Author: Joshua A.C. Newman
Disney plays Xenon:
Man, those folks did beautiful work. It’s gets all cosmic ‘n’ shit at the end, but this could be right out of Barlowe’s Expedition.
My Misspent Youth
I’ve been playing Misspent Youth every week for the last couple of months with Evan Torner, Kat Jones, and the designer, Rob Bohl. It’s his first publication and it’s in ashcan form. I believe it’s sold out now (EDIT: It’s not! But there aren’t many left. Check the comments to get a copy!), but the ashcan phase is nearing completion, so you’ll be able to get the full version sometime soon.
It’s maybe 50 years in the future. New Orleans has been hit by hurricane after hurricane and its management has been handed over to the Mangrove corporation, a hotel and disaster population management company.
In the center of the city are the floating remains of New Orleans, repolished and slick for a few hundred “perfect” people living inside — perfect being a matter of genetic fashion. Outside is a ring of desperate people, used as cheap labor and fed on a nourishing but narcotic “Goo”. It keeps their bellies full and their motivation low.
This vast ring is all floating rafts, lashed so tight and close you never see the water. People live in houseboats. Neighborhoods have tides and waves. And everyone knows that the Big One, the truly terrifying hurricane, is on its way. But three kids are tired of that shit.
They are Lillybelle (played by Kat), a hippie earth mother, genuine and naïve and infectious with her passion …
Sammy (played by Evan), a kid with money and connections whose firmest belief is that he is a great author and a great hero…
and Benoît (played by me), an Algerian/French punk raised on the inside by (and to be) a chef, back when they had real food in there and everyone wasn’t just to be fed Fancy Goo.
They wanted people to eat real food, smoke real weed, and fuck for love and passion. Together, they sold drugs (a lot of drugs), beat policemen very badly, did what you do to rats (a lot of rats) and raised a (frankly, shitty) popular revolution against Mangrove. They (at least two of them) fucked a lot and had a vague, 17-year-old kind of relationship.
We finished the game with some revelations about the characters:
Sammy was truly asexual — I couldn’t ever figure out if that was going to change about him, and Evan played him that way to the end. And it turned out, he truly had it in him to be a real author. His fake accent, attention whoring, and action movie heroics were just grist for the eventual mill.
Lillybelle was curious: alternately gracious and scheming, sexually free but manipulative, she first raised a crowd to our aid, then wound up founding a religion.
Benoît was furious at Mangrove. He wanted to simply kill every person therein and turn it into a populated greenhouse, with the able people from the ring farming and living inside in the safety of the dome. It turns out, the one thing that was in his way was Lillybelle. For all his narcissism, he actually loved her and knew that he relied on her to keep himself from self-destruction. In the final episode, in our epilogues, Benoît had sold out completely. He’d been willing to sacrifice everything for his revenge against the people in the dome, but Kat sold out Lillybelle to save him. She spread her religion — a watered down “Spiritual, but not religious,” crystal-waving religion — for Benoît. My big plan had been for him to self-destruct completely without his democidal dream to sustain him. But the rules intervened on Kat’s and Benoît’s behalf. Benoît wound up farming, teaching everyone how to cook again, and eventually finding a non-violent compromise when Mangrove came back to finish the job. It was in no small part due to Kat’s public, religious persona that Benoît was able to so negotiate. But he was so disappointed in her, they never managed to see each other again. Sammy wound up having a clique of asexual artists. They wrote together and formed the “creation myth of our society”.
The game does what it’s supposed to do. I was some extreme version of 17-year-old me, all violence and comedy. The dude got laid a lot more than I did, though.
There were also, of course, scenes of underwater action, a fight with not one but two hot ninja women, a storm that scrubbed away a city, a villainous black-eyed middle manager with an escape pod, illegal rooftop gardens full of tomatoes, basil, and marijuana, a plastic underwater chill room, Cajun sepratists, sabotage of the Goo network. The game gives plenty of latitude and direction on the aesthetics of the environment. But all of that is in service to the teenage rebellion that you are the center of — in our case a teenage rebellion about drug use, social class, and sex. Its story arc mechanics give you good direction on what’s to do at any moment.
The game really does what it promises. It’s a good time.
Don’t Let it Sneak Up On You
In case you’re wondering, that’s a prototype of what is to become a fully autonomous interceptor of descending warheads.
Or a fully autonomous interceptor of, you know, whatever.
I Like to Imagine the He’s Saying “Hyum Hyum”
Interestingly, when I inquired about doing this in college, my professor warned me against it, telling me that it was really painful.
Trek On
Stroking the Data
This is a really interesting interface that truly hides behind the objects in your environment. This could solve the problem of losing the remote control forever!
Now I’m thinking about embedding a bluetooth headset with a solar panel into a tree. You could control outdoor lighting by tapping and rubbing the tree. Or a coffee table that controls the stereo.
With three microphones, you could probably detect direction, too, which means that you could make more complex gestures (dim the lights by stroking down the wall or bring them back up by stroking up.)
No, It Won’t Be, But Don’t Count That Against It
Judd just sent me a link to The Surrogates. It looks like it could be good, solid, real Science Fiction. It’s supposedly been in production since the beginning of the year, so maybe we’ll see it soon?
Equating a movie to “Blade Runner” is pure hogwash, of course. That’s what Marketing calls any SF movie that’s not about blowing up the bad guy in a pit of space lava. But the premise is very strong, even without hyperbole. It reminds me of something else Judd told me about once.
The Un-Store R0xx0rz
I’m very excited to say that my games — and, indeed, all publications, should I ever get around to That Other Stuff — are now available from the Indie-RPGs.com Un-Store. This includes the never-before-sold-outside-of-Gen-Con Shock: Sheets, now bundled with Shock:. You can also get them separately! I thought they were going to be kind of a cute thing, but they were a surprisingly hot item at the con.
They’re pre-printed, double-sided Shock:Issue grids and Antag:Protag sheets. It makes it just that much faster to get down to playing. Plus, you can stick a couple in the back of the book and always be ready to play!
The Un-Store is going to be reaaally interesting. The wheels have just left the runway. But it’s gonna fly.
Governor Palin Supports Jews for Jesus
So, you know how Palin keeps talking about how they can’t let another Holocaust happen? It’s not out of respect for the humanity and distinction of the Jewish people. It’s just so we can die in the rapture.
Well, OK, that, and making the relentlessly Left-Wing, Progressive, pro-civilization and Democratic Jewish population of America waver in their support for the best Democratic Presidential candidate in my lifetime.
In August, just eight weeks ago, Governor Sarah Palin sat in her church, the Wasilla Bible Church, and listened to their honored guest, David Brickner, describe how the challenges Jews face in Israel is a result of their having rejected Jesus as their personal lord and savior. The talk was entitled, “The Jerusalem Dilemma.” That’s code for “The Jewish Question“.
If you’d like, you can download the audio file or read a PDF of the sermon.
If Jews have anything to fear from the upcoming election, it’s not that Barack Obama might be a Muslim (he’s not). It’s not that he’s black (that’s good). It’s that John McCain selected someone who believes that we should be converted en masse by being lied to. If you are, or know, Jews in Ohio, Florida, or any other swing state, make sure they know this. There’s been some ugly racism showing in polls of Jews, and it needs to be made clear which side the bread is buttered on.
Vote Barack “The Butter” Obama.