cartesiandaemon

Crossposting

2022-02-01T22:17:15Z

Crossposting to LJ has been discontinued. I am posting a lot less anyway, but if anyone is still following me on LJ, the posts will probably not return. LJ-style posts can be found on Dreamwidth as Jack. You may also find me on twitter as cartesiandaemon, or on facebook under my full name.

If you've any other suggestions, please let me know, I should still see comments.

The book of Judith, a summary

2021-12-04T20:33:01Z

We actually READ the book of Judith for Hannukah. I will attempt to summarise.

Nebuchadnezzar is the autocratic emperor of Assyria and (realistically) rules a vast swathe of territory and (unrealistically) thinks that he is almost a god. This isn't THE Nebuchadnezzar, not any of the other Nebuchadnezzars either. Stories of the time apparently just slap the Nebuchadnezzar label on rulers who are going to be bad news, reflecting that the people who wrote the stories which we're reading were first, people in Jerusalem conquered by Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar and deported back to Babylon, then their descendants who later returned to Israel. Fictional Nebuchadnezzar has a massive beef with Some Ruler who doesn't really come into the story after the first chapter.

There is detail about Some Ruler's fortified cities (wall width, size of stones, gate size, number of towers), which having recently read https://acoup.blog/2021/10/29/collections-fortification-part-i-the-besiegers-playbook/ was pretty interesting from a historical-strategic perspective. A wall like that shuts off raids from any any army less professional and determined that what the emperor of Assyria can muster.

Narrator: This is what a walled city protects against, and this is what it doesn't.

Not-Nebuchadnezzar summons armies from all of his tribute territory, all the way west through the middle east to Egypt and Ethiopia to come make war on Some Ruler. They say, "no, we've tried going to war for causes we don't care about, it sucks, screw off." He says, "do it anyway". They say, "you and what army".

Then he summons a giant army from the territory which does respond to him, and crushes Some Ruler. Then he swears by his throne that he will totally make all those territories west all the way to Egypt sorry and stab them with his own sword. Then he summons his important general Holofernes and says, "It's murdering people who don't do what I say day, go west and kill everyone you find in such a way that I get the credit" and Holofernes is "yes sir".

Narrator: There's a count of infantry and cavalry and (implicitly) a lot of unequipped hangers on. This is how you organise armies. Also a LOT of supplies. Also a lot of gold.

Holofernes marches west and kills and ravages and burns until some countries come begging to let them worship Fake-Nebuchadnezzar afterall. Then he's like "we've conquered everyone," and someone is like, "yes, everyone apart from the jews in the hill country where it's hard to march armies" and he glares at them and takes his army off to conquer them too.

Someone explains that those people are protected by God and it's impossible to conquer them, unless they screw up and offend God somehow and God lets it happen.

Narrator: SO DON'T OFFEND GOD, OK? ARE YOU LISTENING AT THE BACK?

Holofernes is offended by this so he sends Someone up into the hill country as punishment, vowing to kill him along with everyone else. Some other suck-ups tell him that the hills are bad for armies so he can't force the outnumbered defenders into a pitched battle, but if he can camp the right water-supplies the people will eventually have to surrender.

Narrator: This is why in the present we're so careful to maintain the spring and the cisterns and everything. THIS MEANS YOU, MR POPULAR FRONT OF JUDEA.

So, the country is besieged, especially the poorly-attested town where a young, industrious, pious, admirable woman called Judith lives. Her husband had died, but she continued to run their estate very efficiently, and do lots of pious things.

Narrator: blah blah piety blah

The situation got worse, and there was much debate about "OK, we've been observant, God will save us, but we've rationed water for weeks and people are starting to die, WHEN will God save us, is there a point where we should surrender anyway".

Judith said, this won't do, I'll fix everything. And she went to the town leaders and told them to follow her plan and she would go and deal with the army by herself. And because (a) this is a story (b) they were desperate (c) she was very pious and seemed like God would approve of her and (d) they didn't want to go fight the army themselves.

So she mourned and prayed some more, and then bathed and put on the best finery she only wore for special occasions, and took one maid with a supply of kosher-slaughtered food, and boldly marched down to the army.

Army: Why are you here?
Judith (cunningly lying): The desperate town leaders are going to start eating the tithed grain set aside for God and the priests, or just outright surrender. They are no kin to me any more, take me in!
Judith: And take me to your Top Man because I can tell him how to conquer the town, and the whole country. Only him.

Narrator: This is why you NEVER NEVER eat the tithe set aside EVEN WHEN an army is besieging you.

And the scouts politely captured her, but finding that all very plausible, and also noting that although she hadn't made a point of it, she was very good looking and the sort of woman Holofernes liked hanging out with whether or not he got any Key Military Secrets out of it, very politely took her to Holofernes who was just as delighted to receive her as everyone said.

And they had some quiet dinners, and Judith was very careful to ensure that they both had fine refreshments, but she only ate the kosher food.

Narrator: Only eat kosher food.

And Judith explained, that the leaders were going to abandon God, and when they did, God would let the army attack safely without protecting the defenders. But she added, she was still pious and God would let her know when that happened. All she had to do was go outside the camp to pray last thing at night, and listen for God's response.

Narrator: Outside the camp. Remember, that's important foreshadowing.

So they did this a few nights, with Judith talking with Holofernes, and him becoming increasingly smitten with her, but her also saying, maybe tonight is the night you get to attack.

And eventually he talked her into a private dinner, where she was very solicitous of his comfort, and they drank wine, and he drank A LOT and fell fastly asleep.

Narrator: Pay attention, this next bit's clever.

And she drew his sword from his scabbard and hacked his head off as hard (and quickly and quietly) as she could.

Narrator: OK, maybe actually the clever bits were all the earlier bits. This bit wasn't exactly clever, just very effective and satisfying.

Then she left the tent (possibly suffering a bit of ribaldry from the guards) and her maid hid Holofernes head in the empty kosher food bag, and they left the camp (ostensibly to pray, as she had each previous night and Holofernes had given permission for.)

And as soon as she was out of sight, they dashed up the hill to the defenders and said they'd returned. And everyone celebrated. And then all the men timed a big attack in the morning which led to Holofernes army first, forming up in triumph that they'd destroy them in a face-to-face battle, but then panicking when they realised that the general's head had vanished in the night and appeared on a spear over the defender's camp. And the army was driven away or killed.

And God was like "Nyah, Nebuchadnezzar, you thought you were almost divine, but your macho army totally fizzled, and I struck it down with nothing more than a single determined, personable, pious woman."

This all alludes to the more genuinely historical invasion by the Greek Seleucids repelled by the Maccabees, so it is celebrated in Hannukah, along with the later tradition that one of the things Judith specifically plied Holofernes with was good cheese. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1138701.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Friday Five: Clothing

2021-11-14T21:43:04Z

1. Do you have a yearly, or monthly, clothing budget? Do you stick to it?

No, I'm fortunate to have enough slack that I don't need a strict limit. Or unfortunate, that as with many other things, perhaps I need a budget TO get me to spend ENOUGH. I'll always have clean, un-holed clothes. And have slowly developed a few I actually like, like smart but interesting socks, and fresh, well fitting T-shirts and jeans.

But I have very few clothes I especially like, and it would be nice for me to have SOME.

I have been trying to piece together how to buy better looking clothes, without just buying more expensive clothes that fit equally mediocrely. I think basically I need to have clothes that fit well. And maybe replace them when they're fraying a bit, before they're fraying a lot.

I guess my weight changing hasn't helped.

2. Do you buy trendy clothes, or classic pieces that can be worn for years?

I have no idea HOW to buy fashionable clothes. I could barely RECOGNISE fashionable clothes. But I'm not sure my clothes would be described as "fashionable". Or as "pieces". No, that's not quite fair. As someone else said, I do have a "recognisable aesthetic" as it were.

3. Is there a current fashion trend that you hate?

Whatever I personally notice is usually eclipsed when I see a friend trying to buy women's clothes and discover there's some new fundamental part of clothing which they've decided to spent a few years selling clothing without. "Hey, here's trousers, without the end of the legs." "Hey, want a jumper that doesn't keep you warm?" "We've changed our sizes again. Now sizes below this threshold are all labelled as '2' and sizes above this threshold are all labelled as 'XXXXXXXXXXXXXL'. Good luck."

I often am a little grumpy at something silly, but I can't remember any right now

4. Have you had clothing altered to fit you better?

Apparently this is easy and useful (and cheap by the standards of buying clothes), so that would be very good, but I haven't actually managed it before.

5. Is there a piece of clothing, or accessory, that you covet?

There's not a thing. But I do wish I could look, I don't know, well dressed. Like some people seem to manage, or man people manage in the photos photography friends post. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1138553.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Half way down the stairs is the box where I fit

2021-10-26T19:29:05Z

Half way down the stairs is the box where I fit
There isn't any other box QUITE like it
If I'm not in box A, and I'm not in box B
Then when will I find just right the box for me?
The box that I fit
It isn't quite normal
It isn't quite weird
It isn't quite straight
And it isn't quite queered
But all sorts of funny thoughts run around in my head
And I don't fit in your box, I fit in my box instead

I wrote a poem! Adapted from A. A. Milne's "Halfway down the stairs is the stair where I sit"

It came out in a burst, trying to capture the feeling of finding the box where YOU fit, and not feeling like you just don't fit anywhere anymore. In this case, for potentially getting a diagnosis of ADHD (or autism). You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1138424.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Gideon the Ninth

2021-10-02T09:30:59Z

I reread Gideon the Ninth and half way through Harrow the Ninth. I posted a lot of recap and musings on Facebook:

https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10104135617416710&id=36912084

Should be public to everyone, but you can always comment here if you don't use Facebook You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1137977.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Do you want a Time Travel Debugger

2021-09-30T16:02:46Z

I never got around to talking about what my current work do: http://undo.io There was some previous discussion on the topic on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jack.vickeridge/posts/10103938681712440

What is a Time Travel Debugger

It records everything that happens in a program's execution, so you can step backwards as well as forwards, or rewind execution and then replay it again more carefully. Or you can "replay" it backward, e.g. going to the end of time, seeing your program crashed with a null pointer and then setting a watchpoint on that pointer and reverse-continuing until you find out where the pointer was set to that value.

There's two main modes of use, using it like a debugger sitting in front of a program, or using a companion recorder (which is actually an executable with much of the same code but packaged differently) to record your program in your overnight test suite, or running to replicate a bug that happens in a very long running process. Then once you've reproduced the bug once, you've almost finished, you can just load up the recording and step forward and back in a debugger until you figure out what went wrong.

That sounds impossible!

Yes, it does sound impossible, but it works.

It records literally everything the program does that interacts with the outside world in any way, e.g. any system call (including any file access, network access, gettime, even getpid, etc, etc), any instructions which write to shared memory, etc. That can get large for some programs (but customers do use it successfully!)

It saves a snapshot at several points during history (by forking the process there), so it can create the state of any point in history by forking another process from that snapshot, and playing it forward using the saved events instead of actually doing any of the things that interact with the outside world.

It does all this by rewriting the compiled program in memory, and maintaining a mapping between the rewritten memory and the original assembly. So you the user see the original source code and original assembly, with whatever level of debug info you originally compiled the program with. But behind the scenes, almost any non-trivial instruction is rewritten to do something else, to either to save the result of the instruction in the event log, or to replay the value from the event log.

That means that you can attach it to any program, compiled any way, just like any debugger can. You don't need to compile it with some magic -- people keep expecting this, and it could have been written that way, but instead, you can just connect it to any program you could attach gdb to.

Caveats

Recording multiple threads is slow, and recording multiple processes doesn't exist yet. We're working on it, but right now can help with some multithreading bugs but can't help with others.

Program execution is slower, between 2x and 10x. We are working to improve that. Replaying through execution can be faster than that (and you can usually go directly to the beginning, end, etc without any replaying).

This is all on linux only.

The interface and implementation is based on the gdb forntend/gdb server protocol. So by default it looks like debugging with gdb but with "reverse-next" as well as "next". And it works with any program which uses gdb backend, e.g. visual code, emacs, although some of those are tested extensively and some aren't.

But no linux debugger has a very good UI, so currently it is mainly used by people who have to debug using something like gdb anyway, but want to be able to solve harder bugs quicker. We are trying hard to make it easy for languages like python and java where the translation has to understand an interpreter as well as the code. This works in the sense that it can be recorded and replayed, but getting a good user experience is a lot harder.

Worth and Price

I always describe it as, the difference between "not having a debugger" and "having a debugger". If you have a debugger, maybe actually 90% of problems you can solve with print statements. But the 10% that you can't fix with print statements could take months to solve without a debugger, or hours with a debugger. It's hard to describe why you need a debugger to someone who hasn't tried using one. But almost no-one would go back to not having one.

A time travel debugger makes trivial the small proportion of issues that still feel impossible even with a debugger. You say, "yes, it fails intermittently but we don't know if we'll ever track it down unless someone wants to study the failure for nine months", but that might be only hours with the right tool.

Unfortunately, this tool takes a large amount of programmer effort to create, and is only viable if it's sold commercially. If you view it as "The 5% of bugs we have that take 9 months to track down, instead get solved in a few hours", you compare the cost to the salary for an extra programmer or two, it's very reasonable. But most people including me hate paying for tools, so it's hard to sell.

It has a great retention rate -- any companies which have subscribed to a contract, have almost always kept it, and programmers who have used it regularly (including me) are very very eager to keep having it available.

Currently there are several introductory offers. There's an educational license which is cheaper or free. There might be an offer of free licences to the right open source project if you're interested. There's a 30 day free trial, and a personal license, in the hopes people will become converts and persuade their employer to adopt it. There is standing offer that if you have an intractable hard to reproduce bug that's you'd like to see just go away, we can arrange some sort of trial to have someone come and help capture and diagnose that bug, and see if that leads to a longer term arrangement.

Ask questions in the comments. Feel free to download the trial -- if you've used gdb, it's fairly straightfoward to try out, and it's magical to see "step back, step forward".

Or if it sounds like you might be someone who would actually benefit from acquiring a license, I can put you in touch with helpful people -- we used to focus on big clients because there was a lot of shakedown, but now it works more reliably out of the box, it's plausible for a wider spectrum of companies and people. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1137863.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Swimming

2021-08-15T20:05:10Z

I went swimming again, almost all afternoon at Jesus Green Lido.

I brought my goggles and for almost the first time I've been there the water was clear enough to see a long way. It was quite magical drifting underwater -- the natural light falling down, and dozens of small leaves hanging suspended stationary in front of you like a living box of light, instead of an empty skybox.

I swam ten good strokes underwater which as much as I usually ever manage, and swam down to the deepest point a few times.

And swam a proper mile.18 lengths, 1800 yards, none of this 1600 or 1700 approximation I end up converting yards to meters and back again :)

Sunday I cycled to Upware along the (broken) cycle route 11, first time I've tried to follow a national cycle route. Description on facebook. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1137333.html using OpenID. comments so far.

ADHD emotional dysregulation

2021-07-21T16:39:16Z

As often happens, a friend with experience with ADHD linked me to a quiz inspired by diagnostic questions. One question was "Do you often have difficulty completing tasks because of your own emotions" (or something like that) and I was like YES that's my entire personality. (Exaggerated for effect, that's not my only personality but it is defining a lot of my characteristic experiences.)

Another was "do you tend to give up on tasks that you find hard or confusing" and... yeah, that. Not intellectual things! But "no-one tells you what to do" things

To cut a long quiz short, I had medium levels of forgetfulness and inattention, low levels of impulsivity and forgetfulness, no developmental delays, but maxed out "Emotional Dysregulation" and "Inflexibility". So not classical ADHD but I DO fail to do things: https://www.idrlabs.com/adhd-spectrum/65-45-70-25-100-90-40/result.php

Aside

Obviously those are based on my quiz answers. Lots of the questions I yelled "COMPARED TO WHO?" and I wasn't being contrary -- genuinely the thing I want to know is, given my awareness of my own level of eg coping strategies for being late, is that typical, or high, or low?

I wasn't born knowing how much average people struggle with things! And even if you ask most people can't tell you! So went with best guesses. But assuming the "YES THAT'S ME" questions and the "I guess I do have coping strategies there" q I placed ok results prob mostly right

Continuation

My friend recommended the video "Why is it so hard to do something that should be so easy" by "How to ADHD" BY Jessica McCabe about adhd style emotional dysregulation and "climbing the wall of awful" and strategies that don't work. Short and v watchable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Uo08uS904Rg

I don't want to be premature but that seemed to unlock answers to a lot of questions. I have a lot of friends with similar but different struggles and I seemed to fit in with them but some of my classic experiences didn't fit them and vice versa, so I didn't have a box for me

I like being in literal boxes, and I like being in metaphorical boxes when they're the right shape, but not when they're not. But this seemed right for me. Knowing seemed to help, even in a few days. And gives me an action plan. See how much knowing the things I need to watch fixes them. Possibly diagnosis helps. Possibly medicine helps. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1136708.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Cross-posting

2021-06-24T21:00:14Z

I know I asked this before, but which of you have a decent way of crossposting posts between Twitter/Facebook/mastodon or dreamwidth? Do you have a way of crossposting friend only posts? I used to try to cross-post links but now I think cross-posting the content is easier (for micro-posts where there doesn't need to be a canonical comment section).

Ifttt is the thing that's supposed to do that but I've ended up confused whenever I try to set it up. I think the ideal design would be some input feed that everything else is crossposted from, and the crossposting relying on webforms so that it doesn't only work for services that have an existing API and willingness to let people use it. But i don't need s perfect solution, just anything that works for now You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1135815.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Eurovision

2021-05-24T19:57:26Z

Belated Eurovision reactions :)

Cyprus won on sequins.

Albania had good lyrics, all about having ruined her life and would God forgive her, shedding "tears of rust", in Albanian. But didn't easily come across if you didn't speak the language.

Israel was probably fighting uphill

Belgium hooverphonic. I loved their dark suit aesthetic. If I was choosing on looks alone they might be my favourite

More on FB: https://facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10104037873366570&id=36912084 You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1135275.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Coton to Madingly Woods and American WWII Cemetery

2021-05-24T19:56:05Z

Comments and photos from a short walk, connecting to the first of the walks I did this spring:

facebook.com/jack.vickeridge/albums/10104038398863470/ You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1134998.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Wimpole to Orwell

2021-04-12T07:59:06Z

Photos: https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?vanity=jack.vickeridge&set=a.10104003128715130

I extended my walk with a short leg joining up Wimpole Hall to Orwell, a nearby village, which joins to another long distance trail I criss-crossed before, the Greenwich Meridian Trail (running roughly south to London).

Now, along with my short walk from Waterbeach up the river to Bottisham Lock along the Fen Rivers Way (which goes from Cambridge to King's Lynn), that joins up bits of route all the way from Bottisham Lock along the river to Cambridge, and the through Cambridge past the CMS and West Cambridge Site to Coton, and on through the villages to Wimpile Hall and thence Orwell. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1134130.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Vaccinated!

2021-03-13T11:11:28Z

Astra-Zenica You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1133121.html using OpenID. comments so far.

I'M GOING TO GET VACCINATED!

2021-03-09T20:41:25Z

I've no idea why I'm apparently early in the queue, if my GP just had a surplus of slots, or if it's based on my weight, or something else.

But I've been saying for months not to quibble, just take what's offered, so I must just take my own medicine. On Saturday! In Barnwell.

I'll be able to do things again. At some point. Very eventually. But maybe I'll feel it's responsible to do SOME more things before that, given our current high level of caution. But eventually, public face licking parties! :)

Many condolences to people who have come up unlucky in the queue, especially people who were more vulnerable to start with. That's a lot about the national situation that should have been different. But it's still nice to celebrate some victories whether or not the best victories

I've almost forgotten how to be excited by things. I'm trying to consciously remind myself. I can't have a party (yet), but I used all caps. Non-ironically!!

Go me! Go me! You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1132739.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Turtlepeligo RPG (adventure 2, session 10 retrospective: What could still be improved

2021-02-24T21:44:24Z

Do you like the way I said "what could still be improved", rather than "what went badly" as if doing creative things is an ongoing journey rather than a pass/fail test? I hope so because it's hard work making my brain do that, but I think the rewards are worth it.

I had to force myself to sit down and go through all the major pieces of prep I did and ask "would the session have gone as well without it" to get my list of "what went well" because my first instinct was to assume that all the things the players did awesomely would have happened anyway, even though when I looked closer, a lot of them wouldn't.

Invent not "Who Are They" But "What are They Trying to Do"

In roleplaying -- or linear narrative fiction like books, tv, computer games -- any interaction is more interesting if the participants are actually interacting. If the PCs have a clear goal for the scene which could succeed or fail. And the NPCs are not just passive, but are pushing in a direction -- be it "make the guests happy" or "make friends" or "do a street performance (without being interrupted)" or "don't let anyone past the bridge".

But I just verbalised that dichotomy now, despite reading a lot of similar advice (goals, "what's my motivation for this scene", every scene should be about resolving a conflict of potentially thwarted success, etc)

So in the past a lot of my worldbuilding was too static -- a status quo of "this person/animal/society usually does this" instead of "is currently trying to do that", like a painting instead of a "in media res". I will try to do the opposite!

And further, not just minor conflict, but I always empathise too much with NPCs, I need NPCs who want something unreasonable and aren't willing to compromise, and even NPCs who are just antagonistic, so there is significant conflict for the players to overcome!

FWIW, I think some mediums make the opposite mistake, e.g. art, fictional encyclopaedias, exploration games are much better suited to showing a snapshot than an unfolding narrative. The same applies to larger bodies of work: The Robin Hood or Arthurian legends, or the stories about a pantheon of gods usually paint a picture of what the characters are like much more than presenting a beginning-to-end story. I think Magic:The Gathering is much better suited to showing what a world IS like than by showing some great transition, and I wish they would take an approach more like greek myths and less like the MCU.

Have clear goal

Related to the above, I tried to have a clear goal "a demon has escaped from the spirit forest, find it and fix it". I even explicitly asked people to think about a few ways that scenario could end. But I think it wasn't immediate enough, and didn't build on people's existing awareness enough, so it felt very abstract and not like a clear goal.

I could have fast-forwarded to start the party in the ruin of a farmstead, with an immediate "help, help, stop it, it went that way" or similar.

Or I could have done a cut-away scene to show the spirit demon causing mayhem even if they didn't know that in character yet, so they had a strong motivation to stop it.

I tried to establish the important points by having the party encounter a lesser dangerous spirit immediately, to establish rules of "how to deal with dangerous spirits" and "what damage they could do" and that helped, but I don't think it did enough.

More minor scene-to-scene goals (e.g. convince X to let you take her boat, scale the cliffs at Y) would also give more stakes and opportunity for establishing trade-offs -- sometimes you fail that thing you wanted, without failing the whole mission, and that makes the whole thing more interesting.

Have meaningful action resolution

I hadn't realised I'd done this, but half the session was "find out about the mission, get in a boat, go there", which was great for getting people used to the setting and mechanics, but didn't have a lot of "Can I do X?" "OK, well, roll, and we'll see", simply because I tried to seed in obstacles to the campaign, but I didn't think of every interaction as one that might go either way, even when choosing an NPC's attitude differently might have turned the conversation from "she gives you a quest" to "you try to convince her you're up to it" or turned "you get in a boat" to "oh no, a character acted out one of their flaws and now the situation is harder, can you fix it?"

Timing

I knew with six people, two of whom are 9 and 12, it would be hard to fit things in, and I pared the plot down a lot to a simple "establish premise, dangerous encounter [with fish], some more role-playing to establish characters, climax confrontation", but even so, people were losing concentration after a couple of hours. So we had a good session, hopefully memorable (especially the bees and the fighting the fish), and people got used to the characters and mechanics, but I feel like I could have done better to make two hours thrilling from the start.

Cookie economy

Because there just wasn't enough difficult resolution, people had few opportunities to spend cookies, so they loved earning them, but they didn't matter often enough so there was no real chance of running out, or a sense of how close they were to losing a conflict over something. Partly, I need more opportunities to make actions that matter, maybe I need to reduce the number of cookies.

Minor bits of prep

There were lots of minor things that would have helped. I planned to use physical counters for cookies but that was a bit risky with Ms Under One's inquisitive hands around, but I think they were much less resonant when they weren't being added and spent all the time. I wished I'd had a chance to prep my helpers a bit more specifically with like, this bit could be written small, this bit could be big so everyone can see, that are automatic if you're used to running games, but you don't necessarily know if you don't.

There were a few practical inconveniences like, how do I print out a few copies of the quick start rules and make it obvious at a glance which bits of paper are duplicates and which people should try to look at both of. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1132502.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Turtlepeligo RPG (adventure 2, session 10 retrospective: What went well

2021-02-24T00:08:14Z

I put a lot of thought into how to make a game work where there were six players who want a variety of different things. I don't usually recommend that, but I wanted to play with all the support bubble! In particular, I wanted to avoid a system like DnD that defaults to "we kill it". But I also wanted to include some conflict along the lines of combat where you have a particular ability, and you use it, and get the thrill of rolling a dice and being effective.

Map

I predicted this and I was super right, that drawing a map of the area the PCs would go to would be incredibly useful. I got a lot of "ooh, what's that" and "can we go there" which was exactly what I hoped for -- it gave the players a meaningful sense of being familiar with the islands on these specific turtles, and immediately conveyed the general "how big is this" without me having to describe it verbally.

I drew a (very provisional) sketch of the whole turtlepeligo: one big miles-long grandma turtle with the spirit forest on her back, and a dozen young-to-middle-age turtles with villages, pastures, seaweed, etc, etc. And players were immediately invested in "where do I live" "what's the turtle like on my island".

And I drew the three islands the players were likely to visit, so they could rapidly see the status quo and decide where to go. It would have been well worth drawing some of the specific locations too.

It also forced me to realise specifics about layout I might not otherwise have thought of, like "there should always be a few boats drawn up on the beach, right?"

I didn't even expect to use the maps for trying to have people move around, which I think was the right approach. The main focus was giving the PCs handles to interact with the world. Although in a scuffle I might break out a map and PC/NPC standees, not to judge exact distances, but to see "who's fighting who"

Character sheets

Likewise, players often use character sheets as a User Interface for "what things can I do? what can I try? what should I ty to do?", so I wanted the character sheet to reflect the sort of game I wanted the players to have. I think this worked very well!

I avoided pages of numbers that were going to be ignored. Instead I focused on:
* a short three line description of your character
* a list of "character beats", i.e. stereotypes or traits you could play up. The intention here was to guide people into characterising their character by doing in character things. You got cookie-tokens for doing so, though that may or may not have made a difference.
* a list of "abilities": some things you were good at (either deliberate actions like "ship-handling" or narrative constants like "people instinctively like you"), and some special actions you could choose to take by spending a cookie-token.

I tried to spread these out so every player would have abilities and traits useful in different situations, and some that you could easily enact even if you were bad at improv acting, and some that encouraged improvising.

Because I knew everyone so well, I expanded the basic character concepts from our previous game into characters that I could imagine the player enjoying playing. And I think I succeeded, not everyone engaged with everything, but people were enthusiastic about their character. In another game, I might design N pre-gens and let people choose or pick randomly.

If you play multiple times I would definitely let the character beats evolve, possibly along with small personal -development quests, or just with "change it if you're bored of it", but for a first time playing the concept I didn't include that.

ETA: I wasn't sure how much difference the character beats made, but Cookie Mistress said that when I was distracted by GMing tasks, lots of what the players did was directly inspired by acting out a beat, ability or flaw, and she said she could see them grin in satisfaction when they'd checked it off, so I think that counted as a win. Some of the best roleplaying from some of the boldest and also shiest members of the party did come from building directly on a character beat.

ETA: I can share the character sheets if anyone's interested (although they're a bit unfinished atm)

Change one thing about your character sheet

I didn't insist on this too hard, but I told people to change at least one thing on their character sheet, so they wouldn't default to just passively sitting near it, but feel obliged to take ownership of what traits and abilities they *wanted* to have. I think there's more opportunity here but I think it was useful.

Delegating specific roles

Mixed success, but definitely useful. I chose several roles that I thought I might struggle to have time to do along with the rest of the GMing and primed individual players to do them. That was "scribe", i.e. record all specific events, NPC names, etc. Cookie Mistress, i.e. give out cookie-tokens, refresh them at end of scene, etc. And initiative keeper to make sure everyone had a chance to act during combat.

My theory was that having a specific role would help people feel engaged and responsible more of the time, and it wasn't perfect but I think it helped.

Worldbuilding details

Everyone loved the turtles, and got invested in the "demon escaped from the spirit forest" plot. And lots of the smaller details interested people, the sea-goats and hippos; the giant-spirit-flying-fish, the details of the archipelago, the electric pike the fish ate like spicy crackers. And always loves it when I roleplay bees and fish and goats :) Everyone loved befriending the giant fish and making a plan to tame it!

There's other things I can do better, but I love how some of those ideas turn out, of having a throw-away idea in advance and adding it to the "put in for colour" list and then having people get excited about it, is one of the things that I'm really pleased when I do well.

Action and conflict resolution

It was definitely correct to leave out most of the complicated mechanics from something like DnD, we could barely get through a simple plot with no mechanics in a couple of hours as it is. It would probably have worked equally well to start with simple 1st-level DnD characters and have an experience with a bigger proportion of board-game-y stuff, which would have worked very well for some of the players but less well for others. I may try something like that in future.

The system didn't come up much so I wasn't sure I was going to have much to say, but when I thought about it, it actually worked incredibly well when it did come up.

The system said you could spend cookie-tokens to succeed on a dice roll, and I need to tweak the concept to avoid confusing people, and avoid people being disappointed when you DON'T roll the dice. But it DID do what I hoped, and encourage people NOT to spend a cookie when they thought the random result would be interesting, but encouraged them TO spend a cookie when they wanted to look cool.

For instance, there were a few "do I know this" or "can I talk to them, how do they take it?" type rolls people could have spent cookies on and didn't, with a range of outcomes. And then there was a scuffle with the big spirit flying fish:

* Intermediate result let one player's boat be capsized
* Bad result, he couldn't see the assailant under the water
* Intermediate result from the fire demon let loose a fireball but couldn't hit the target under the water
* Good result (or cookie?) from original player to mount upturned boat and set spear against fish's glide, successfully injuring it
* Fortunate result from character who loves animals, calmed the fish and persuaded it she wasn't hostile, and ended the fight. Everyone got invested in finding it alternative food!

That could all have happened in a more mechanics-focused game, or a narrative "what do you want to happen to your character" game, but I think it the system supported that sort of resolution, in that I designed it so that each roll would USUALLY produce a meaningful, often dramatic, result with the potential to swing the encounter and have meaningful repercussions. And that the encounter could plausibly swing between talking and fighting and back again, not have one always take second place, or have the characters fight about how they would handle every encounter.

It's also a minor point but one that I've wanted to try for a long time, I explicitly tied difficulty of an action to "the GM just adjudicates depending how good you are, but narratively most characters spend most of their time doing things that are routine given their expertise", with only some specific actions during conflict/combat explicitly comparing PC/NPC's competence to each other. That means you can just say, "I'm a master thief", and the GM can handwave the sort of thing a master thief would encounter based on everyone's familiarity with eg heist movies, without having to constantly adjudicate "wait, is that a +5 difficulty or a +10 difficulty" or getting into nonsensical situations where the GM handwaves an appropriate difficulty for the character who usually does the lock-picking, but that gives a nonsensical result for how difficult it is for a non-expert character.

What DIDN'T work coming up next post :)
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Jack and adventures in dishwasher unclogging land

2021-02-04T15:49:32Z

I feel really stupid that I live in a house and don't understand how to fix it (with either competence or money). But slow progress!

Dishes were clean. Bailed standing water out successfully. Unscrewed the filter drain bit at the bottom

I had the magic right size star screwdriver, so +1000 past Jack for buying a too extensive screwdriver set. Why are there so many different shapes of screw? WHY CAN'T THERE JUST BE ONE?

Took out a little basket, and some related bits. Really needed cleaning, vinegar plus soaking plus scrubbing made them a lot more palatable! That's the bit I've done before but should do more regularly

Actually those bits came out first, before I got to the screws. But once the screws are off, the larger filter drain component seems like it only comes off from underneath the dishwasher

Waggling the dishwasher out from under the counter looks possible but difficult You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1131603.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Me: Time to get things done.

2021-01-20T19:24:17Z

Me: Time to get things done.
My brain: Ooh, lets write a story where Tony Stark teases Bruce Banner about the six snakes he had to fight for theses defence.
Me: Exactly! Thank you, that's what I'm talking about. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1131012.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Alpacaoids in Coton

2021-01-17T20:45:14Z

Alpacaoids at Coton!

Went for a muddy walk :) Think I went that way decades ago when it was a footpath behind the CMS, before a lot of the nice path was put in.

I cycled to West Cambridge site and walked along the cycle path bridge to Coton, dodging road works.

Near Coton church, looking very lively

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THREE SEPARATE stories about Greek n mythology

2021-01-14T21:19:53Z

Now I'm consuming THREE SEPARATE stories about Greek n mythology: reading Percy Jackson, playing Hades, and reading digital comic Lore Olympus. It's not as confusing as you might think! All the characters are very different in each, but that COULD be the same people seen from different perspectives You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1130244.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Vaccinations also rising

2021-01-14T13:35:33Z

https://ourworldindata.org/covid-vaccinations

Nice to see the vaccination graph still going upwards. If that's accurate the UK is 4.5% vaccinated, rising at about 5% per month. (?) I hope we can ramp up further (we ideally need to get to like 170% or something) but that's a good start!

I know it's not meaningful but it feels nice to have numbers of people having been vaccinated starting to rival number of people who have been infected. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1129993.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Infections falling, deaths still rising

2021-01-13T14:50:57Z

First good news, it looks like number of infections in UK (and London) have JUST started to fall. If so (and it's very early to be sure), that's some evidence lockdown #3 is working. I was genuinely scared it wasn't enough.

And genuinely scared that if it wasn't enough, the government would continue to double down on blaming people for exercising outside while infections climbed, and done nothing to address the most likely causes of infection (businesses and public transport where people HAVE to be indoors, but the guidance on how to minimise risks is outdated and unhelpful).

On the downside, deaths are still rising. Looks like it's worse than the first wave and hospitals will continue to struggle 🙁 You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1129788.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Perseus Jackson vs Wolfy McWolface

2021-01-11T19:09:26Z

I can't figure out why I'm more annoyed with the Percy Jackson characters not figuring out who "Perseus Jackson"'s father is, but not with the Harry Potter characters for not figuring out that the werewolf was "Wolfy McWolface"

I think it's that Lupin's name was clearly supposed to be out-of-universe knowledge. Obviously the characters might know plenty of Latin, but there wasn't a sequence of events where he was called that BECAUSE he was bitten by a werewolf. So I'm happy to treat it as a narrative convention, just like I don't ask, "how come all these novels have a statistically improbably narratively meaningful ending?"

Whereas from book 1, it feels likely that Perseus' name wasn't massive coincidence, but was given by his mother BECAUSE his father was Poseidon. And it makes sense that he didn't make that connection, but CHIRON didn't?

--

Or maybe "Perseus" is just such a common name for demigods now it didn't come up?

--

In fact, there's a wider literary point here, which is that books are often interesting if there's hints that the reader can pick up on and suspect a connection but not be sure of, or make an unlikely connection.

But having it work depends on how much the reader knows and how much genre awareness the reader has. Hints for a 10-year-old who hasn't read many books will be different to hints in book 2 of 3 you expect a dedicated subreddit to spend 10 years analysing in extreme depth.

And if the hint lands emotionally, you tend not to pick apart the logic, but if it doesn't we often get pedantic, even if it's not less logical, just less interesting to us personally.

--

Even now, I often find myself really interested in books that FEEL difficult to figure out, even if the difficulty is in piecing together what they're saying, as well as or instead of the complexity of what they're saying.

I always think of Too Like the Lightning here -- I was SO INTERESTED in it, despite the fact that almost every plot point made me vehemently denounce it 　 But they were all INTERESTING because they raised interesting questions, about that world and about our world. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1129546.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Birthday Party tomorrow (all online!)

2021-01-08T19:47:03Z

Birthday party tomorrow (Sat) evening (c.f. https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1128589.html)

There are a variety of 'rooms' present as zoom breakout rooms, discord channels, and pages in a google sheet.

Zoom link: [see locked post] (online from this evening)
Discord link: [see locked post] (feel free to comment now)
Sheets link: [see locked post] (feel free to post pictures now)

I will make the rooms in a hurry tomorrow, but expect "hang out and chat" but maybe also "post pictures of yourself dressed up", "no politics chat", "the bar area", "hi I don't know anyone", "anyone for games?" etc. Some will be more active in video, some on text and spreadsheet. Feel free to look by earlier, drop in briefly, or hang out all evening.

If you've never used zoom before, you may want to make sure you have it ready (using desktop client, web interface, or mobile app). It's pretty straightforward but the user interface can be weird. If you installed the desktop client six months ago, you may want to download the latest version (5.3 or later).

If you've never used discord before you should be able to use it in the desktop app, desktop web browser, or mobile browser, and use the link to join my server, but you may want to check the link works. You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1129120.html using OpenID. comments so far.

Interests

2021-01-03T22:01:39Z

I never filled out the interests section of my profile, but if you want to ask me what I think about three tags that I used, please do? :) https://jack.dreamwidth.org/tag/ You can also comment at https://jack.dreamwidth.org/1128883.html using OpenID. comments so far.