From Brooklyn Arden via my fraternity mailing list: Baby Got Book.
I've got a few minor quibbles with the song, but props for the effort.
Defaults
11 years ago
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Nice Guys' fantasies about women's fantasies about non-Nice Guys
BetaCandy at my new favorite feminist-media blog The Hathor Legacy points out that the misogynist who gets the girls is a male fantasy:
I’ve been thinking about this character I see on screen everywhere. He’s mean to women. The women know they’re being mistreated. And yet they can’t get enough of being used and abused by him.
He doesn’t exist.
Let’s just dispel that myth right away. As presented in TV and film, he doesn’t correlate to anyone in reality. He’s actually a fantasy concocted by male screenwriters who have issues with women.
As straightforward as the explanation is, though, I have a feeling most Nice Guys(TM) won't buy it, because there's another meme that goes around that What Women Say They Want and What Women Really Want are unconnected. "Look at [Attractive Bad Boy] on [Popular Show]!" they cry. "It's not just the characters that are attracted to him; the fans are too!" (Of course, the fact that the Attractive Bad Boy is virtually always played by the most conventionally attractive actor on Popular Show has nothing to do with this.)
I’ve been thinking about this character I see on screen everywhere. He’s mean to women. The women know they’re being mistreated. And yet they can’t get enough of being used and abused by him.
He doesn’t exist.
Let’s just dispel that myth right away. As presented in TV and film, he doesn’t correlate to anyone in reality. He’s actually a fantasy concocted by male screenwriters who have issues with women.
As straightforward as the explanation is, though, I have a feeling most Nice Guys(TM) won't buy it, because there's another meme that goes around that What Women Say They Want and What Women Really Want are unconnected. "Look at [Attractive Bad Boy] on [Popular Show]!" they cry. "It's not just the characters that are attracted to him; the fans are too!" (Of course, the fact that the Attractive Bad Boy is virtually always played by the most conventionally attractive actor on Popular Show has nothing to do with this.)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Drama stars
There's an interesting set of discussions going on at Tales of the Rampant Coyote and Blog of War about how to crack the save game problem, that problem specifically being that, in a situation where the outcome is dependent on a roll of the virtual dice, players will save and restore until they get the desired outcome. Sometimes it doesn't actually involve a save game - lots of old school RPGs encouraged obsessive-compulsive rerolling of stats and balanced the game accordingly.
I've done this before, Fallout 2 being the most egregious example to come to mind. There, I played my typical scientist/diplomat main character (because I like having as many dialogue options as possible), only to find out that, unlike the first game, you can't talk your way out of most fights. So instead, I just did a lot of save-scumming, restoring the game on a per-combat-round basis, to get through the tougher fights.
There have been plenty of methods employed to limit this behavior, the most common being save points, prerolling and "roguelike" saves (i.e., where quitting automatically saves, saving automatically quits, and dying forces you to start over). Save points are often annoying because they parcel out the game into chunks that aren't always manageable (if I have 20 minutes of free time, there's little point in playing a game that spaces the save points around 30 minutes apart), and because they can give away the pacing of the game. Prerolling involves making decisions involving randomness far in advance of when they would actually be checked - for example, determining the contents of a treasure chest at the start of a level rather than when the chest is opened. If the player wants to try for better treasure, he or she will have to replay the entire level. This works tolerably well for something like treasure, but not at all for something like combat, where there's not much way to determine outcomes in advance. Roguelike saves work for roguelikes because those games involve randomly generated content; for a story game, replaying the beginning stages will quickly become repetitious.
The Rampant Coyote has come up with an alternative mechanism to discourage save-scumming: "drama stars." These work analogously to the "drama points" used by many tabletop RPGs - if you engage in what the game deems risky behavior (e.g., "dangerous" dialog choices, and presumably anything requiring a nontrivial skill check with consequences for failure) or when bad things happen (e.g., a character getting knocked out or killed in battle), you accumulate "drama stars" which can be redeemed for in-game benefits like reviving a fallen character.
The system reminds me of a variation I thought up a while back of a battle system proposed by Shamus Young for lightsaber duelling, wherein the concept of "hit points" was stupid (nobody gets scratched by a lightsaber). My system had various types of analogues for hit points, from armor that took damage to magic potions that wore off over time (I aimed for "interesting" and "varied" more than "realistic"), but the version that applied here was a character whose survival was based on "luck." "Luck" was a kind of RNG karma; unlucky circumstances (e.g., failing to hit an opponent) would build up karma and lucky ones would build karma. Enemy attacks, however, would always miss, using up karma dependent on the likelihood of hitting and the ferocity of the attack, until the character's luck ran out. Under such a system, you don't want to be the golden boy/girl who succeeds all the time, because that'll deplete your karma and you'll lose faster. (I'm not sure how one "recharges" one's fortune - perhaps going to a casino in town and losing money?)
The tricky bit in the "drama stars" system, though, and the one that really discourages save-scumming, is this: drama stars aren't saved. You restore your game, you're back at 0. Thus it's arguably better to play out poor consequences, because the drama stars earned more than negate those effects. However, this creates a new challenge: how do you maintain game balance when some players play in 20-minute "coffee breaks" and others play marathon sessions? One suggestion in the comments was to allow a "progress save" that works like a roguelike save - you want to stop playing, you save and exit, and when you come back your stars are intact. If you restore any other save, though, you're back at 0.
All in all, it's an interesting concept, and I can't wait to see more about Frayed Knights. (Why does this sort of thing only seem to show up in indie-game discussions, anyway?)
I've done this before, Fallout 2 being the most egregious example to come to mind. There, I played my typical scientist/diplomat main character (because I like having as many dialogue options as possible), only to find out that, unlike the first game, you can't talk your way out of most fights. So instead, I just did a lot of save-scumming, restoring the game on a per-combat-round basis, to get through the tougher fights.
There have been plenty of methods employed to limit this behavior, the most common being save points, prerolling and "roguelike" saves (i.e., where quitting automatically saves, saving automatically quits, and dying forces you to start over). Save points are often annoying because they parcel out the game into chunks that aren't always manageable (if I have 20 minutes of free time, there's little point in playing a game that spaces the save points around 30 minutes apart), and because they can give away the pacing of the game. Prerolling involves making decisions involving randomness far in advance of when they would actually be checked - for example, determining the contents of a treasure chest at the start of a level rather than when the chest is opened. If the player wants to try for better treasure, he or she will have to replay the entire level. This works tolerably well for something like treasure, but not at all for something like combat, where there's not much way to determine outcomes in advance. Roguelike saves work for roguelikes because those games involve randomly generated content; for a story game, replaying the beginning stages will quickly become repetitious.
The Rampant Coyote has come up with an alternative mechanism to discourage save-scumming: "drama stars." These work analogously to the "drama points" used by many tabletop RPGs - if you engage in what the game deems risky behavior (e.g., "dangerous" dialog choices, and presumably anything requiring a nontrivial skill check with consequences for failure) or when bad things happen (e.g., a character getting knocked out or killed in battle), you accumulate "drama stars" which can be redeemed for in-game benefits like reviving a fallen character.
The system reminds me of a variation I thought up a while back of a battle system proposed by Shamus Young for lightsaber duelling, wherein the concept of "hit points" was stupid (nobody gets scratched by a lightsaber). My system had various types of analogues for hit points, from armor that took damage to magic potions that wore off over time (I aimed for "interesting" and "varied" more than "realistic"), but the version that applied here was a character whose survival was based on "luck." "Luck" was a kind of RNG karma; unlucky circumstances (e.g., failing to hit an opponent) would build up karma and lucky ones would build karma. Enemy attacks, however, would always miss, using up karma dependent on the likelihood of hitting and the ferocity of the attack, until the character's luck ran out. Under such a system, you don't want to be the golden boy/girl who succeeds all the time, because that'll deplete your karma and you'll lose faster. (I'm not sure how one "recharges" one's fortune - perhaps going to a casino in town and losing money?)
The tricky bit in the "drama stars" system, though, and the one that really discourages save-scumming, is this: drama stars aren't saved. You restore your game, you're back at 0. Thus it's arguably better to play out poor consequences, because the drama stars earned more than negate those effects. However, this creates a new challenge: how do you maintain game balance when some players play in 20-minute "coffee breaks" and others play marathon sessions? One suggestion in the comments was to allow a "progress save" that works like a roguelike save - you want to stop playing, you save and exit, and when you come back your stars are intact. If you restore any other save, though, you're back at 0.
All in all, it's an interesting concept, and I can't wait to see more about Frayed Knights. (Why does this sort of thing only seem to show up in indie-game discussions, anyway?)
Jeff should really go to sleep
Sometimes it feels like everyone else out there has a textbook to life with all the theorems explained, and I just got a handful of axioms and have to derive the rest. Except that the textbook was put out by a less than competent publisher, and is rife with confusing language and out-and-out errors, so I really am better off figuring it all out myself, even if I make the occasional mistake and spend a lot of time reinventing the wheel.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Don't be That Guy
Via tekanji: synecdochic (whom I discovered through this post on being sex positive in the wake of the OSBP explosion), has a post about not being That Guy:
I thought: hey, good post. And then I stopped myself. Because fucking hell, those parameters -- though nicely stated and I'm really glad the guy has both figured them out so early and can articulate them so well -- shouldn't be something that's so rare. They should be standard default operating assumptions.
I particularly appreciated this bit of advice, which I hadn't thought of before:
And if you see a man and a woman having an interaction and the woman's displaying those signs -- backing up, pulling away, looking away, her mouth smiling politely but her eyes nowhere near the person she's talking with -- the way to gracefully stage a rescue is to step in from a distance (not in her space, not within touching distance of her) and distract the guy by striking up a conversation with him, not with her. That gives her the chance to slip away if she feels the need, with less of a chance of making her feel more threatened. (Not no chance, sadly. But less of one.)
I see this happen pretty often (especially riding the bus - women riding alone get singled out for being chatted up just about any time they're not actively avoiding it). The best response I could think of on my own was frown power, because I really didn't want to take it upon myself to interfere for fear of coming off as a "white knight," and I didn't trust myself to read the interaction right. Even now, I'm not sure what my intervention threshold in such a situation would be--especially given that the particular accoster I'm thinking of has in the past tried to start conversations with me when there wasn't a single woman to hit on, and wouldn't take "I'm sorry, I'd like to read my book" as a hint to back off - it's selfish, but I fear that if I do that I won't have a moment's peace again (then again, I'll be changing bus lines in a month when I move)--but it's nice to have more recourse than just saying "dude, that's not cool."
I thought: hey, good post. And then I stopped myself. Because fucking hell, those parameters -- though nicely stated and I'm really glad the guy has both figured them out so early and can articulate them so well -- shouldn't be something that's so rare. They should be standard default operating assumptions.
I particularly appreciated this bit of advice, which I hadn't thought of before:
And if you see a man and a woman having an interaction and the woman's displaying those signs -- backing up, pulling away, looking away, her mouth smiling politely but her eyes nowhere near the person she's talking with -- the way to gracefully stage a rescue is to step in from a distance (not in her space, not within touching distance of her) and distract the guy by striking up a conversation with him, not with her. That gives her the chance to slip away if she feels the need, with less of a chance of making her feel more threatened. (Not no chance, sadly. But less of one.)
I see this happen pretty often (especially riding the bus - women riding alone get singled out for being chatted up just about any time they're not actively avoiding it). The best response I could think of on my own was frown power, because I really didn't want to take it upon myself to interfere for fear of coming off as a "white knight," and I didn't trust myself to read the interaction right. Even now, I'm not sure what my intervention threshold in such a situation would be--especially given that the particular accoster I'm thinking of has in the past tried to start conversations with me when there wasn't a single woman to hit on, and wouldn't take "I'm sorry, I'd like to read my book" as a hint to back off - it's selfish, but I fear that if I do that I won't have a moment's peace again (then again, I'll be changing bus lines in a month when I move)--but it's nice to have more recourse than just saying "dude, that's not cool."
2008 Nebula winners
Congrats to the 2008 Nebula Award Winners!
I feel a bit out of the loop, as I've only read/seen the really mass-appeal ones (Harry Potter and Pan's Labyrinth). I've seen The Yiddish Policemen's Union in the bookstores, but placed in general fiction it had the appearance of your typically pretentious modern-lit. I'll probably check it out soon from the library, as I've been reading that sort of thing a bit more of late.
Apparently the short story and novella winners are available online at Asimov's, so I'll probably read them soon as well.
I feel a bit out of the loop, as I've only read/seen the really mass-appeal ones (Harry Potter and Pan's Labyrinth). I've seen The Yiddish Policemen's Union in the bookstores, but placed in general fiction it had the appearance of your typically pretentious modern-lit. I'll probably check it out soon from the library, as I've been reading that sort of thing a bit more of late.
Apparently the short story and novella winners are available online at Asimov's, so I'll probably read them soon as well.
And all we got when I was there was TMBG
I don't know if this is awesome or horrible.
Brown Daily Herald: Gunther, Sunshine Girls 'Tra la la' audience
Brown Daily Herald: Gunther, Sunshine Girls 'Tra la la' audience
Friday, April 25, 2008
Namesakes
Apparently the old Adam West Batman show had a supervillain called the Bookworm (played by Roddy McDowall), whose lair was a library, whose henchmen were named Printer's Devil, Typesetter, and Pressman, and whose power was to read books in a matter of seconds, giving him the knowledge of all recorded criminal plots.
How cool is that?
Of course, this being the 60s Batman, he merely speaks in quotations and leaves Riddler-esque literary clues to his crimes.
For a darker, more modern twist on the literary-minded supervillain, there's Tatterfiend from Madness: Minority of One, a (regrettably incomplete) Justice League fanfic.
EDIT: From derspatchel come these links to the cute and hilarious "The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman":
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZJXUkSy45Y
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBRoGduSv9A
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpZFucWSk6g
How cool is that?
Of course, this being the 60s Batman, he merely speaks in quotations and leaves Riddler-esque literary clues to his crimes.
For a darker, more modern twist on the literary-minded supervillain, there's Tatterfiend from Madness: Minority of One, a (regrettably incomplete) Justice League fanfic.
EDIT: From derspatchel come these links to the cute and hilarious "The Amazing Adventures of Little Batman":
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZJXUkSy
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nBRoGduS
Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CpZFucWS
The 50 best cult books
The Telegraph lists the 50 best cult books.
Whenever there's a list like this, I like to construct a histogram from the list. For series, I'm arbitrarily using the date of the first book in the series.
1700-1799 **
1800-1899 ****
1910-1919 *
1920-1929 **
1930-1939 **
1940-1949 ****
1950-1959 ********
1960-1969 ***********
1970-1979 **********
1980-1989 **
1990-1999 ***
2000-2008 *
Unsurprisingly, like every other such list it approximates a bell curve, this one peaking in the 60s. (That early bump is an artifact of condensing the 18th and 19th centuries.) While the argument can be made that that era was more conducive to these sorts of books catching on, I think what we're seeing here is a skew from the compilers of the list and society in general. This peak corresponds to the postadolescence of the Baby Boomers. Cult books from previous generations are largely forgotten; cult books from later generations haven't attained the same level of sustained notoriety.
Commenters have pointed out some of the more egregious omissions, and I think it's telling that (at least among the ones I agree with, which is admittedly biasing things), they're either more modern works that haven't gotten credit (Fight Club, Trainspotting), or genre works (Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings).
Whenever there's a list like this, I like to construct a histogram from the list. For series, I'm arbitrarily using the date of the first book in the series.
1700-1799 **
1800-1899 ****
1910-1919 *
1920-1929 **
1930-1939 **
1940-1949 ****
1950-1959 ********
1960-1969 ***********
1970-1979 **********
1980-1989 **
1990-1999 ***
2000-2008 *
Unsurprisingly, like every other such list it approximates a bell curve, this one peaking in the 60s. (That early bump is an artifact of condensing the 18th and 19th centuries.) While the argument can be made that that era was more conducive to these sorts of books catching on, I think what we're seeing here is a skew from the compilers of the list and society in general. This peak corresponds to the postadolescence of the Baby Boomers. Cult books from previous generations are largely forgotten; cult books from later generations haven't attained the same level of sustained notoriety.
Commenters have pointed out some of the more egregious omissions, and I think it's telling that (at least among the ones I agree with, which is admittedly biasing things), they're either more modern works that haven't gotten credit (Fight Club, Trainspotting), or genre works (Stranger in a Strange Land, Lord of the Rings).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
