Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

So I promised on the last Shadowrun Sundays to blog about RPG rules, but to tell you the truth I’m not feeling the mojo. Both the day job and the publisher job have been more than overwhelming and I’m completely unprepared. So I’m going to chat about the card game Dominion instead, because I can ramble about this one without working too hard at it.

I was introduced to Dominion over a year ago by a few members of my gaming group. It’s what gaming circles commonly refer to as a deck-building game. Unlike CCGs (collectable card games) like Magic, players do not go out buying base decks and expansion packs to find the perfect set of cards for their decks. One person buys the base box set or the base deck and everyone plays with that. There are expansion sets, but again, not everyone is spending their money on their own individual versions of this. BoardGameGeek.com has a lot of videos, reviews, and FAQs on Dominion that you may already know about. I haven’t gone through them all, but the ones I’ve seen are insufficient for brand new “never heard of it” kind of players. Which is why I’m writing this.

Dominion Victory Points Shield

FYI: There are also anti-Victory cards, like Curses, which subtract from your overall points at the end of the game. And the Dark Ages expansion can actually force you to trash your high-cost Victory cards.

But let’s start simple, with a snapshot from my Dominion Online account.

DominionOnline Base Deck & Opening Hand

The available Victory cards (upper left) are the Estate (worth 1 VP and costing 2 copper to obtain), the Duchy (worth 3 VP and costing 5 copper), and the Province (worth 6 VP and costing 8 copper). The Treasure cards (upper right) are Copper (worth 1 & costing 0 coppers to obtain), Silver (worth 2 & costing 3 coppers to obtain), and Gold (worth 3 and costing 6 copper to obtain). So you spend money, get land, and once the Province deck is “sold out” or three stacks of the Kingdom cards are “sold out,” whichever comes first, the game ends and the winner has the most VP.

Sounds simple, right? Except you have to get money to get the higher costing cards and the most copper you can have in your hand (bottom middle) to start off with is 5, and the most copper you start off with is 7, one shy needed to buy a Province.

That’s when we get to the Kingdom cards (upper middle). These cards can give you additional cards, additional actions, additional buys (purchases), or additional money. Some of these cards give you all at the same time. The base set starts off with 25 different “decks” (stacks, really) that do various things. Each game only involves 10 of the available decks (or 11 if you’re using a card that curses other players, then you have to add the curse deck to the game). The idea is to add as many of these Kingdom cards to your own hand that allows you to continuously increase your money, cards in hand, available actions, and enough purchases that you can keep buying cards so long as you have the money for them. Since each player starts off with 1 action, 1 buy per hand, and 5 cards per turn, you might see how being able to draw more, act more, and buy more during your turn would be to your benefit. Especially if someone has hit you with a bad card like Militia, which forces you to discard down to 3 cards before your next turn begins.

Dominion can be fun if you play with the right people. I’m not a seriously competitive person with most games. I want to have fun more than I care about winning. That being said, I don’t want to lose every game either. So Dominion Online was a bit of a shock when I ran into a few uber-competitors who decided to use every nasty attack card in their deck to slam me down to the minimum number of cards and trash as much of my deck as possible. It’s why I tend to play the bots more often then not, because at least the bots are deliberately being mean even if they do win more often than I like. I’m also trying to get some friends online so we can have some private games and chat while we’re just having fun for fun’s sake.

Dominion Online has helped me hone my RL strategy. I finally won a few games last week when my gaming group played (and surprised myself when doing so). But I’m not found of DO’s help files. The interface is not terribly intuitive. It took me forever to find the help files and even then they only went over the game rules which I already knew from playing live. Nothing explains what the Coin Count points means, but I assume it has to do with the leaderboard rankings, and the VPs (of which I have zero) aren’t explained at all except that they give you discounts on buying the online expansions. When you choose to play bots, you aren’t allowed to use the decks you build (DO randomizes the base set), so you have to choose the Multiplayer option, make your game private, and then pick a bot to join your game so you can practice with the deck you built. You get more coin points playing other players than you do playing bots. But no where do I see the option for earning VPs for your account. Maybe it’s in the Adventure section, which I have yet to try.

DO was entertaining for maybe the first few weeks I was on it, but I’m kinda bored now. I don’t like that there’s no way to escape the gaming bullies (I ran into one a few weeks ago that kept following me from game to game so he could insult me over chat. He didn’t like that I abandoned a game I started because he wasn’t being nice to one of the other players) without losing ranking on the leaderboard or having it reflected against your total percentages. I was enjoying a few games against other people when they “abandoned” the game due to poor internet connections (or so the DO interface informed me). I play it now and again (against the bots) to continue checking out my strategies, but to be honest the bots keep kicking my butt. Except for serfbot who I almost always win against. But serfbot is designed to be beat. He’s the tutor.

So anyway, those are my random thoughts on Dominion and Dominion Online. FYI: I’m thinking of building an RPG from scratch for my blog, both as an example of what I’m talking about and potentially something to put before my gaming group. I may have more on that later, but I’m not sure yet. If you’re interested in seeing something like that, let me know.

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

Designing a Data Recovery Solution[/caption]

Today’s SQL Saturdays post is aimed at the teachers, librarians, and tutors of our community. A few weeks ago, my employer held a “bring your kids to work” day themed “Work in Progress.” The day was broken up into intervals that included exercise and snack breaks, even a walk through our beautiful little mini-park. The thrust of the exercise, though, was to walk the 8-12 year old children through mock interviews and mock-job training. Volunteers were picked to read through the children’s resumes and interview them. A co-worker and I were picked to do on-the-job training for a group of 5 kids. The goal, I was told, would be to explain my day job and teach the kids how to do it.

I admit to being a little panicked. I’ve rarely been able to explain database administration to an adult in a way that makes sense to them. Trying to teach kids in 30 minutes how to do what I do seemed impossible. Then fellow SSCer Stefan Krzywicki suggested I do a bit of flowcharting, because lots of kids enjoy drawing. With that idea, I was off and running. After a quick kid-friendly explanation of database administration, we “programmed” burgers, pizza, and even one girl’s gymnastics class routine.

Supplies needed:
Several large sheets of paper
Lots of colored markers or pencils
Dollup of Patience

The Basic Flowchart Shapes

There are 5 basic shapes I used : The terminator oval, the process rectangle, the decision diamond, the preparation hexagon, and the arrow-shaped precedence constraint. (All documents are attached to this post). Rather than confuse the kids with the more complicated terminology, I called them “Start or End,” “Prep Work,” “Job,” “What’s Next,” and “The Question.”I initially started off with a PBJ (peanut butter and jelly sandwich), but the kids didn’t like PBJs. When I asked them for suggestions everyone agreed they liked burgers. So I used that to illustrate the flowchart process. We start in the kitchen. Our prep work consists of laying out the ingredients and heating the pan. Burger assembly is broken down into multiple jobs. Questions are asked about what we want on the burger, with each question leading to a yes or no decision. If the answer is yes, we do the task, then we move on to the next question. If the answer is no, we move on to the next question. We end our process by eating the burger. Here’s what the final workflow looks like.

The Burger Program

I could have made this a lot more complicated with the number of condiments and the additional process of adding seasonings and asking how the burger should be cooked, but that’s not the point of this exercise. The point is getting them to think of something they do every day as a program that can be broken down into multiple steps and multiple decision-making points. After the burger example, the kids got their own paper and choice of markers so they could program pizzas and ice cream sundaes (I gave them the option of programming whatever food they wanted and this is what they chose). I stood over their shoulders, answered their questions, and made suggestions when they hesitated. What kind of toppings? Do you want the cheese on the pizza first or the pepperoni before the cheese? Do you have to make the ice cream first or did you get it from the store?

It’s important to let the kids make the choices about what they want to do with their programming. Telling them “it doesn’t work that way” or “you’re doing it in the wrong order” doesn’t help them. Asking them a question about the order, though, lets them think about the ramifications of their choices. “Do you want to add the ice cream to the bowl before the chocolate syrup?” is a better way of guiding them, and if they want syrup under the ice cream, let them have it in that order. I like syrup on all sides of my ice cream, so I’m not one to judge. @=)

Reminder: Kids will not always stick to the actual flowchart shapes. That is absolutely OK. The shapes aren’t important. What is important is teaching kids how to break things down into individual logical units and learn how to order those units. So encourage the creativity. And when they’re finished, let them decorate their flowchart with pictures. My group drew pictures of their completed pizzas and sundaes and one kid even drew himself eating said pizza.

After we finished that project, one girl was so excited that she wanted to do it again, but didn’t know what to draw. When I asked her what activities she enjoyed the most, she said gymnastics class. So I walked her through her routine. We started at home, the prep work was gathering her gymnastics supplies, then she drew her tasks (getting dressed, getting in the car, walking into class, warming up). We had a decision point where she decide which of three gymnastics practices she would do next (tumbling, flips, or ribbon work), and another decision point that depending on whether or not she was on a team and had to do a team practice. This chart was more complicated than the food chart because it had multiple branches, each with their own terminators. Every terminator was “home,” but her new chart looked more like a real programming workflow because home didn’t happen at the same point every time.

After we were done, the kids signed and rolled up their flowcharts to take them home. They had a great time programming their favorite things. Who knows, this experience may have influence a new generation of database administrators and programmers.

Oh, and as far as the kid-friendly explanation of database administration goes, here’s how I spun it. “You know all those treasures, coins, and equipment you can earn in a video game? Each game has a limited number. A database stores that information. My job is keeping track of what is in your inventory and how many of each item is still available in the game.”

To which the response was “What games do you work on?” ah-hem. Apparently I explained my job a little too well. They were very excited to meet a “game designer.” For the record, though, I have actually programmed games. Text-based MUSHes, though. Not video games. It’s the same difference, right?

SQL Saturdays WorkflowLogicAttachments

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

When religion, relationships and sex collide, life gets strange … and sometimes interesting.

As a writer, I get to go to all sorts of interesting places (not as many as I want to) and do interesting things and read interesting research. I read about science, history, religion, civil rights, sex, politics (maybe that should be lumped in with the sex reference?), and relationships. There are few news articles I read just to understand where people come from on things. I don’t always agree with what I read. I hate yellow journalism or pieces deliberately slanted to evoke a reaction without saying anything of substance, but I read them because understanding how other people think is one step to understanding the characters I write about.

I count among my friends several who self identify as lesbian/gay, one who self identifies as bisexual, and one that identifies as polyamorous. There may be more of each among my friends, but they have not chosen to out themselves to me and I respect that choice. It is their choice, and theirs alone.

That being said, I grew up in a small town where one did not discuss anything but hetero relationships, and even then there wasn’t much said about them. Of course, these people were ultra conservative in several ways and desperately wanted to be identified with the rebel South even though they were born and bred Yanks. So when I got to college, I was woefully ignorant about sexual terminology and relationship possibilities. I’d met all of one gay person during my teenage years, at Girl Scout camp of all places. As uncertain as I was about how I should be reacting, by the end of the two week session, I knew I had nothing to worry about. She was just another Girl Scout attending summer camp, singing songs, building campfires, and toasting marshmallows. She didn’t act “deviant” in any way, didn’t come on to any of us. There was no fondling in the middle of the night or attempts to stare at us when we were all in the group shower. She was as normal a person as I, as any of us.

Being a theatre major, where talking and joking about sex was anything but taboo, was an education in and of itself. I learned things from my fellow students that were worth their weight in gold. This is where I met my second openly-gay friend. He was a wonderful fellow who I had a desperate crush on. That’s when someone else broke the news to me. She suggested I could “fix him,” but not only did I find that offensive (because he wouldn’t be the same guy he was now if he changed), but he wasn’t at all confused about his preferences. He had a boyfriend and that was that.

Part of my growth as a writer has been to touch upon subjects that make me uncomfortable. I never heard of erotica until the past few years, let alone all the terminology associated with the genre. I’ve never written about sex or relationships beyond friendships. So as part of my education, I’ve been researching, reading, and writing. The more I learn, the more I find myself exploring these themes in my work. The Hunt for Liberty Jones contains a brief and deliberately vague hetero sex scene. Silk and Steam has a potentially bisexual protagonist (don’t blink or you’ll miss the revealing line). And Circle of Fire (my work in progress) has a blatantly bisexual character who prefers her own gender for reasons of power and politics. Of course, when my reading group read the scenes with her, they all informed me that “real lesbians” don’t get all gooey over a guy (a particularly sexy guy, FYI). I kept my silence, but I found myself wondering what I missed that they didn’t pick up the bi hint and thought she was a lesbian. So, that I need to fix.

In the meantime, I’ve been researching a lot of religious topics and blogs for this same WIP, in addition to the research I’m doing for Shadowrun. I wrote about an Islamic character (Goatfoot) a while back and have been very interested in the cultural aspects of her background. So when my research on relationships, sex, and religion recently collided, I found myself captivated.

Ferrett Steinmetz, friend, fellow author, and VP tribe mate, is one of my LiveJournal friends. He regularly blogs about polyamorous relationships (among other things) and makes no bones about his opinions or preferences. While his opinions are not necessarily those of other people, he makes a strong case for why poly works for him and how poly should work for secure, confident, and willing adults. (NOTE: His blog contains a lot of adult content, so don’t click on that link if you’re at work!)

Two months ago, I was searching the internet for a web comic I read occasionally (Married to My Wife, a completely harmless and fun view of one artist’s day to day life), when the results flashed up a website called Polygamy 911 (again, adult content, mostly language). The blog’s author, Fiona, lives in the U.K. where she discusses polygyny. Here’s what her first post says:

My name is Fiona.

I am not muslim, but my husband is

I was a happily married woman. Our two children had just left home for university, and I was looking forward to being a wife again, spending more time with the husband I loved.

Instead my husband comes home one day, and tells me he has taken another wife…

Fiona’s story is a very interesting one. She has a lot to say about poly from her perspective, and it is very different from everything Ferrett has been saying. Granted, the two situations are not the same. Ferrett’s relationships are open and knowing. Fiona got blindsided by her husband and has been forced into this relationship. But what they both say can be boiled down to the same thing. Relationships and sex are about trust and faith, and when religion gets mixed up in the formula, it can make life difficult for everyone involved.

While these two pour their hearts out to the internet, I lurk and read and digest their words. The writer in me processes the resulting plot bunnies while the person in me empathizes with the struggles both of them live with. I find myself in awe of their fearless ability to discuss their own lives with millions of strangers, to put the haters to shame with their strength and resolve. In these blogs I see heroes fighting the good fight and keeping their heads above water. I probably don’t have the right to make these comparisons, but I see characters worth reading and worth appreciation.

These are the things I learn when I do research, and I am awed.

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

Today’s Writing Prompt Wednesdays is going to take a page from my actor’s handbook. The most valuable acting lesson I ever learned was that a character does not just magically come into existence when she appears on the stage (or the page). Characters exist both before and after the performance (even if they’re “dead”). My acting professors taught me to think of my roles as people with their own lives, dreams, and problems. So that’s what we’re going to do as part of today’s writing prompt, create life before book for our protagonist (or side character).

NOTE: I’m actually having an issue with one of my supporting characters in Circle of Fire, so this is a great opportunity to indulge in a writing prompt that I myself am using.

Da Prompt: Take one of your characters (protagonist, villain, or supporting cast) and write up what they are doing with their life before the book starts. Obviously they didn’t get born as full blown characters in Chapter 1, so write a “slice of life” piece from before the story starts. Are they getting ice cream? Getting into a car / spaceship wreck? Did they just fail seminary school or get kicked out of the military?

This scene MUST be something that does not happen in the book. Remember, this is “before the book.” Develop your character using the little interactions in her life that may not be meaningful to the character herself but showcase the flaws and strengths of this character. And remember, this is not meant to be another scene added to your book. It’s background only, a POV scene meant to help you birth the character before the story actually starts.

Da Wordcount: 2,000+ (in other words, as long as you need it to be).

Have fun!

——————————————-

Writers are frequently asked the question “Where do you get your ideas?” The question is a hard one to answer because we all find our inspiration in different places. Some people need to be given prompts, little snippets of ideas to spark their imaginations.

With that in mind, I am posting Writing Prompt Wednesdays. The goal is to inspire writers with exercises meant to train their skills and fire up the creative juices. There are rules. Most prompts will have associated word counts or style instructions. These are not meant to restrict the writer, but give the writer a chance to explore different ways of writing.

If you are an author in search of that one juicy idea, I hope these posts help. If you have ideas for writing prompts, please let me know.

Da Rules:

1) Anything goes so long as you stick to the spirit of the prompt.

2) I ask that if you do publish something based on one of my prompts, that you post the good news (and the link) in the comments of the prompt that inspired your success. You want other people to help you celebrate, right?

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

Lessons from the Editor’s Desk

As a new editor and slush reader, I am still learning a lot of things. I’ve heard the stories from other editors and agents, but never truly grasped what they mean or all the stuff they deal with until I got on the other side of the desk.

Take Penumbra eMag, the digital specfic magazine I now work for. Each issue I do my share of the slush reading. Penumbra doesn’t have a lot of submission guideline restrictions. We ask that the manuscript be readable. We ask that it be in .doc or .rtf format, not .docx, .wps, or any other format. We ask that the story be 3500 words or less. We ask that the story abide by our monthly theme and that the authors state that monthly theme in the email subject. Aside from that, we’re pretty flexible.

I won’t reject a story if the monthly theme is listed in the body of the email (though that makes it more difficult for me to know which emails I need to read in which order). I will reject a story if no theme at all is listed. And no, I don’t read the story to find out what theme I can apply it too. We get a lot of submissions, I have a day job and my own writing career, so anytime an author makes it easy for me to reject them, I will. Especially when they admit in their email that they’ve violated the guidelines.

Which happens more often then I ever expected.

When I open a submission, the first thing I check is the query-listed wordcount. If an author claims 3499 or 3500 words, I check is the true wordcount in my trusty copy of MS Word 2000. Penumbra has a limited budget, and therefore a limited maximum number of words we can buy per issue. We want to get as many stories and poems in as possible, so we tend to be very strict about the wordcount. So when someone tells me they know they’re over the wordcount but will cut the story later during edits, or when they deliberately send in a piece that is over the wordcount by more than one or two words, I reject it. Editors operate under the assumption that authors know how to read, and therefore have had the opportunity to review the guidelines. It’s not the editor’s job to remind authors to check guidelines. It is the editor’s job to thin down the slushpile by rejecting stories that don’t fit, and guideline-ignoring stories are always the first to go.

After recently rejecting one such story, by an author who claimed his wordcount was only 3500 despite the fact that he knew it wasn’t, I received an email from the author offering to cut his story further and resend it. Apparently he’d already trimmed off 1000 words before sending the story in at 3569 words, assuming that 69 words wouldn’t matter. But here I’m thinking “that’s an extra poem. That’s an extra piece of flash fiction that I would have to reject because someone else wanted to take up that extra space.” Plus, Penumbra pays by actual wordcount, not rounded wordcount, so this author is asking us to pay him more for his story than we pay anyone else.

When I rejected him again, telling him he should have cut the story down to our wordcount limit before he sent it the first time, I got an interesting response. “Okay, you win.”

Win? Win what?

Slush reading is not a contest. There is no winning here. There is no prize for rejecting stories. Editors do not meet at a cantina in the middle of the night and pull out their stack of rejections for comparison (“Mine stack’s bigger than yours”). We do not hold secretive award ceremonies for the editor who beat down the most authors.

In this same email, the author goes on to lambast me for not being a “rubbery market” like “many markets are,” because if I was truly being fair I’d allow him his extra words and ignore the fact that he ignored our submission guidelines. I’m also in the wrong, apparently, because our submission guidelines don’t say that stories will be rejected unread if they don’t abide by the guidelines. The he slams out with the passive aggressive by apologizing for taking my time.

The first thing I learned as an author was that if I wanted to go above wordcount, I needed to query the editor to verify. If the editor said no, I’d either not submit or trim my story to the wordcount. The second thing I learned was most editors and agents will reject unread any manuscript that doesn’t follow their guidelines. That’s the way the industry works. The submission guidelines, contrary to their name, are not a suggestion. They are a house rule and, as I’ve since learned, a test of an author’s intelligence and ability to follow instructions.

As an author myself, I get that it sometimes feels like editors are out to get authors. But it’s not true. Editors truly want to be bowled over by fantastic fiction, if authors will let them be. But I am learning that more often than not, we authors tend to shoot ourselves in the foot and then refuse to take responsibility for it by blaming the people who rejected us. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. We send in a submission “knowing” that the editor won’t like it, then get angry and surprised when our worst fears are acknowledged.

But if we know that the editors won’t like our work, why are we still submitting it in a condition that isn’t publishable or that deliberately ignores the guidelines?

It’s not a contest. There is no prize. As an editor, I don’t get paid by the number of stories I reject. I get paid on the success of the magazine. I want Penumbra eMag to be brilliant. I want hardworking authors (new or veteran) who know how to follow a few simple instructions and then can leave me stunned by the beauty of their fiction. I want to cram as many people in the magazine as I can. I want Penumbra submissions to sky-rocket because when they do, we can start accepting more authors, more stories, and maybe even up the per story word limit.

I hate rejecting other authors because I find myself on the other end of every email I write. So don’t make it easy for me, please. Follow the guidelines. Write brilliant stories. Make me fight myself over which stories I want. And don’t give me a reason to push your story to the bottom of the heap.

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

Welcome back to Writing Prompt Wednesdays!

Sometimes the best way to learn things about your characters is to write about them in different situations and see how they react. We all wear masks, disguising parts of ourselves from other people. How we act depends on our clothes, environment, and the people around us. If this is true of us, it should be true of our favorite characters too. So what masks do your characters wear?

Reference: Yesterday’s post, an essay on The Masks We Wear inspired today’s writing prompt.

Da Prompt: Take a character from one of your Work in Progress stories and write four job interview scenes based on the below scenarios. The character should be dressed appropriately for each environment. Remember to add in your specfic twist!

Da Scenarios:
1) Job: Pirate. Interview Place: High-priced fancy Restaurant. Interviewers: Lynch Mob
2) Job: Prince or Princess. Interview Place: Rice field. Interviewer: Magical (or alien or god-like) fish.
3) Job: Administrative Assistant. Interview Place: War zone. Interviewer: Army Colonel
4) Job: Superhero or Superhero Sidekick. Interview Place: Hidden Stronghold. Interviewers: Superhero panel that includes one villain representative and one non-super representative.

Da Wordcount: Per scene 500-2,000 words.

Have fun!

——————————————-

Writers are frequently asked the question “Where do you get your ideas?” The question is a hard one to answer because we all find our inspiration in different places. Some people need to be given prompts, little snippets of ideas to spark their imaginations.

With that in mind, I am posting Writing Prompt Wednesdays. The goal is to inspire writers with exercises meant to train their skills and fire up the creative juices. There are rules. Most prompts will have associated word counts or style instructions. These are not meant to restrict the writer, but give the writer a chance to explore different ways of writing.

If you are an author in search of that one juicy idea, I hope these posts help. If you have ideas for writing prompts, please let me know.

Da Rules:

1) Anything goes so long as you stick to the spirit of the prompt.

2) I ask that if you do publish something based on one of my prompts, that you post the good news (and the link) in the comments of the prompt that inspired your success. You want other people to help you celebrate, right?

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

A few months ago, I stumbled across a manga called Glass Masks, an amazing (if sadistic) take on theatre, acting, and the Stanislavsky method of acting (also called Method Acting). The reoccurring story theme is how actors achieve characterization by donning an invisible (or glass) mask of the part they are playing. They become someone else entirely, leaving behind everything that smacks of “self” except those bits that might be crucial to the role.

I’m a theatre person. I have modeled for print brochures, narrated industrial films, played extras on TV pilots, and been on stage in the chorus and in speaking roles. I’ve worked backstage as stagehand, costumer, prop mistress, stage manager, set designer, lighting designer, costume designer, director, and producer. I played the mechanical nightingale in a stage production of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Nightingale, as well as a courtier wearing robes and a two foot mask on my head. These are my credentials, all of which serve me well in my current roles as a DBA, a SQL Server trainer, a writer, and an freelance game writer. And when Glass Mask caught my attention, I thought to myself “Wow, I know some people who actually pull that crap.”

Look at Shia Lebeouf, Disney star turned mega-movie star, who admitted to dropping acid so he could understand a role. Or Matthew Lillard, who screamed himself hoarse to properly convey the voice of Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movies. Dustin Hoffman even has a story from when he was a young actor about the lengths he goes.

Actors are paid to assume masks, to become someone else, to be unrecognizable in our own person. Non-actors don’t have that excuse, so when someone is caught pretending to be someone other than who they are, the world around them crashes to a halt.

A month after I started reading Glass Masks, the world learned Manti Te’o's dead girlfriend was neither dead nor a girl. Half the internet thought he was a dumb dupe, the other half thought he had deliberately scammed the public.

Me? I believed him instantly, because I’d seen the same thing happen to a friend of mine.

The thing about masks is that they are so easy to assume. We have our day-job masks, our family masks, our best-friend mask that differs only slightly from our friends-but-not-besties mask, and our strangers mask. For some of us, we change behavior as easily as we change our clothing. Sometimes changing our clothing changes the mask automatically. A woman in heels and a business suit acts differently than a woman in jeans and a grubby tee. A man in TWPs and a polo acts different from a man in a blazer, dress shirt, tie, and pressed pants. Our masks are ruled as much by our surroundings as our clothes. Are we at the beach with a bucket of beer and a picnic basket? Are we in a courtroom trying to buy a judge’s sympathy? Are we sitting in the office trying not to give the boss an excuse to sit behind our shoulder?

We wear masks to protect ourselves from the blows real life deal to our egos and self-confidence. Masks are our armor, built around the kernel of our sanity to keep us safe through this roller-coaster existence we call life.

Actors are not so different from non-actors in this respect. Regardless of our jobs, we all have masks for the different sides of our lives. Today, Investigation Discovery showed a real life crime program about a man pretending to be an 18 year old marine to a 17 year old girl who turned out to be her mother pretending to be her. All of this occurred over the internet, in chat rooms, where two middle-aged people could set up a fantasy of being younger and sexier and more interesting than they believed they really were. And in the middle of this fantasy, a young man was murdered because the older man believed so much in the fantasy that he thought the “young girl” was cheating on him with the younger man (a coworker and ex-friend of the older man).

When the Manti Te’o girlfriend scandal erupted, experts claimed it isn’t unusual for people to explore their sexuality and sexual identity on the internet by building a fantasy life for themselves and indulging it with other people. The hoaxer did, at one point, claim he loved Te’o. Maybe he did. I don’t know.

What I do know is my own personal experience, back when I played on and co-administered a MUSH. One of my online friends, we’ll call him Bob, and a player few of us liked, we’ll call him John, had their own brush with the mask syndrome. I didn’t care for John because he was something of a bully both IC (in character) and OOC (out of character). Bob was a self-admitted loner who didn’t have a strong social life outside of the internet, but had many friends and casual acquaintances on the MUSH. One day, Bob met a girl in a chatroom and the pair hit it off immediately. It brewed into an online romance. So far as I know, there was no tinysex (what is now called sexting) involved, but Bob was falling for the girl and wanted to meet her.

One day, the girl came out to Bob in a private chat on the MUSH. Or, to be more precise, John started sending Bob private messages with the details of Bob’s conversation with his online girlfriend. Word-for-word details that could only have been gotten from the girl’s hacked account or from someone who had posed as this girl. John wasn’t confused about his sexuality. He wasn’t exploring himself. He put on a mask and roleplayed as the type of young woman Bob would be attracted to precisely to tear Bob’s life apart. It was a mean, deliberate, pre-meditated attack to prove a point. John admitted this to Bob and to the rest of us, smug in his superiority while we watched Bob fall apart and become nearly suicidal.

We banned John from the MUSH, but that didn’t fix Bob. There is no fixing of that kind of damage. Only healing, if healing truly can be had. The only thing we could do was be there for him, and that was so very hard when we’d only met IRL twice and were an entire country away from each other.

I learned then, all those years ago when the internet was just the world wide web, the true power of anonymity. For all that we trade away our privacy on the internet, it still remains a place where we can don a mask different from the day-to-day roles we play. We can be male or female, young or old, gifted or talent-less. We all become writers of fiction, building characters actors can only envy as we craft personas to lure, to tempt, to hurt, and to soothe. The internet gives us the ability to craft glass masks beyond anything that real life gives us, and gives us the privacy to believe our own publicity, to buy into our own masks as if the things we have created here are more real than reality itself.

Yet, as we craft these masks and believe what they make of us, we also open ourselves up to the masks of others. We become vulnerable even as we armor ourselves. Our fantasies become our truths and our truths become part of the fantasy. This is why we find ourselves wounded and grief-stricken when the bullies, the pranksters, the criminals, and haters crack our masks. We forget, while we are riding the high, that we can be damaged by a simple Tweet or a little text or a shared picture. We forget that the masks we are wearing are indeed glass, fragile, delicate, hand-spun glass that shatters at the slightest blow.

These are the masks we wear.

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

For the past few Shadowrun Sundays, we’ve briefly discussed worldbuilding (Part I and Part II here). Today we’re wrapping up with the central imperative of every game system: A Higher Power.

Religion is a touchy issue in real life. Even if insult is not intended, someone who looks hard enough can find something to take offense at in a fictional work. This is not to say we should pussy-foot around the issue in our worldbuilding. It is merely a caution that we should be aware of what we are writing about, to do our research so we understand our subject matter, and treat the subject with respect.

Earlier I used the term “higher power.” Every game has one. Sometimes it’s gods, or God, or AIs, or something that isn’t quite explained to the players. In Monopoly this power is the Bank. In Eclipse Phase it is the TITANS or the Exsurgent Virus (take your pick). In Shadowrun we have spirits, dragons, AIs, and pantheons of old and current gods. Some games even use real religions as the base of their game religion.

D&D uses opposed pantheons of good gods and evil gods. This is a cross between real ancient religions (like the Greco-Roman pantheons of gods who were not fully good or fully evil) and Zoastrian-influenced Christianity where there is a force of good and a force of evil. Gods work for a medieval period game. But if we’re designing a high tech, science fiction game (like Eclipse Phase), religion isn’t going to be of paramount importance to the NPCs or PCs. In some games, the Higher Power may in fact be a mere mortal that is just so awesome, he’s untouchable. When I look at the Doctor Who game, I see lots of higher powers.

Once we decide on the type of Higher Power our game will have, we need to decide how it affects the Way Our World Works and how NPCs and PCs will interact with it (or them). In some games, these higher powers need to be avoided at all costs. D&D actually requires many NPCs and PCs to pray and worship and tithe to the higher powers in order to gain their abilities.

Notice how I keep saying “NPCs and PCs?” There’s a reason for that. NPCs should always abide by the same rules as the PCs or players will not enjoy the game. NPCs might be normal humans like the PCs, but they can also be nasty critters (hellhounds, Beholders, demons, AIs) that live under the bed or in the dark. (Eclipse Phase has some really nasty nanite swarms that still gives me the shivers just thinking about them.)

Out of higher powers come the villains of our play. Once we understand what drives the rules of this world, we are free to have our TITAN create a nasty group of uplifted carnivores or our gods create a race of demons. Where do dragons come from, anyway? And how does a bumblebee know how to fly?

Once we know the answers to these questions, once we have our geography, peoples, time period, and gear thoughts, our worldbuilding is mostly complete. It only remains for us to tweak it as we discover that some things work better than others and some things just don’t work at all. But that will fall into place as we turn our attention to other matters, such as Game Rules.

Have you built a game from scratch? How easy was your worldbuilding, or did you even bother?

If you have any thoughts to add to these articles, I’d love to hear them. Comments are always welcome.

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

Friends, I need your help.

My eldest cat (16 years old) has a tumor on his side that is swiftly filling with fluid. My vet has never seen anything like it. Since it’s mostly harmless (benign), she doesn’t want to put him under because anesthesia and surgery would likely cause more problems than they’d solve at his age. He might not come back out of it.

The fluid has been analyzed and is made up of protein, keratin, microphages, and pigment. Nothing harmful. We’re using a fine needle aspirate to drain the tumor occasionally before it gets too big, but the tumor fills up at least half way in just three or four days. The more the tumor fills, the less quickly it seems to fill. It’s not doing anything. The cat doesn’t even know the tumor is there, really. It doesn’t hurt or bother him.

But it bothers me because I don’t know what’s causing it and my google-fu fails me in trying to find an answer.

So, does anyone have any thoughts on what could be causing this tumor? Is it diet related? Is it something else?

The cat has hypo-thyroidism, but it’s under control with his special Y-D food by Hills. Any other thoughts?

Originally published at Ramblings from the Flip Side (Site under construction). You can comment here or there.

As the publishing industry changes with the advent of electronic books, so too does the electronic submissions process. Gone are the days of deciding between A4 and 8.5″ by 11″, buying paper by the case and ribbon / ink cartridges in bulk, and including S.A.S.E.s with each submission. The phrase “Do Not Print Double-Sided” is pretty much meaningless now, as is “double-space between sentences.” Many editors, agents, and publishers allow for single-spaces now as well as a variety of sans-serif fonts instead of just Times New Roman and Courier / Courier New.

There are other changes to the submissions process.

Including “Disposable Manuscript” on an electronic document is a little redundant since email attachments aren’t ever returned anyway (making the “disposable” part of the label an assumption and unnecessary). Sad to say, I do not ever recycle my electrons. I use them and throw them in File Thirteen (aka the Recycle Bin). Don’t hate me for this.

Specifying which geographic rights authors are willing to sell, while not completely obsolete, is falling by the wayside. Especially for small publishers. Once something gets out on the Internet, it’s hard to govern where in the world it will end up. Amazon and Barnes & Noble can use their country-specific sites to throttle where ebooks end up available for sale, but that restriction is easy to get around. These days, publishers just grab the Worldwide rights (to cut down the hassle) and talk language rights and translation rights (for ebooks only!). North American, United Kingdom, or European rights just don’t make sense in our global Internet where virtual goods can easily be transferred between countries.

Social media is becoming more and more important to many publishers, to the point where many independent presses are now asking authors what media tools they use to promote themselves and their books. Author access to (and use of) websites, blogs, and other social networking sites are all becoming a consideration in the submissions process. I’ve even seen a few publishers who request the authors marketing plans as part of the submission.

As part of the social media advent, publishers are also looking at how authors portray themselves on the internet. Authors who are rude and insulting to reviewers (or fans) may just social-media themselves out of a book contract. Authors who complain about their editors, agents, or previous publishers may also talk themselves out of the contract.

Since networking is much easier to do in the Internet Age (no longer does one have to attend conferences or conventions and shove business cards up someone else’s nose to get attention), authors now have the option of actually meeting potential agents and editors online, discovering their needs, and sending them with a properly tailored query instead of shooting off subs in the dark.

There are a lot of holdovers from the Old Way of Doing Things as authors learn to adjust to the new. It’s not just authors adjusting either. Publishers, editors, and agents are still transitioning to the electronic world while some of them still prefer good ol’ fashioned paper snail-mailed submissions. That’s okay. To each their own. But now, with submission guidelines available for free viewing on their websites, authors can no longer play the “ignorant of submission guidelines” card. The information is out there and many libraries and public internet cafes offer free internet access to discover the information. So it’s time to take advantage of the new world of electronic submissions and change along with the industry.

As I come across more interesting gems in my slush pile, I’ll be sure to let you know. Until then, happy writing and joyous reading.