I [...]]]> Now that the Harry Potter movies are over, I expect that there are movie executives scrambling around, trying to discover the next big thing. Since young adult books are still popular, I expect that’ll be their focus — perhaps the Hunger Games trilogy or Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series will garner a huge audience.

I have a humble suggestion: why not re-work the Harry Potter series? After all, with a few tweaks I think you could bring in a whole new audience. To that end, I give you a scene from

RICHIE DAWKINS AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE

INT. SHACK BY THE OCEAN – NIGHT

The room in this broken-down shack is dominated by KEMPTID, a giant of a man with an umbrella. He is talking with RICHIE, a young eleven-year-old with round glasses and dark hair.

          KEMPTID
     Y’see, Richie, yer’ a wizard.

          RICHIE
     I’m a what?

          KEMPTID
     A wizard, o’ course, and a thumpin’ good’un, I’d say, once yeh’ve trained up a bit.

          RICHIE
     That makes no logical sense.

          KEMPTID
     What d’yeh mean?

          RICHIE
     Look, there isn’t any such thing as magic. The universe can be perfectly explained by the natural laws of science.

          KEMPTID
          (taken aback)
     But, but yer parents–

          RICHIE
     They died in a car crash.

          KEMPTID
     No. He Who Must Not be Named, a dark wizard, killed ‘em!

          RICHIE
     Really? That’s more plausible than a car crash? There are a little over two thousand car-related deaths per annum in the UK. Do the math.

          KEMPTID
     But…but…all th’ letters, Richie! And I c’n do magic with my umbrella!

          RICHIE
     Any stage magician worth his salt could do the same. Your anti-scientific flim-flammery will find no toehold with me, sir. Now shove off. I’ve got a perfectly mundane life as a friendless orphan to live.

–

I’m not sure how to spin this out into eight movies, though. Perhaps I should have taken the approach that Eliezer Yudkowsky took for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

As a sign of my unhealthy fascination with the Space Core, I spliced a number of its lines together into a 30-second sound file that [...]]]> I loved the game Portal 2 for its gameplay, story, and especially its writing. One of my favorite bits was the Space Core, a computer personality who was fixated on space.

As a sign of my unhealthy fascination with the Space Core, I spliced a number of its lines together into a 30-second sound file that is suitable for being a ringtone. Now your phone can talk about going into space! You can grab either the mp3 file for Android or similar phones or the m4r file for iPhones.

Fiasco is a role-playing game that re-creates neo-noir stories like those found in Coen Brothers movies. Given my history with small-town universities, I couldn’t resist creating a Fiasco setting based on one.

Universities are strange places, and small town universities even more [...]]]> While I was away dodging weather, my “Town and Gown” playset for Fiasco came out!

Fiasco is a role-playing game that re-creates neo-noir stories like those found in Coen Brothers movies. Given my history with small-town universities, I couldn’t resist creating a Fiasco setting based on one.

Universities are strange places, and small town universities even more so. Faculty fight viciously with each other because the stakes are so low. Students grub for grades, or give up and drift through school. Townies hate the school, but it’s the only thing keeping the town alive, and many of them go to school part-time.

Given the pressure and the fault lines that run deep beneath, it’s no wonder that sometimes cracks appear.

I learned a lot about writing a Fiasco playset in the process, much of it thanks to feedback from Jason Morningstar, creator of Fiasco. The trickiest part was getting relationships right. Because of how you generate a Fiasco setup, all relationships have to work with all other ones. My first draft had people playing faculty members, students, and townies. That led to some odd potential contradictions: what if two people had a relationship that indicated they were faculty members, but one of those two had a second relationship that indicated they were students? That’s why many Fiasco playsets carefully segregate the relationships into non-exclusive groups such as family members, people who work together, people who know each other through hobbies, etc. In my case, once I made the default assumption that all of the players were students, I could much more easily put together relationships that meshed well.

(You can break this rule, of course. Jason’s Lucky Strike playset assumes that everyone’s an American soldier in World War II. There’s a set of special-case relationships, like “German prisoner of war and guard”, that break this assumption. They’re grouped together and labeled “use with care” to help players realize that they’ll have to work harder if they want to incorporate these relationships.)

I had fun mixing very specific and more gonzo elements (like the “Neophyte Marxist revolutionaries” relationship or the truly unfortunate object “a roomate who died”) with more prosaic and simple ones (like the cafeteria and coffee shop, or the thirty-ought-six rifle). I hinted at possible story lines for players to run with: there are suggestions that something unsavory is up with the local YMCA, that bad things have been going down at the gravel pit down by the river, and that the town mayor may not be on the up-and-up. Even if the elements related to those story lines aren’t used in a game, they tend to inform players’ choices and vision of what the university and surrounding town are like. I chose a couple of elements to refer to multiple times, because I like claustrophobic Fiasco settings. I also spent a lot of time thinking, “How can this relationship, need, location or object be troublesome?” That lent the playset a seedy, sinister undertone that I really like.

“Town and Gown” is free to download and guaranteed to cause quite a fiasco.

Judgement Day wasn’t always in 2011. The movie Terminator originally claimed that Judgement Day [...]]]> People have been gleefully pointing out all day that today, 21 April 2011, is the date of Judgement Day, when Skynet comes online and kills us all. That, of course, is the date given in the TV show “The Sarah Connor Chronicles”.

Judgement Day wasn’t always in 2011. The movie Terminator originally claimed that Judgement Day would come on August 29, 1997. Successive movies and TV shows have happily moved the goalposts.

It occurs to me that Judgement Day is a lot like various Christian sects claiming that Rapture is coming on a given date. They typically climb a mountain and wait for God to take them away, only to have nothing happen. So: is Judgement Day the nerd version of Rapture?

Also, Rapture came on 21 August 2007, in case you weren’t watching:

Given her love of DV, I wonder what the future holds for Liza. I’m guessing it’ll be something [...]]]> A while ago we watched the original Star Wars movie with Eli and Liza. Liza especially was entranced. “There’s Darth Vader!” she said excitedly when he strode onto the rebel ship for the first time. “Listen! He’s breeeeeathing.”

Given her love of DV, I wonder what the future holds for Liza. I’m guessing it’ll be something like this: