Author: Joshua A.C. Newman

The Hr.Ms. Mercurius

Hr.Ms. Mercurius in Lego

Above is the Hr.Ms. Mercurius, a (completely fictional, though named after an actual) 17th c. Dutch sailing vessel. Judd saw some earlier prototypes, but honestly the other ones are really primitive in comparison. They lacked a mizzenmast (the most sternward mast) over the poop deck* and were overall much clumsier in appearance.

I realize that the sails don’t make a lot of sense just yet; some of them put others in their lee. Some pictures I’ve been looking at seem to imply that that’s OK. I don’t know. I suspect that talking to actual sailors might help. Fortunately, I know some. Maybe next time I’m at home.

You’ll note there’s really nowhere to put crew markers. My original intent was to have them be little markers you move around the ship physically, but I think that it’s a pipe dream that would require bigger ships, which would require more table space. More likely, there will be a Lego plate with dots on them: yellow dots represent Sailors, red dots represent Marines, maybe black dots represent Cannon. Maybe you have a dot with a big hat and a fancy coat that represents the captain.

Check out this very interesting article on shipboard combat. It supports the offense/defense comments I made in the last post, too.

*Hee hee hee!

Like Eagles on the Sea

Trafalgar

I grew up in Newport, RI, the home of a lot of sailing history — the White Horse Tavern down the street from my house was a Revolutionary hangout run by pirates and Captain Cook’s Endeavour lies at the floor of the harbor (as well as lots of other interesting ships of varying origins), and the frigate Rose, which played the part of the HMS Surprise in Master and Commander was a frequenter of our harbor when I was a kid. I’ve always thought that sailing stuff is interesting, but I don’t know how to sail, myself (which isn’t to say that I haven’t done what I’ve been told on friends’ boats and felt very important for doing it). I have little bits and pieces, and I love watching yacht races like the America’s Cup, but I only barely understand what’s going on and how it works.

But I aim to change that. I’ve wanted a game of Tall Ship pursuit for a long time and I’m just starting to formulate one.

Continue reading “Like Eagles on the Sea”

War Tank on One Wheel Operated by One Man

Fighting wars... with fun!
It’s been a while since I posted some Minutiæ from the real world, but I’m gonna get back in the swing of things with this awesomeness from the evercool Modern Mechanix weblog. This particular oddity makes it look fun to fight a war! The best part is that the thing is a giant wheel, but it has these legs in the front that it uses to vault over obstacles, presumably like barbed wire and trenches.
Big Wheel is unfortunately not interviewed in the article.
Hey, can you imagine how loud it must be in there? I mean, aside from being inside the cabin with the engine, your head is at the center of two parabolic dishes that focus the noise on your ears. Also, please note that you can steer or shoot. Why did it take so long to put the triggers on the steering apparatus of vehicles?

Vaya con Reptoids

The Hidden Masters

Robert Anton Wilson just died. It’s sad, despite his wishes. I’ve loved his writing since I was a teenager and had just discovered Illuminatus! and Cosmic Trigger. He was a friend of Timothy Leary, Anton X. LeVey, Philip K. Dick, and lots of others from that crowd.

He’s the source of my skepticism and the reason I find it so beautiful. In the front flap of Shock: there’s a paean to Doubt, the source of learning. That’s a perspective I gained from him. His indulgence in the ridiculous was an exercise to see how much of the ridiculous was true, and how much perceived truth was just a somber mask over absurd reality.

He was a wild experimenter with his own nervous system, taking LSD every day for decades. He was a week short of 75, having survived polio as a child and considering every day to be an opportunity for a new perspective on life.

Don't believe.

Alphagraphics: Worst Printer Ever, or Worst Printer Possible?

Alphagraphics Fucks Up
My experience with Alphagraphics has been just awful and won’t frickin’ stop. They won’t send me my refund check now until I ship back the books that they got me two months late and have IPR do the same. And they didn’t tell me this. I had to call and ask why I didn’t have a refund yet. And leave a message. Now I’m supposed to call their accounting department and figure out how stuff’s supposed to be shipped to them.
They company is just terrible. Lemme say it again so Google can hear: My experience with Alphagraphics has been uniformly terrible. It’s been expensive, time-consuming, and fraught with amateur errors on their part.

So it turns out they’ve been waiting for me to return the books to them on my own dime. And neglecting to tell me that the whole time.

I have never had a poorer experience with a printer than I have with Alphagraphics. They have cocked up every single element of this job. It has taken them three months to get me a reprint of 100 copies. Then, despite assurances and requests, they ship it by, I dunno, dogsled or something so it arrives two weeks later than their already two months late.

Then, when I ask for a refund, they apparently expected me to a) wait for the books to show up and b) instruct IPR to repackage them and send them back at their expense while I do the same with my copies.

Seriously, it’s like they’ve got monkeys running the company. And they’re not particularly bright monkeys. We’re not talking apes; I could trust my printing to a bonobo and get better results. No, we’re talking tamarins at best. And those monkeys have cost me a lot of money. Unlike other tamarins I’ve met.
So, some advice: never, ever use Alphagraphics. I’m truly, genuinely amazed that such a company can exist. May their assets be purchased by an organization with a little more professional pride.

(I just edited the previous post, which I thought I’d lost, into this one for brevity and not-harp-on-it-like-a-crazymanness.)

The Core of the Houdini Thing

From The Secret Life of Houdini: The Making of America’s First Superhero by William Kalush and Larry Sloman:

One particularly alluring performer was the beautiful Evatima Tardo, who would allow herself to be bitten on her bare shoulder by a rattlesnake, be impaled on a makeshift cross, and have her face and neck used as a cushion for dozens of pins. Her amazing tolerance for pain and resistance to poison came from an incident in her childhood in Cuba where she was bitten by a fer-de-lance, the most poisonous snake in the hemisphere. Houdini was smitten both by her beauty and her showmanship; while undergoing some of these tortures, she would blithely laugh and sing. Her end was grisly, however. Although immune to pain and poison, she fell victim to love and bullets, dying in a double-murder-suicide love triangle.

I can’t find any pics of this fascinating character. A tragedy. So, imagine, if you will, a fiction game in which the protagonists are each a performer in a wandering troupe. Maybe they’re a circus, or maybe they’re a traveling family. But two things we know for sure: they’re almost supernaturally competent at what they can do, and they’re jealous, angry, in love with, and fearful of each other in varying proportions.

First run around the barn will use The Mountain Witch‘s very elegant rules. Things will evolve as required, I’m sure.

It’s A Long Way From Kung Fu Grip.

Action Reporter

The Houdini thing below is having its first protoplaytest in a couple of weeks. We’ll see how that goes. But there’s one other project I’m excited about that I forgot to mention. It’s about war journalism in the era of the citizen journalist, the blogger. The date is 15 years from now. The civil war has entered your town. Some of your friends took up arms. You took up a cellphone camera and a secure server. The inspirations are Max Headroom and DMZ. The concept’s got a lot to be worked out, but most of the game will likely have to do with dealing with information suppression and figuring out how to make and fight propaganda.

In the interest of that, check out the war reporter action figure pictured at the top of this post. Think about how cool it is that there’s an action figure who comes with a camera and laptop. Notice that you can stick different logos on the camera to subtly distinguish your perspective on the war and its reporting.