On our drive down to the city on Friday, Chippy Sunshine and I grabbed some of the first game of the series.  Boston beating Toronto a stunning 14-3.  The next morning, we set out early for the Rogers Centre Skydome: Chippy Sunshine, Evil Jordan, my brother Taylor and myself.  We were not prepared for one thing; the bane of basement dwellers everywhere: the sun.

To say it was hot out, would be an understatement.  Southern Ontario has been firmly in the grip of a heat wave now for nearly two weeks.  What relief we see in the rain is short-lived; there are no soft falling misting sprinkles here, only hard, unrelenting droplets, cold as ice and as hard as bullets.

Saturday, July 10th, 2010.  Bright blue skies, sun high and bright in the sky and not a cloud in sight.  Temperatures up in the lower triple digits.  The teams take to the field and we take to our seats.  Evil Jordan, having waited a whole year to trash-talk is silenced when Boston runs one in.  He sullenly declares that the Blue Jays are “cooking something up”.

His prediction seemed to be coming true as the Jays tied it in the bottom of the first, and then scored two more, bringing the total to 3-1 Toronto.  Honestly, I’d expect Evil Jordan to gloat more, and take the opportunity, but it’s just too damned hot to trash-talk.  It’s too hot to drink beer, and nobody feels like getting a hot dog.  Everybody just gets some water or a soda into them, shuts up and focuses on the game.

Top of the second now, and Boston decides to copy Toronto, bringing in three more runners on their own.  Toronto is shut out at the bottom of the second, and it’s now 4-3 Boston.  The third is much the same.  Boston puts another runner in, and keeps Toronto out.  5-3 Boston.

The heat is unrelenting.  Chippy takes my shirt (previously removed to make way for a jersey) and uses it as a makeshift tent.  Taylor, Evil Jordan and I share a bottle of sunscreen.  It works for a bit, but Taylor eventually retreats to the shade of the stadium staircase.

Toronto begins to turn it around in the fourth: 5-5, and 7-5 Toronto by the fifth.  I merely have to tell Evil Jordan to “shut the fuck up” to keep the illusion of banter going.  It’s too hot to think of anything particularly clever, but I did get in a good shot about Toronto trading away Halliday before he pitched his perfect game for Oakland, and we shared a chuckle about Scott Downs (hehehe…it’s Downs’ syndrome).

The crowd suddenly goes wild, screaming like both teams had suddenly hit home runs simultaneously.  A cloud had drifted overhead and momentarily blocked the sun.  The game also stops momentarily as everybody watches a frantic race in the 400-seats between two young boys scrambling towards a foul ball struck far and away from anybody in the seats.

Toronto won that game: 9-5.  Evil Jordan got his gloating, and it was a great game.  With one exception: could somebody in the Blue Jays organization actually throw a ball without hitting somebody?  There must have been about six beans against the Sox that day.  Absolutely unbelievable.  I’m shocked that nobody rushed the mound; some of those seemed intentional.

Another note: I’ve been watching the All-Star game while I’ve been writing this.  While I’m not really a National Leaguer (except for the Braves; for whatever reason, I get more of their games on TV than anybody else), it’s good to see them finally win one of these games.  The last one they won was in 1996, and now that it actually means something, that’s all the better for them.

Just some notes:

• I live near Toronto (or close enough), so I have a hard time getting baseball on TV.  If I’m at a bar, it’s usually preempted by hockey in the spring, football in the fall or soccer whenever.  It’s a little disheartening to see football ads throughout the show.
• Can Fox broadcast a single fucking baseball game where they don’t cut out at least one-third of a side to make room for more ads?  Do we really need to miss a strike out in order to see another of those stupid ads for FreeCreditReport.com?
• A lot of people were booing the Yankees players.  As a Boston fan, this warms my heart considerably.

ALSO, today George Steinbrenner died of a heart attack.  I’m not a huge fan of his, but I’m sure where ever he is, he’s firing Billy Martin.

Protesters who were complaining about being harassed and victimized by the police: kindly shut the fuck up. 

Compare the actions of the police in accordance to the riot with the third grade.  Let’s say that you’re sitting happily at your desk, doing your work, when the class clown decides that it’s a good idea to sneak a tack onto the teacher’s chair.  The teacher sits down, gets the point (obligatory pun) and demands to know who did it.  Nobody wants to be a rat, so nobody speaks up, and as punishment, you’re all kept in detention after school.

Is it fair?  No it’s not, but that’s one of the prime rules that you learn when you’re in the third grade.  Life isn’t necessarily fair.  Sometimes you get more than you bargained for, not because of anything you did, but because of what those around you did and what you didn’t do.

To clarify things in my example, the students in the classroom would be the protestors, the class clown represents the Black Bloc rioters and the teacher represents the police force.  Instead of the silence of those around them (although there was plenty of that too), the Black Bloc wears a uniform black costume, complete with mask that prevents them from being identified, then changes back to street clothes when it becomes convenient to do so.  This means that it’s difficult if not impossible for the police to single out Black Bloc rioters from the rest of the protestors.

Not only is there that difficulty for the police, but the protestors themselves make the work more difficult by actively refusing to cooperate with the police, and the camera crews that did spot Black Bloc rioters removing their disguises were threatened with violence.

I’m not saying that the police are in the right here.  I believe that the legitimate and cooperative protestors have my support.  I do not believe that Toronto was an appropriate location for the G20 Summit.  My real problem is with the troublemakers.  The ones who refuse to leave an area when ordered by police, or record an event and then use video editing to make it appear as if police are using excess force. 

I believe that on both sides of the fight: the police and the protestors, there were many people who wanted to do just what they came there to accomplish.  The actions of a few (relatively speaking) overzealous individuals on both fronts ruined that.

Protestors have a moral, if not a legal obligation to stop a Black Bloc rioter from causing property damage or assaulting somebody if it is safe to do so and within their capacity.  Any protestor who cheered on the Bloc when they smashed a store window or set a police car on fire should be considered culpable.  If more legitimate protestors were to speak up against the Black Bloc, or even to take action against them, the protests could become more peaceful, and then police presence and the inevitable violence of the G20 Summits could be reduced.

But if they didn’t do anything, how can they be found at fault?  If you were enter a store with a friend, who then proceeds to shoplift, both of you can be arrested for the crime.  It’s unfortunate, just as it’s unfortunate that innocent people were arrested or assaulted during the riot.  It’s not fair, but then again, life isn’t fair.

We all learned that in the third grade.  Some of us just need a refresher course.

This year however, it was shaping up to be better.  Most of April has been warm, downright balmy some days.  Compare to last year, when there was snow, this Easter weekend was a complete turn-around.  It was shorts-weather.  It was awesome.

Today however, was a little different.  After continual heavy rain.  It decided to start snowing.  Not just a sprinkle either.  We had full on white-outs in Lindsay.  We’re talking zero-visibility.

Mother Nature is such a tease sometimes.

If you read my last post, you’ll know that Elan Games, the place where the server this website is hosted from, went out of business in late March.  John Prentice, the man behind the business had to move the server to a new location, a process that took about a day, during which the website was inaccessible.

Everything looked good until April 1st, when I went to post a special April Fools day page, and couldn’t upload my files.  It turned out that my FTP connection was no longer valid because of the move, and some later troubles came in. 

Long story short, John had to divide his time trying to get me access to the website innards (important), and search for a job (somewhat more important…I guess), so I’ve just been able to get access yesterday, which lead to updates on the main site today.

So, what did I do with my month off?

Well, I managed to actually get a few articles done in advance, something that I regularly complain about.

I also managed to enter and complete a script challenge at Script Frenzy.  The challenge was to write a 100 page script in 30 days, which I completed with some 7 hours to spare.  I ended up writing what I think is a pretty good comic book script (but then again, who thinks their stuff is shit before the 4th revision anyway?).  I’ll be revising it soon, along with writing the second installment.  More details on that soon.

So, now that things on the website are back to normal, expect more updates.  I have a few things I’ve wanted to write down, but have been holding off on, so stay tuned for that.  I’m also working on a new article series, which is a collaboration, more on that later too.

TLDR; - I’m back, new stuff up, more new stuff later.

PS - Email comments on the main page aren’t working right.  I’m looking into that.  Comments on the blog still work fine.

You might remember Elan Games from:

• The Great Crush Tasting
• Elan Tournament of Champions All-Nighter
• New Years at Elan
• Elan Games Halloween All-Nighter 2009

Elan Games or it’s owner John Prentice have also featured in:

• Mailbag: November ‘08
• From Soda to Superheroes

So, yeah, John means a lot to this page.  In fact, he is the official Useless Babble web host, which is why I love to plug him and his business as much as possible (besides the fact that I enjoy going to it, and would have liked to do so more often).  Not only that, but our servers are located in Elan Games.

Unfortunately, while John moves the servers to another location, this website will be down.  We’re expecting it to be Monday and possibly Tuesday of next week, and then back up and peachy keen.

So, for a short period this weekend, you can read one last blog article about one last All-Nighter at Elan.  The end of an era.

John, if you happen to read this, I hope you all the best.

That is because I am cursed, and nothing good happens if I cook food on St. Patrick’s day.  It’s sort of a reverse-luck of the Irish thing, and not at all pleasant. 

So, I’ve hinted to it on the main page, but here’s the whole story:

The St. Patrick’s Day Story

I’m not a bad cook.  I won’t be making creme brule and vichyssoise anytime soon, but what I do put my mind to comes out tasting pretty damn good.  So, when January of last year came around, I got to thinking about making something special for St. Patrick’s day.

My family’s Scotch-Irish, so as a kid growing up, I always got to partake of a traditional meal: corned beef, cabbage, potatoes, turnips.  I didn’t think of it much when I had grown, since I didn’t care all that much.  Chippy Sunshine though, she had never had this meal.   It was all foreign to her, the stories, the food, the history; it was all a great excuse to expose her to a facet of my life that she hadn’t seen.

So, I started planning, got some recipies, tested out a few things and settled on a meal plan.  We would be having corned beef, cabbage cooked with bacon (and cooked quickly to avoid the stomach-churning stench of cabbage I remembered as a child), mashed potatoes and soda bread.  I decided to avoid turnip because, fuck it, nobody likes turnips.

That night I threw myself into the work, cooking the food while explaining the historical importance of each component.  Explaining how corned beef wasn’t available in Ireland and was really likely adopted by immigrants in New York who were exposed to Jewish communities, and how the potato famine forced many away from their homeland.

I was talking about the cabbage when I noticed a problem with the corned beef.  Instead of settling gently in the boiling water, it had decided to float to the top and bob around, half-cooking, and generally annoying me.  I was going to be damned if my corned beef was going to be overdone on one side and underdone on another.

So I decided to do just about the stupidist thing you could think of; I poked it down with my finger.

Now normally, that wouldn’t be all that bad, but I the corned beef was a little more accomodating to my digit that it otherwise would have been and my hand went knuckle deep into a pot of boiling water.  I never realized that after a certain temperature, you just stop feeling the heat.

Immediately I threw my arm up and out of the pot, water still sizzling and steaming on my hand, and ran across the kitchen to the sink which I started to fill with ice water, before I plunged it in with an audible sigh.

In the end, we ended up using a vegetable steamer to weigh down the corned beef in the pot and keep it cooking properly, but my cooking for the night was through.  Parts of my hand had turned gray from parboiling and began to throb with pain.

All in all, the meal was fine, one of the best I had cooked in a long time, but the hand was a painful reminder not to get too caught up with history when I’m standing in front of a pot of boiling water.  Good life lesson there.

Although it’s only been a year, I’ve had to promise Chippy Sunshine that I will not prepare any food today for fear of starting a true curse of yearly cooking mishaps ending in injury.  And that’s why I’m eating cold sausage for dinner tonight.

True story.

See, to me, the term cinematic means that it’s like a movie.  That sounds pretty cool right?  After all, movies can be pretty exciting, especially on the big screen, with sound blasting all around you and a bucket of popcorn in your lap.  But then again, you don’t really do anything at the movies.  You watch, but that’s about it.  You’re not a participant, you don’t have a role.  You don’t matter.

This flies in the face of game design theory, where you as the player are generally assumed to be the focus.  In a game, you take control of the most important character: the protagonist.  Your actions doom them to death or help them save the princess from the clutches of an evil, fire-breathing dinosaur thingy. 

So, if it’s not your actions, what else can make a game cinematic?

Well, it’s certainly not how you play, that’s for damned sure.  You don’t see Bruce Willis get shot up by the terrorist as the screen fades to black, just to see the scene start up again with Bruce now avoiding the gunfire.  That would be disturbing at best, but in most games, multiple lives and continues are staples, so it can’t be that either.

I think the best way to describe what most game company marketing executives call “cinematic” is a game that has a lot of cut scenes.  With improvements in graphics and sound, video cut scenes have become much more common over the last 10 years.  It seems like only yesterday when Final Fantasy 7 allowed us to put down the controller for a good 10 minutes to watch a pretty video before playing again.  (Seriously, right in the middle of battle too, what the fuck was up with that?)

Things have gotten worse, or better, depending on how you look at things.  Games like Metal Gear Solid 4 boast over 5 hours of cut scenes, for a game with a total play-time of about 19 hours.  That means that for almost 1/4 of your total time playing, you’re sitting and watching the action happen without taking part in it.

Now, granted, MGS4 is an extreme example, but we seem to be coming to an epoch, where cut scenes may overtake actual playing time of games in the future.  A game designer with delusions of grandeur may decide that we gamers aren’t worthy enough (or good enough at playing) to do the truly cool things in the game, and he’ll just have to put it in the middle of a 15-minute unskippable cut scene.

Well, fuck him, that stupid hypothetical designer, and fuck the real game designers who think this way.  Games are meant to be played and enjoyed, not watched.  If you have enough time to read a magazine while waiting for a cut scene to finish, then it’s too damned long. 

Tonight I played the Hard Rain demo, and it took my breath away.  “Finally” I said to myself, “this is what a cinematic game is supposed to be.”

Hard Rain puts you in the shoes of a single character in a much larger plot.  Think of yourself not as a protagonist, but as an actor.  It’s quite literally like you’re playing a role in a film, while the plot is unfolding in front of you.  Maybe that’s what a cinematic game should be, not a game that makes you watch movies, but one that makes you feel like you’re taking part in one.

That’s a definition I think we could all agree on.

The concept is simple: I show you how to create a campaign setting (the specifics are for D&D 3.5 ed, but the overall theory can be applied to pretty much any roleplaying game or even to anything else really), and give examples of each step.

At the end of the entire exercise, I’ve promised to put out a book for download that covered all of the new material, and fleshed all the examples out.  So, in the end, it’s a free campaign setting.  Not a bad deal.  What makes it even sweeter is that in the weeks before the first World Craft article, there was a site-wide survey that asked people what kind of setting they wanted to see.  The dying earth genre won by a wide margin.

Dying earth, by the way, is a genre created by Jack Vance.  Consider a world that is going to end, but not right away.  It might end in weeks, months, years, decades or centuries, but it’s going to end and there’s no stopping it.

The world used in these article examples is called Penumbra, and it’s slowly being consumed by the Plane of Shadows.  Eventually waves of utter darkness are going to consume the last points of light in the world and extinguish them forever.  Cool concept eh?

Well, I had actually kind of forgotten about the whole ‘got to write a sourcebook’ thing up until about Friday night or so.  That’s not good, especially since there’s only one more installment of World Craft left before the book is due. 

Needless to say, I’m really kicking myself.  The book itself is mapped out now, chapter-by-chapter, and I’m expecting about 14 chapters overall.  In the next couple of days, the first chapter (races) will be completed.  So, there’s going to be a lot of ass-busting needed to meet the April 8th deadline (the math doesn’t add up, I know, but bear with me, there’s a small interruption there).

Now I know I’m not famous for updating this blog on a regular basis, but there might be a slight slow-down as I pour more of my energy into getting a good chunk of this sourcebook completed.  Also, keep tuned for status updates like this one.

Penumbra Sourcebook Status: Races (75% completed)

Oh, and in case you’re interested, here’s a list to all 8 installments of World Craft.

1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7 - 8

The only problem is that your options are usually limited during the twilight hours.  Sure, there’s always convenience stores, but those don’t really count.  Grocery stores, even department stores are the best places to visit on your pre-dawn excursions.

It was a Saturday night back when I was in college.  I was hanging out in my dorm room playing a video game, when my phone rang.  It was Roger, a strange little guy who I hung out with for no other reason that he was the only other person in the dorm who was in the same program I was.  He told me that a bunch of them were going out and if I wanted to join.  I was bored as hell, so I told him I’d be right over, threw on a jacket and was on my way.

It was a little after 2am when about five of us piled into Christo’s car and headed off campus.  “Uhh guys” I said, “Won’t the bars be closed now?”

“Oh we’re not going to the bar.” Roger said smiling to himself.

“Then where the hell are we going?”

“We’re going to Sobey’s.”

So, about ten minutes later, we all got out of the car and looked lovingly at the bright glowing exterior of the Sobey’s.  The grocery store beckoned to us, a beacon in the dark of the night and invited us into her warmth. 

Being from a small town that had, at the time, only just started getting over the taboo of having shops open on Sundays, the idea of a store being open for 24 hours a day was a bit of a novelty, and I resolved right then and there to not be a jackass, and to respect the store and those who worked there.

My resolve lasted right up until the time we started having grocery cart races down the dairy aisle.  The store was deserted, I mean, apart from the five of us and the poor bastard who was working the till, there was nobody else, and of course we were making complete fools of ourselves the entire time, if not for ourselves, then for the amusement of the girl at the checkout counter who was eyeing us warily.

We finally made it to the checkout.  I had a Hungry-Man’s 1 lb. Breakfast meal that I had recently read about and some sweet sweet bulk food banana chips, and the Mamas and the Papas were playing over the intercom.  The checkout girl rolled her eyes at our exhuberance, but didn’t say anything.  I guess that she had probably seen stranger people on the graveyard shift.

We headed out, and back to campus, all on a kind of high that comes from the novelty of purchasing food when most people are sleeping.  It’s hard to explain really, just one of those experiences that one has to have for themselves to truly appreciate.

That night, we promised the checkout girl that we would stop racing our grocery carts.  The next time we visited, we switched to jousting.