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Dominic, Dominic…

On hearing that IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Khan had been nabbed and denied bail pending a sexual abuse trial, I was quietly pleased. Presuming his alleged victim isn’t simply hoping to hit the wrongful lawsuit jackpot—which doesn’t seem likely, but can never be entirely dismissed—we’ve got a rare case of a man of power and privilege being held accountable. By the time I learned he is (or rather, was) a major contender for the French presidency, the news should have been even better.

By the time I learned this, however, my reaction was more muted. Would I be so cheery if, say, France had snagged John Kerry on one of his many francophilic trips, charged him with sexual assault, and ruined his 2004 bid for the presidency? Probably not, but my objections would lie with Kerry rather than France. I can’t consider myself a hypocrite when it comes to arresting some other country’s leading politicians because I would also cheer the arrest of America’s leading politicians for the same crimes—presuming, again, the charges are genuine.

My country, however, again fails the hypocrisy test. Remember how it backed Blackwater employees who perpetrated massacres on unarmed civilians, giving credence to Blackwater’s claims that they were not subject to American military law because they weren’t regular forces, nor American civil law because they weren’t in the US, nor Iraqi law because they were operating under the American flag? They were mere sociopathic thugs. Imagine the uproar were presidential hopeful Tim Pawlenty to take a “fact-finding” trip to Iceland, observing how the economic policies he embraces destroyed that country’s economy and blaming it all somehow on Democrats, get arrested for rape, and be denied bail. Conservative politicians would go berserk and immediately manufacture a narrative of false arrest and probably terrorist conspiracy with Obama as cryptoislamic ringleader. Moderate politicians would agree that Iceland has no place “interfering with American politics” in this way, whether or not the charges were true. Liberal politicians would mumble something about international cooperation but wouldn’t actually stand up to defend it for fear of being painted as “soft on foreign policy.” Obama would find the middle ground between these, and the US would cut whatever portion of its throat faces Iceland simply to punish them uppity furr’ners.

But of course, like all other crimes, IARIYAR

2011 05 15 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

One of the Guys

I’m reading my second Lois Mcmaster Bujold book, both late entries in the “Vorkosigan saga,” which I take to be a series of stories about the rise and rise of Miles Vorkosigan, born to the ruling family of an interstellar empire but tainted by physical defects in a culture that places a heavy stigma on genetic flaws. (Vorkosigan isn’t genetically flawed; he was poisoned in his mother’s womb. But the Vor citizenry don’t always make the distinction.) It’s not bad. Not rush-out-and-buy-the-series great, but perfectly decent space opera. Space opera mixed with police procedural, in the books I happened to pick up.

While I rarely pay much attention to such things, the thought popped unbidden into my head: “Hey, I’m enjoying a female sci fi author.” Doesn’t that sound horribly sexist? It does to me, because my natural state of mind is to presume everyone is not only equal but identical until proven otherwise. I would expect to enjoy male and female authors equally well. But I don’t—not in the realm of science fiction, anyway. History, puzzles, and humor, among other subjects, are a different matter.

The field isn’t exactly devoid of worthies; I admire LeGuin and Butler and a few other female scifi writers a great deal. But respecting their technique isn’t the same as enjoying their stories, which—again sounding sexist—gravitate toward inner, social and emotional conflicts like coming to terms with a child lost to eugenic regulation, rather than external, active conflicts like preventing a war between rival planets by smuggling an incriminating datacube to their governments. Nothing inherently wrong with either type of story, just a preference for the latter.

In addition to excellent female scifi writers who aren’t to my taste, there’s the bad writers. Anne McCaffrey comes to mind as one of the most famous, whose novels read like someone trying too hard to imitate the boys in the boys-club atmosphere of sci fi, mixed with some unsubtle Mary-Sue scenarios. And there’s plenty of lesser known female hacks. There’s plenty of lesser known bad male sci fi writers, too. Lots and lots and lots. Lesser known, perhaps, because there’s too many for any one to stand out.

So maybe the gender divide I experience has nothing to do with gender itself, nor with some dubious equation of talent and gender, or of interests and gender, but simply demographics. Because men dominate the sci fi genre so heavily, female writers, good and bad, stand out more. And because there’s so few, very few indeed rise to the tiny fraction of a percent of either gender that I consider worth reading.

I hope that’s the explanation. Because the other two explanations aren’t very palatable. I don’t think I’m prejudiced, because, as I say, the surprising thing is that I don’t like more female scifi writers—but it’s so hard to feel any certainty about one’s own prejudices. And I don’t want to think that men and women are so different when it comes to writing ripping good tales, or that men and women are so different when it comes to reading them. Otherwise, pointing to the singular example of Bujold sounds a little too much like the bigot’s rationalization “Some of my best friends are…”

2011 05 13 mdlake Review
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Ghost Hunter

Reluctantly, Eileene told me about the new SpecTrek app she bought for her android phone-plus—reluctantly because it’s pretty dorky. The idea is your phone reports an outbreak of ghosts in your neighborhood and, using some map utility, selects a nearby spot where you can chase one down. When you arrive at the destination, you get a congratulatory picture of a ghost and a new location to run, jog, or walk to; keep it up long enough, and you’ve exercised.

Okay, so it’s really dorky. If it works, though, it’ll be well worth the negligible price and embarrassment. Admittedly, that’s a big “if;” Eileene has left a long line of failed exercise incentives in her wake.

But however dorky the idea, somebody’s gonna use it. Maybe a lot of somebodies. You never know what will become a fad. Which makes it an excellent RPG adventure seed. You could do it from inside or from without: either the PCs learn that people are disappearing/dying/going catatonic with fear and it’s up to the PCs to figure out what’s going on, or the PCs themselves are android enthusiasts who discover their new exercise app is actually tapping into the supernatural. Either way, it’s a natural mesh of traditional horror and modern technology, a natural fit for any paranormal investigation game like Chill or Bureau 13.

Probably best as a one-shot, but you could stretch it a bit with the dilemma of how to stop people from using it without letting them know why. If word gets out, after all, lots of people are going to rush right out and by the ghosthunting app. Gullible, superstitious people at first, then skeptics and the kind of people who read the Weekly Sun to goggle at what people will believe, and finally everyone when the evidence begins to mount. Presuming that a whole lot of gates to the ghostly realm are much worse than a few, and a few much worse than none, stamping the number down to zero would require some creative thought, and an elaborate, multi-session plan.

2011 05 11 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

7 Wonders

I got an exposure to the board game 7 Wonders last night. Players represent the home cities of the seven ancient wonders of the world and try to rack up the most victory points by the end of the game. Building your wonder can play a big role in this, but doesn’t strictly have to; you can earn plenty of VPs with smaller civic projects, accumulating “technology,” and collecting larger armies than your neighbors for bloodless battles. It’s a pretty standard “German”-style game, with high quality components, a theme of victory by construction, a system by which almost anything you do is at least potentially worth victory points, a tension between cards that score points and cards required to build them…all familiar elements. At the heart of the turn structure lies one unusual mechanic: players’ actions consist of playing one card every turn from their diminishing hands, and all unused cards are passed to the left for the next turn, so you rarely know what you’ll get next and will often want to play a card simply to keep it out of the next player’s hands.

Though interesting, that hand-passing mechanic is not enough to make 7 Wonders stand out from the crowd. What really deserves comment is the scale of the game as an activity (as opposed to the scale of the game’s theme).

It’s fast. With players familiar with the rules, I expect you could whip through a game in about half an hour.

It can handle 2 to 7 players. Effectively. The number of players affects the feel of the game: with few players, you can hope to see a card you pass come back around, and because many functions depend on what your immediate neighbors to the left and right have done, many players means you’ll be largely ignoring half the table. The number of players does not, however, affect the play time much, because you take about the same number of turns and everyone plays simultaneously. Also, because everyone plays simultaneously, you don’t suffer a lot of down time between turns, even with many players. The game remains entirely workable with wildly different numbers of players, which is fairly rare among board games.

It strikes a good, though not remarkable, balance between accessibility and depth. Rather on the light side, I’m afraid, but not entirely vacuous. The strategic challenge is much like Race for the Galaxy, in which you must decide early on which path to pursue and hope the cards you get support that decision, with limited ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The speed and flexibility in number of players and depth-to-simplicity balance make 7 Wonders admirably suited to fill in the odd gaps at our monthly game days. Suppose three players arrive and we expect another two in half an hour. Rather than sitting around doing nothing, or getting hip deep in a more involved game and leave the later arrivals sitting out, we can break out 7 Wonders. Suppose we’ve got six players hankering for a round of San Juan, which can accommodate no more than 5 players, or four players who hanker for it and two who hate it. We can break out 7 Wonders to keep that extra pair busy. Or suppose we’re winding down after four hours’ heavy strategizing but aren’t ready to throw in the towel, so we need something fairly light that seven people can play in the space of an hour.

We own other candidates that could fill such gaps, but not many, and not as well. Settlers of Catan and San Juan are light and quick, but inflexible in the number of players—SJ wants three or four, and Catan’s exquisite balance breaks down unless you have precisely four. Kem>Medici is more flexible, but too cutthroat for many at our table. Fluxx is more flexible yet, but far too shallow, and the play time is too unpredictable.

7 Wonders works so well at filling these gaps that it feels like the designer sat down and thought about how to make a game that would fill them, rather than taking the more typical routes where a designer starts by thinking either “I want to make a game using this clever mechanic; what other rules will make it a good game?” or “I want to make a game about this competitive environment; what rules will simulate it accurately?” People who engage in something like our monthly game day, with fluid start and stop times and an indeterminate number of players, can definitely use this. Whether 7 Wonders has the depth to maintain interest over the long term remains to be seen.

2011 05 09 mdlake Games Comments (0) Permalink

7 Wonders

I got an exposure to the board game 7 Wonders last night. Players represent the home cities of the seven ancient wonders of the world and try to rack up the most victory points by the end of the game. Building your wonder can play a big role in this, but doesn’t strictly have to; you can earn plenty of VPs with smaller civic projects, accumulating “technology,” and collecting larger armies than your neighbors for bloodless battles. It’s a pretty standard “German”-style game, with high quality components, a theme of victory by construction, a system by which almost anything you do is at least potentially worth victory points, a tension between cards that score points and cards required to build them…all familiar elements. At the heart of the turn structure lies one unusual mechanic: players’ actions consist of playing one card every turn from their diminishing hands, and all unused cards are passed to the left for the next turn, so you rarely know what you’ll get next and will often want to play a card simply to keep it out of the next player’s hands.

Though interesting, that hand-passing mechanic is not enough to make 7 Wonders stand out from the crowd. What really deserves comment is the scale of the game as an activity (as opposed to the scale of the game’s theme).

It’s fast. With players familiar with the rules, I expect you could whip through a game in about half an hour.

It can handle 2 to 7 players. Effectively. The number of players affects the feel of the game: with few players, you can hope to see a card you pass come back around, and because many functions depend on what your immediate neighbors to the left and right have done, many players means you’ll be largely ignoring half the table. The number of players does not, however, affect the play time much, because you take about the same number of turns and everyone plays simultaneously. Also, because everyone plays simultaneously, you don’t suffer a lot of down time between turns, even with many players. The game remains entirely workable with wildly different numbers of players, which is fairly rare among board games.

It strikes a good, though not remarkable, balance between accessibility and depth. Rather on the light side, I’m afraid, but not entirely vacuous. The strategic challenge is much like Race for the Galaxy, in which you must decide early on which path to pursue and hope the cards you get support that decision, with limited ability to adapt to changing conditions.

The speed and flexibility in number of players and depth-to-simplicity balance make 7 Wonders admirably suited to fill in the odd gaps at our monthly game days. Suppose three players arrive and we expect another two in half an hour. Rather than sitting around doing nothing, or getting hip deep in a more involved game and leave the later arrivals sitting out, we can break out 7 Wonders. Suppose we’ve got six players hankering for a round of San Juan, which can accommodate no more than 5 players, or four players who hanker for it and two who hate it. We can break out 7 Wonders to keep that extra pair busy. Or suppose we’re winding down after four hours’ heavy strategizing but aren’t ready to throw in the towel, so we need something fairly light that seven people can play in the space of an hour.

We own other candidates that could fill such gaps, but not many, and not as well. Settlers of Catan and San Juan are light and quick, but inflexible in the number of players—SJ wants three or four, and Catan’s exquisite balance breaks down unless you have precisely four. Kem>Medici is more flexible, but too cutthroat for many at our table. Fluxx is more flexible yet, but far too shallow, and the play time is too unpredictable.

7 Wonders works so well at filling these gaps that it feels like the designer sat down and thought about how to make a game that would fill them, rather than taking the more typical routes where a designer starts by thinking either “I want to make a game using this clever mechanic; what other rules will make it a good game?” or “I want to make a game about this competitive environment; what rules will simulate it accurately?” People who engage in something like our monthly game day, with fluid start and stop times and an indeterminate number of players, can definitely use this. Whether 7 Wonders has the depth to maintain interest over the long term remains to be seen.

2011 05 09 mdlake Games
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And He Smote Them Sorely With Boric Acid

The ants have returned. You can drive the little buggers back with poison and flamethrowers and boots, but there can be no permanent victory over one of nature’s most successful families. At best, you can weaken a colony to the point where another moves in.

I think that’s what happened since last year, when I discovered that a homebrew of boric acid and sugar works waaaaay better than brand-name sprays, granules, and traps. The boric acid never wiped out our ants, but it kept ’em out of the house apart from occasions when the mixture dried too far for the ants to eat and needed to be refreshed with a bit of water.

The ants out on the yard got smaller, too. I could never make up my mind whether this was a competing species that kept to the outdoors and therefore suffered less poison or evidence of the damage done to the colony. See, I know many species of ants don’t grow to full size in a nascent colony; in these earliest stages, they have little resources to build more ants, and quantity (for bringing in more food) beats quality (like strength for fending off competitors), so a colony’s first ants grow small, and later generations get larger. In extreme cases, some species go through this cycle every year, shrinking over the winter and growing with summer plenty. Boric acid and sugar work together as poison that gets taken back to the colony and fed to the non-foragers. Clever! If the ants in or house were getting smaller, then maybe—or so I liked to imagine—the colony had been poisoned so badly that it was forced back to emergency rations. Or maybe it was just a different kind of ant, but that explanation offered less testimony to my god-like powers over life and death.

Alas, it seems the latter explanation was the correct one. The ants, I repeat, are back, and they’re tiny. But they’re not just smaller than they were last year; they’re more aggressive. They nip. Different behavior, I’m guessing, means a different species entirely. So what I get for my god-like power is a nastier form of mortal pest. The deity business isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

2011 05 06 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Lord of the Formics

The ants have returned. You can drive the little buggers back with poison and flamethrowers and boots, but there can be no permanent victory over one of nature’s most successful families. At best, you can weaken a colony to the point where another moves in.

I think that’s what happened since last year, when I discovered that a homebrew of boric acid and sugar works waaaaay better than brand-name sprays, granules, and traps. The boric acid never wiped out our ants, but it kept ’em out of the house apart from occasions when the mixture dried too far for the ants to eat and needed to be refreshed with a bit of water.

The ants out on the yard got smaller, too. I could never make up my mind whether this was a competing species that kept to the outdoors and therefore suffered less poison or evidence of the damage done to the colony. See, I know many species of ants don’t grow to full size in a nascent colony; in these earliest stages, they have little resources to build more ants, and quantity (for bringing in more food) beats quality (like strength for fending off competitors), so a colony’s first ants grow small, and later generations get larger. In extreme cases, some species go through this cycle every year, shrinking over the winter and growing with summer plenty. Boric acid and sugar work together as poison that gets taken back to the colony and fed to the non-foragers. Clever! If the ants in or house were getting smaller, then maybe—or so I liked to imagine—the colony had been poisoned so badly that it was forced back to emergency rations. Or maybe it was just a different kind of ant, but that explanation offered less testimony to my god-like powers over life and death.

Alas, it seems the latter explanation was the correct one. The ants, I repeat, are back, and they’re tiny. But they’re not just smaller than they were last year; they’re more aggressive. They nip. Different behavior, I’m guessing, means a different species entirely. So what I get for my god-like power is a nastier form of mortal pest. The deity business isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.

2011 05 06 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink

Whenever You’re Ready…

Overheard a woman tonight explaining her approach to evangelism. I won’t be able to quote her verbatim, but this is pretty close:

“When you’re ready. I don’t try to make someone believe; I can’t do that. But when the time comes, when they need God and they’re ready for the Message, it will be there for them.”

Clearly she was proud of herself: her gentle approach and the spirit of Christian charity with which she offered patience. I suppose it’s better than Torquemada’s approach to conversion, or even Pat Robertson’s. But does it really demonstrate a generosity of spirit?

Imagine the same sentiment came from an atheist: “When you’re ready. I don’t try to make someone give up superstition; I can’t do that. But when the time comes, when you no longer need the comfort of an imaginary magical friend and you’re ready to face the world as an adult, rationalism will be there for you.”

Sounds pretty patronizing, doesn’t it? Especially the smug assurance that the day will surely come. I wonder how she might react to the same condescension reflected back upon her from one of the converts she seeks. Judging by other evangelists I’ve met, she’d probably politely and excuse herself. But her private thoughts would not be very Christian at all, I’m sure. By the same token, the nasty attitude she’s spreading with smiles and condescension isn’t very Christian, either.

2011 05 05 mdlake Atheism & Religion Comments (0) Permalink

Loosened That Up For You…

A panel on the radio was discussing bin Laden’s execution tonight, and specifically who deserves how big a share of the credit for it. To their credit and my surprise, conservatives are applauding Obama for the raid.

Claims that the Bush administration and its hard-line policies should share the credit are somewhat more dubious. One of the panelists to claim that torture was justified, because it produced the information necessary to find bin Laden. When challenged on the claim, on citations of reports that the relevant intelligence was recovered only after interrogators abandoned tortures, he smoothly shifted gears just enough to claim that subsequent interrogation successes had been possible only because prisoners had been “made compliant” beforehand. An evil euphemism.

I suspect we’re going to hear a lot more of this meme; it has just the kind of untestable truthiness of which the right-wing propaganda machine is so fond. And it deserves to be slapped down.

Claims that torture softened up prisoners for interrogation under more ethical and professional standards should just make the speaker look weak, which, in a very real sense, he is. Just like the he-man who grunts and grips but fails to open a jar, only to see someone with a lot less testosterone and a little more sense twist it easily open with the right tool, or a loosening tap on the counter edge. Then the he-ma puffs himself up and claims “I loosened that up for you.” Sure you did, big guy. Now get the hell out of the kitchen before you make another mess.

2011 05 05 mdlake Politics Comments (0) Permalink

Price of all the Tea in China

Someone’s making another go at a privately-owned, for-profit snack bar tucked in a corner of the Montclair Public Library. I think it’s the third attempt I’ve seen in, oh, fifteen years or so, and I wouldn’t bet heavily on any greater success than its predecessors. With several coffee shops, snack stands, and the like just down the block, there simply isn’t enough demand to sustain one.

People who spend lots of time in the library like to lunch in the space, granted, but the people who spend lots of time in the library—retired, unemployed, or living on disability—brown-bag it. They don’t want to spend $4 for a cup of fair-trade organic tea, no matter how attractive the posters.

Ah, yes, the posters. Some of them explain why buying your tea in a recycled paper cup is a boon to the environment. (Maybe compared to a styrofoam cup, but not brewing your own at home. It’s still unnecessary trash.) Others vaunt the value of community farms and fair-trade…without a lot of concrete facts and figures that could be independently checked. Just vague assurances that these plantation workers are much happier than workers on other plantations. The newest two explain that exotic teas just taste better, in terms we associate with wine snobs: “greenish with overtones of copper.”

In short, it’s a coffee stand with grossly overinflated prices, wrapped in vague, feel-good advertizing. Montclair has its share of naive liberals with too much money, but even so, that strategy only works in areas of high-volume traffic, where you can pick off lots of the breed. The half dozen regulars passing through every day aren’t going to sustain a business even if they do shell out, between them, $24 a day for tea.

2011 05 05 mdlake Uncategorized Comments (0) Permalink