Jim’s Brain Online

Posted by Jim at July 30th, 2005

Today I went to a wedding. Unlike last year’s weddings, this one passed without any risk of violence, immigration related problems, or obscene songs played at the reception.

This left me free to think about other things. Once upon a time people threw rice at weddings. Rice symbolized prosperity and fertility. Recently people stopped throwing rice, having learned that the stuff gets eaten by birds, expands in their stomachs, and kills them.

People must now find substitutes. At this wedding, they blew bubbles.

Rice makes sense as a symbol. Especially in cultures where rice is a staple food, rice is intuitively connected to prosperity and fertility.

Bubbles, by contrast, aren’t intuitively connected to anything (except perhaps Lawrence Welk and champagne). They are slick on the outside, hollow within, and pop instantly when they encounter a problem. These aren’t exactly the qualities you want out of a marriage.

I can only assume that bubbles aren’t supposed to symbolize anything themselves. They symbolize rice.

Coming home was more eventful than the wedding itself. We arrived home to discover that a car had run the yield sign near our house, hitting another car, and totaling both. Thus we arrived home to find that we’d missed the fire trucks and the ambulance, but, were in time to watch four police cars full of cops interview the drivers and other witnesses. We also got to watch the tow trucks pull the cars away.

Abby and Rebecca got to watch the whole thing and found it fascinating.

Posted by Jim at July 28th, 2005

ACCESS moved out of 207 East Fulton today. It’s the ending of a process that began in December with GRACE (my primary employer) moving out.

GRACE and ACCESS moved in to 207 Fulton together a few years ago. At the time it felt momentous. Both organizations had been together in the basement of 38 West Fulton underneath San Chez Bistro. While a good place to be, it did have a few problems. For one, it was a basement and smelled exceptionally musty. For another, it was so easy during the winter to come in before it was light, leave after it was dark, and (unless you went out for lunch) never see sunlight the entire day.

Let’s not even mention the time that fluids from the bar leaked through the ceiling into our conference room.

All in all, I didn’t feel sad to leave that building. Far from it, we were moving into the top floor of a building that looked over downtown Grand Rapids. We could see rain. We could see sun. I considered putting together a GRACE webcam, allowing anyone to peer out our windows.

Organizationally, it meant that ACCESS and GRACE could stop paying the city for parking, a multi-thousand dollar expense.

We (GRACE and ACCESS both) assumed that we’d be there forever.

As it turned out, we weren’t even there four years. GRACE and ACCESS began to realize that rent plus other expenses more than made up for the lack of parking fees. This November, GRACE’s board decided to move GRACE’s offices into various churches around the city, locating me in my house.

After that, an office chosen for two organizations became the office of one (ACCESS). Realizing that they could get a better deal somewhere else, ACCESS began looking around, finally settling on Goodwill’s Urban Center.

It’s a strange thing. As an ecumenical organization, GRACE tries to get Grand Rapids’ churches (of all denominations) involved in social problems. They helped start ACCESS, an organization that coordinates Kent County’s church food pantries. Since then (slightly more than 20 years ago), GRACE and ACCESS have always shared an office. If you worked for GRACE you eventually got to know people in ACCESS and vice versa. We had monthly meetings/potlucks to discuss office issues and talk, a combined Christmas party, and attended each others’ events.

This afternoon we had all of ACCESS’ stuff out of the building by 2 p.m. No papers. No computers. No people. The church that owns the building hasn’t been able to rent the GRACE side yet, so that’s empty too.

As the others drove off to Goodwill, I made a last round of the office, checking for anything anyone forgot. Alone on the third floor, I remembered our hopes for the place, thinking about walking into the building when it was still full of the former owners’ files, planning what we needed for the cabling, and the open house celebrating our arrival.

I walked through GRACE’s side of the office, noticing where my name used to be outside my cubicle, ghosts of former co-workers in my mind.

It’s not bad the way things worked out. On a financial level, I’m better off now than I was when I worked solely in that office. On a personal level, I enjoy consulting and the control of my life it brings. Even with ACCESS moving and GRACE spread all over, I’ll still see many of the same people.

Still, there’s something I miss.

Posted by Jim at July 23rd, 2005

I played in a game Friday night. Joe ran “Dogs in the Vineyard.” It’s a role playing game written by an ex-Morman that combines the mythology of the Wild West with mythology of the settlement of Utah. You can read Ed’s commentary about the game at Esoteric Murmurs.

People play the “God’s Watchdogs,” a group combining the functions of circuit riding old west preachers and traveling gunfighters. Their job is to keep order in the towns of “the Faithful,” a religious group that left the decadent east. A collection of small towns and villages in hostile territory, “the Faithful’s” settlements have no police force or judicial system. The “Dogs” protect them from threats from the outside and sins within.

Authority is a major theme of the game. No one keeps the “Dogs” in line. Any decision they make is assumed to be beyond question. They choose whether to punish or show mercy and how.

Our Group:

Sister Ruth: A healer and sharpshooter. Unlike most of the group, she’s level headed and prone to think before shooting.
Brother Everett: Raised in the east, he was kidnapped by a Faithful Uncle and brought west. Much of the time he’s been pretending to believe, but recently (and almost against his will) has begun to believe.
Brother Jude: Coming out of a troubled background, Jude distrusts authority despite having become the ultimate authority in many people’s lives. In an effort to avoid possession, he’s also come to have a relationship with a demon.
Brother Josiah (my character): Born into a Faithful family, Josiah nonetheless went to college in the east, learning a great deal about science. His family is strongly connected with the Territorial Authority (the government back east).

Which brings me to the games so far. Joe’s run three games. Here they are:

1. In the first game, we discovered that the town Steward was working with a local builder in a land grab scheme. After sneaking into the man’s house at night, Everett shot the builder in the street. The Steward (Jude’s brother) was sent back to the Dogs’ Temple for wiser heads to punish, barely escaping immediate execution by Jude.
2. In the second game, we discovered that the town doctor was allied with demons, Brother Everett shot the doctor, and incapacitated the Doctor’s demon possessed wife. Brother Jude picked up the Doctor’s spell book and only barely escaped possession himself.
3. The third game began began before the Dogs even rode into town. Finding a group of armed men menacing a farmer, we disovered that the local tax collector was corrupt. Not only was he taxing more than he ought to, he was focusing his efforts on a family of Chinese converts and keeping the extra money for himself. By the end, Everett killed half the man’s gang of enforcers (the four Boyce brothers) and the others left town, having been nearly killed by Jude. Owing to Josiah’s contacts within government, the tax collector will likely be stripped of his office and the remaining Boyce brothers will find their faces on “Wanted Dead or Alive” posters.

For me, the third game was the best of the three. It was the first game in which Josiah’s background actually mattered. It directly affected the story, forcing the Boyce brothers to stop collecting taxes because their methods (not noticeably different from highway robbery) were against the law. Not only that, it was the first time I was able to bring Josiah’s desire to invent devices into the game.

In previous episodes, he’s mostly (like Ruth) acted as a buffer between the townspeople and Jude and Everett’s tendencies to shoot first and ask questions later. Admittedly, this time he was enthusiastically part of Jude’s idea to drop by the tax collector’s house/store late at night and yank the guy out of bed for questioning. Still, Josiah has yet to shoot anybody. In the context of the game so far, that’s amazing.

I can’t think of anyone shot so far that hasn’t deserved to die, but I’ll be surprised if that continues. In the course of visiting three towns, we’ve killed 4 people and badly injured 2 more.

Young men with guns make for entertaining stories, but I’m glad I don’t run into them in real life.

Posted by Jim at July 19th, 2005

I recently read Ed’s post on Esoteric Murmurs which referred to a post on Vincent’s blog and Ginger Stampley’s in 20 by 20 Room… Basically, they all meditate on the question using your own ideas vs. recreating someone else’s fully developed ideas (either in a game’s setting or in how to create a game). I’m taking a slightly different tack than they, thinking about how a fully developed setting affects how I GM a game.

I have to admit that I’ve seldom run a game set in someone else’s universe. The major exception to this is an Amber campaign I ran for two or three years. That campaign, though fun to GM, was something of a failure in too many ways to list here. One of the major ones is my own tendency to create the underlying mechanism of why powers work and how to use them. It’s not a bad thing in itself, but in combination with more players than I can really handle (9+ on some nights), and the fact that my ideas were in direct conflict with the actual Amber RPG’s assumptions made me pay more attention to it than that aspect of the game deserved.

Not only that, but because I’ve liked Zelazny’s Amber books for years and know them well, I couldn’t help bring in unfinished business from all 10 books. That created an outrageously complicated plot that was most definitely in the spirit of the books, but was extremely hard to resolve.

I don’t know whether this sort of thing is what Vincent is trying to avoid, but it sounds like it. At least for me, the major problem with running a game in someone else’s world is that I want to experience their world, not mine. That means total consistency in details and a (much harder to achieve) consistency in tone.

I’m inclined to think that this takes energy away from what really drives me to play games–creating plot and setting.

I’ll contrast this with a campaign that was something of a success: my Cyberpunk campaign. Though imperfect, it was a great learning experience for me. I took the core Traveller rules, modified them for my setting, and then set out to recreate the feeling of being in Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers, Walter Jon Williams’ novel Hardwired, William Gibson’s Neuromancer and/or the movie Blade Runner.

At the time there were no cyberpunk games out. They came out the summer after I ran the campaign so I was totally on my own in figuring out how to do this.

I spent a lot of time thinking about the sort of relationships characters could have with each other and the world (cynical, not trusting even the organization they worked for), the tone (gritty, urban decay), the technology (body modification, computer hacking), and the story (investigating a biotechnology corporation).

In the end, I grew a lot in my ability to tell stories in general and that campaign in particular worked out okay.

The difference between running Amber and running that cyberpunk campaign is less than one might think. Both games constrained me considerably because of the source material. The core difference in running the cyberpunk campaign was simply that I wasn’t constrained by specifics of any kind. I had no need to remain true to things that had happened in the past whether they are related to powers, characters or plot.

All I had to do was respond to players actions and ideas, think about what would happen next and how to make it feel appropriate to the story.

These experiences tend to point in the direction of Vincent being right–at least when I’m running the game. Working with a well thought out setting can paralyze you. Creating setting as you go along can do wonderful things for the game.

For me, this seems likely to be true mostly because it allows me to step in the direction that helps create a good story instead of a story that’s true to the source material.

Here’s a funny thing though:

I’ve got some background in Jazz. At points in my life I’ve been semi-competent in playing 3 different instruments (trumpet, bass guitar, and voice). I’ve also been taught the basics of how to improvise and how to train myself to become better at improvising.

One technique for improving your ability to improvise is to memorize other people’s solos note for note. More than that, you try to play the solo exactly as they did, ranging from dynamics to tone. Why? It forces you to expand your skills, exposing you to techniques that you’d never need to learn if you were playing stuff that came only out of your own head (and hands).

Moving back to role-playing games, I don’t know if I rose to the challenge, but gamemastering Amber certainly did require more skill than doing my own stuff. Amber games often seem to include an excessive number of players and one is forced to develop techniques to occupy them–ranging from quickly switching focus from player to player to encouraging them to play without GM intervention. Similarly, working with an intricate background had it’s own problems to overcome. I had no choice but learn how to elegantly retrofit things that were inconsistent into the story (even if I wasn’t always successful). Mind you, I do things like that in most campaigns, but never to the extent I have to when working with the endpoint of other people’s ideas.

I’m not saying that delivering a good version of someone else’s story is necessarily as creatively satisfying as creating your own new thing, but it does push you.

That’s not a bad thing, provided you don’t do it forever.

Posted by Jim at July 18th, 2005

Thin clients. Whatever operating system you prefer, you’ll find that you have a few available, allowing you to view the desktop of a computer far from you. I haven’t had much reason to mess around with VNC (the most common unix based thin client), but I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop. Part of this is because I administrate a server whose sole reason for existance is to allow people access to remote desktops (alias terminal services).

The last time I installed FreeBSD, I was amused to find a command line program called rdesktop. Rdesktop allows people to connect with windows just as well as a windows client, something that amused me as I am doubtful that Microsoft released the details of their RDP protocol. My only complaint was that they were apparently running RDP 4 instead of 5, opening the possibility that rdesktop would stop working as soon as Microsoft dropped support for 4.

This time I installed FreeBSD, I was amused to discover that GNOME 2.10 came with a gui for rdesktop and that RDP-5 is now supported. Not everything has been implemented, but that’s better than nothing.

As a result, I’m now able to administrate the Windows servers I’m responsible for via FreeBSD as well as XP and Mac OS X (which has an official Microsoft supported client). It also means that I can get at programs on my XP boxes from other OSes, something that entertains me.

It would be interesting if someone were to create an open RDP server. I imagine that there might be legal trouble as a result, but rdesktop doesn’t seem to have been shut down. On the other hand, the Remote Desktop client comes as part of XP and doesn’t really constitute any kind of money stream for Microsoft.

Terminal Server licenses, on the other hand, probably constitute a small but significant money stream (at $76 per person or device using the server). I can imagine they might get more upset about that.

Posted by Jim at July 14th, 2005

	The beach at Charlevoix. If you look at the upper right of the picture, you’ll see a nuclear power plant. It just makes you want to go swimming, doesn’t it? UPDATE:It’s actually a cement plant. See below.
	Kristen reading in the hammock at Applesauce Inn.
	Kristen while we went hiking at the Grass River Natural Area.
	A dump truck. You can’t see it very well in this picture, but there’s a sign in the window saying it’s for sale. You know you want it.
	When Kristen learned that I’d brought my ibook along she was not happy. She seemed to believe that you’re supposed to leave computers at home during vacations. Fortunately for me, I happened to have it along when we went to Charlevoix, enabling me to occupy myself while Kristen went to the crafts fair. I waited for her at the coffehouse pictured on the left. As it turns out I could have sat down anywhere. Downtown Charlevoix has wireless internet access.

Posted by Jim at July 13th, 2005

Though I enjoy watching baseball, I’m not a fanatic. By not a fanatic, I mean that I enjoy going to baseball games and occasionally watching it on television, but I don’t really have a favorite team and if you asked for any player’s stats I’d have to look them up.

Honestly, I’m more likely to read a book than go to a game. In fact, relatives of mine will recount one time that I actually read a book all the way to the game, during the game, and probably did my best to read it on the way home. I don’t know what the book was (it may have been The Mote in God’s Eye), but I’m pretty sure that the White Sox were playing the New York Yankees.

For better or worse, this means that I can enjoy the occasional baseball influenced novel. Michael Bishop’s novel Brittle Innings follows the story of Danny Boles, a rookie shortstop on a minor league baseball team during World War II.

First off, I’ll just mention that I like the writing of Michael Bishop a lot. He’s one of my favorite science fiction writers. He pays a lot of attention to the creation of good characters as opposed to good physics. He has written stories that include aliens, but in the end, his stories about aliens end up exploring what it means to be human. Though he’s written stories set on other planets, the state of Georgia dominates his books. His writing style can be geuninely beautiful.

In short, it’s at least as accurate to describe him as a southern fiction writer as it is to describe him as a science fiction writer.

Brittle Innings is (at least in theory) not a science fiction novel. If you find it, you’ll find it in the general fiction section. This represents the book reasonably well. Someone who doesn’t read science fiction will be able to read it. They’ll be especially likely to enjoy it if they like baseball–as Michael Bishop evidently does.

However… It’s fiction written by a guy who normally writes science fiction which means that odd things are in store for the theoretical average reader who comes across the book expecting something like Shoeless Joe (inspiration for the movie Field of Dreams).

I have no idea how such a reader will respond to one of the major premises of the book: the idea that Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a true story. What that reader will do when he or she realizes that Frankenstein’s monster is playing minor league baseball under an assumed name is entirely unpredictable, but the Publisher’s Weekly review on Amazon probably reflects exactly that situation.

Whatever the case, I’m someone who constantly reads science fiction and I love the book. I reread it most summers.

It’s a great window into the 1940’s in rural Georgia, paying attention to such diverse issues as race, World War II, relationships between fathers and sons, and old monster movies.

Trust me, this blog entry doesn’t do it justice.

Posted by Jim at July 10th, 2005

These past few days Kristen and I have been on vacation. As we sometimes have in the past, we spent 4 days at the Applesauce Inn Bed and Breakfast. It’s a nice place to be, located close to decent hiking, beaches, restaurants, some interesting small towns, and some 30 wineries.

It goes without saying that we left our children with my parents who deserve a lot of credit. Not only did they take care of them for four days, but they also brought them to swimming lessons despite the fact that my dad can’t swim. Despite this, he was still required to get in the water.

I’ll probably post a couple pictures in the near future, but for now I have to do something else. Our cats came up with a “creative” solution to the fact that I was not around to change litter by “thinking outside (if rather close to) the box.”

I go to clean that up now.

Posted by Jim at July 5th, 2005

With the retirement of Sandra Day O’Connor, people have, as always, begun to speculate about how the next the Supreme Court will affect the legality of abortion.

What I find interesting is that people come to each new Supreme Court nomination as if it would instantly make abortion legal or illegal. I’ll grant you that they have to in order to rally the troops (whichever troops you prefer to rally), but neither the next Supreme Court justice nor even a decision reversing Roe v. Wade will necessarily end the struggle over this issue.

What I mean by this is that first of all, five of the current nine justices have stated that they will vote against attempts to overturn Roe v. Wade–that’s without O’Connor. If that’s true, abortion’s not likely to become illegal anytime soon.

Secondly, the aftereffects of reversing Roe v. Wade don’t necessarily outlaw abortion. The argument just moves over to each individual state, fragmenting the struggle. Some places would instantly outlaw it, others instantly legalize it, and others would undoubtedly struggle for years over the precise circumstances under which abortion is allowed or denied.

In the end, it seems likely that we would have a patchwork of standards. Bearing in mind that people can legally visit any state they want, abortion seems likely to end only at the federal level.

I can’t help but be curious about the likely political consequences. I’ve often thought that the Republican party’s pro-life stance has bought it many votes it might not have otherwise gotten. If there’s no Roe v. Wade to point to, it becomes harder to argue that voting for a Democratic presidential candidate is a vote for abortion rights. In my more cynical moments, I’ve often thought that it was in the Republican party’s best interest to constantly work for outlawing abortion, but to never actually succeed in doing so.

Indeed the main point of the article I linked to earlier is that success on abortion could cause major problems for the Republican party. I think it goes a little overboard on the negative consequences, but it definitely seems likely to require some restructuring afterwards.

Whatever happens, I don’t think anybody is going to get exactly what they want. Thus I write this little essay in the hopes of deflating both people’s hopes and fears in this area.

Posted by Jim at July 3rd, 2005

Here’s a memory from my not particularly wild or crazy college years:

During my first (second?) summer of working on Hope College’s grounds crew, someone decided to host a fourth of July party. This party was not technically on the fourth of July, but I think that it was on the weekend before. That was close enough.

So anyway, on some weekend night that was close to the fourth, the group of us gathered at a house near campus and sat down to watch a couple films and drink a moderate amount of beer.

The films (in case anyone cares) were Caddyshack and Strange Brew. It seemed that half the times I went to someone’s house to watch a movie that summer they were showing “Strange Brew”–a movie that is funny, but not 3 times in a summer worth of funny. On the bright side, I hadn’t seen “Caddyshack” before.

Sometime around midnight, we walked out into the backyard and one of the guys unveiled the rocket. It was four feet high and made of cardboard. It was powered by bottle rockets. I don’t know how many there were, but probably at least 50. They filled the end where you’d expect them to be, but he’d also placed several additional clusters of bottle rockets alongside the body.

After that, he lit the fuses and it shot up, disappearing into the night.

In memory, what impresses me most about that rocket is that we didn’t set it off in a field. We were close to the middle of Holland, Michigan, an area where houses crowd the edges of their lots and backyards are small. A place not unlike the section of Grand Rapids I live in now.

Sometimes I wonder where that rocket landed.