Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Mac Moyer's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008
9:56 am	What does Indie Press Revolution bring to the table? EDIT: I've received some very helpful responses from folks who work at IPR in the comments. Some points: Publishers set prices at IPR, and IPR takes a 15% cut, which is smaller than a typical bookstore model. I've personally had very good experiences buying directly from indie RPG publishers, but that's not always the case. IPR is providing professional customer service so you don't have to take a risk working directly with the guy who wrote a beautiful little RPG, but can't seem to offer customer service worth a damn. They're out there. IPR's slightly-higher-than-usual S&H fees reflect more expensive packaging to better protect their books. I can vouch for this first-hand: they do use better packaging, and it does work. drivingblind points out ways to keep S&H-cost-per-book lower... see the comments for details. Even folks who work at IPR aren't 100% pleased with the e-commerce software they're using. The answers to my core question -- what does IPR do for me? -- has a lot of answers, and many of them are publisher-oriented. But the fact that I got so many thoughtful, rational responses from folks who work at IPR indirectly answers the question better than anything. It's clear these guys care about their business and want to serve consumers. They're making a quality effort in a challenging sector of a tough industry, and that deserves some support. I'm going to leave the post below as originally written, but be advised that my mind has changed. In my continuing fascination with indie RPGs, I've noted that in the last year or so most indie publishers are moving to Indie Press Revolution to handle their mail-order sales. I don't know a lot about their operating model or the economics of their unique product range, but I do know that as a consumer I don't care for a lot of things I'm seeing at IPR. First, their prices aren't good. Now, these are indie RPGs, and I accept that I'm paying a premium for buying from small presses. But it seems to me (my memory may be faulty) that I paid less than $22 for my copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I bought it directly from the publisher's web site (which isn't an option anymore, now that the publisher only sells it online through IPR). And it seems to me that IPR is a middleman taking a cut of the money I'm paying... but what am I, as the consumer, getting for my extra dough? Second, their shipping fees are awful. Perhaps I'm too coddled by Amazon's free shipping deals, but I'll point out that independent sellers through Amazon charge only $3.99 for shipping a single book. IPR charges $5.79 for shipping a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard," and even more for bigger books. Now, "Dogs" is a great game, but it's a tiny little book. Why so much for shipping? It's only a couple of bucks, but on top of their already high product prices it gets amplified. As a fan of indie RPGs, it's hard for me to feel good about selling my friends on a copy of "Dogs in the Vineyard" when I know it will cost them nearly $28 for a 160-page, digest-sized book. Worse yet, I already own and love "Dogs," but I'm reluctant to buy any games I'm less familiar with from IPR, because I don't feel comfortable with the value I'd be getting. Finally, the web site is hard to use. It's hard to find stuff, even with the search function when you know exactly what you're looking for. Do a search for "spirit of the century." The game "Spirit of the Century" is the ninth entry on the page! WTF? Making this worse is IPR's habit of posting a full entry for each available format for a product. There's an entry for the print edition, an entry for the PDF edition, and an entry for an option that includes both. All for the same book. It makes much more sense to me to put up just one entry per product, and show a column with the available buying formats and corresponding prices. It sure would be easier to browse the results of my search if there weren't three nearly identical entries for every project, producing a list so unnecessarily long that it extended over three pages. I know IPR is scraping out a niche for itself in a hard-to-sell area of an industry that isn't exactly the place to go for profitability to begin with. And they must be doing something for publishers, or so many indie publishers wouldn't be using them. But, as a consumer, I'm not seeing the benefit of using IPR. I never like to be a complainer, especially about a small-fry operation that's serving the gaming community, but IPR needs to do a better job of telling me why I should support them. So far I avoid it as much as I can, but if they continue to be the main outlet for small RPG presses it's going to be hard to follow indie RPGs without them. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008
1:29 pm	At the hospital, vaguely I'm staying at Sacred Heart Medical Center for a few days. I'm reluctant to post details, because detailed medical information posted in public could be used against me or my family in the future, but it's not because I don't want my friends to know. Feel free to contact Joellen and me directly, and we'll do what we can to fill you in. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, June 23rd, 2008
9:22 am	So long, George, and thanks for all the F-bombs When I was in high school, Nick-at-Night started showing classic ('70s) SNL episodes edited down to half-hour best-of shows. (I bet NBC would have a hit on its hands if it did this with current SNL episodes... but I digress.) My favorite of all of these was George Carlin's appearance. Other comedians go for the laugh first, and a few good ones occasionally make you think. Carlin's comedy always went for the thinking first, and the laughter came as a result. I never looked at the world the same way after I first saw George Carlin's standup. We've lost a great American hero, a guy who fought hypocrisy and never ran out of enemies. And I can't help feeling we lost him just when we need him most. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 12th, 2008
9:47 am	No Play NW! Last year, I wanted to go to Go Play NW, but we were on the verge of Riley, so I didn't. As Riley's first birthday approaches, I got to thinkin', "Hey, I bet Go Play NW is coming up soon." So I looked it up, and it was almost a month earlier than last year. It was May 31st through June 1st. Man, I need to get on some kinda mailing list for this thing. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 2nd, 2008
11:28 am	SCIENTIFICTION! I'm reading The Skylark of Space, and for some reason this passage struck me as especially iconic: For forty-eight hours the uncontrolled atomic motor dragged the masterless vessel with its four unconscious passengers through the illimitable reaches of empty space, with an awful and constantly increasing velocity. I don't know why that passage strikes me as so representative of pre-Golden-Age science fiction. The elaborately stumbling rhythm? The lengthy description without a drop of imagery? The awkward pairing of the emotional adjective "awful" with the factual "velocity," in a sentence already weighed down with numbers? Above all, I can't figure out how you would build a sentence like that without a word processor. It's like the Stonehenge of sentences. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
3:53 pm	Science fiction in academia A bit ago, I commented about science fiction not being part of the academic canon of literature. Today I stumbled across an exception, a collegiate course on science fiction, by Dr. Courtney Brown at Emory University. And it's a podcast. (Scroll down a bit, or track it down on iTunes.) It's called "Science Fiction and Politics," and it's a social science course, not a literature course, but... whatever. It's close enough. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, May 7th, 2008
9:37 am	Trail of Cthulhu player's guide = smart Trail of Cthulhu is nifty and gorgeous. It's also a $40 core rulebook. And Cthulhu campaigns are notoriously short. So Pelgrane Press has done something I think is very smart. They're selling a player's guide for $11. Now, for most systems, a player's guide is extra material... an extra expense. But in this case the player's guide is a subset of the core rulebook. Just what the players need to play the game, but not something extra for the GM to buy. Pelgrane also offers PDFs of the ToC rulebook. I've seen from experience that, when a PDF is available for an RPG, especially a short campaign, the GM will often buy a copy of the core rulebook and spread the PDF around among the players... who never buy the book for themselves. With an inexpensive player's guide, I think Pelgrane is opening up a way for non-GM players to support the company and the product line, and they're not overcharging for it. In other words, I think many players who might otherwise be inclined to violate the copyright now have a very reasonable alternative. It's good for everybody, and it's smart. I would sure like to see this model catch on. Way to go, Pelgrane! (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2008
9:32 am	Geek affirmation I'm feeling a little ungeeky today. It's because of podcasts. I listen to the Butcher Block podcast, which is dedicated to Jim Butcher stuff. At least, I did until yesterday afternoon. While I enjoy the Dresden Files books very much, and I liked the SciFi Channel show, I was seriously outgeeked by the last episode of the podcast. After the speaker got very worked up about a new Dresden Files graphic novel and the cover art for some upcoming books... I turned it off and unsubscribed. I just couldn't share her excitement. I just can't get that revved up about those things. Somebody let me know when the next Dresden book comes out in paperback... other than that, I don't have the mental bandwidth to spare. I'm listening to the GeekDad podcast this morning, specifically the second of their "HipTrax" episodes. The first song was about Harry Potter (which I don't pay any attention to), and the second was about World of Warcraft (which I don't pay any attention to). *sigh* I didn't immediately turn that one off and unsubscribe, but it was a sharp followup blow. I'm feeling very out-of-touch, geekwise. So pardon me while I affirm my geekiness. I once watched all of the Lord of the Rings movies, extended editions even, in one day. I self-published a board game. I started a local science fiction reading group. I go to at least one game con a year. I know the name of that guy with the weird nose who threatens Luke Skywalker in the Mos Eisley cantina in Episode IV. I refer to the first Star Wars movie as "Episode IV." I wear glasses. Once a week, I am a Dungeon Master. On alternating weeks, I play a Japrilian diviner named Abu Zayn Mahdi ibn Asad al-Ragush al-Guluq. He was trapped in a crystal sphere for seven hundred years, after finding said sphere in the enemy palace his side captured at the Battle of Korhan. His sister Hafsa, a batulifaizah (virgin battle-priestess), was a crucial leader in the battle, and Mahdi had received word the night before he entered the palace that his wife had given birth to their first child, a son. He has seven levels in wizard, and five in the geometer prestige class. His Intelligence score is 21. He does 24d6 damage with his Disintegrate spell (26d6 if he uses a spellglyph), if his target fails a Fortitude save (5d6 if the target succeeds), and he usually casts True Strike first to get +20 on the hit roll. Okay, I feel better. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, May 2nd, 2008
10:19 am	Laying a foundation My friend shadroe and I started up a local reading group for classic science ficion. We settled on the Classics of Science Fiction list to guide us, a compilation of several critical lists of the best and most important science fiction novels. While I consider myself a science fiction fan, I went through the list and checked off only about a dozen titles I'd read, out of almost two hundred. Why so few? Because I studied English literature in college, and science fiction isn't really in the canon. You can often take a course on science fiction, but in one course you won't read enough novels to give you a solid foundation. And colleges don't generally offer more than one. So my fiction reading bandwidth was occupied with lots of non-scifi. It's been a great journey for me. After the last year of reading almost nothing but strong scifi classics in my spare time, I have a new understanding of the history of the genre, and I feel like it's just barely a first glimpse. But it's already been such an amazing view, I'll be on this path for a while. As we reached the end of our last reading cycle (all the members of the group pick a book from the list, and we read one every three weeks before we pick another batch), I read far enough ahead that I decided to independently read the three volumes of Asimov's anthology Before the Golden Age, stories that appeared in the magazines when Asimov was growing up in the '30s. I'm halfway through the collection now, and it's a particular eye-opener. I kind of knew science fiction magazines were more important in the early days of science fiction than they've been in my lifetime, but it's a new experience to actually read some of the best short stories from the early days. It's like I've seen the mountains for my whole life, I'm finally trekking out to climb some of them, and I'm finding the beauty of the valleys and rivers below them. I've already made a point of picking up some of the other short-story collections on our list, Campbell's 1952 Astounding Science Fiction Anthology, Conklin's The Best of Science Fiction, and Adventures in Time and Space. I'd like to read all of these before I get to the new-wave Dangerous Visions anthologies. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 24th, 2008
8:37 am	An open letter Dear CNN Headline News, "American Idol" results are not news. Please devote the time you are planning to spend on this "story" in the future to instead covering meaningful world events. If you find yourself facing a slow news day, there's always a couple of wars you could mention now and again. Thank you, Mac (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
10:24 am	Transmitting John Williams directly into my skull I admit it. I want this toothbrush. It says it plays the "Star Wars Theme Song." But from which movie? After the initial fanfare (maybe that's the whole two minutes?), each movie varies quite a bit. What I really want is the Imperial March. If I could start every morning with the Imperial March, I would be a better man. Y'know, maybe I just oughta get one o' them CD alarm clocks to start my day off right. To start my day off like Darth Vader. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 21st, 2008
5:19 pm	4th edition blues Went to Just-a-Game Con on Saturday, and played in a D&D 4e demo. I won't go into details (if you want details, this is a good rundown), but in short I like it. A lot. My first-level wizard was way more fun to play than any first-level wizard I've ever seen, and it feels like the fixes are systemic and smart, with a real focus on making the game friendlier, faster, and funner. I'm very confident 4e will be a much better game than 3.5. I'm running a 3.5 game that I'm ready to shut down in the next couple of months (expect a post-mortem post here in 6-7 weeks). I won't be re-tooling that game to 4e. But I'm playing a wizard in another 3.5 game I really enjoy, and which appears to have the legs to go on indefinitely. And the GM has no intention to switch to 4e. I think that's a real shame. I'd prefer to play 4e, but I see her point. The period of learning could really disrupt her story-focused campaign. It's a mature game, and our characters are at 12th and 13th level. Most of us are built out of a variety of splatbooks. The characters would play much differently if they were converted to 4e PHB-only rules. And I don't want to play another D&D game. I've said before that I'm not that much of a fantasy fan. I'd rather my second game was something different (Trail of Cthulhu is new and shiny). I especially don't want to play a 3.5 game and a 4e game at the same time. If I can't needle the GM into switching -- and she was pretty adamant that she won't -- I'll be sticking with 3.5 for a while longer. Ah well. (Comment on this)
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
8:11 am	Crib notes Riley slept overnight in the nursery for the first time last night. We've got her into a pattern of being rocked to sleep every time. As sweet as it is to hold a sleeping baby in your arms, she needs to get into a pattern of going to sleep in her crib... so she can get herself back to sleep again when she wakes up in the middle of the night. Tuesday night's adventures in imposing new sleep patterns left her so tired that she slept much better last night. Let's hope that pattern continues.... (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 6th, 2008
6:27 pm	My Darling Fire Hazard I TiVo'd My Darling Clementine on TCM or AMC or something, and watched it this morning. I've seen it twice or thrice before, but this is the first time I remember noticing that two fires get set in the course of Wyatt Earp stopping violent drunks... and nobody seems to notice. These fires get set, and seem to go up pretty quickly, and the scene just wraps up with nobody so much as grabbing a bucket of water or... saying anything. Seems like a bad policy when your buildings are all made out of untreated, desert-parched timber. I wrote a paper in a college film class about the use of fire in a later John Ford western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Fire was used as a sort of icon of the John Wayne character's violent courage, the smooth way he lit his cigarette in the chimney of a lantern while he held it in his mouth, and later it transformed into self-destructive fury. I can't decide whether there's a connection, or John Ford just decided it would be fun to put fire on film in a couple Clementine shots. At the time, it just seems like the chaos of the moment... but both instances in Clementine happen under nearly identical circumstances. Ah well. Burn, baby, burn! (Comment on this)
Monday, March 31st, 2008
10:40 am	Not going to GameStorm is for chumps GameStorm was rad... again. That's my summary. ( I describe my own con experience in more detail... ) ( I detail my observations about GameStorm in general in more detail... ) (18 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 17th, 2008
12:23 pm	Why I stopped watching The Sarah Connor Chronicles, why I'm reconsidering, and what I learned I got a season pass for Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles when it came out. I watched it for a while, and then decided I wasn't interested anymore. As it happened, it had a very short season, and the decision not to watch it anymore came just before the two-hour season finale. So, why did I quit? The action scenes. There were a lot of them. A lot of them. They took up lots of time. And, almost always, what was at stake in these action scenes was the lives of the protagonists. This can work in a movie, but it doesn't work in a TV show. We, the audience, know that the protagonists aren't going to get killed off in a fight. So when a fight happens, and the only thing that's at stake in the fight is whether they live or die... there's not really anything at stake. The fight is on the screen just for the sake of putting a fight on the screen. And the fight scenes were all full-tilt, car-chase, epic, explodey fight scenes. All with no stakes. It got numbing very, very quickly. ( The rest behind the cut, 'cause it's longish... ) (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 9th, 2008
8:59 pm	ALERT: TV shows do not accurately portray technology Joellen is watching Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. When the characters snuck into a government building to load a virus into a computer system, I spotted the same model of KVM switch that Joellen and I have. The character (in this case, Sarah Connor) plugged her USB thumb drive into one of the KVM switch's USB ports... the ones that you plug the keyboard and mouse into. The only other thing that was plugged in was the video cable... the one that leads to the monitor or the video card. This implies that the KVM switch transferred data from the USB thumb drive to the computer through a video cable. In case you're not aware, this is not how KVM switches work. So let it be known: TV is wrong. (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 8th, 2008
8:08 pm	Tentative GameStorm schedule Here's my schedule so far for GameStorm: Mac Moyer's Schedule GameStorm 2008  Friday  Saturday  Sunday 8am   8am   8am   9am   9am   9am   10am   10am Grill the Gurus Poolside 10am   11am   11am   11am   12pm   12pm   12pm Cobras in the Cockpit Centennial Center CC20 1pm   1pm RPG Design Forum Poolside 1pm Stonehenge Centennial Center CC2 2pm   2pm TransAmerica Centennial Center CC27 2pm 3pm Through the Desert Centennial Center CC21 3pm Taluva Centennial Center CC27 3pm   4pm Ticket to Ride: Europe Centennial Center CC21 4pm   4pm   5pm 5pm Robin D. Laws Speaks Poolside 5pm   6pm   6pm Horror Rules: Black Hill Gulls Nest GN8 6pm   7pm Star Wars Saga Ed.: Tartress Station Quayside QS1 7pm 7pm   8pm 8pm 8pm   9pm 9pm 9pm   10pm 10pm   10pm   11pm   11pm   11pm   12am   12am   12am   I am running games marked in this color. This is definitely a more relaxed schedule than last year, but still lots of stuff I'm excited about. The emphasis this year is on sharing as much time with Joellen as possible, so we can tag-team Riley. We're signed up for some of the same events, and we'll work together to teach/referee the games I'm signed up to run. I'm leaving Sunday morning open, to minimize the stress of checking out. I also hope to play my latest unpublished prototype with friends (and new friends, I hope!), and Sunday afternoon may be a good time to squeeze that in. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
12:00 pm	Thanks for the memories, Mr. Gygax Gary Gygax has moved on to a plane consistent with his alignment. There are a lot of pioneers that you just think... they were in the right place at the right time. If they hadn't been there to do what they did, somebody else would have done it. The details might have been different, but the broad strokes would have gone down the same way. But I don't think that's true of Gary Gygax. If Gary Gygax hadn't done it, I think it's entirely possible tabletop roleplaying games never would have been born. His appearance on Futurama warmed my heart. I reflect that I'm not completely sure I've played an RPG directly written by Gygax. I've played D&D (as recently as last night, as it happens), but the first material I owned was the red box, which was written by Frank Mentzer. I probably played earlier, Gygax-written editions of D&D with friends, though... but I never owned the books. I own Boot Hill. I made a character for Dangerous Journeys, once... a solid couple of evenings' entertainment, that. A prized gem of my collection is a copy of Role-Playing Mastery, not because it's worth any money as a collector's item, but because it contains the thoughts on the essence of the hobby by the man who started it. The real prize is the hours and hours of fun I've had and will continue to have playing a genre of games that Gary Gygax had the vision to create. Thank you so much, Mr. Gygax! (Comment on this)
Monday, February 25th, 2008
8:58 am	On fruit The latest xkcd captures nicely my personal struggle with fruit. I love fruit, but often it's a pain in the ass. I would quibble with a lot of the positions on this chart (I think his division of apples into green, just above the zero-point on the tasty axis, and red, just below it, is accurate for two varieties of apple, the Granny Smith and the bred-for-looks-and-not-flavor Red Delicious, but ignores a wide range of wonderful varieties, including my beloved Honeycrisp), my biggest difference in opinion is on the banana. I think bananas are delicious, which puts them much higher on the tasty axis, but that's subjective. More objectively, I believe they are incredibly easy. Of course, I carry a pocketknife, so slashing open the end of a slightly green banana is no trouble for me. At work, the powers stock fruit in the kitchenette, and bananas are consumed faster than any other... because they are so easy to eat one-handed at the keyboard, I believe. Now, bananas bring me to another fruit-related Interweb item I want to share. NPR's Fresh Air recently aired an interview about bananas, which you can listen to on their site. In addition to the obligatory scolding of American banana companies for the political consequences of their operations in foreign countries, this program covers the state of banana varieties in the American marketplace. Unlike apples, almost 100% of bananas sold in megamarts are just one variety, the Cavendish, a second-rate banana that replaced the reportedly superior Gros Michel around the 1950s, when Panama disease made it impractical to propogate the Gros Michel in commercial scale. Now it appears that Panama disease is taking its toll on the Cavendish, too, and something drastic is going to have to change in the banana world very soon. Will new techniques and technologies be developed to protect the Cavendish? Might they be adapted to return the Gros Michel to its former glory? Will new varieties replace the Cavendish? Will we lose our massive quantities of bananas entirely? I think the last possibility is unlikely... where there's a dollar, there's a way. In unrelated news, a very nasty virus snuck up on me in the wee hours of Saturday morning and punched me in the face. Let this be a warning to you: protect your face from face-punching viruses. (6 Comments |Comment on this)