Joshua A.C. Newman – Page 54

The Dead Lady of Clown Town

… excerpted from The Rediscovery of Man, by Cordwainer Smith:

… Said little Joan… “I bring you life-with. It’s more than love. Love’s a hard, sad, dirty word, a cold word, an old word. It says too much and it promises too little. I bring you something much bigger than love. If you’re alive, you’re alive. If you’re alive-with, then you know the other life is there too — both of you, any of you, all of you. Don’t do anything. Don’t grab, don’t clench, don’t possess. Just be. That’s the weapon. There’s not a flame or a gun or a poison that can stop it.”

My two other bikes are the Blackbird (AKA the Monster, a carbon mountain bike build by my friend Daniel) and the Yellowjacket (my Trek 6500 road/city/”urban assault vehicle”). This one’s going to need a name soon, cuz it’s almost done!

I needed some additional parts as of the last installment. Let’s see what we’ve got.

Handlebars
A pair of handlbars! The old aluminum ones were really uncomfortable. These were $15 used.

Chainwheel/crank

A Dura-Ace chainwheel and crank! These were originally from a $400 set and were in a pile of parts at Northampton Bicycle.

I asked if they had a used crank/chainwheel around that I could use, and they said, “no,” and I said, “What about that one?” And they said, “I don’t know whose that is,” and one of the guys said, “That’s your friend’s. He cracked the left one and didn’t want the cranks to not match,” and the guy said, “Oh, then, $10?” And I said, “Awesome.”

The bolts have been removed because I’m not going to have a front derailleur, so it’ll only have one chain wheel. The nuts, which are a little collar that goes through the space between the chain wheels are too long to work, though, and I hadn’t come up with a solution yet at the time of this picture. There’s a pic of my solution a little further down.

Shifter woes
This turned out to be an unexpected problem: I wanted to use bar-end shifters, but they’re long (longer than they have to be, I think, but hard to modify in that respect), and they have to work within the curve of the bar. I had to find a solution to this for the new bars.

The shifter solution

… and this is the eventual solution! I took after it with a file and just kept shaving off aluminum until it fit.

The end of the bar wound up being at a 15° angle or so. Now that I look at this again, I might take off another big chunk of bar so the shifter body itself becomes the end of the bar, since it sticks out kind of far right now.

Also note the brake levers. $3 for a set of four on Ebay. Hooray!

Derailleur

This is one of the pieces of my dad’s old bike. Everyone loves that bike, but it had too many problems.

My brother has taken the frame, though, and I’ve got the derailleur and a couple of other parts. We’re doing cool stuff with it. Far from being buried behind the barn, it’s being reincarnated as several newer bikes! The spring on the derailleur cable there is an idea taken from his bike, too. It used springs there, but they’re a little too shiny (and one of them’s fucked up) so I ordered some springs from McMaster-Carr and have used them here in a couple of places. I’m pretty sure they can’t be used for brake lines, though; I think they’ll take up slack by straightening, rather than stopping the bike. I’m gonna try one anyway and see if it works.

Drive train

Here’s the drive train in place. Note the bolted chain wheel.

I have some concerns about the long-term viability of that derailleur, unfortunately. Even though it’s a beautiful piece of machinery, it’s not very advanced. It’s built for a 5-speed cluster, max, and that’s a 6 on there. I have a 5-speed cluster, but I’d need to build a wheel around it, which I’ve never done before. So for the time being, it’s a 5-speed with an extra sprocket.

There’s also the issue of the gear ratio. I wanted a big chain wheel on there so I could get ~5:1 gear ratio with an 11-tooth sprocket on the back. The Yellowjacket as a 4:1 and I run out of gears going downhill (and there are a lot of hills here). But this cluster has a 13-tooth, which gives a ratio of 4.07:1. I was looking for a 20% increase in speed and got a 1.7% increase. Pretty fucking weak. So I gotta learn how to build wheels and I gotta keep my eyes open for high speed clusters in the garbage.

Chainwheel/crank solution

This is how I got the chainwheel bolted in: with the power of washers! If I’d been really doing what I should, I’d have cut them down to fit; right now, they rest at an angle. Oh, well!

The bike, so far.
And here she is, with everything but brakes (which, thanks to Ebay, should show up any day).

The tires are Bontrager Road Warriors. They’re 26″ (mountain bike sized) road slicks. They’re very smooth; you can really feel the difference between even a road treaded tire and these. They’re no good in sand or dirt, but as long as you’re on a reasonably clean road, they’re spectacular. The saddle was $15 at the bike shop. I think most bike shops will have saddles that people have swapped out.

Bike, oblique

A little bigger and up-closer.

All that remains is brake installation (C’mon USPS!) and a general up-tightening, wrapping the bars, finding some bolts to fill the water bottle cage mounts, and it’s good to ride! Then the challenge will be not bolting on a bunch of stuff. I mean, if I get a flat on this bike, I’m pretty fucked, since I don’t want to put a saddle bag or pump on, never mind lights or water bottles. I’ll probably stuff a tube under the saddle if it’ll fit, but I’ll have to carry tire levers and a pump in my backpack or something. Since this bike is made for hopping around the city for errands and stuff, I’ll probably be carrying it anyway. I’ll be doing a little detailing with gaffer’s tape, too, on the chain stays, both to add a little black back there and to keep the chain from dinging the clear coat and making rust.

Almost done!

Shock: Going Out and Running Out

Everyone who’s ordered Shock: from me up to today should be receiving their book in the mail in the near future. Sorry it took so long, preorderers; I’ve really only just gotten back on track after Gen Con this week, both with shipping and with the rest of my professional life. Man, that thing takes it out of me.

Let me know if you don’t get your books in the appropriate future! Kaare, this especially means you.

This also means that I should bring up something important: Shock: is almost sold out again! I’ve got 5 copies and IPR has 6 remaining. That’s right, 94 sold in the last four weeks. I could learn to love that! I’ll be doing another print run just as soon as I can, but you know the way these things work. It could be a while. So if you’re planning on playing the game soon, buy a book before they’re gone into the land of hazy printer communications!

Building a Bike from Bits, part 2

Returning from Gen Con means that I get to start working on bikes again!

So, you may remember that about a month ago, I took apart some junker bikes in the hopes that I’d be able to reassemble them with minimal hassle into a single, functioning bike. Well, things are proceeding!

Blue frame
This is the frame I’m using right now, the Novara MTB frame from many moons ago. I’ve taken after it with a steel brush a little to take off the major rust. I’m also starting at it with a can of methylene chloride.

This is what methylene chloride does to paint when things are working well. Unfortunately, not only did it not want to attack most of the primer on the frame, but it was also dissolving my nitrile gloves that were supposed to protect me. The vapors were burning my hand through the glove. Bad scene.

My Lovely Lady decided to have at it with the steel brush. She got the seat stays pretty shiny!

95% of the pait has been removed here, no thanks to the methylene chloride. Sandpaper did an awesome job where nassty chemicalses failed me.

It’s really hard to get paint out of these crevices. It’s right there! Why can’t I reach it? This is why sand blasting is so great.

The frame, all cleaned up. I really like the sanded finish. At one point, I had plans for a blue/black paint scheme, but the raw steel is so cool, I just shot it with clear lacquer. I missed a couple of spots and had to resand and go back over it, but I really like the way it looks.

I didn’t want to go through all that again, though, so the fork got matte black. I was originally going to do the polished metal/matte black on a different bike, but now I’m all excited that this one could actually work out, so I’m at least trying out the scheme here. At least I’ll learn a thing or two about how to make it look good.

Remember how I was complaining about the awful stem that had come on this bike? Not only was it the one-bolt, redo-your-handlebars-anytime-you-change-something variety, but it’s like 10″ long. This odd stem is about 5″ and is correct. If I need to, I can raise it about an inch. It was a happy find. I went to the bike shop, asked if they had any threaded, two-bolt stems, and this is what they came up with out of the back. It was originally polished aluminum, but I sprayed it with the same matte black I did the fork with, leaving the polished front for contrast.

… and that’s the frame with the flip-chopped bullhorns I made out of the original bars. I cut them with a pipe cutter. It was easy. They’re not going to be great bars — I can tell already — but since I got a two-bolt stem, it won’t be a big deal to change them if I find a better pair in the trash. Please ignore that hideous saddle. Since this bike is liable to be used by guests, I have to get a better one. I have too much respect for the groins of my guests to leave that one on there.

Here it is with some wheels on it! It’s going to get some road slicks and, ideally, a single speed chainwheel. That back wheel there is a 6-speed, which is very practical. The front wheel is from the Fiesta De Crap red bike, which oddly I have on there because I think it looks better. The hub is matte black and the rim
is a more geometric shape than the rear one from the Novara. But the back one’s got the gears… so I might wind up swapping casettes if they’re compatible.

So, yeah. The only parts missing now are:

parts that make it go

parts that make it stop

I’ve got Ebay looking for some decent cantilever brakes so I can use the road levers I’ve got, since the guy at Laughing Dog Bikes (nice website there, guys) explained how to make them not suck. So far, the bidding’s gotten up to $3.90! Hooray for obsolete parts! Laughing Dog is great, by the way. Website aside, they’re helpful, friendly, and excited about bikes. I also need a 1- or 2-chainwheel crankset and might ask around for such a thing at the shops. The wheels are both quite messy. They’re sloppy and rusty, but it’s nothing some grease, a little tightning, and some scrubbing won’t fix. I’m half-hoping that the casettes are incompatible so I get to build my first wheel. On the other hand, since I lack the tools to do it properly, maybe I should put that off for a while.

Not as bad as I thought!

Indie RPG Awards

I’d been stupid busy when the Indie RPG awards were actually going out at Gen Con this year, so while I was really happy for the winners, I wasn’t paying that close attention to the standings. It turns out, though, that Shock: was pretty far up there: 6th runner up behind Meg Baker’s 1001 Nights, Fred Hicks’ Don’t Rest Your Head, Jared Sorensen’s Lacuna Part 1, Chat Underkoffler’s Zorcerer of Zo, and Luke Crane’s Burning Empires. Those are all games I’m happy to lose to! In fact, there were few of the 44 entries that I’m not proud to stand beside.

Thanks, John Kim, for running the awards. You’re clearly doing your job well, if those are the games I’m losing to!

Looking Back to Look Forward

There’s something really interesting going on at Fair Game: a retrospective among several of the key players of the Forge Booth about what happened when. See our trials and tribulations! Watch as questionable decisions are made, then recovered from! See as the recriminations and self-doubt of yesteryear turn into laughter and self-mockery!

Over at the Playcollective, we’ll be discussing out own impressions of this year as soon as we’ve got some time to figure out just what happened. It’s a big deal, starting a thing like that, and the results aren’t easy to see, never mind understand.

Bleary Eyes and Smiling Faces

Gen Con was great. The Playcollective succeeded glowingly (though the details of that glowing are debatable — we didn’t make a million billion dollars in solid gold rocket cars, but we made a huge first step, the nature of which we’re just starting to discuss), the Forge did its furious demo and excited customer thing, the Ashcan Front rocked out, and the Burning Dead slung games and donut-based rumors.

The games were great, the friends were greater, and I look forward to seeing everyone again just as soon as possible. Malc, we all miss you already and wish you a year of exploration and adventure, ending here in Western Mass.

No energy for making a headline pic.

When The Only Tool You’ve Got Is A Hammer, Every Problem Looks Like A Nail.

Where’s Cyberpunk?

Around about a year ago, I made a post about my enthusiasm for the work of my friends — largely folks interacting through the Forge, though now that community has been largely pushed out of the nest and into the Playcollective, Story Games, the Ashcan Front, the various Go Play events and the like — and how I thought our group of experimenters benefitted from our mutual encouragement and critique for our varying endeavors in a manner as an artistic movement. One of the things I noted in that post was the incredible power of mutual storytelling where, if the technique is properly refined to the situation, the outcome, far from being chaotic and without direction, can actually be much more powerful and affecting than a single vision. To do this, we devise rules of conduct that, if followed, act as creative constraints that everyone uses to synthesize their visions. These rules don’t always work as intended (typically because the designer made assumptions about what the players knew and understood), but sometimes they do. And when they do, they’re awesome.

From that, you can very safely infer this: some games are awesome. Others are less so. The awesome games do a particular thing — communicating with a certain group of people how to do a certain thing that that group wants to do. Most other games are worse at that — they communicate with a different group of people and/or have a different result (and very often, they neither communicate their rules, nor are the rules effective). And, until a player has played another game that claimed a certain thing that doesn’t do it well— say, trying to play Cyberpunk and wanting speculative fiction — that player will most likely not know precisely what they need to do to make it work. And from that, you can infer this: as a class, old games are not as good as new games. Cyberpunk is an inferior tool for making speculative fiction than Shock: is, GURPS is inferior for making character drama than PTA, and D&D is inferior to Dogs in the Vineyard for telling tales of violence as a moral tool.

They are objectively worse because, when they were designed, they didn’t have the reflection on their own long-term existence to draw on, but then claimed that the players could use them for “anything” — including speculative fiction, character drama, and tales of violence-steeped morality. New editions of such games are patches, not new games; when the error is in a core assumption, you’re not going to fix it by tacking on a system or writing a guideline section. Consequently, D&D’s greatest successes have been when it keeps things close to its core assumptions, and D&D 3+ is a refinement of its character-building-treasure-hunting seems to be just fantastic. But it sure is frustrating to try to use it for Narrativist purposes, as is often done. But the players frustrated with Narrativist play in D&D have paid attention and have written new games that do what they want.

That’s not to say that any given new game is better than a given old game, just like a given new car isn’t better than a given old car, or a given new hammer is better than a given old hammer, but what the new tools lose to the chaos of experiment, the old game never has a chance to even try— assuming it’s stood the test of time in the first place and it wasn’t lost to the same chaos. The design of a new game, like the design of any tool, is a process that starts with critique of the tools from which it evolved.

If you’re unsatisfied with a game you’re playing, figure out where your play falls short from the assumptions up and make what you want. There’s propbably someone else out there who wants what you want. I bet they’d pay to learn how you figured out how to solve that. Maybe they’ll like what you did, but think they can do it better. That’s the way a technology evolves.

And if you are satisfied and enthusiastic about the games you’re playing, awesome.

Starting from Rust

You might remember a little while ago that Vincent and I built him a bike out of, well, out of a bike. It was a lot of fun!

I’ve wanted to have a guest bike for a while so that when people — let’s say, Malcolm Craig — come to visit, we don’t have to drive into town. It’s stupid to drive there. We have a beautiful bike path and bikes run on lunch instead of gasoline. But, of course, bikes are expensive.

But not if you start rummaging. I was given this beauty a month ago or so. It had vines growing through it. Let’s look at some of the highlights, shall we?

Novara Rustpile

The first things to note: the rat trap is not connected to the frame at the top of the seat tube. That’s because the rack has two holes and the frame, one. When I got it, it was attached by a twist tie.

Also, note the 26″ wheels (that’s mountain bike size) with the drop handlebars.

Brakes at their worst.

Hey! Check out those brake shoes! The one on the left there is from a V brake. You know, the kind that works. The one on the right is the correct kind, from a cantalever brake. You know, the kind that doesn’t. In case you’re unfamiliar with these things: this is a cantalever brake.

This used to be a chain.

I think the rust on here is pretty beautiful. Unfortunately, it prevents the chain from bending.

The Heaviest Bike in the Universe.

This fiesta de crap is donating brakes and maybe the bars and shifters. I wanted to chop and flip the Novara’s bars into bullhorn bars, but I can’t seem to combine the brake levers I’ve got with those bars — the original levers will only work on caliper brakes, not cantilever or V — so I might go with the straight bars. I’m torn, though, because of the bar-end shifters on the Novara. I really wanted to have a single bar-end shifter. So I dunno.

Your bike a splode.

So everything comes apart. Notice the evaporated daylight. I can’t find my 5mm hex wrench now.

Monkeys!

That Lady I Like So Much took this pic of me dismantling. I’m trying to get the stupid fucking bars out of the stupid fucking stem. Why did anyone ever think that threading handlebars through was a good idea?

Those tires are total crap and dry-rotted to boot. They’re getting replaced with Bontrager Road Warriors.

I don’t have a picture of it, but not one bolt on the left side of the bike matched its counterpart on the right. One of them was, in fact, a drywall screw.

I’ve been steel brusing off the rust, which has been easier than expected. Once the majority of the rust is off, I’ll take the paint off with some methylene chloride (maybe the nastiest chemical ever created for non-military purposes) and repaint it a deep blue. If this frame were better (and without dents) I’d spray it dark blue, with a black fade underneath to give the paint some depth, then again with a clear gloss. But that’s not for this frame.

(Continued when I’ve got more bike building time.)

The Cupboards are Bare

Out of Shock:

Guys, I’m all out of Shock: 1.0 hardcopy. In fact, I sold one more than I owned (Sorry, Moreno!), so folks who want a stopgap copy of version 1.0 will have to get it by pre-ordering 1.1 through IPR. You can still pre-order 1.1 through me, of course, though you won’t get 1.0 to hold you off until then.

Thanks for all the orders!

Author: Joshua A.C. Newman