I just made it through a 45 minute body combat class without an asthma attack!

So I guess the corticosteroids are working.

Yay semi-functioning lungs!

Of course, I'm sore and tired because it's my first real workout in a while, but at least I am now moving in the right direction. Hopefully, this also means that I'll be okay when contact dance starts up again next week.

See my post over on NikkiNewsNet.

Federal Tory MP John Baird accidentally outed by a provincial candidate in an interview with Andy Barrie.

I'm really interested to see how this plays out. And for that matter, really interested to see how and if Rick Mercer responds.

1. Captain's Fury by Jim Butcher

reread.

2. Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

reread.

3. First Lord's Fury by Jim Butcher

The Codex alera series is finally brought to a satisfying conclusion. Especially after re-reading all of the books in one shot, I found it really interesating a) how many world details are still unexplained, and b) how much happens off-screen. A lot of important events (graduation, weddings, attempted assassinations, etc.) happen off-screen, and are just casually mentioned as having happened. This might bother me, except that the series was already six books long - if Butcher hadn't trimmed so carefully, the series would have had to be a lot longer. I think Butcher did a good job of focusing on the dramatically interesting events, as opposed to those important tothe characters. All in all, I heartily recommend this series.

4. Stiff by Mary Roach

Roach investigates the science and business of death. She is, as always, engaging, thoughtful and wonderful to read. Be warned, though, the book is pretty graphic in its discussion of dead bodies.

5. Leviathan by Scott Westerfield

YA novel, steampunk done right. Darwinian bio-ships and mechanical walkers! Set at the beginning of WW1.

Now I'm all out of Mary Roach books to read, so I need to go get more non-fiction. come to think of it, I'm out of fiction to read, too, once I finish the Zelanzy short story book I'm on now.

I need to sit down and go through the Stephen Brust Dragaera novels and figure out which ones I have read and which I have not, and pick them all up. I notice that Indigo has none of them, but at least amazon seems to carry them.

part 1: fashion.

Last night, the belt I wear with my work pants broke. It has been getting worn, but I realised that I can put my finger through the hole that the buckle goes through. Since I was at work until 8:30 last night, this meant that shops were closed by the time I got back near home, leaving me beltless for today.

Since I had no belt, I wore suspenders to keep my pants up. I also added a grey vest over the standard black oxford shirt to cover up the suspenders and give me a pocket to keep my phone in. The pocket watch was a natural addition at that point. As was the grey silk brocade tie. I used my new skills and did a full windsor knot. I considered a fedora, but since I lack a good overcoat, the effect would have been wasted.

I need to go buy a new belt this weekend.

I'm not sure what to do about footwear - my combats have a big split in the leather, but I can't afford to replace or repair them right now.

part 2: medical.

A wheezy day today, despite the advair. I called off the planned gym experiment - I am concerned that if I have to leave classes gasping for air too often, they'll have to ban me from the gym. and that would upset me greatly.

part 3: gaming.

I've decided on running Nano-Victorian Futures and Sleepers at ACUS. The website has stymied my attempts to register games thus far. I have been mucking around the wiki adding more NVF character gneration examples and the skeleton of a section for Sleepers. I've got a plot seed for NVF that should grow into an actual plot before the con. Still not sure what Sleepers will be about plot-wise, but if all goes according to plan, I should just need to nudge the players a bit and sit back to watch the mayhem. I'm really hoping someone comes up with a Sleeper that is weirder than my sample ideas.

part 4: NOMs.

I really want chocolate right now. Instead, I have apples. I do not want apples.

If I'm going to continue to eat meat, I kind of think this is a good idea. Not that I have any delusions about regularly butchering my own meat, but it does seem like the sort of thing I ought to do at least once so I know what I'm doing when I eat dead critters. It seems like a decent compromise between the standard supermarket meat experience and actually killing animals myself (which would invariably be difficult, since novices would mess it up causing extra suffering to the animals).

Also, knowing how to cut meat would be helpful for the inevitable zombie apocalypse. One way or another.

ETA: I really need a catchy name for this system. Preferably one without my name in it so other folks won't feel weird using it once I get the kinks ironed out (and in). Meta-diceless?

I finally figured out how to polish the general set of diceless rules that I've been meddling with for a while (basically the rules set that Nano-Victorian Future is based off of).

You can get a general feel for the rules here.

Basically, it uses an Amber-ish diceless conflict resolution - whoever has more points wins. Characters are based on three types of properties: attributes, powers and knacks. Attributes are qualities that everyone has, and the primary focuses of conflict. Powers are qualities that some have, and some do not. Knacks are features unique to the character. Every character should also have a motivation, a couple words that sum up the main narrative drive for the character.

Exactly what the attributes, powers and knacks are is setting dependant.

While I haven't made it explicit in NVF, I've got a loose system for using powers and knacks in conflicts. Depending on how broadly usable a feature is, I either just add it in for the conflict, or double or (rarely) triple it. Moving forward I think it will be more clear if I let a player know up front if a given feature is straight-up, two-fold or three-fold. For example, a cloak of invisibility does only one thing, where "super-senses" is more broad, so the former would be two-fold and the latter straight-up. You would need to have more than twice the points to see past the invisibility cloak with your super senses.

In a fantasy setting, this would be pretty important if powers included being highly skilled at something (like fencing, say).

Finally, I've noodled before about the "Princess Bride problem" - how do you deal with Wesley and Inigo game-wise, letting Wesley win when they fence even though Inigo does nothing but fence? Previously, I figured that the solution was "fate points" in service of Motivation, but worried that the game would devolve into the players trying to game the fate point system.

My new idea is to simply not tell the player how many points they have. That introduces uncertianty into conflicts without overly eroding a PC's competancy. If you try to use a fate point and you're out, the action will either fail, or the player takes "damage" in one way or another.

It's probably a big PITA for the GM, so I'll have to work out some way to track this for myself during play, but I think it's worth a shot. I won't change the existing game I have running now, but I'll make the tweaks to any games I start up in the future, including convention games.

Presumably as a side-effect of the reg page going up a month later than usual, there's only about a week until the end of game submission for ACUS.

This means I have to start and finish thinking about which games I am going to run, and soon.

Ideas I have so far;

• Another Nano-Victorian Future game. I'm pretty confident that the setting and system are holding up for this one, since it seems to be working in my F2F game. I just need to come up with a plot, but for NVF, that shouldn't be too hard.


• A consensual world style fantasy game using a set of diceless rules similar to the ones for NVF. I'd have to a) come up with a plot on the fly, and b) go for one of the longer slots so we'd have time to build the world and still have a game. I'd be nervous about the pacing/timing, especially since I doubt I'd have a chance to playtest it before ACUS.


• Sleepers, a game of spies and secret agents. As previously mentioned, this needs some smoothing out still.


• I could try to run Blood Shadow again, but I'm still feeling deflated from how last year's went, and I haven't figured out how to fix the setting.


• I could maybe throw together a set of rules for a Jim Butcher Codex Alera game? And come up with a plot? Perhaps better I don't.

I'm interested in Primetime Adventures and In a Wicked Age, but I don't know the rules well enough to run either as yet.

I will probably end up running two games this year. One of them will almost certainly be Nano-Victorian Future. Any comments from the peanut gallery on which of the others sound good?

Friday night, I dreamed an RPG. Or, at least, the basic broad strokes of one.

Zil and I have been watching a lot of Chuck lately. This apparently triggered a dream about secret agents and spies with weird knacks, powers and features. As the dream progressed, it turned into a game design.

The game is called Sleepers. All the players are sleeper agents for an intelligence agency. They're all in deep cover doing spy things. You go from your basic undercover spy, to guys with Intersect type things in their heads, through brainwashed Dollhouse-esque characters who don't know they're agents until they hear their trigger phrase, and down into really weird stuff.

Each character would be made with a small number of points. To get more, the character takes negative features - things like being activated by a trigger phrase, being a double, or even triple agent, having arrival agency have your loved one hostage, etc. The GM would have to figure out how big a bonus to give for each drawback. The idea is to get characters with really odd situations. In return, they can use the points on either becoming super awesome in attributes, or (in my mind, better), coming up with wacky spy powers. I had more examples from the dream, but I've lost them now.

For attributes, since we're talking spies, I figure we should assume that they're all universally highly trained in all combat skills. Any spy can take out a non-spy, and spy on spy competition comes down to finding another edge. Strength and Dexterity would have to be on the table, as would something like Intelligence (for code cracking, hacking, etc.) and maybe some sort of social/lying/acting attribute.

Anyway, this more or less popped into my head when I woke up Saturday morning. I think I could make something out of it.

Of course, I just found out that the ACUS game submission deadline is this week, so the question is, can I fill in the gaps and smooth it out by the end of the week?

Does anyone has an optometrist they like in the general Yonge/St. Clair or Forest Hill areas? The last eye checks I had were from a surly, unhappy guy in a closet attached to a chain optical retail store, and I'd rather not go back there.

Take as given that, in the real world, there is no place for super-powered vigilantes running around
beating the hell out of criminals that they just happen to run into while rooftopping. There are a
host of reasons why comic book style heroes aren't realistic.

So, with that, if one found one's self suddenly in possession of super powers, what could one do
with them? How would they a) make daily life easier, and b) how could one use them to Get Rich
Quick? How would being super change your employment prospects?

Each of these short articles will consider a specific super power.

---

Today's power: Telekinesis, because I had more requests for this than any other power.

Telekinesis is the power of moving things with your mind. In the small scale, this is a great power for the lazy. I myself have been known to lie in bed and cry "Pants! To me!". This has yet to prove more effective than getting up and picking up my pants. I will keep trying.

We've got a number of variables in telekinetics to consider. After the last article, I'm going to try to address a few more of the "science" issues, too. For the sake of limiting the argument, I'm going to assume one can't lift one's self - at that point, we're really debating flying, not telekinesis.

First off, the biggest issues with TK (as the hip kids call it) is strength - how much weight can one move? A few pounds? As much as a strong person? Lifting tanks?

Secondly, we have what I am going to call object tracking. Basically, this is how many objects one can manipulate simultaneously. Juggling is impressive because we've only got two hands. With high object tracking, one just manipulates each ball individually. This is the difference between throwing a knife with your mind and throwing the entire silverwear drawer.

Next we have range. How far away can the user move things? A few feet? Line of sight? This also raises the issue of feedback - can the telekinetic "feel" what they are manipulating?

We should also consider duration - how long can one hold something with TK? How long can one work with it before becoming too tired? Is that related directly to the mass of what you're moving?

Finally, we have granularity. How fine is the control? What is the smallest thing the power wielder can manipulate? Can they write thier name with a pen? Use chopsticks? Move individual blood vessels? Rearrange atoms in a molecule? The last isn't something one sees often - IIRC, Phoenix could do it, and one or two others.

---

Now, on to the science issues. The first issue I see with TK is Newton's third law; to every action, an equal and opposite reaction. If a strong TK user lifts a bus, Newton's law says the weight of the bus then presses down on the TK user. That much weight is going to crush the TK user's legs. Even if that weight somehow gets distributed through to the users feet, there's still a decent chance the user gets pushed into the ground by the weight of the bus. If TK is not a force that acts on the user, then a TK user in a fight pushing against an attack wouldn't get pushed back by it either.

There's also the issue that we'll have to address for pretty much every power - where does the energy for all of this come from? I always like the pseudo-science of having a hyper-efficient metabolism, to the point of just doing e=mc² in your belly if need be. Or somehow pulling in energy from another universe. We're talking about comic book powers here, so a high degree of hand waving is acceptable.

---

So, how does one make money as a telekinetic? With a high degree of strength and a decent range, you can replace a crane on a construction site. I couldn't find quotes online for how much it costs to operate a big lifting crane on a highrise, or unloading an ocean shipping container vessel but if you can charge as much as one of those without having to pay to buy and maintain the gear, you're probably not too badly off, assuming that you can maintain a solid 8-10 hours of lifting things.

If your range is *really* good, you could lift planes into the air, taking them quickly to cruising altitude, and bringing them into land again, though object tracking becomes an issue for a major airport unless you have many telekinetics. You could also, with enough power, get a job flinging things into orbit for NASA.

If you have very fine control, a career in electronics, watch-making or medicine could be yours. Being able to make very tiny movements without risk of hand tremors would be pretty useful there. Of course, if you can moves atoms, you're Dr. Manhattan, and the whole concept of money becomes rather moot.

If you have high object tracking, you can do things a lot faster - assembling a car in minutes because you can move all the pieces together at once, etc.

If the process isn't that taxing, power generation isn't a bad way to go - just spin a turbine as fast as you can for as long as you can. Of course, from the perspective of the power utility, it's better if you can do so more or less continually. Only generating power for 8 hours a day is less useful (but then again, people *do* use solar, and at this time of year, 8 hours is about all you get)

Again, we also have more illegal careers. Thief is again a possibility, but we need to again discount it as insufficiently profitable for the risk and effort invovled. The telekinetic is better off cheating at gambling, very carefully. If you can work at a good range, rigging the lottery is a good way to do this, but you can only get away with it twice before people get suspicious, and you get shut down whether or not they can figure out how you're doing it. A cheating gambler has to be careful not to win too often.

The military applications are numerous - someone who can catch and throw bullets and missles, lob tanks and pull down enemy fortifications is a big plus on the battlefield. The telekinetic is still flesh, though, and a big threat like that makes you a big target for assassins and really heavy weaponry. Eventually, you let your guard down and you're done. The army isn't known for paying fantastically well, to the soldiers at least.

Weird dream last night.
( dreamtime )

New thing of the indeterminate time period: Super jobs.

Take as given that, in the real world, there is no place for super-powered vigilantes running around beating the hell out of criminals that they just happen to run into while rooftopping. There are a host of reasons why comic book style heroes aren't realistic.

So, with that, if one found one's self suddenly in possession of super powers, what could one do with them? How would they a) make daily life easier, and b) how could one use them to Get Rich Quick? How would being super change your employment prospects?

Each of these short articles will consider a specific super power.

---

Today's power: Teleportation.

While one of the weaker fight-crime powers, teleportation is great for "normal" life.

First of all, a teleporter doesn't have to commute. As someone who spends close to two hours a day getting to and from work, that would be miracle enough. Party hopping and being able to see folks over distance would be pretty great, too.

So, with that, even if you could only teleport yourself (and, hopefully, your clothes), you've already made your life better. The two most common variation points on comic book teleportation are distance and weight allowance. Nightcrawler can only handle short distances, and can't carry much weight. He still has to commute to the X-mansion, but he can at least get to the Blackbird in a couple hops without having to wait for the elevator to the hanger. Lila Cheney can transport herself and a sizable entourage over intergalactic distances. Magik can move herself and her team a fair distance, provided no one minds stopping in Limbo first.

To make a living with your teleporting, you've got a few choices. The simplest is comeptition for UPS - when you absolutely have to get it from point A to point B *right away* the teleporter is the way to go. Mass and distance effect what you can do here. If you're 'porting letters across town, you're not going to make as much as the guy who can shift a dozen shipping containers from Taiwan to Boston. Mass is especially key. If you can only transport small things, your business will have to specialize in very valuable small things - bags of diamonds from Russia to Washington or something like that.

"Something like that" brings us, of course, to the more dangerous ways to make money; to whit, illegal jobs. Becoming a smuggler is the logical extension of the courier job. Being able to move drugs, stolen goods or just skip around customs agents makes the teleporter valuable to the black market. If you can move people around, too, so much the better - grab the product, put it in a vault, then bring the buyer and seller there, and everyone gets cleared out without much risk of a double-cross, since no one knows where the product is.

Becoming a thief, while also easy for the teleporter, is significantly riskier, and likely with no better a payout. Just because no one can stop you getting into the bank vault or museum doesn't mean you won't leave evidence behind when you grab something. Plus the stolen goods still need to get fenced, so you still need to be hooked into organized crime. Even if you steal cash, there's a risk of the cops tracking the bills back to you.

There are, of course, the insane badass careers of assassin, spy, terrorist and counter-terrorist, but unless you happen to be into that sort of thing before you start teleporting, odds are you won't really get into it afterwards either. Plus, a CIA operative doesn't make as much money as the ones in the movies do.

I suppose you could also make a killing as a stage magician.

Comments? Complaints? Suggestions for another power to cover?

I've gone off-goal for a bit, serious book-wise.

34. The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

A Victorian stage magician and his giant mute assistant. They fight crime! Good Victorian silliness.

35. Furies of Calderon by Jim Butcher

re-read

36. Academ's Fury by Jim Butcher

re-read

37. Cursor's Fury by Jim Butcher

re-read

And that's it for 2009. 2010 begins with finishing my re-read of the Codex Alera series in preparation for diving in to the sixth and final book.

Ran out of spoons today. I ended up bailing on all my plans for the day because I was just too wiped to go anywhere.Thursday and Friday nights were fun, but they used up all my energy. Apologies to those expecting to see me today.

Tomorrow, it's my brother's 30th birthday. I haven't gotten him anything yet, so tomorrow will also include a surgical strike on... something.I may soon head bedwards.

HT to matociquala

Holy crap.

Bionics — Photo Gallery — National Geographic Magazine

While in Ktown for the weekend, we stayed with the Lizrents. The Lizrents have a cat. A sweet, pretty, stupid cat with long hair. This means that my allergies start to overwhlem whatever anti-allergen I throw at them after a while. To survive, I bring out the nuclear option - stimulants. Pseudoephedrine and caffeine keep me perky and breathing despite the cat.

The downside is that I don't sleep well with all that in my system.

Sunday, I loaded up with tea and advil cold+sinus to get to "normal". Then we left and headed home. By the time we got there, I was bouncing off the walls. My stomach is also unhappy, whether due to turkey or caffeine (or egg nog) I am not sure.

I only got about 4 hours of sleep last night.

Yule vigil (staying up from sunset to sunrise tonight) is going to be *fun*! I'm hitting caffeine now to make it through the day. I don't want to touch stimulants after sunset, since it feels like cheating. If I start nodding off, though, I may cheat with some absinthe.

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? - Avatar - io9

In which Annalee Newitz sums up the problems with Avatar and movies like it, and the fanboys fail to get it an have a tantrum in the comments.

Monday is Winter Solstice. I'll be staying up all night to make sure the sun comes back on Tuesday. :)

I'm working Monday, but taking Tuesday off to sleep. We'll see how this goes - I prefer to do the vigil without stimulants since I figure it should be difficult. Given that by the time the sun rises on Tuesday, I'll have been up for more than 25 hours, I may give up and caffinate. Or have absinthe. We shall see.

The plan is to leave work a bit early and get home to do my opening rit at sunrise. Thereafter, I'm not sure what I'm getting up to. I want to hit the festival of lights in Kensington, but I also want to hang out with the "It's not a school night!" Stitch and Bitch crowd.

I'm giving serious thought to dressing up in a robe and my birch bark mask for Kensington, just because. I also think I will rig up a carrying method for a moon jar, since it is effectively captured sunlight in a jar. I'd also like to see how long it lasts on a full charge with the new batteries in it.

Has anyone else been to the festival of lights before? When are the prime hours to be there?

At Thanksgiving, I picked up three books without reading the back blurb or looking at the cover art. I picked them up because all three authors were folks who seem to be highly regarded by folks I like, and authors I had never read a novel by. Scalzi's Old Man's War was the first of the three.

29. Escapement by Jay Lake

I wanted to like this book. Steampunk! Submarines! Airships! It just didn't work for me, though. I found that I didn't connect with any of the characters. I didn't buy into the setting (a world where literal clockwork makes everything go, and a giant wall divides the north and south hemispheres concealing much of Earth's gears etc.). In some settings, magic gets turned into technology (Mieville's New Crobuzon, Brust's Dragaera, Butcher's Alera), and that really works for me. Here, Lake does the opposite - technology gets abstracted into magic (and not in a Clarke-ian way, either), and I found it irritating. The female characters spent what seemed like an unreasonable amount of time self-consciously examining the injustice of the patriarchy to a degree that felt anachronistic.

30. Bone Dance by Emma Bull

I think Emma Bull is getting adopted into my list of "My People" authors. She was already on the nomination list for her work on Shadow Unit, but I think Bone Dance may have cinched it. "My People" authors write characters who feel like people I could know and get along with, who react in a way that I expect people to react in. In the set of three new authors, Bull is the clear winner. I will be buying more of her books. And reading the rest of Shadow Unit S2 if I have to convert it to ebook format myself.

31. Spook by Mary Roach

Mary Roach, a skeptic, looks into spiritualism and evidence for life after death. I'll be honest - if Mary Roach wrote a book called "Toast", I would read it, and probably enjoy it. She's an indrebily engaging author. Spook wasn't quite as rivetting as Bonk, but it was still pretty good.

32. Princeps' Fury by Jim Butcher

SQUEE. Book 5 in the Codex Alera. This round brings out a lot of the best stuff in the series. I am fighting to hold to my policy of not buying hardcovers. But book 5 came out in paperback the same day book 6 came out in hardcover. I am not sure how long I can wait to read book 6 (which ends the series).

33. Makers by Cory Doctorow (ebook)

Wow. While Cory's previous books didn't suck, this one shows some major technical skills. Makers solves some of the issues I had with previous Doctorow books - like Spider Robinson, a lot of Doctorow's work is just too fundamentally optimistic about the human condition. Makers is certianly not a a mope-fest, but the way the characters evolve and act feels a lot more real. The characters make mistakes, and sometimes they just can't fix things. Sometimes things that don't make sense happen, but they feel like the way things don't make sense in the real world. Unlike Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, the Disney love in Makers didn't bug me. Defintely worth reading, and, in my opinon, Doctorow's best work so far.