lost camera: camera unlost, but not quite found.

After seeing this on Boing Boing, I figured that it could use some reposting. A sad, sad lesson that these people are teaching their child. If there even is one.

I think that Canada should be held for the blame. But seriously, this is a seriously asshat thing to do.

lost camera: camera unlost, but not quite found.

"I hadn't posted here in a while, because just after the last post, I got a call from an excited park ranger in Hawaii that 'a nice Canadian couple reported that they found your camera!' She gave me their name and number, and I eagerly called to reclaim my camera.

"'Hello,' I said, when I reached the woman who had reported the camera found, 'I got your number from the park ranger, it seems you have my camera?'

"We discussed the specifics of the camera, the brown pouch it was in, the spare battery and memory card, the yellow rubberband around the camera. It was clear it was my camera, and I was thrilled.

"'Well,' she said, 'we have a bit of a situation. You see, my nine year old son found your camera, and we wanted to show him to do the right thing, so we called, but now he's been using it for a week and he really loves it and we can't bear to take it from him.'

"I listened, not sure where she was going with this."
[via Boing Boing]

True20 On The Way

I will more than likely be posting more information as it comes up. Particularly once the PDF update is released. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens.

Although I was thinking of running a True20 event at our Cleveland Game Day I don't know if I'll have the time with the PDF release. Maybe.

True20 On The Way

"True20 Adventure Roleplaying, our new 224-page core rulebook by Mutants & Masterminds designer Steve Kenson, is now at print. This beautifully illustrated hardback is the culmination of three years of design and development. While first designed for the fantasy setting of the Blue Rose RPG, True20 has been expanded to handle nearly any genre. The four winners of our Setting Search (Borrowed Time, Caliphate Nights, Lux Aeternum, and Mecha vs. Kaiju) wonderfully express this flexibility and provide new GMs with a variety of ways to enjoy the True20 experience.

"With the game finished at last, I thought this would be a good time to reveal some of our plans for True20 Adventure Roleplaying. The first question, I'm sure, is 'when can I get it?!' The game went to print a little later than we had planned due to some unexpected production difficulties, so True20 won't be in stores until March. We have stopped selling the old PDF and the new core rulebook will become the standard entry point for True20. A week before the book arrives in stores, we're going to be sending out a link for a free update to the new edition to everyone who bought the original PDF. We're doing this for two reasons. First, we want to give a 'thank you' to all the early adopters of True20. Second, we hope this sneak peak will encourage you to go down to your Friendly Local Game Store and pick up a print copy of the game. We're confident that you're really going to like what you see in the finished rulebook and we hope you let the owner of your local store know that True20 is the next big thing in roleplaying.

"Over the next few weeks we're going to offer several previews of True20 Adventure Roleplaying, so those of you who haven't checked it out can see what all the fuss is about. We're also going to be launching a dedicated True20 website, which include forums for all things True20 (including Blue Rose). We'll be showing off True20 for the first time at the GAMA Trade Show in March in Las Vegas, where hundreds of the country's best retailers will have a chance to check out the finished book. GTS provides an ideal launching point for one of our most important releases of the year."

Today's Trip To The Library

[A bit later than I originally planned to post this...due to not being able to get onto Blogger]

I Went to the library today to pick up some books that I had put on hold and had finally come in. Already started, of course, and there is going to be some coolness here. I have to get a good start on Hiding in the Mirror since I was the 57th in line for it when I put it on hold a couple of months ago. I am sure that I won't be able to renew it. Besides, I'll really want to read the book on Supermodernism when it comes in.

So, the books are:

Hiding in the Mirror, the Mysterious Allure of Extra Dimensions, from Plato to String Theory and Beyond. I heard Laurence Krauss a few months back on an NPR program on science and knew that I would have to read this book. This little bit, which he recounted during the radio show, was a big seller:

Two parents walk in the middle of the night to sounds of their daughter's crying out in the distance. The father rushes to her bedroom and finds her missing. He frantically searches everywhere, slowly coming to the grim realization that she is gone. His wife runs into the room soon afterward, overcome with panic. At his wit's end, he dashes out to the living room and picks up the phone and calls a neighbor. He returns to his wife and, in words that are probably unique in the history of television he tells her:

"Bill's coming over. He's a physicist! He ought to be able to help!"

That was a synopsis from an episode of the Twilight Zone, no doubt unique in many ways. He then goes on to say:

I now vividly remember (or I think that I remember) being struck by how exotic and powerful Bill the physicist's knowledge seemed, and how much respect this knowledge engendered in his frightened neighbor. I, too, wanted one day to be privy to such secrets, and to explain them. I wanted to be the one whom people in distress knew they could count on. In short, the physicist-superhero!

And how cool is that? I mourne the end of the days when physicists could be super-heroes. Admitedly, Reed Richards still is one (and a recent Fantastic Four movie would account to that) but you just don't see the scientist as hero like you once did. When overthrowing the Ivory Towers of science fiction I fear that heroes like that were disposed as well.

The next two books (which now I don't remember what lead me to the first of them, but once I found one I found the other) are both from The Disinformation Company. They are: Book of Lies and Under The Influence. Book of Lies is "The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult" and I most likely came across it while searching for something on Grant Morrison, since he contributed.

From Morrison's introduction:

Personally, I don't need to know HOW it works -- although I have bucket loads of colorful theories -- just as I don't seem to need to know how my TV works in order to watch it, or how a Jumbo Jet stays up when I'm dozing through my in-flight entertainment at 35,000 feet. What I do know for sure, based on the evidence of my senses and on many years of skeptical enquiry, is that magic allows us to take control of our own development as human beings.

Under The Influence is about the world's "War On Drugs" and sounded pretty darn interesting too. That's the last one on the list for now though.

Supermodern: Beyond Cyberpunk?

I've been re-reading my copies of Warren Ellis' cool newer comic, Desolation Jones, and checking his website about it. In a post on there that was his author's commentary on issue one he mentioned an interesting term that I've been nosing around on the internet for more information about: supermodern.

Just the sound of it is interesting. So, I've Googled and gone through the internet archive (not with a lot of luck...but I didn't find a few sites with some interesting IDM stuff). While I can't find the original PDF, not can I find an archive of it either :( I did find a thesis by Adam Montandon about supermodern. Here's the abstract:

As access to global communications technologies such as the internet increases, so too does speculation about life inside of electronic volume. Free from the constraints and boundaries of physicality, many provisional attempts have been made to create spaces without boundaries. However the entanglement of the mind within the body has created a culture that has chiefly experienced only partial immersion in virtual reality, the mind goes where the body cannot follow. This in turn leads to a new architectural sensibility based on reducing physicality in architecture, in order to give the body the same freedom in physical space as the mind has enjoyed in virtual space.

A new architecture of the physical is born from experience in the electronic. An architecture that encompasses a digital, networked, global, transient and virtual mindset. It appears that we are not, as one may expect, building virtual architecture inside computers, but instead are creating cyberspace on earth. This new architecture is the inverse of Postmodernism. This is Supermodern.

While I couldn't find the PDF, Google does have an html cache of the thesis here.

Now, I haven't read and digested all of this article yet I do think that it suggests some interesting ideas for cyberpunk (and even "regular" modern gaming) as it goes in directions that gamers would not normally think to go into.

What do people think, and better yet...what can we build out of these ideas to use in our own campaigns or settings?

Central Intelligence Agency Homepage for Kids

Great, now the CIA has a webpage for Kids. As if marketing sugary cereal to them wasn't bad enough.

Central Intelligence Agency Homepage for Kids

Foundphotos

This has been a favorite site of mine since I first discovered it (and now that I am on their mailing list I get notified whenever it is updated). Unlike what you typically think of regarding photos and the internet, this site isn't about porn. Actually it is pretty worksafe other than the ocassional digression.

You're probably wondering why I'm bringing this up on this site then. Well, a lot of the photos can be used to spark ideas for characters, locations, and campaigns. There are a lot of subtle, slice of life things in the pictures on this site that can really cause your games to take off in unexpected directions (like the Anagram Map of London below).

That spark is what can make the difference between an engaging and enjoyable campaign, and a deary one. Enjoy, and let me know what you think.

"ABOUT FOUND PHOTOS:

"The Found Photos started last year while searching for mp3's using a filesharing program. I was searching through someones shared file list and saw a folder named 'pictures'. I downloaded the folder and found 20 or so digital camera pictures of this persons life taking pictures of himself, his friends etc. It made me wonder what else was out there, and after searching for more photos I found hundreds, thousands of them shared to everyone.

"The world seems like a smaller place after finding all these photos and posting the ones that are worthwhile. I can see so many of the same emotions and situations that i've experienced over the years, unique to each person but similar and instantly recognizable. I've filtered through 1000's and 1000's of photos of everyday life and not so everyday life to find the ones that make up the archives here. Hopefully the pictures as worthwhile to view as they have been to find.

"-Rich Vogel"

Foundphotos

Bradbury: LA needs monorails!

Aw, come on...every body needs more monorails.

Bradbury: LA needs monorails!

"Ray Bradbury has written an editorial for the LA Times calling on the city of Los Angeles to build a monorail network before the city's traffic becomes completely unmanageable." [via Boing Boing]

CryptoKids™ America's Future Codemakers & Codebreakers -- Site Start Page

Now, it is probably disturbing enough that the NSA actually has a "kids page" on its site. Teaching young generations the importance of code-making and code-breaking is always room for fun. Heck, I used to buy "How To Be A Spy" and "How To Be A Detective" books at the Scholastic Book fairs when I was a kid. Making it into a government program is what is making it a bit weird.

So, how would this sort of overt covert recruitment impact an espionage (or pretty much any modern setting) RPG?

CryptoKids™ America's Future Codemakers & Codebreakers

The Anagram Map of London

Here is an interesting resource for GMs who want to turn the world on its end for their players. This link is to a map of the London Underground, but with all of the tube-stations relabeled with anagrams of the station names. For example, Old Street is "Eldest Rot," Oxford Circus is "Crux for Disco."

I am sure that Urban Fantasy GMs of all stripes can find a use for something like this. This makes an interesting map to an alternate London, in a Grant Morrison inspired campaign.

The Anagram Map of London

In this case, the map is the territory. If you decide to use this in your games, please make a comment and share what you have done.

Edit: Since Greg Stolze mentioned this site in a post to the thread that I made about this on RPG.net, I thought that I would include a link to the site in this post as well. Anagrams are everywhere.

Edit[2]: Apparently legal action has forced the removal of the original map. You can find more information here. You can also find Anagram Maps for other cities (including Cleveland) here.

Stephen Colbert | The A.V. Club

From an interview with Steven Colbert at the A.V. Club.

Stephen Colbert | The A.V. Club

"AVC: You were into Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, were you not?

"SC: Yeah, I really was. I started playing in seventh grade, 1977. And I played incessantly, 'til probably 1981—four years.

"AVC: What's the appeal?

"SC: It's a fantasy role-playing game. If you're familiar with the works of Tolkien or Stephen R. Donaldson or Poul Anderson or any of the guys who wrote really good fantasy stuff, those worlds stood up. It's an opportunity to assume a persona. Who really wants to be themselves when they're teenagers? And you get to be heroic and have adventures. And it's an incredibly fun game. They have arcane rules and complex societies and they're open-ended and limitless, kind of like life. For somebody who eventually became an actor, it was interesting to have done that for so many years, because acting is role-playing. You assume a character, and you have to stay in them over years, and you create histories, and you apply your powers. It's good improvisation with agreed rules before you go in."