gang leader (the bad), and a hapless petty thief (the weird). A rival gang, the Japanese occupational army, a Manchurian resistance, and a few other characters are all scheming and killing for the treasure map, but they’re just complications; all must inevitably come down to a three-cornered showdown over the treasure somewhere in the Inner Mongolian desert.

GBW is obviously indebted to the spaghetti western The Good, the Bad, the Ugly specifically, and to the Sergio Leone “man with no name” trilogy generally. Many scenes are taken straight out of the spaghetti westerns, but only slightly less obviously from a lot of other movies, too: Raiders of the Lost Ark, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, and The Road Warrior come to mind; there are more, undoubtedly including some kung fu classics and Hong Kong shoot-’em-ups that I wouldn’t recognize.

Indeed, for all it owes to spaghetti westerns, I see a stronger resemblance between GBW and Kill Bill: it’s less a movie in its own right than an excuse to string together a series of tribute scenes. At one point, GBW even borrows Kill Bill‘s version of “Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” making it a tribute film to a tribute film. This goal of slapping together a lot of popular shots from elsewhere might explain why Winchesters and cowboy hats feature alongside Benny Goodman, sidecar motorcycles, 1980’s moussed-up hairdoes, and sideways gangsta-style pistol grips. It definitely explains why my attention drifted farther and farther from the film as it progressed. I found the original mashup entertaining, and the unfamiliar eastern sense of film pacing put a fresh spin on the genre. But after a while, I began to suspect, and then to realize we would never get past the tribute pastiche. The story elements that made no sense—or rather, only made sense in light of the knowledge that the big showdown had to occur at the end—began to grate.

This is still a fun film, a good popcorn-crunching tale. Movie buffs can entertain themselves by playing “spot-the-reference,” scoring extra points for putting down opponents’ references as too obvious to be worth mentioning. But like most popcorn-crunchers, it’s immediately forgettable, in the same way the Scary Movie series, satirizing the already satirical Scream franchise, is eminently forgettable.

2011 06 22 mdlake Review Comments (0) Permalink

Sampling Fiasco

The other system I got to try last weekend was more rewarding. Fiasco is GM-less, rules-lite, and just generally the greatest departure from the traditional RPG I’ve tried. (Although it shares much with Executive Decision, I don’t consider the latter an RPG, strictly speaking, despite encouraging roleplaying while seeking to win by scoring victory points.)

Characters are not defined by their abilities; indeed, skills and talents aren’t addressed in the game at all. Instead, characters are defined by their relationships with one another. You will share with each player sitting next to you around the table a relationship and some other feature of interest—a motive, a place, an object, or something similar. These shared elements are selected semi-randomly, first by rolling a stack of dice, then by taking turns choosing elements from a list designed for the scenario. So if, for example, you’re playing a mafia scenario, you might share a relationship of “rivalrous siblings” and a dark secret of “killed the don’s wife;” if you’re playing a game of betrayal in academia, you might share a relationship of “former student/mentor” and the object “incriminating photos of the dean.”

Choosing these elements is a two-step process. One player chooses the type of element, another the specific element in that type, taking a matching die from the central pool as they do so, until the dice, options, and necessary elements are exhausted. (The numbers rolled in the initial pool limit your choices: once you’re out of 3’s, nobody can choose the third list in any category, nor the third element in any list.) You can select elements for anyone at the table, so no one has sovereign control over who they are. Perhaps you have your heart set on the motive “finding out what’s hidden under the old mill’s floorboards,” but chances are good someone else will saddle you instead with “getting enough money to pay off my gambling debts,” especially if the 3’s run out early. That’s okay. Go with the flow.

You may as well, because things aren’t going to end well for you, anyway. You may have noticed the elements above have a dark tone. Fiasco is a dark game, seeking to simulate movies of simple plans gone horribly wrong, people whose ambition exceeds their reach, grand schemes and poor impulse control. Think Fargo, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or Reservoir Dogs. Knowing what the game is about gives perfectly innocuous elements, like “a baseball bat autographed by Mickey Mantle,” a deliciously sinister tone even before the game begins. Focus of a jealous feud? Collateral for a foolish loan? Murder weapon?

When play begins, the dice—half white, half black—are dumped back into the middle of the table. Players now take turns narrating the action in brief scenes, no more than four or five minutes long. A player may choose either to “set the scene,” describing where the action takes place, who’s there, what’s going on in the background, or to determine whether its outcome is generally good or bad for those involved. The other half of that choice is surrendered to the table at large. Somebody, either the active player or someone else at the table, sets the scene, and the players involved start acting; anyone else is welcome to supply necessary minor roles, troupe-style. Within a couple minutes, somebody, again either someone else at the table or the active player, dramatically picks up a die from the middle of the table: black for good result, white for bad result, and it’s up to the players involved to make things turn out that way. Finally, once the scene is resolved, the active player (not necessarily the one who selected it) hands that die to any player at the table he likes, and a new turn begins.

When half the dice at the table are gone, the story gets “the flip,” a major new element that’s likely to upset the course of the action. When all the dice are gone, the story’s over, and it’s time for the denoument. Players roll the dice they’ve been handed over the course of the game and subtract the total of the white dice from the total of the black dice. A large positive or negative result means a relatively happy ending for that PC; a result near zero means a disastrous ending. Players describe their just desserts in a quick montage; if they’re very lucky, they come out no worse than they went in.

Fiasco is an excellent game, with rules that brilliantly reinforce the intended purpose. It is definitely not for everybody. Part of the price of a GM-less game is that everyone gets to be a GM at times, and players have to be willing to surrender a lot of control to one another—control over their own characters, the direction of the plot, and the final outcome. Another price to pay is the likelihood of a sort of formless, it-is-what-it-is story line; no established mysteries or carefully paced rise to a climax here. And, of course, the tone of a Coen brothers movie is a fairly specific taste. I struggled the whole game to match that tone, to anticipate where other players wanted to go, and to fit my patches of narrative with an idealized rise to a climax, with limited success. Without skills and hit points, Fiasco offers no tools for space battles and dragon slaying, so you can’t fall back on letting the unfolding action dictate the story; everything you do is naked narrative. It’s hard work, and not everybody has the talent to pull it off. But when you do pull it off, it can be beautiful.

To date, supplements have come out at a good clip. This is good, because the lists of elements are foundation and framework for the game. The rules are literally all described above, and can’t support a game alone. You’ll need the inspiration of those elements, and their setting-specific nature means you’ll need lists appropriate to the story you want to tell. Some of the supplements are obvious: bank robbery, treasure hunters, Elizabethan tragedy. Others are inspired. Having lost my legs in a tornado while trying to tie down my uninsured farm equipment, only to watch my spinster sister take grandma’s wedding ring to marry good-for-nothing Sam Morgan and leave me with a failed mortgage, I’m eager to see what trouble awaits me outside the rural midwest—maybe in the frozen isolation of McMurdo, or 1963 Dallas.

2011 06 21 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Sampling Mouse Guard

NerdNYC held one of its Recess game conventions this weekend. (“Convention” is an overstatement for a one-day, two-slot event with maybe eighty to a hundred participants, but it’ll have to do.) I value Recess for its high incidence of new, experimental, and/or indie RPGs. D&D is still the biggest boy on the block, but even the D&D games only use D&D rules, while portraying an entirely different sort of narrative than killing monsters and taking their stuff—gothic horror, wild west, Pokemon… it’s a crowd very open to ideas.

I used the opportunity to sample two games I’ve been curious about: Mouse Guard and Fiasco, with mixed results. Or perhaps I should say “to sample two rule sets,” because the Mouse Guard game was a mash-up of Fallout, Lost, and Deadwood, with nary a mouse in sight.

Can’t say I cared for Mouse Guard, though I can appreciate where the designer was trying to go. Characters are defined in part by their abilities, drawn from a short, broad list, but perhaps even more by three or four powerful motivators: their goals, their beliefs, their instinctive reactions to certain stimuli. Characters advance and improve through failure and denying their motives as much as through success and displaying motives in what is traditionally called “good roleplaying.” I get a strong impression that the mechanic is not meant to reward inconsistent play; rather, the GM is expected to set up situations that force players to decide between motives, and the character is rewarded for advancing the plot by resolving these dilemmas, one way or another. A promising idea that would get far better mileage in a campaign than in it could in our convention one-shot.

Less promising is the conflict system, which seeks to resolve gunfights, debates, and job interviews by the same head-to-head mechanic. Both sides, usually but not necessarily players vs. GM, define what they want to gain from the conflict. They then establish “disposition,” a sort of generic measure of their physical, mental, and spiritual capacity to continue the conflict before breaking in some fashion—when one side runs out of disposition, the other wins. Each side secretly commits to three sequential tactical actions at a time, rather than acting turn by turn, for reasons that escape me. Their choices are attack (attempt to reduce the opponents’ disposition), defend (attempt to restore lost disposition), feint (um, I’m not entirely sure what this is supposed to achieve), or maneuver (attempt to gain a bonus to their next action). So the GM may secretly decide the goons will attack-attack-defend, and the players may collectively decide to feint-maneuver-attack, and the gunfight, argument, or what-have-you will be resolved over the next three rounds as an attack/feint conflict, an attack/maneuver conflict, and a defend/attack conflict, in turn. Confused? You aren’t alone. Adding to the confusion for our inexperienced pick-up group was a need to disengage what we were actually doing from the game-mechanical label for that round. A flurry of insults might be an attack, or a maneuver, or even a feint, depending.

In combat, this system produced a highly abstracted synopsis of a fight rather than a thrilling blow-by-blow account. In social conflict, it was even worse, again producing an abstract synopsis of an argument in place of actually hearing the argument and reaching a conclusion organically. I generally felt more like we were talking about roleplaying than actually roleplaying. With a little practice, players could easily become familiar enough with the tactics to use them meaningfully; the system may be difficult for old-school gamers to grasp, but the elements are simple enough to use. With a lot of practice, they could begin using the system more as intended, communicating their tactics naturally, and knowing how to frame their behavior as attack, feint, etc. as appropriate. But I doubt even devoted, veteran players would ever really get past that high-level abstraction of the story and consequent loss of immersion, which I very much disliked, even as a gamer who is generally comfortable with elegant, generic rules.

I’m told that Mouse Guard is closely related to the more ambitious Burning Wheel. Though fans are quick to insist that it is definitely NOT Burning Wheel lite, or the kids’ version of Burning Wheel, or any other diminutive, it is nevertheless a simpler and more concrete application of similar mechanics from the same author. The latter game is said to be even more high-level, even more abstract, and even more a product of negotiating a story’s outcome ahead of time instead of simply seeing where it goes. If that’s so…whoof!

2011 06 20 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

Moldy Charcoal

I’ve loved playing with fire since I was a kid. Lots of pyros are drawn to its beauty, its destructive power, its mathematically chaotic nature. I’m drawn to its self-sustaining behavior, its propagation and eventual exhaustion. A systems analyst to the end. And experts will assure you there’s always something to learn. They say the same about concrete. Experts are funny that way.

Anyway, I learned something new about fire lately. Our charcoal somehow got damp over the winter, despite being set on a raised platform in a dry shed. I suspect a leak in the roof, especially since some of the briquettes got moldy, an inverted cone of moldy bricks in the bag suggests moisture from above. Regardless, the charcoal got damp, and I didn’t want to spend the time or money getting a fresh bag, so I decided to make due with what I had for the year’s first grilling, resigning myself to sizzling the steaks in a cast-iron skillet if necessary.

Knowing the charcoal would be difficult to light, I supplemented the newspaper kindling with actual kindling: a few twigs scavenged from the back yard. Even this wasn’t enough, and I had to start over, this time with a veritable bird’s nest of pine twigs. This second attempt succeeded. Expecting the charcoal to burn slowly and none too hot, I overloaded the grill, seeking to make the most of the possibility that the first few briquettes to light would help dry the rest of the batch and aiming to keep the grill warm despite inferior fuel. It worked. Too well.

To my surprise, dampness didn’t slow the fire at all, once it got going in the first place. Either the drying process worked way, way better than I anticipated, or there was less moisture trapped in the charcoal than texture suggested, because the energy required to boil that moisture away was insignificant—and I do have experience with the difference between damp wood, green wood, and dry wood. Quite rapidly, I had a bed of glowing coals too hot to approach even with grilling tongs, and I had to adapt to cooking at a much higher temperature than usual. (Grilling cookbooks suggest a spray bottle of water to cool overactive coals, but a little extra moisture had already failed me!)

There’s no scientific mystery here: more fuel means more heat, sooner or later, as long as the fire can sustain itself. Still, the results were surprising, even paradoxical in the word’s informal sense. Pound for pound, dry charcoal burn hotter than wet charcoal does, no question. But to casual observation, a wet charcoal fire burns hotter than a dry one, because the threshold of sustainability is higher. Dry charcoal can burn steadily in a manageable little pile; wet charcoal is either inert or an inferno.

2011 06 17 mdlake Cooking Comments (0) Permalink

All They Need is a Miracle

I was warned that some people have unrealistic expectations of teachers, but I wasn’t given all the specifics.

Parents’ unrealistic expectations usually involve better grades. Some of them take the genius of their children on faith and can’t understand why little Billy doesn’t get straight A’s. Some of them have been ruined by a generation or more of educational theory that suggests “getting the idea” is more important than getting the right answer—true in a way, but easily misunderstood—or that we should award A’s for effort alone. Even if the homework is regularly only half done. (“But little Billy really tried!”) Some think that learning happens only in class, and either can’t or won’t provide a safe, quiet study environment. (The cases of can’t can be heartbreaking.) Some think that teaching is easy, and if little Billy refuses to do his homework and refuses to study for tests and refuses to come in for tutoring that we can simply beam understanding into Billy’s head with good intentions. All this I was warned of.

Students’ unrealistic expectations, by contrast, usually involve less work or, ideally, no work at all. I was warned of this as well, and cautioned to consider complaints of excessive work load fairly, but not to take them at face value.

I didn’t get warned of the end-of-term crunch in which kids who have blown off their lessons all semester suddenly realize they’re not going to get the grade they want, or expect, or in some cases need—for a scholarship, to avoid parental wrath, or simply to graduate. And suddenly, they begin showing up at the teacher’s lounge door hoping that one hour of individual attention is miraculously going to sweep aside four months’ willful ignorance.

It won’t. Especially not when that “individual attention” is being spread among six different kids, from three different classes, with the same expectations of a miracle.

2011 06 16 mdlake Teaching Comments (0) Permalink

Common Enemy

I’ve written before that the more I learn of upcoming MMO Star Wars: the Old Republic, the further my initial enthusiasm withers. No news since then has reversed that trend, but a recent video reporting on Operation: Eternity Vault has accelerated it. Amid wailing, demonic crescendos and booming timpani, we are informed that an even greater evil is about to erupt on the galaxy, an evil so absolutely huge as to dwarf even the war between Empire and Republic.

You know what that means, don’t you? It doesn’t mean turning the action up to eleven; it means setting aside the whole war thing and working together to defeat it, undoubtedly amid token snarling about how much everyone involved hates doing so. Just like the war-less World of Warcraft. Again. Also a sure sign that all that unique content isn’t going to be nearly so unique, nor so thorough, as promised.

I’m getting pretty tired, by the way, of all the Carmina Burana wailing and booming shit. Recent features designed to get the fanboys all riled up over glimpses of gameplay are positively loaded with it, and the choice seems to be intended to conceal what look to be very ordinary fights with very ordinary creatures, bots, and bosses. Careful editing of the tiny clips weren’t careful enough: you can spot light sabers chopping through foes without doing any apparent harm and head shots that mean no more than fewer hit points on the meter. Since the unofficial theme song of Dante’s Inferno won’t be gushing out the speakers while you play, it’s common sense to watch the video clips with the sound off. Supply a few whooshes and pew-pews of your own if you like. Without the soundtrack, gameplay looks depressingly shopworn.

Creating a huge, consistent, self-contained universe is lots and lots and lots of hard work, I know. And it takes lots and lots of bucks to make it happen on the scale of an A-list MMO. It’s only natural that developers will want to reuse content whenever possible. That’s fine.

As long as they’re honest about it. Treating polished but familiar mechanics as the second coming just makes me feel cheated.

2011 06 15 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink