New on Desk #35 — Dim Week

The cabin weekend was apparently a bit much for me, considering how melancholy this week’s been. Not much has happened, just the routine stuff. Intellectually I know that this’ll get better and I’ll manage to be productive at some point again, but I have to admit that I’ve thought about just winding down like a spring toy this week. You grow old, you slow down and then you stop moving altogether. So nice.

The Wheel of Apples

One of the inconsequential things I’ve practiced this week is juicing apples in a fruit press. The technique involves first picking and sorting the apples, then crushing them in a kind of hand-cranked apple grinder, and then pressing the resulting mush for juice in a turn-screw press. The vital nectars of the apple harvest then sustain the pressing crew and whoever wanders near until you’ve drunk maybe a pint, by which point you’re sick of the sweet taste and have to start figuring out what to do with the rest of the jug.

You get maybe 0.7 liters of juice out of 10 liters of apples, with the squeezed out rinds going into the compost, where I would like to say the wasps will have a grand old time, except I haven’t seen many wasps hanging out this year; normally they congregate to the sweet smell of the juice, so I guess they’re extinct now. The number of apples, on the other hand, seems to increase every year as my parents and all the other lazy bums grow to appreciate the taste of the apple juice and conspire to scrape together more and more apples for the apple grind. If you don’t have to turn the press yourself, it’s just like a juicing machine: apples go in and juice comes out.

Worst part is that when Conan the Barbarian turns the apple mill for one montage, they bulk up into Arnold Schwarzenegger, as per the movie. I just get dizzy. The running theory is that I need a heavier press.

And this is apparently the most exciting thing I’ve done this week so yeah, this’ll be a short newsletter. Good thing too, I’m not really feeling like writing.

Monday: Coup de Main #12

Over in the D&D land we had a productive dungeon-crawling session last Monday, as the party focused on mapping out the Yragern manor basement. Various caverns and mysterious details were discovered even with the party doing their best to avoid any serious commitments; the expedition was a bit top-light, as we only had three players and the assorted henchmen available — the lowest player count so far for the campaign, I think. At least they didn’t decide to skip the dungeon altogether on account of not having enough PCs, that would have been just sad.

The party found an Inscriber’s Staff in a hidded treasure cache and generally handled themselves well in the cellars. The strangest event of the session was no doubt the triple critical INT check (as in, three PCs all rolled a ‘1’) on recognizing a giant centipede nest; evidently the earlier run-in with the critters on the ground floor served the lesson. The most exciting, though, was the cliffhanger at the end of the session: while the party had been exploring downstairs, a competing adventurer party had breached the house such that the two parties stumbled on each other with little warning. We’ll be finding out how that goes first thing next time.

Thursday: Varangian Way

My second game of the week was again Varangian Way with the RPG Club Hannilus. We’d been planning to play the Varangians bi-weekly with Flame/Star/Night, but work-related delays with the latter have left the Varangians ruling the roost for the immediate present. I’m not complaining, as the game grows more entertaining by the session, as we figure out how to play this experimental design.

We had just three players this time, and the agenda sheet (the players sort of “order” scenes well in advance from each other, forming a plan for what we’re doing) indicated that it was time for me to start developing the story of Säisä, a forlorn Finnish forest witch who’d gotten adopted by some reaving vikings earlier in our campaign development. I established said vikings as a sort of piratical fellowship, nasty customers. This’ll carry fruit later, no doubt.

Meanwhile, though, the session MVP was no doubt Petteri, who was running a storyline for young Hallad, an inexperienced Swedish adventurer who had joined a Swedish expedition into Finland Proper and was now exploring the accursed in-land swamps of the wild region. Petteri painted an economical little Shangri-La story for us about this idyllic secret village protected by the mists of the expansive moors. Hallad had to win the village’s — and more importantly, the village witch’s — trust in spiritist testing to succeed in his quest. The covert climax of the story came when Hallad decided to stay at the village only to learn that the secret village would have the youngest child of the community slain to make room for one more head under their strict population control scheme. Good stuff.

The game’s in solid enough shape now that we can basically just play the process and see what comes of it. It’s so ambitious that further game design will basically require playing for a while, so hopefully Petteri’ll have the patience to keep playtesting. We’re already basically doing the Ars Magica troupe play thing effortlessly (something that AM itself never could make consistent), and the game promises to grow better as we go.

A TV Show: Good Fight

I self-medicated my general feelings of malaise by crash-watching the first season of the legal drama Good Fight over the weekend. Nice change of pace, as I haven’t watched much TV over the year, and specifically not something in the drama department. There’s a certain type of psychological character perspective that drama as a genre has, and that lacks in many other entertainment literature forms. It’s a nice change of pace in moderation.

The series gets off to a strong start, and I specifically like that it has a thriller premise more than a gimmick one: the interest lies in the tricky-yet-relatable position of the main character as she falls victim to a ponzi scheme (not in a stupid way either) and is forced to delay her retirement, except office politics leave her unable to return to the firm. While I will watch a sufficiently stupid gimmick (e.g. consider Good Doctor, a medical drama centering on an autistic doctor with autism superpowers), I’d say that a tense thriller plot is overall the superior hook to found your script edifice.

The first season continues generally well, combining episodic legal storylines of slight political bend with the overarching character drama. The weakest part of the series is the younger main character, who is unrelatably clueless about her family’s ponzi schemes; the general characterization isn’t that she’s so naive as to need institutionalization, but the plot demands her to be painfully vapid about anything to do with her father’s financial crimes, which makes the characterization inconsistent. The A-plot of one of the later episodes is literally about how much of a total tool she is, which is maybe something you don’t want to do with a protagonist character without making it the immediate focus of the story, as the protagonist’s incapability in tying up her own running shoes is generally a much more pressing issue for the audience than whatever the plot du jour happens to be. Either make them an actually trained lawyer, or make them a clueless victim; making the same character be both seems strange on screen.

Club Hannilus Minutes

So, some recent online discussion. To tell the truth, my own discussion has mostly revolved around Coup campaign systems development, but fortunately others keep bringing up a variety of topics:

• Is Gygaxian naturalism inherently boring? What even is this jargon term, “Gygaxian naturalism”? What’s going on with Grognardia anyway? The old school D&D discourses continue unabated, which I guess isn’t news in itself. Seems like most of the contributors have an inherently sophisticated take on the naturalism issue in that everybody seems to take it for granted that the game state should be dynamic in the naturalist sense, even if basically nobody seems to underwrite the aesthetics of Gygax’s fantasy porridge world. So yes, naturalistic in the sense of simulating gnome habitat distributions, but not necessarily Gygaxian in the sense of making gnomes really fucking boring.
• Did you know that D&D single-use magic scrolls apparently originate in Persian folklore? I vaguely remember encountering the tidbit myself — not the D&D comparison, but the actual fairy tale with the magic scroll that bursts into flames when used — but we actually put a little bit of legwork into finding it, and failed to scare up the trope. I even perused the folklorist myth indexes a bit, but no luck. Could be that it’s so rare as to not really be a trope (“motif” as we say in folklorism), or the entire idea itself is mythical.
• How acceptable was magic considered in the Middle Ages? This is the exact sort of topic where history nerds like to one-up each other with various perspectives, with the less informed stoking the flames, so it’s easy to generate discussion. As if “Middle Ages” even means anything in a context like this, you might as well ask what they used to eat during the Middle Ages — the only correct answer is “everything”, duh. The basics got covered pretty well, though.
• Knights of the Dinner Table and The Big Bang Theory were considered side by side as examples of geek belittlement, one from inside and one from outside the subculture. I particularly liked one contributor’s observation about the sitcom, which I haven’t seen myself: “I tried watching it and was completely confused… It’s basically people doing normal things and a random laugh track… Like — let’s go play D&D! <laughter>” Yeah, I can see how that could be confusing for somebody who considers playing D&D to be a normal thing to do. Apparently it’s exotic enough that it works as a punch-line in a sitcom, though.

State of the Productive Facilities

Situation nominal.