Ferrett's Stupid Nail Tricks: The Latest Nail-Related Weirdness

“Your salon really does love finding new and interesting polishes, doesn’t it?” asked Little_ribbit.  To which my response was, “Replace ‘salon’ with ‘me.'”
Basically, if it’s new and crazy, I want it on my nails.  (Next up: Nail wraps from Espionage Cosmetics.  Nebula, Circuit Board, Steampunk, Time Lord, Zombie Killer.)

Would You Like To Read About A Masturbating Wizard? Who Wouldn't?

Alex Shvartsman’s second Unidentified Funny Objects anthology is out today, featuring stories by some of the funniest guys in SF.  I am not in this edition, proving that Alex has improved his taste since the first book.
But the second book has some slam-dunk authors in it, like Ken Liu, Robert Silverberg, Jim Hines, and Mike Resnick.  I anticipate it’s gonna be full of clever, funny stories, as the last book was.  And to whet your appetite for this book, I’m linking to my rather bizarre story from UFO 1, “One-Hand Tantra,” about a man who casts spells by…
…well, I’ll just give you the opener.

“The path of most wizards is solitary,” Loefwyn’s father had told him when his power had first manifested itself. “Your path, my dearest and only child, is more solitary still.”
To this day, Loefwyn wished he had never become a masturbatician.
As his father had promised, Loefwyn’s singular sex magic had given him a decent living. He’d just scraped up enough cash to build the obligatory wizard’s tower, a ribbed rock column jutting up to advertise his unique talents. Masturbaticians were rare, effective ones even more so . . . and both Loefwyn and his spells were potent indeed. Intrigued merchants dropped by to witness the town’s newest oddity–even as they hesitated to shake his hand.
Now, royalty–minor, vicious royalty, but royalty still–had hired him. Enspell Griselda the One-Eyed, and Loefwyn’s success was all but guaranteed.

You can read the whole thing here – and if you like that, then buy the new book.  If you don’t like it, then assume that they’ve gotten much better at filtering out things like this and buy the new book.

Creative Solutions, Or: I Bet That's Why That Guy Had $12 Million In The First Place

From the obituary of Robert Taylor:
“Robert Taylor knew he had a winning idea for a product the moment he thought of it.  Looking at the mess a bar of soap had left on his bathroom sink, he spotted a gap in the market for a bottled liquid soap dispensed by a pump. Realizing bigger companies would quickly copy his idea, he borrowed $12 million – every penny his business was worth – and ordered 100 million little plastic pumps from US manufacturers, creating a back order so huge that no rival could buy pumps for at least a year.”
Props to you, Robert Taylor.

The I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon

Just a reminder: the I-Shoulda-Seen-That-By-Now Movie Marathon is next Saturday, at our house.  The ISSTBN Marathon is a long-standing tradition, where people gather to watch movies that they feel guilty about having gotten to this fine age without having seen.
(Someone always tries to go, “Well, there’s this movie I love…”  No.  This is about films you have not seen.)
My choice for this upcoming film festival: Clue, which I feel guilty about not because I feel it’s a great movie (I don’t think it is), but rather because I feel that as a former Rocky Horror-obsessed lad, I should have seen Tim Curry in all of his best roles.  Our pal Lucy is seeing The Wrath of Khan because Jesus Christ, don’t you know you don’t get your soul until you’ve watched Kirk and Spock battle Ricardo Montalban?  And Mel wants to watch Flashdance, which I’m not entirely sure how she feels guilty about not seeing it, but then again she’s a girl who loves Dirty Dancing and I assume there’s something about estrogen and 80s dance movies that is like an Innsmouth call to the deep.
So if you’re local and feel like watching, the rules are at our Evite, and just lemme know that you’re attending.  I feel like we need a couple of dramas, or at least a movie produced somewhere outside of the “1982 to 1985” range that we’re currently sporting, so all film lovers are welcome and loved as long as they choose a good movie.
A good movie, mind you.  I chose My Dinner With Andre the last time.  I’ll let the Doctor speak for me on that choice.

Is The Dog Whisperer Doing Some Weird Kind Of Good?

I didn’t expect a post on Cesar Millan to be the hot discussion of the month, but lots of people weighed in on what a jerk Cesar is.  The Dog Whisperer’s training is barbaric and unscientific! people cried, just before LiveJournal’s automated spam-handlers blocked their frothing anti-Millan links.  He’s harmful!  He’s propagating horrible disinformation about how dogs behave!
All true.  Cesar’s concept of “the pack” is actually hokum.  The study that came to the conclusion that “dogs have a strict hierarchy” was from putting different groups of unrelated, captive wolves into a pen and letting them battle it out, which is kind of like throwing various families into a lightless prison and assuming their behavior is normal.  As it turns out, there’s an alpha dog when they’re jammed together into a survival mode found nowhere in nature, but in real life wolves tend to travel in family structures.  The dogs follow their parents because their parents have been proven to be responsible.
So Cesar is peddling theories that don’t play any more.  And I’m fully willing to admit that his habit of throat-punching dogs to get their attention probably isn’t for the best, as is his theory that if a dog is scared, you “flood” the dog with his terror so he gets used to it.
Yet still, Cesar’s helped me.  His thoughts on why dogs bark may be completely akimbo, but his practical advice of “Don’t yell, just stay calm and show the dog that there’s nothing to worry about” got Shasta to bark a lot less.
And I think Cesar’s helped a lot of people, by disseminating a real truth that most of Cesar’s foes tend to overlook: as the world’s most popular dog trainer, the constant and enduring lesson of every one of his shows is, if the dog behaves badly, it’s your fault.  You are providing improper feedback for the dog.
Which is really valuable.  Thanks to Cesar, when Shasta misbehaves, I don’t get mad at her – I wonder what I could be doing better.  Which makes me less likely to mistreat her, or get frustrated.  And maybe the feedback that Cesar tells me to provide is wrong, but that conceptual shift that “It’s my job to show her what to do” is such a change that it has all sorts of behavioral fallout for me.  It’s not the damn dog, it’s the damn me.
Which is something that gets overlooked a lot.  Not to mention that Cesar’s popularity brings professional dog trainers to the fore, and makes people more likely to seek them out, thus maximizing the chance that someone will find a dog trainer who goes, “Oh God no, don’t listen to that fool.”  For all that people hate Cesar, he’s actually doing a lot of good that gets overlooked.
This isn’t a defense of Cesar.  I’m just fascinated by how complex life is.  This is a case where a self-taught dog “expert” got catapulted to the fore by virtue of working with some celebrities, and while he’s spreading some horrible habits among dog owners, quietly he’s also propagating a set of tools that’s also genuinely helpful to dogs.  And I think that as people, we tend to go, “This is good!” or “This is bad!”, in most cases it’s a weirdly mixed bag where yeah, you wish that Cesar wasn’t as popular as he was because he’s got some really toxic effects, but on the other hand if nobody had heard of Cesar Millan then a lot of people would still be blaming their dogs and not themselves.
It’s not all good, or all bad.  It’s this weird, “Well, kinda….” where I think that if you’re honest, you look at it and find it hard to nail it down exactly what sort of effect this all has.
Life’s messy.  Just like our dogs.

Would I Have Supported The Government Shutdown?

Well, the government is down to life support at this point, and the only people happy about it seem to be Tea Party members.  The rest of the world sees this as a massive dysfunction of our politics, but the dyed-in-the-wool conservatives look at this rebellion against a Congressional vote, an electorial referendum, and a Supreme Court ruling as a noble stance.  Obamacare will ruin America if it’s passed.  Nothing is more important than stopping this hazardous and poorly-engineered law.  Thus, they’re pulling out all the stops to shut this down.
…which is really what I wanted when Iraq and the Patriot Act went on the table. I bashed the spineless Democrats for rolling over to Dubya, was infuriated that they didn’t put up any major resistance to what turned out to be legitimately terrible intel and lawmaking (provided, may I remind you, largely by Republicans), and felt impotent as the Dems donned their patriot flags and went along with it.
In fact, the one guy who didn’t flow with the crowd wound up being President.  And though he turned out to be almost every bit the warmaker and privacy-destroyer that Bush was, the fact that he refused to support Iraq was a major component in him getting elected.
So what if the Democrats had some blood in them, and had forced a government shutdown in the Senate?  Would I have been cheering?
I know I would have, at least initially.  It would have felt good to see my guys making a big fuss about how awful the Patriot Act was, and to not fund a damn dime until Bush and company told us exactly where all their intel was coming from.  It would have been a deeply unpopular move, but in retrospect it would have been the right thing – to bring the focus to the American people.  And doubtlessly, every Republican in the world would have called the Democrats terrorists (which, you know, is a term they bristle at when they’re dismantling the government and literally killing children with their holdups), and talked about how unpatriotic they all were, and I don’t doubt they would have gotten a free pass from the media.
Yet as time went on, and the costs of the shutdown became apparent – my friends out of work, the damage it’s doing to the next generation of government (remember when getting a government job meant bad pay in exchange for security? that’s gone), the hurt poor, the threat of defaulting on loans – I’m positive I would have backed off.  Because there’s two things in this:
1)  Holding our breath and shutting everything down to stop this war would be, in some ways, more costly than the war itself.
2)  Even if we could shut everything down, regrettably, 90% of the country backs this thing, and assuming the resolution had been passed to go to war, legally we’re looking at what America wants, and America should have it.
Because yeah, I disliked the Iraq war.  But despite the constant conservative whining, government is not about getting everything you wanted.  It’s about pooling resources to get some of what you wanted, making compromises for much of the rest, and enduring a couple of really odious things that are popular and may even be vital.  Yeah, you’re not thrilled about birth control being handed out on your dime; I’m not thrilled about drone strikes being handed out on mine.  But the deal with, you know, democracy is that we all vote on it.  It’s the will of the people, not the will of one person.
And there are times when the minority rights should be protected, no question.  But when all the legal hoops have been passed on multiple occasions, that’s actually what democracy is.  What you’re doing is actually the opposite of democracy, shutting down everyone’s votes until you get your way – and maybe that’s morally necessary at times, but don’t call it “Constitutional” or “Democratic” or anything like that.  It’s violating the oath and the intent of your office to try to armwrestle people into submission.
The will of the people has been expressed through the mechanisms of the people.  Now you’re exploiting loopholes and refusing to pass a clean CR bill to get your way.  If that had happened with Iraq, I probably would have been morally behind them, as I would have seen the stopping of the Iraq war as a good and just cause.  (Which, really, the post-invasion havoc, the lessening of American political power, and the drag on our economy all has only proven to be not nearly worth the cost of taking down one repugnant dictator.  It’s like burning down your house to rid yourself of a bedbug infestation.)  I would have at least appreciated the intent behind the shutdown.
Ultimately, though, I would have been against the shutdown as going too far.  Yes, we could have done it.  But we’d made our point.  We had raised the issue of the Iraq war 40 times in the Senate and had it shut down every time by the House, and at this point it’s not the House that’s the problem, it’s our refusal to do what the Democrats ultimately did in real life – say, “This is a shit sandwich, but how can we refine it so that it works as best as we can make it?”
Because no, I don’t like the Iraq war and the Patriot Act.  The way this works is not to hold my breath until I turn blue; it’s to convince people how awful this is in the next round of elections, and get enough voters on my side that the government has no choice but to transform it bit by bit into something functional.  But until then, I make these ugly laws work to the best of my ability, because my job is to keep the country running smoothly, not to punish people for poor decisions.
So I wouldn’t have.  As I don’t now.  As does most of America, and unfortunately, given that the Republicans’ avowed and open strategy is not to negotiate with Obama until he caves on Obamacare, the blame for this mess can be laid squarely at the feet of the Republicans.

Numenera: How'd The Second Session Go?

So last week, I took the Numenera system out for its first spin.  Last night, my players showed up for the second session. And we learned more what worked about Numenera and what didn’t.
As usual, my toss-off ideas have already begun to mutate into large-scale pillars of the campaign.  You see, last week, the characters started out on the Wandering Way, a pilgrimage-like walk around the land, and I figured I’d have them run into a few fellow travellers so it didn’t feel like they were alone.  And so they ran into – oh, I don’t know, an old wise man who looked like Obi-Wan Kenobi and his boy apprentice, who’d had his mouth sealed shut by the Iron Wind (the rogue storm of nanobots that plagues Numenera).  They were on their way to the healing pools.  Flavorful, a brief encounter…
…but then, thanks to a twin set of botched rolls analyzing the old man’s cypher equipment, the players became convinced that the old guy’s equipment was about to explode, and hastily made their exit.  Which meant the big monster that was scheduled to attack that night hit the old man and his apprentice first.  Which meant when the players defeated the monster, they found a small, scared, mouthless teenaged boy hiding nearby, which was not at all part of the adventure I had planned.
So it goes.
As a good DM, you roll with it, and I said, “Well, they’ve already rescued the boy, how can we make him a) helpful and b) interesting?”  The helpful was an easy shot: this group had no nanos, which is to say nobody who understood technology at all.  The boy’s a nano-in-training.  But what made him interesting?
So when the session started tonight, two of the players – who were healers – discovered that the boy’s mouth had been sewn shut.  As in, he’d had a mouth once, and had been purposely sealed.
Further examination revealed that the boy had a head full of wasps.
That’s right; some unfortunate experimentation with the Iron Wind – the kid’s an explorer – had transformed the boy’s brain and skull into a literal hive mind of small wasps.  He thinks, he thinks, through the insects now, which has put a sadly premature end to his dating life.  But fortunately, one of the cyphers the players had was a one-shot “learn a language” numenera, and he burned it to learn the kid’s body language, allowing this mute boy to tell his sad story – how he’s convinced the Iron Wind is sentient, how he’s been chasing it (and all nanites) for study, and how once his head was transformed to a wasp cage they sewed up his mouth so they wouldn’t escape.
That set a nice tone of weirdness for the evening.
The players then set out on the obligatory “find the foozle” part of the canned adventure, wherein they were to go to the Synth Gardens to get healing supplies.  The Synth Garden, I extemporized, was a large half-buried geodesic dome.  Jerry, who’s playing a parkour-like Jack, immediately scaled the dome and started looking for alternate entryways.  Why, strangely enough, as he began to explore, he found a crack in the dome, because you try to reward players who do interesting things.
Then I made my first GM Intrusion: “Hey, Jerry, how would you feel if the crack snapped underneath you and you fell into the dome?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” he grinned.
Jerry fell in solo; I was wondering how the other players would get in, as they weren’t notably climby, but then Christie realized she had a cypher that allowed her to pass through walls. I hadn’t been expecting that, but that was actually an awesome solution – even if I had to burn a GM Intrusion to have the portal explode a second after they dove through it.
The inside of the Synth Garden was a wood of of tall, slender black trees made of circuitry and blinking Christmas lights, the dark place filled with the warm whirr of fans keeping the servers at operating temperatures.  Stacks of home-grown servers were everywhere, sprouting from the ground, surrounded by curls of cable.  As Jerry tried to make his way back to his compatriots (guided by the convenient explosion), another GM intrusion meant that he leapt over a stack of disk drives and landed straight in the middle of a pack of Broken Hounds.
These Hounds, however, were circuitry beasts, wiry half-robot things that looked like a Doberman made of legos and buzzsaws.  A fight, needless to say, broke out, as poor Bob (the hive-mind boy) ran for the hills.  Many GM intrusions and botched rolls (this group loves 1s) helped keep the combat interesting, including:
1)  Yes, you fake the Doberman out so it bites its companion instead.  The companion is so wounded it explodes in your face.
2)  You chop the Doberman to bits.  The bits crawl to the trees and reform into four more smaller techno-spiders.
3)  You chop a tree down to kill a techno-spider!  The botch means it falls on your companions.  This intrusion means two black techno-spiders were in the tree, and they fall on your friends!
That went on until it was clear the players would be either overwhelmed by the endless waves of regenerating techno-spiders or have to run, at which point clever old Bob the NPC shut down the garden’s guardians long enough that they could find the central virus-server and destroy it.  End session as they harvest a bunch of Numenera in triumph.
So.  What did I discover about Numenera this week?
1)  Players Love GM Intrusions. 
After last session’s intrusion-low game, which gave them little experience, I amped up the intrusions, giving as many as I could.  After the session, all three players told me they frickin’ loved the intrusions, as it always made the game more interesting – and requested even more of them in the future.  They were enthusiastic, and in fact I started to ask, “Hey, can I raw-dog this intrusion?” because it was more exciting to offer them a “blind” XP that they trusted would be weird and fun rather than explain the new surprising thing in advance.  They were generally receptive except when it was life-and-death, in which case they wanted to know.  Which is fair.
2)  Players Are Not Sold On The XP Tension.
You spend XP to reroll, or to advance your character.  Which means every time you throw in an XP, you’re sacrificing future gain.  It’s part of the game system, but it does mean they feel bad about cancelling out that failure by burning the level of Effort they were about to buy.  The players were generally good about it, but they did note an understandable reluctance to throw all that away just for silly combat.
It’s one of those things where the system works, and is in fact designed around the idea of burning XP for current and future gain, but it just doesn’t feel rewarding when you do it.
3)  The Descriptors Are Badly Designed. 
If you’re “Intelligent,” you get a pure bonus to your stats – all upside.  But if you’re “Charming,” you get a minus on any willpower rolls.
Considering the players make all the rolls, it’s sort of mean to ask them to remember when they’re bad at something.  There’s every incentive to remember the positive rolls, but the negative ones are just baggage they’re carrying with them.  Which isn’t to say that it couldn’t work, but the descriptors are designed so only some players have drawbacks – which means it’s hard for me as a GM to remember who’s bad at what, and the players are already (as I mentioned in my writeup of the first session) carrying a lot of mental rules baggage with them already.
If every descriptor had a plus and a minus, that would be awesome.  You could say, “You have a minus, what is it?” and feel comfortable as a GM.  But they don’t  As it is, I was put in the position where I had to ask for almost every interaction, “So do you have a negative modifier for this?  Look on your character sheet!  Look!” and eventually I just… didn’t bother.  Which isn’t a good place to be, where already we’re ignoring portions of the character sheet.
4)  The Players Get Much More Into It When They Understand The Rules…
My players told me that the first session was okay, but they had to know so many rules that it was hard to get into the game.  Fortunately, the rules are simple enough that this session they got it, and they termed this session “actively fun.”  We’ll be playing again next week, yay!
5) …But There’s Still A Lot Of Confusion What Edges Do. 
They get that paying some portion of their stats helps them do better at things, but the cost reduction of the edges was still baffling, and required some discussion.  I also had to prod them that burning XP let them re-roll, and I’m not sure they remembered that XP could let other people re-roll.
In short: it’s fun enough that we’re already running, and they all said they were looking forward to next Monday.  Which is great.  I don’t know what I’ll do when I run out of pregenerated adventure as a plot hook, but hey!  Clearly, my imagination runs away with me anyway.
(I just hope “GM space” doesn’t take up too much of the creative space I allot to writing fiction.  I’m taking a three-week break after my novel draft, so this game is opportunely-timed; we’ll see what happens when I’m back to story-writing.  Walking our new dog will give me more time to think, though.)