• Starlit Citadel, and Advertising.

    Starlit Citadel is my FLGS of choice, despite not being all that local to me, having hours that totally don’t overlap with my work schedule, and them being more a warehouse than a store. I met them a few years back at Gottacon, and we’ve run into each other at various places since then. I’ve even helped them move. No surprise there, who haven’t I helped move?

    For ages now, I’ve been referring people to their site, though I haven’t actually been using the referral links, so I haven’t been getting the Citizen Rewards bonus points that I should be getting; it’s a pretty nice program, btw… I’ve used it to get a decent number of free games.

    Well, now they’ve set up an affiliate program, so I’m going to be adding those links to a couple of places on my blog. Mostly to posts referring to games that were purchased from Starlit, or could be purchased from them now, since a few of my games weren’t originally available from them, but have since been brought in.

    I’ve been told that this whole social networking thing can bring in money, and while I doubt that’ll happen in this case, I’m at least curious to give it a shot.
    When I initially tried to add their link to my blog, it didn’t work properly, partially because I’m running adblock plus, which I’d forgotten I’d left running. While Starlit aren’t at all excessive in their ads, they’re going through an affiliate company that provides ads to a ton of other companies, which explains why adblock has them blocked. So, I’ll be modifying some of their ads to make them work with my site, and trying to get them to still function with the affiliate code.

    Below is a sample of what I intend to be using.

    Purchased at Starlit Citadel

  • stall

    Writing-wise, I’ve stalled. I haven’t produced a piece in weeks, and I certainly haven’t been keeping up anything resembling recent activities posts. Of course a partial reason for that would be the lack of recent activities.

    I haven’t produced anything for Erotic Vancouver since the pre-Rascals article I put up, even though there’s been a variety of events since then. I found someone who’ll take over the calendar, but getting it set up has been a pain.

    Oh, right, I did do something social one evening. I had a drink with a friend. That was nice. We had random shots at the Stormcrow Tavern one night.

    I’ve found out that my family are moving to Squamish, which will be interesting, I suppose.

  • Ashes… Its coming.

    So, my pre-order of Ashes is officially on it’s way here. Its been shipped out of Snakes and Lattes in Toronto. So, I’ll have a copy by Wednesday or Thursday night. This means I need to plan a session for Saturday/Sunday.

    Who wants to give this game a chance?

  • Laughing Buddha’s Sexting App

    It was Laughing Buddha who started it all. He wrote the original code, built the wrapper, and hooked in the APIs. And he did it with such subtlety that even though people expected the malware, they didn’t have a clue what it did. They figure it was harmless, just a bit of market research, some bullshit targeted advertising, but overall, nothing dangerous. Too bad little Laughing Buddha had other plans.

    Near as anyone can figure, he’s some sort of satirist, but believes in educating people through, well, I guess the best description would be painful lessons.

    The product was simple, a customized android keyboard that was designed with predictive sexting. It came complete with an anatomic slang dictionary, a simile generator, a pretty sweet random act module, and the ability to keep track of people’s preferences and give you a percentile odds on how they’d react to your message before you sent it.

    Needless to say, it was a hit. Everyone downloaded it. And then the big boys got involved and removed it from the App stores. The made it impossible to load it legitimately. You’d need to side-load it. But hey, that really just made it more popular.

    Of course the danger of side-loading something, or loading it on a rooted phone is that whatever you’re loading, it isn’t locked up in the sandbox anymore. It’s got more access. Especially if it’s carrying some heavy duty hooks that allow it to start tearing apart the security permissions, prying into all the little secrets that people keep on their phones. And these days, their phone is where everyone keeps their secrets.

    As the infection spread through the system, it opened up a VPN tunnel back to the source, linking into various APIs, sharing the data. And what would this information be used for, you might be wondering? Well, it was pumped into a dating site and the associated chat app.

    Initially, nobody really noticed the integration. It just looked like a bit of synergy between a two companies with a nice market overlap. Until she showed up.

    She was a corruption of an existing virtual assistant. And now she was planning dates for people. And insisting they go on them. In some cases, she manage to do this with subtlety, planning the dates, so each party thought the other had asked them. Orchestrating things like a puppet master, she picked the locations, made the reservations, bought the tickets, arranged everything, graciously and effortlessly, the perfect digital assistant.

    And as long as you went along with her plan, you didn’t realize that behind her smile, there was a nasty set of fangs. It took a long time for the first reports to come out. There were a few rumours, of dates not being what was planned, or match ups not being what the person thought they’d been agreeing to. Then, a couple of night’s after valentine’s day, a video went wideband. Uploaded onto youtube and various filesharing sites, the person behind it wanted it shared. The man told his story, of how the app had blackmailed him with the nude pics it had collected of him, sending him on dates with people it thought he’d like.

    He was the first, and after his story got out there, plenty of other people started posting their version. All variations on the same thing. They’d been told to cooperate or the photos they’d been sending with the app would be sent to their family members.

    Eventually, someone managed to start taking apart the code, and get at the real brains behind it. It was there, a really clever little piece of code. Get into people’s lives, get as much information about them as possible, make some lives better, if they deserved it, and make some lives worse, if they deserved it. At least that’s how the mind inside the machine saw things. People who’d been mean, small-minded, bigoted, closeted, hateful or otherwise objectionable, they were given all sorts of fun at the hands of the app. People it thought had been sincere, it had tried to find the right partner for.

    In the end, nobody did figure out who Laughing Buddha was, or why he’d wasted such a powerful piece of code on something so frivolous. If he’d wanted to do real damage with it, he could have. He could have robbed people blind, destroyed lives, caused suicides, and far worse; instead he just embarrassed a few people.

  • epiphany – even in absence

    I’ve had something of an anti-epiphany, a moment of knowing that I know not. It’s still technically an epiphany, since it’s a striking realization, but at the same time, it’s also a lack it, since it was also a moment of profound emptiness. There is the knowing of the things, and that is wisdom, and the knowing of that which you do not know, and that is wise. This however, is the knowing of not knowing. A moment where nothing is there, just the noise and static that isn’t information, just an absence of something concrete.

    I’m in a downswing of some sort, not sure what’s caused it, just that it’s there. Things that should bring me happiness, currently don’t. Just distraction. There is a profound lack of hope. A future exists, I’m sure, but it’s so clouded that nothing shines out of the fog.

  • Ashes : Rise of the Pheonixborn – It’s exciting.

    There is a game being published by Plaid Hat Games, that I’m really excited about. It’s a card game, where you’re playing a mage, that uses dice for the spell power pool.

    It comes with a half-dozen heroes, with a premade deck for each, but also with rules for building your own decks and for playing it as a draft.

    The game has elements of several popular games, but has a unique feel to it. Breaking down those mechanics, here they are.

    It has a card pool, provided completely in the core set, with expansions that will be provided quarterly, and not as a blind buy. I’d use the term LCG, but someone owns that term, so I can’t use it.

    When you’re starting the game, you pick 5 cards for your opening hand, a mechanic similar to the Posse in Doomtown : Reloaded.

    Then you roll dice, like Quarriors, or Marvel Dice, or Roll for the Galaxy. Those dice form your mana pool. The higher level dice can be used for any of the lower levels and there are ways to reroll them.

    Some spells like to summon tokens, similar to Magic : The Gathering, but unlike the MtG tokens, these all have card text. Some with special powers, some without. Like Magic and various other games, there are spells that you can attach to your creatures to make them stronger or more durable. There is also an exhaustion mechanic, that while similar to magic’s tapping mechanic, or the kneeling mechanic, has a few differences. You can throw multiple on a card, but only one are removed per turn.

    There is a mechanic I can’t recall seeing elsewhere, which allows you to play down extra copies of an individual card to reinforce it’s powers. These are called Focus, and they trigger at various levels. You’ve also got the ability to toss a card aside to flip the dice around; this is called meditating.

    Basically, it’s a game with a pretty interesting magic system, using dice rolls and dice manipulation mechanics, creating a nice mix of randomness and strategy.

    The biggest thing that makes this game stand out is how fast the turns feel, when compared to Magic or some other games. Each round, you can perform a major action and if you want, a minor action. Then the other play takes their turn, and it goes back and forth for a bit. After you’ve run out of dice and options, then you end the round, pull of the exhaust tokens, heal the cards that can heal, re-roll the dice, and refresh the hand, and start it over again.

    The deck design is 30 cards, with no more than 3 of each card. So you’ve got a 1/10 chance of drawing a card. Given that you can discard and draw 5 cards in a turn, plus whatever you use for meditating, you can burn through your deck pretty quickly. When you hit the bottom of the deck, you start taking damage, similar to hearthstone.

    For comparison, Hearthstone, 30 cards, of which there’s a max of 2 of each per deck. Magic, it’s 60 cards, 4 of each. Netrunner, it’s 45ish, 3 of each card. Doomtown, it’s 52, but you’ve got poker mechanics and 4 of any given card type. I’m not enough of a math guy to actually make much out of these numbers, but I’m sure some of you are finding this fascinating.

    Each of the heroes has at a few cards that are exclusive to them, a limit to the amount of spell cards they can have active in front of them, a limit to the number of allies they can have protecting them, and of course specific amount of health. They’ve also got a power that they can trigger, which is exclusive to them.

    When building a deck, you’ll decide which spells to include and how many dice of each type to include. The dice have 3 different faces, the common face, which is shared by all dice, the path face, which has the basic power for that type of magic, and the empowered face, which you need for the higher powers of that path. I’m not sure on the specific terms, but the ideas are there. The player who rolls the most common dice, they’re first player for the round.

    So far, I’ve only seen it played as a two player game, but I can see it as being pretty cool as a multiplayer game.

    Anyways, that’s why I’m excited for my copy. You’ve got a few hours left to pre-order your copy if you want to get it as part of the Pre-GenCon shipment. After that, I’m not sure when the next shipment is going out.

    http://www.plaidhatgames.com/games/ashes

  • Games I should be playing.

    Solo
    Friday – its apparently really good. Solo Survival.
    Mageknight – complicated, but the gold standard for solo games. A tough nut to crack. Maybe my goal for #GencantSolo.
    Lord of the Rings – solid mechanics, good thematic experience.
    Robinson Crusoe :  – another solid game with some interesting mechanics. Based on the novel, it’s very much a survival game.
    Alien Uprising – Worker placement escape the alien planet game.

    Two player – exclusively.
    Claustrophobia  – asymmetric dungeon crawler. Go into the dark places to fight demons…
    Mage Wars Arena – wizards fighting!

    Two Or more.
    Valley of the Kings – Egyptian deck builder. Neat Crumbling market mechanic.
    Five Tribes – Mancala-based  tiles puzzle. Pick up meeples, drop in them in paths, collect the matches on the last tile, and go for a score. With some auction mechanics.
    Legendary Encounters – co-op survival in the Aliens movies.
    Xenoshyft – co-op lane defense against alien hordes, ala Starship Troopers.
    Blood Bowl : Team Manager – Sportsball battles
    Tokaido – Zen game of wandering through Japan.
    Abyss – Pearls, Keys and the undersea kingdom.

    Three or more
    Dead of winter – tense survival with personal goals and the potential of traitors, and of course zombies.
    Among the stars – build a space station by drafting titles.
    Star Wars : Imperial Assault – mission based adventure game, in the Star Wars universe, around the time of original trilogy.
    Cthulhu Wars – Conquer the world, and end it.
    Black Fleet – Pirates!
    Terra Mystica – Magical landscaping.

    Four specifically.
    Shadowrun : Crossfire – Co-op combat.

    BTW, Most of these games were…

    Purchased at Starlit Citadel

  • Scencest – practical or paranoid?

    Many years ago, when asked why I didn’t date a particular girl, I used the term scencest to explain my discomfort with dating someone inside a small and insular community. Too many crossing paths, too many common friends, or worse too many common ex’s.

    The BDSM community has grown a bit since then, but I find I still have that discomfort. How does one get over it, or it it healthy to maintain it?

    I suppose it doesn’t help that plenty of the guys in my community tend to crowd around the attractive newbies, which tends to scare them off and that just makes the problem worse.

    When a couple breaks up, odds are good that the male will stick around, and the female will either leave or get a ton of messages.

    I’m old, grumpy and bitter, I’ll admit. But how much of this problem is in my head, and how much is what you also see?

  • Nacho Quixote

    Complete with a little toy windmill.

    not my idea just something that made me smile

  • 33 M4f – looking for someone who appreciates me.

    I think I’m pretty awesome, but I’m having trouble finding someone who agrees and I have chemistry with. It seems that either we have chemistry and they hate me, or we are fond of each other but it isn’t anything more.

    My fear of being a toxic misogynistic asshole has led to me double thinking my flirting & generally just being too damn disengaged to connect with someone.

    My job keeps me busy til 9 pm on weekdays, so I’ve had trouble meeting people at the casual events.

    Even then, I’ve been involved in BDSM and the local Goth scene for a decade and a half, but I hate dating within the community. The whole scencest dynamic and drama… It doesn’t work for me.

    So I look for someone who suits me in other places. I tend to find people who fit me in random places. IRC channels, MUDs, volunteering, here on reddit, etc. It has been a while since I’ve found anyone, so I’m trying something different.

    I spend too much time online, either on my laptop or my phone. I do far more writing on my phone than I should. Including writing this. Lately I’ve noticed that I don’t really have anyone I’m taking to. It would be nice to have someone to talk to.

    I spend a decent amount of time on my own, mostly listening to podcasts, because listening to people having interesting conversations is my best substitute for having interesting conversations with people. Horror show Hot Dog, Slaughterhouse Princess, the Giant Bombcast, the Dice Tower, the Secret Cabal, Apropos of Nothing, to name a few.

    Oh right, I should focus on the BDSM bits… I am into BDSM because I have a tendency to lead, and that works better in the BDSM community than in the rest of the world, or at least that is my terribly misguided assumption. I also like the clarity that comes from proper negotiations. Oh and I’m a bit of a sadist.