See if this sounds familiar:

When I was a teenager, I spent a lot of time hanging out with the guys (not all actual scrotum-toters) from the comic shop. We had a great time, on the whole, though we got into the stuff you get into when you spend a lot of time with the same people, but, unlike with actual family, there’s sexual tension.

The lot of us got together to play roleplaying games more or less weekly from when I was 15 until I was 19 and the store was starting to falter. When we got together for parties, though, for birthdays or whatever, we did other stuff. Sometimes we fought with boffers (I scoff at what you think a boffer is — ours were made of rattan, weighed a good pound or two, and we fought to submission), or, on rare and exciting occasions, got to watch smuggled anime brought by our transitory Navy friends who would bring bootlegs. Mostly they were untranslated, multigenerational messes that really seemed to threaten the health and safety of the VCR. I remember The Samurai in particular was full of baffling features, like geyserish nosebleeds.

But it was fun! It was worth it! We were seeing amazing imagery that far exceeded even that of Heavy Metal, until then the Platonic ideal of a cartoon where you could see nipples. We signed petitions to bring Akira to a nearby theater (Boston being the closest we could get to a Rhode Island showing). We gobbled up Appleseed (BAD MOVE STICK TO MANGA), Black Magic M66, and Bubblegum Crisis.

For some reason, probably the fashion dictates of the day, we never got into giant robot stuff. For me, that was still the stuff of legend that I had to travel to New York, making a pilgrimage to the big, old Forbidden Planet full of imported Japanese goodies. There, I first saw the triple eye and domed head of the Scopedog and first experienced the mysteries of a robot bear that turns into an egg. While I purchased the bear/robot/egg for further study, there were no Scopedogs for sale in any price range I could approach, so it remained a mystery until a few years ago when I was rummaging around MAHQ and came across it looking for ideas to make Lego robots. Then, thanks to the rest of the Internet, I was able to finally watch the series. It’s very grim and very good. Like a lot of series, I feel like the ending is a partial violation of the spirit of the series, but I now have the context to really appreciate it.

And, as my work with Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack (née Mechaton) has progressed, I’ve looked more and more at this stuff. I’ve watched a lot of Patlabor, Dougram and Gundam as well as the complete series of VOTOMS. And I’ve been reading Colony Drop. What’s neat about it to me is that they have the same relationship to it that I do: this is stuff they love because it has a particular place in their hearts, and they, as fans of that age, helped it to become a thing here. But in becoming the thing it now is, it’s lost some of the stuff they (and I) loved about it then. To be sure, I think there a) was a lot of irredeemable crap then, and, b) there’s very good stuff now (see Gundam 00), and history tends to edit. But I don’t see anyone doing now what Masamune Shirow was doing then (least of all Masamune Shirow). I suspect the money’s too big for the fanzine scale at which he started; or perhaps the fanzine scale is so vast now, thanks to Teh Intarents, that I just don’t know where to look.

But Colony Drop lets me know that, irrespective of Damn Kidsism, other people love what I love, too. They’re independently publishing a zine right now, and you can guess how I feel about that. It talks about the evolution of Anime not as a piece of marketing material, but as a scene and an artform, as fans. And, unlike a lot of zines, the drawings are quite good. It’s ten bucks. They’re good graphic designers, too. You should get yourself a copy if you enjoy this stuff as much as I do.

A few weeks ago, Carrie and I spent an hour at the Smith College Botanical garden, enjoying the warm weather a week before the terrain-altering snowstorm hit. The bees were taking advantage of the situation, too.

You’ll want to view this lady full-screen and 720p if you can.

I got a chance to try the new basic rules at Metatopia this last weekend, playing couple of games with Dave Leciston, Mark Andrews, Michele Mishko (who subbed for Bill Refsland when he had to attend to con duties), Mike Miller, and Rich Flynn. Here are some highlights. Many robots died for this playtest.

All told, the con was really interesting, if event-packed. There was little time for socializing, which suits the intentions of the con, but I really wish I’d had the time to hang with some of those folks some more.

More photos available on Flickr!

If you’ve got Mechaton already and would like a PDF of the Metatopia experimental rules, please give mee your email address in the comments!

I’m very pleased to say that all Kodrek sets have now been sent! Some folks may have already gotten them.

I’m really looking forward to hearing about peoples’ games — video some and show me! — and how they house rule the game. It’s designed with some deliberate flexibility and commentary on what taking advantage of each piece of flexibility does.

Thank you, Human Contact backers, for encouraging me to finish this game. I’m really thinking about publishing it for real now.

Hurricane Irene really set me back on finishing up Kodrek. But I managed to get a video of play up in time to get it into the Thousand Year game Challenge!

Also excitingly, I’ll be printing up booklets and sending out games in the coming week!

The 1.0 rules of Kodrek are complete! I’ll be sending boards out to all the Kodrek-level Kickstarter backers just as soon as printing is complete.

The timing means that I’ll also be entering the game in the 1000 Year Game Challenge. It’s got some stiff competition!

Kodrek is a game with a funny background. It comes from an actual game of Human Contact. Because HC is about cultures and their expressions in contrast with other cultures, we needed a game that summed up the part of the culture we were soaking in during a particular scene. In this case, it was an Academic (a bit of a dick, that guy) who was gambling. Now, keep in mind, the Academy doesn’t have money; its members trade in ideas because of their post-scarcity environment. So the guy was gambling with money that he was manufacturing. But he considered all the marines and pirates around him murderers, so he figured it all came out it the wash.

My specification was that it be a three-way game with shifting alliances. Vincent wanted it to be a game where you committed to plans in secret and then revealed them to each other, then dealt with the consequences. You can actually see the scene in Human Contact on page 84. We described the triangular board, the move-slapping, and that was about it.

After the game, Rob had to go home and Vincent and I went for a walk. We kept going back to the board game idea and rough-sketched play. I’ve thought about it for a few months and have come up with these final rules.

The game has a lot of variables and the rules discuss some of the things you might do differently if you lived with a different clan. I look forward to seeing the variants that players come up with!

I’m considering publishing the game. For the time being, it’s though I might loosen it up a little bit, allowing commerical products and derivatives once I’ve decided.

Download the rules here!

Readercon is fucking rad. It’s a four-day literary science fiction convention in Burlington, MA (I didn’t know there was a Burlington in Massachusetts, either!), up route 128 where Autodesk and Adobe live. It’s the sun of the solar system of events that take place in Corey Doctrow’s Eastern Standard Tribe. It’s a miserable land of industrial parks and highway exits and I can’t wait to go back next year.

Carrie and I went together, not knowing exactly what we’d find. For me, it was sort of a fact-finding mission. I wanted to know if they were my people; the kind of people who think about the differences between Philip K. Dick and Bruce Sterling, not just as authors with bodies of work, but as what they have to say about the societies they live in. Panel after panel — only a one-hour break for dinner, people — was about gender, empire, race, sexuality, and the human central nervous system. I stayed each day until my brain was full, but much of Saturday night was spent in the company of other science fiction authors, drinking beer, talking about ideas. I got to shake a couple of very famous hands and am very excited to explore some new fiction.

I also got to play a game of Orange Book Shock: for the first time in a year or something. Ish and Greg picked me out of the crowd with their own copy of the book and we squeezed in a couple of hours to spin a weird little yarn about passenger pigeons that were hypnotized to carry memes through a New York City post-memetic apocalypse. Greg’s protagonist, Bill, was the last independent pigeon man in the city, while Comcast had consumed the entire Empire State Building, turning it into an enormous rookery. He was convinced that his last independent opposition, Phil, had the cure to the plague that was killing all the pigeons. Phil knew for certain that the plague wasn’t real, but was using Bill’s fear to get him to sell out to Phil. In the end, they used their memetic tricks on each other until they both believed that the pigeon plague could only be tamed by getting a regular treatment from the Empire State Building. The plague, of course, was a memetic one for humans — there was no disease, just a communication-controlling corporation that wanted a couple of putative indies around to do their memetic dirty work.

As you’d hope from these things, I came back charged up to read and write. I have a shiny newly-signed copy of Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. “Chip” Delaney, who’s a much weirder and more fun person than I imagined. I’ve also got a copy of Visions of Tomorrow: Science Fiction Predictions that Came True, edited and signed by Thomas A. Easton and Judith K. Dial, which is good fun. Along the way, I picked up a copy of Norstrilia, by Cordwainer Smith, which is his lone novel, the rest of his corpus being in the form of short stories and articles on psychological warfare for the CIA.

The biggest takeaway, though, was my immediate, stammering, giggling fanhood of Vandana Singh. After a panel on the place of colonialism in science fiction (rooted as it is in the imperial age and tales of trips to foreign and savage lands), I ran up to the dais and gushed at her. I’m so pleased that it didn’t put her off. I asked if I could give her a copy of Human Contact, and bless her astounding dignity, she asked if I would sign it for her.

I’ve got one of her books on Kindle now and another coming in the mail. Tonight’s my first change to sit down and read it. That her work is at the top of this rarified reading pile is a testament to how much she moved me with her incisive thought and warm, vivid prose.

I’m hoping I get to participate in the con next year. I’m nervous about asking them as though I was asking the whole con on a date.

I just spent the last weekend at Connecticon with Emily Care Boss, Robert Bohl, Epidiah Ravachol, and a ton of really awesome people. Thousands of them, in fact. We played some games, sat on a couple of panels, and sold some games.

Connecticon’s got a real concentration on making stuff. The costumes are ubiquitous, handmade, and amazing. There are drawing and sculpture classes. The Artist Colony has passionate and skilled artists who make funny, creative things. My favorites are the minicomic called Unpopular Species by Dandelion Studios and the prints of Chen (pronounced like “Chanukah” not “China”) from Botodesigns. Unpopular Species is a small field guide to animals that are ugly, poisonous, or grotty, while Chen’s work inserts robots, anthropomorphic cucumbers, and other cute critters into traditional prints, doing her own screen printing. She even custom printed me a shirt in the color combo I was after. I’m wearing it now. It’s quite silly.

My games of Human Contact were fantastic. One of them ended with the literal human sacrifice of the three Envoys. They were thrown in a volcano. The society in question had determined that human sacrifice was a real problem and had developed artificial intelligence for the purpose of sacrifice. Now, as capitalism took over the culture, they noticed that AI sacrifice wasn’t making their lives better. Fortunately, there were these new guys… This was about 6 months into their first encounter with the society, and the Envoys had determined that their hypercapitalism and problematic religion gave the society a decade or so before total economic collapse. The only tools they had were an underground of rationalists (who didn’t have to be underground before this monkey business started), a theocrat who was secretly atheist, and the leftover bits of technology that the Envoys had left. We had some hopes they’d be able to rescue themselves before the Contactor showed back up and everything went to crap.

Emily, Eppy, Rob and I also ran a panel on independent game design and publishing. We talked about a couple of RPGs, but there were multiple people with board game designs they were working on. It was a very exciting panel. One woman named Mary was in my breakout group and had three really powerful board game designs she was incubating. I hope she pursues them.

James Carpio invited us on a whim to his panel on GM issues and it was a really fun time. There were two kids in the front row, both high school aged, who I fully expect to be generating their own games and thoughtful articles in a couple of years. They were looking hard at their game of Dark Sun and thinking about both its social and technical aspects as related issues. They had some really thoughtful advice for other attendees, too.

Thank you my fellow players for making some really good science fiction, thank you to our panel attendees for being lively and smart participants, and thanks to James Carpio for making us so welcome to play our games, Rym and Scott for giving us opportunities to run panels, and Connecticon in general for its high energy and creativity. I had a great time and look forward to doing some really fun stuff with you next year.