Lucian Smith

Go Play Northwest: 2023

2023-07-14T06:28:56Z

So as some of you may know, I have greatly enjoyed playing 'tabletop roleplaying games' (i.e. the genre of games that includes D&D) over the years. Since the pandemic, I've been involved in a startling increase in the number of games I've been able to play online: at one point last year, I was in *five* at once! It's dropped back down to three in the past year, but it's still a lot of gaming.

Most of those games are 'traditional', meaning that they have a 'GM' (gamemaster) in charge of the world, every other player controls a player (a 'PC'), and the group of players are generally some sort of heroes, or at least a cohesive group of people wandering around solving problems and levelling up (gaining more abilities, and getting harder to hit).

But another genre of RPGs are sometimes called 'storytelling games', and more generally fall into the category of 'indie rpgs'; games created by one or maybe a handful of people with extremely simple rules that are used to let you play out a specific type of scenario. Some aspects of traditional games are included sometimes, but everything is up for grabs: maybe there's no GM; maybe the players are terrible people; maybe we're telling an emotional story more than an action-oriented one; maybe we're just world-building and not telling a story at all.

Go Play Northwest (http://goplaynw.org) is a 3-day gaming convention here in Seattle that focuses more (but not exclusively) on storytelling and/or indie games. The format is that there's two or three sessions per day, about 3 hours long each, with games you can sign up for beforehand, or games you sign up for on the spot from the options that turn out to be available.

And all that was so that you knew what I was on about when I told you the games I played! So here we go:

Companions' Tale : My first game of the convention! The conceit of this game is that you are telling the story of the Hero of the Realm from the perspective of everyone *else*, their companions in particular. Everyone takes turns telling stories and adding to a collective map, with no GM, and no resolution mechanic: every story is true... at least from that person's perspective. Players are encouraged to tell stories that contradict each other, making the 'truth' of what actually happened subject to interpretation. The companions are foregrounded a bit (there are rounds specifically about telling stories about them, not the Hero), but you also include stories from witnesses to events, and historians talking about the events. The companions each get a Role chosen from cards (thing like 'Protege', 'Lover', 'Oracle', or 'Mercenary'), and you also get a beautifully-stylized picture who becomes that Companion.

One thing I particularly liked about this game was that I would have an idea about Something That Happened in the game, but then I had to additionally imagine who was telling the story, and who they were telling it to. So when I got the Lover, I had an idea about what happened when she and the Hero met, but then additionally decided I was telling this story to our son, years later, which added an interesting dynamic to the story. It was also fun to come up with further-afield 'documents' to share: my favorite of mine was probably when I started my 'Historian' bit with, "Thank you for purchasing your '23 and you' genetic information packet! Before you peruse your results, we would like to remind people that the information herein are for entertainment purposes only. In particular, Locus 23 (the so-called 'monster gene'), while unusual, in no way proves that you are an actual descendant of the Void Monsters; this is pure speculation. [...]"

Another fun bit: at the beginning, Aaron gave me four pieces of paper to tape together to make our map. As a joke, I said I would tape them together all skew... and then thought, 'Wait, that could actually be fun," so I taped them together with two big triangular gaps between them, thinking they could be impassable mountains or something. Those gaps quickly became 'The Void', and were a central theme throughout the story. It was great!

The Love-Blind Bird This game is not actually available anywhere, but is 'close' to having a kickstarter for it. It was cool! The game setup is that you get a picture of a flying galleon in three different 'seasons', and ask each other questions about the journey of that ship and its crew. There's also a soundtrack you can play (for each season) as additional inspiration. We found that both the questions and the answers were sources of worldbuilding, or plot advancement: 'when half the crew left, where did they go?' is a perfectly reasonable question to ask, even if this is the first time we've discovered that half the crew left. In our story, the ship sang to us, and steering it was a matter of the crew encouraging it to sing particular types of songs by singing themselves, so in addition to 'Captain', 'First Mate' and 'Cabin Boy', we also had the position of 'Chorus Master'. Who then got eaten by the ship for trying to 'improve' a new song that they didn't understand. It was a crazy story, alright? But it was a lot of fun to create together.

Rebel Squadron: A mostly-traditional game! Only with simpler rules, based on a '24xx' system called 'Super Bandit'. Our GM adapted that system to Star Wars, had a battle mat and a solid basic premise ('escape an Empire prison'). The rules were super simple, and character creation quick and easy. It was fun, though I found myself wanting a bit more from the game, though I didn't know exactly what. I felt like if the system was a bit more complex, I could have enjoyed the strategy wargame aspect more, or if the interpersonal dynamics were a bit more foregrounded, I could have enjoyed inhabiting my character more. Maybe the simple addition of 'describe your attack' more often could have helped? As it was, there was a lot of simple 'I roll X; I get a succeess; I take out one storm trooper' which was a little dry at the end of the day. But overall it was still fun, and the ship combat had an interesting rock/paper/scissors mechanic that spiced up the decision-making process a bit... though I ended up being sad that my character's personality (such as it was) wasn't really well-suited for the tactics her skillpoints pushed her towards. Ah, well.

Meridian: This slot was the Lottery! In this setup, everyone who wants to participate puts their badge into a box, groups of four names are drawn out, and they go pick a game to play. This necessitates people bringing things to play, but this year I was ready and had brought a few. Between the ones I had and the ones one of the other people in my group had, 'Meridian' sounded the most interesting, so I ran it!

This was a game I had played several years ago at GPNW, had gotten a copy via kickstarter, and then had promptly never played for five years. So this was the first time I was actually able to play it! Yay! Since I had brought it as a 'back pocket' game that could be run in a pinch, I hadn't gone over the rules super carefully, and the result wasn't as smooth as it could have been, but we still had fun.

The conceit of the game is that it basically starts as a multi-GM, one-PC game, and can gradually morph into a one-GM multi-PC game. The game is set up to model stories like 'Alice in Wonderland' or 'Labyrinth', where one player plays the 'Journier' (the PC), one player runs the world (the GM; me, in this case), and the other players co-GM by playing some of the various denizens of the place. As the game progresses, the other players can decide that the character they are playing joins the PC on their quest, and become 'Companions', moving through the rest of the story with the PC.

Our game had some rough edges from people (me in particular) not knowing the rules very well, and the game itself used a lot of game-specific lingo in its explanations, which hindered people getting up to speed quickly. But we had some fun scenes, it was a unique experience, and it was satisfying for me to finally get to run the thing after so long. I could run it again much better now, I think.

Monster Hearts: Monster Hearts is clearly inspired by Buffy the Vampire Slayer: players are teenage monsters (of various types), all making bad decisions and trying to work through the consequences. I've been avoiding playing this game for years, as any game with the premise 'angsty people making bad decisions!' is not typically very appealing for me. But for whatever reason, I felt up to the task that Saturday night, and decided to give it a try. And it was interesting! I think part of what made it work better for me might be the fact that the GM ran it with an actual plot/mystery to solve, so the whole game didn't devolve into the PCs sniping at each other. Another part of it was that I was able to play a character archetype I hadn't ever played before: I played a 'Hollow': a 'created' teenage girl (sort of like Frankenstein's monster, or the Buffy-bot) who was searching for her identity. I played her as a sort of goth naif, intently questioning people to 'explain donuts', or willingly participating in harebrained schemes because she was starved for purpose. I agreed with anyone's assessment of me, and parlayed that into future scenes: "Argh; January, you're giving me a headache." "I give people headaches?" "Yes!" [later] "OK, you distract Mr. Cooper while I steal the book." "I will give him a headache." I ended up with great affection and sympathy for her character, and for the others in the group. Of all the games I played this weekend, I'd have to say that January was the character I connected to emotionally the most strongly.

Another reason why I think I picked Monster Hearts this round was the fact that my own teenage daughter had been having Big Emotions the previous night, and I felt like actually roleplaying an angsty teen might help me work through and re-surface what that time of life was like for me. I still think this game might not be quite my thing on a different day or with a different set of other people, but it was really solid this time. Thanks, Jamie-the-GM! (Amusing side-note: the four players were Logan, Luke, Lucas, and Lucian).

Crash Pandas: This was a Sunday morning goofy game, and was one of those games that knows exactly what it is, and exactly how to pull that off. You play one of four racoons, collectively driving a car in an LA street race. The map is drawn on a large piece of paper, and you're controlling a HotWheels car vs. other HotWheels cars. You have some basic stats, some sort of motivation, and every round, you each individually decide whether to accelerate, brake, go right, go left, or do some special action. This means that everyone might decide to go right, whipping the car into a tailspin, or everyone might assume someone else will turn, accelerating your car into a wall. Or, in our case, our players literally got right and left mixed up from the perspective of the car (several times! From different people!) and canceled out each other's actions. It was hilarious, zany, and delightful.

Spindlewheel: The first thing to say about this game is that it's gorgeous. It's a short set of rules and a large deck of gilt cards, each with a name ('Revolution', 'Infection', 'Princess') and two lists of associations with that name, one vaguely positive and one vaguely negative. (So 'Princess' had 'sheltered' on one side, and 'diplomat' on the other, for example.) We played the initial bits, going through world creation and character creation. The full game would be too long for a 3-hour slot, but would have consisted of actually playing out the characters' stories in the world you've created. The two people I played with had actually used the game before just for world and character creation, and were now playing through the story with a completely different system (Dungeon World, IIRC), which seemed to me like a perfectly reasonably way to use this game.

World creation comes first, and we added a Microscope-like step of listing things we wanted to see and things we didn't want to see in the world, which ended up pushing us in a semi-sci-fi non-Galilean setting with space junks (partly inspired by Heaven's Vault). Then we started drawing cards, each being placed in a Tarot-like spread with each card representing a particular truth about the setting. We ended up with a post-revolution world, finally freed from oppression, but now exposed to unforseen dangers that the previous royal lineage had protected them against. New technology was developed to allow anyone to launch a junk into the space aether, and one group in particular was making a giant generation ship, designed to go out and greet the very things that could bring doom to the world.

After collectively creating the world, we each created our own characters in much the same way; drawing cards to place in particular spots in our lives. I drew 'deposed prince' and 'princess' as my two core cards, so clearly my character was going to be the last of the royal line, who stepped down for the revolution, but now sought out a way to restore the one good thing her family had done, and protect her people from the dangers from beyond. Similarly, my fellow players ended up creating the lead revolutionary, now conflicted because he wasn't sure he went far enough in breaking the world, and the industrialist in charge of the generation ship, who had grown to hate his sycophants. Spindlewheel itself could handle a game with those characters, we speculated (the main movers and shakers of the word)--perusing the rules, it seemed like even if those three people didn't spend a ton of time together, they could still meet up and interact at times and places over the years. It wouldn't work quite as well to try to cram those three into a DungeonWorld campaign, of course, but that wasn't what we were aiming for, so it's not particularly surprising we didn't land there. Overall, I felt this was a solid, solid piece of world inspiration. Of the worlds I helped create during this con, this was the one that's stuck with me the strongest, so kudos to Spindlewheel.

Illimat: I ended the con with a board game! This was another beautiful game, and was designed as a prop in a music video before the band eventually decided to hire a game designer to build a game around it. And the game was interesting! The video featured groups of mysterious individuals, meeting in strange places to play this game, and it kept that vibe: the cards are basically your standard playing cards, but with four different base suits representing the four seasons, and one new 'wild' suit for the 'stars'. Each round, people try to collect as many cards from the board as they can, or try to set themselves up to collect them more easily later. As you pull cards from the board, you reveal 'illuminaries' from a different set of fanciful cards that change the rules of the game slightly while they're in play. The game has a pretty good combination of luck and strategy, where sometimes you just get the perfect cards for the situation, and sometimes you have to play a bad hand as best you can. I stumbled my way to victory in our first game, and after my son joined us for a second game, he won that one. Would recommend!

So that was my Go Play Northwest, 2023! Overall it was a lovely experience, and great to be able to game with people in person once more, after a long pandemic hiatus. I mean, I've been playing more RPGs online during the pandemic than I ever have in my life), but there's nothing quite like gaming in person. I'm glad I'm finally able to do both once more.

Actual Play Report: 'Storm Cellar' (Part 3)

2017-07-15T02:35:27Z

(Continued from part one and part two, which reveals that I played in a LARP called 'Storm Cellar' at Go Play Northwest, as the character Emily Rayne.)

Part Three: Aftermath

After the game that night, I had a warm glow that lasted all night and well into the next day. I even had a positive dream about Donald Trump--he managed to escape his secret service detail by fooling an elevator into thinking he was Tom Selleck, and it took him to the roof, where he then had to evade the Secretary of Water, who was flying after him wearing a complicated personalized kite/glider powered by handheld water jets.

Sunday morning, I played in my second-ever LARP about kids learning sign language, which was also fantastic in an entirely different way. But somewhere around Sunday evening before the final slot, my emotions started to crash. And it was a highly specific feeling that I had no words to describe, so I’m using this space to try to package it all up, in the hopes that it can crystallize the feeling for other people who’ve felt the same way. Assuming I’m not the only one who’s felt this way. I’m not the only one who’s felt this way, right? Right?

I’ve felt this way at other times in my life, as well. The closest, though not as intense, is the feeling I get at the end of performing in a really good play. You work with other people for weeks to capture a setting and a group of characters, then finally get to show it off to others, and then it’s the final performance, and you’re saying your lines for the last time. I sometimes get a feeling of urgent desperation on that final performance day: every time I enter the stage, I’m reminded, “This is the last time I get to perform this bit; better make it good,” and as I exit the stage, I’m thinking, “Well, that was the last time my character will ever say those lines.”

There’s a vaguely similar feeling I get when friends or family move away, but usually the relationship isn’t as focused: friends are often friends in a variety of situations, so when they leave, the loss can be profound, but isn’t usually acute, per se. A lot of the intensity of the emotions I felt had to do with the fact that the timeframe was so short! I had gamed before with at least one other person there, but everyone else was new to me. So, we met, introduced ourselves, immediately dived into intense emotional scenes, talked about it a bit afterwards, then went our separate ways, all within the space of a few hours. A friend moving away can be as intense, but at least usually has a little more space to breathe.

I did some web searches, and managed to find a few different things that all manage to capture at least part of the emotional roil inside me. One is a phenomenon known as “Post-project depression”. It’s the let-down you feel after having worked on something intensively after it’s suddenly finished and out of your life. There’s an aspect to post-project depression that involves the sudden loss of a routine, which of course I didn’t have here. But the feeling of getting together with other people to make something happen, then being done and feeling the loss, is definitely a big part of what I was (/am) feeling.

A related-though-different emotion is what the Japanese call ‘mono no aware’: an awareness of the transience of things, which heightens one’s appreciation of their beauty, but evokes ‘gentle sadness’ that they are gone. Mono no aware seems to be more focused on things than people or performances (‘mono’ just means ‘thing’ in Japanese), but it seems particularly applicable to a improvised performance that by necessity will only exist in its moment. It’s transient. And that’s beautiful, but sad.

Also related is a feeling that doesn’t seem to have its own term, but many people share it: the feeling of emptiness or grief when you finish a good book. (‘Book hangover’ is sometimes used this way, but has other meanings as well.) As you read, you share in the lives of the characters, and when the book ends, you have to say goodbye to them. As one person put it:

“I cried because I knew that no matter what I could never read that book the same way. I would never wonder what was about to happen, never truly fear for the characters or the world. I could return, pay my friends a visit, but I could never share their feelings of tension and camaraderie. I cried because it was such a powerful connection, so wonderful and exhilarating.” --ancientvoices, on reddit

But perhaps the closest word I could find to describe how I felt was created by the Baining people of Papua New Guinea: Awumbuk, or, “the feeling of emptiness after visitors depart.” The Baining are apparently highly social, and notice when connections are made and broken very acutely:

“Visits are social occasions during which people share food, shelter, and friendship. The shared experiences erase the barriers between individuals and connect them to one another. When the social group disbands, these connections are severed. The socially extended persona is destroyed and individuals must reconstitute their boundaries. They experience this loss in the form of awumbuk. [...] Activities in which sociality is esteemed, for example, hunting and gardening, suffer most acutely from awumbuk.“ --from Person, Self and Experience, p380, Jane Fajans

‘Awumbuk’ seems particularly salient in this particular context, because it describes not only the loss I experienced from the fictional world of Emily’s farm when the story ended, but also the loss of connection to my fellow players, with whom I had worked intensely over a three-hour period to collectively create a beautiful thing. It was great, but the awumbuk is intense.

So I suppose that I could have skipped this whole essay in favor of a “Hey, I miss you guys and the story we created!”

But where’s the fun in that?

Actual Play Report: 'Storm Cellar' (Part 2)

2017-07-15T02:28:34Z

(Continued from part one, which reveals that I played in a LARP called 'Storm Cellar' at Go Play Northwest, as the character Emily Rayne.)

Part Two: Wherein Our Hero Reveals More Details Of The Happenings From Part One, Of An Even More Personal Nature

Spoilers. Big ones. I can’t write about this without ‘em; sorry.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
There’s one other big aspect of Emily’s backstory that made it very personal to me: unbeknownst to him, Emily’s son Theo is adopted. And knownst to her, my own daughter is also adopted. And for both, birth mom has… issues.

In “Storm Cellar”, Theo’s mom is Emily’s half-sister Mira. Bitter after inheriting our dad’s ‘meager savings’, while I got the farm itself, she cut herself out of my life, got a job at the bank, and started working her way up in the world. Then she got pregnant, and had no idea what to do with a child until she thought of me. Showing up on my doorstep with a newborn one night, she shoved him in my arms and paced the room, until finally, with a “I’m sure father would have wanted it this way anyway,” she left. From there, I never saw her much, but eventually, through shrewd (and, as I found out after the game was done, underhanded) business deals, she became a very powerful and rich figure in the town. But I could tell from a distance that all of her actions were entirely selfish, and mourned her from the sidelines.

My daughter’s birth mother doesn’t have those kinds of problems, but she definitely has problems. She loved my daughter in her own way, but the decisions she made will affect her for the rest of her life. Ever since she’s lived with us, the two of them have never seen each other. Eight years on, the situation is no longer as unsafe as it was in the beginning, but we know through an older sibling that the mom is not doing well.

So, each lost in their own way, my heart ached as Emily for Mira as my own heart aches for my own child’s birth mom. And similarly, my heart ached for Theo having to deal with a broken Mira, in much the same way my heart aches for my own daughter having to deal with her broken past.

There’s an interesting and sad fact about adoption that didn’t really crystallize for me until I heard it from a fellow adoptive parent: “There is no successful adoption apart from someone else’s failure or loss.” Adoption is a step towards healing, but there’s only one reason something needs to be healed. And with wounds like these, there is rarely a quick fix available.

Mira had her own ridiculous ideas about how to reconnect with her son, that were all thinly-veiled attempts to separate her son from me. Theo saw right through them and made a beautiful speech about how he wasn’t some sort of piece of land, to be traded and bartered: he was her son, and if she wanted to be in his life, great, but they needed to treat each other as people. As a parent, I will tell you right now that moments like that in your child’s life are what you live for: when you realize they’re growing up, and you can step back and just be proud of them for a little bit, before going back to worrying again. For Emily to have that with Theo was a highlight of the evening for me.

Throughout the evening, Theo and I made various overtures to Mira, all of which were summarily rejected. And it saddened me every time. Mira was set up to be the principal antagonist of the night, and indeed went so far as to get the bank manager to foreclose on my farm so that she could swoop in and buy the water rights it sat on (a ploy that, as discussed in part one, ultimately failed). But I (and Emily, by proxy) was literally never angry at her, nor even scared of her very real power over me and the farm. I was just sad and disappointed.

I should probably mention that the woman playing Mira had a much harder role than I did, but did an absolutely bang-up job of it. At our post-game decompression session, everyone agreed about how impressive and imposing Mira was. And she told Theo and I how much she had wanted to take us up on our various offers, but couldn’t, because that’s not who Mira was.

At the end of the night, the was storm was over and the GM opened the door. Mira, still standing proud despite her plans failing, strode out. Theo ran to the door, and called after her. “You’ll always be family,” she said. Somewhere out there is another woman whose beautiful voice my daughter inherited. I’ve seen her in person twice, and have never spoken to her. But she’ll always be family.

(Continues in part three.)

Actual Play Report: 'Storm Cellar' (Part 1)

2017-07-15T02:25:15Z

I was able to play the “Storm Cellar” LARP at Go Play Northwest this year, and it was one of the most amazing experiences I have ever had. To all the people I played with: thank you for your portrayal of your characters, and to the authors: thank you for creating such an amazing world.

I have a lot to say about the game, and by necessity, some of it will contain spoilers. Part One is as spoiler-free as I could make it and still tell the story I wanted to tell, but if I was thinking about playing it myself, I wouldn’t want to even know that much--just believe me when I tell you it was excellent, have fun doing it yourself, and then come back if you want to hear my take on it. Part Two has huge spoilers, and is very personal. Part Three has no spoilers at all, and is only tangentially related to Parts One And Two, but will make a bit more sense in that context.

Without further ado, I give you:

Part One: Wherein Our Hero Recounts The Events Of And Leading Up To A Saturday Night In July.

To back up a bit for those who might not be familiar with Go Play Northwest, LARPs, or storm cellars: Go Play Northwest is an annual roleplaying convention that is completely focused on getting together and playing various roleplaying games. This year, there were eight different time slots over three days in roughly 3-hour windows each, with breaks for lunch and dinner. There were games to sign up for beforehand, and games you could choose to join at the beginning of each slot. LARP stands for “Live Action Role-Playing”, which is basically long-form improv where the players themselves are the intended audience. A given LARP might have lots of rules or almost none, or lots of pre-defined characters to play or let you make up your own, or might have a tight pre-defined structure or let the players do whatever they want--it’s a very generic term that can encompass a wide variety of experiences.

A storm cellar is an outdoor bunker designed to protect people from the weather, particularly tornadoes.

In this particular LARP (“Storm Cellar”, by Kathleen De Smet and Eva Schiffer), I signed up in advance basically knowing nothing about either the LARP itself or even LARPing in general: while I have acted in many plays and musicals, performed in an improv troupe for ten years, and played and GMed numerous roleplaying games, this would be my very first actual LARP. The person running the slot asked for people’s contact information so that he could send them a character survey: I did so, and in a couple days, I got a form back, asking questions about the kind of person I would feel most comfortable playing. A couple days later, I got another email with the backstory of Emily Rayne, the person I would be playing for three hours that Saturday night.

In general, I had claimed on the character survey that I would be most comfortable playing someone a lot like me, and Emily was a lot like me. Or, perhaps, a lot like *how I perceive myself*, which is a more idealized version of the actual me. But either way, I poured myself into that character, and she fit like an old sweater. Her circumstances and relationships were almost completely different than mine (with one huge overlap--more in the more spoiler-y part two), but if I was granted a stronger work ethic, transported to Kansas in 1939, and given Emily’s circumstances, I could see the two of us making largely congruent choices, on the whole.

The LARP itself was amazing, for so many reasons. There were no mechanics, just our backgrounds, goals, and the premise that we had all been around Emily’s farm when a tornado hit, and we all took shelter in her storm cellar. As players, we gathered in a room in the basement, set out a bunch of LED candles, introduced ourselves to each other, turned off the lights, and started. I kicked things off by standing up, distressed, asking if everyone was OK and that nobody had seen anyone else outside that might need to join us. From there, people gathered in small groups and just… started talking.

Emily was at the center of two major plot threads, one centering on her son, and the other centering on money. The son thread kicked in right away, and led to some very, very powerful and emotional scenes right at the top. From there, it mostly moved to financial struggles, with the son thread continuing to weave its way through the story. There was breathing room here and there, and occasionally I was pulled into other people’s stories and dramas, but by and large, it was three hours of me talking to people, trying to keep my life intact.

And what made the whole scenario the most interesting for me was that if you just tallied up my worldly assets, and compared them to the forces arrayed against me, you’d pretty much assume that I was destined to be screwed over: I had zero political influence or power, a struggling farm that I owed a significant mortgage on, and meager savings. Against this, there were people in the room with ready access to tons of cash, who could casually promise influence and plum positions to people who had the ability to wreck my life.

But I had other assets, that weren’t quite as obvious. I had healthy relationships, a moral center, and the ability to believe the best about people while still retaining a clear head. And if this was a novel, there would be no doubt as to the outcome--obviously, it was going to work out for me, as my assets were things we tell people to value, and the stories we write about. But here, we just had people who were all supposed to make decisions that were best for their own character, not decisions that were best for the story! I honestly had no idea what would happen.

And as a result, I just went with my gut, sinking even more of myself into dear Emily, making her live up to my own ideals, and behave the way I would hope I would behave in her situation. I trusted people, but let actions speak louder than promises. I loved my son, tried to help him through an emotionally difficult time, and invested myself in the people around me; both friends and rivals. I offered forgiveness to those that wronged me, and was sad, but not angry, when it was rejected. At the crux of the night, when it was clear that the rich and powerful were conspiring to try to ruin me for reasons of their own, I was saddened and a little frustrated, but content: I had people that loved me; I had lived by my principles; and if more powerful people than I were going to screw with me, well, that was their choice, not mine.

And then, the instant the opposition made their move, an ally, already worried for me and by my side, stepped in to help. Then someone else, not even aware of my new difficulties, stepped in to help with what they could. And then at the climax of the evening, yet another person, nominally on the side of the opposition, crossed the aisle, and asked me how much I needed. And at that point, I didn’t need anything! I was overflowing in abundance. It was literally overwhelming.

I’m not sure if it’s really possible to convey how the whole evening made me feel. If I had read Emily’s story as a novel, it would have been nice, if perhaps a bit predictable; a bit reminiscent of ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’. If I was cast as Emily in a play, I would have understood her a bit better--as an actor, it’s possible to really throw yourself into your character, and see the world through their eyes a little more clearly. But in the end, it’s still a script, and you know the ending--if my character is overwhelmed, I work at portraying their overwhelmedness accurately and believably to the audience; I’m not literally overwhelmed myself. If my life was actually like Emily’s, I would obviously feel that quite acutely! But while I have amazing friends and family who I absolutely know would come to my aid in the event of a catastrophe, in my own life, catastrophes have been pretty thin on the ground (fortunately!) so while I’ve definitely had times where people have come to my aid, it’s never happened in quite so dramatic a fashion.

But here, walking around as Emily, with no script, only knowing what Emily knew, filling in details from my own life at every turn, everything was so stark and so compressed and so unpredictable that it felt like I might as well have been Emily herself: taking uncertain steps of faith to just treat people kindly in the face of adversity and see what happened.

And what happened was that people embraced me and told me they loved and supported me. It was more than just emotionally gratifying. It was a validation of Emily’s character; of her purpose and her choices. Of me. Well; idealized me, at any rate. I do try to live my own life as I lived Emily’s life that night. At times, I’ve succeeded. I hope people forgive me for the times I’ve failed.

(Continue in part two and part three.)

IF Review: 'Switcheroo'

2015-10-27T22:47:25Z

Right now the annual IF Competition is going on, with an unusually high number of games this year. So much so that, worried about the corresponding burden on judges writing reviews, Emily Short asked some people who don't usually write IF reviews (or haven't recently) to review some. I asked her if there was a game she thought I might be uniquely suited for, and it turned out there was a game ('Switcheroo') about a foster kid! So, naturally, I was intrigued.

The upshot is that I played the game, found it kind of clunky but sweet, and ultimately very insightful about what it means to be a foster child who might have found an adoptive family. The full review is up at:

https://emshort.wordpress.com/2015/10/27/if-comp-2015-guest-post-lucian-smith-on-switcheroo/

If you want to play the game itself (and it's not at all a puzzle game--the basic format is a 'choice' game, where you select from a few options and click which one you want, and there are no wrong choices, as far as I could tell), you can get play it online at the ifcomp site: Switcheroo.

Thanks for the heads-up and the prompt, Emily!

Anyone around with a paid account?

2014-06-11T20:11:40Z

If anyone reading this has a paid account, there's a couple more rss feeds I wouldn't mind being added to lj. There's one from a guy who's just started watching geek iconic movies (http://somewonderfulkindofnoise.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default) and there's maga's other blog (http://heterogenoustasks.wordpress.com/feed/). Thanks!

On being an ugly woman

2014-03-17T02:30:39Z

So, in this year's play at our church ('The Comic-Con Caper'), I'm playing Francis Reynolds, a single mother of five, who goes to this Comic Con every year dressed as Princess Leia. I've been dressing as and trying to act like a woman for several weeks of rehearsals now, and I've learned a lot! I now know how to take off a bra without taking off your shirt. I discovered that it's much easier to file your nails on your left hand than your right (assuming you're right-handed). Through a lot of trial and error, I finally worked out that since men's waists are a generally lower than women's, and since I'm tall to begin with, breasts look a lot more normal on me several centimeters lower than my bra wants to let me have them--I'm going to have to add more elastic to the straps, because they're too short, even at maximum extension. I've discovered that stores like Payless don't even stock shoes or boots for women with my-sized feet. I now know that you can feel fingernail polish through your nails, and that I make a lot more typos with long fingernails. I found that the most helpful videos online that tell you how to walk and talk like a woman are created for the transgendered.

I've also found out what it feels like to be called ugly. And I have to tell you, it stone-cold sucks.

Now, the entire *point* of me being cast as this character was that our writer/director created Francis to be not very attractive, but felt it would be kind of mean to make a woman intentionally ugly, even on stage. But, she thought, if you had a *guy* dressed as a woman, that would be unattractive by default! So I walked into the roll prepared to not be a beautiful woman.

But what I was unprepared for was my reaction to my own appearance. After I got my bra and Leia dress, I would wear them during rehearsals, and started trying to stay in-character (or at least in-gender) the entire time, even when not on stage. I walked around the rehearsal space with my feet pacing an invisible straight line so my hips would sway slightly. I sat with my legs crossed demurely with my hands on my knees. And I realized: I wanted to be pretty! And more subtly (and, upon reflection, erroneously) I felt that in order to be a good woman, I had to be a beautiful woman.

But of course, Francis does not have very good material to work with, and despite my and her best efforts, she looks like a guy in drag. Some of my fellow actors at rehearsal made a few offhand comments along those lines. "Man, you look terrible." "The years have not been kind to 'Princess Leia'." And remember: this is the whole point of me being this role! I'm supposed to look unattractive! But guys, I am here to tell you (because the women already know): having my looks disparaged as a woman made me feel horrible.

There were a few things going on there, I think. At the most basic level, this was the first time in my entire life that anyone had ever called me unattractive, so it was kind of a shock. This is not because I'm some Adonis (far from it), but because I don't have any obvious deformities, and because I'm a guy, and calling guys ugly is not really something our culture ever does. It has been a serious struggle for people in my life who care about my appearance (read 'my mom and my wife') to get me to put any effort at all into looking presentable, because I have never really believed that there was any real benefit to be gained by it.

At another level, dressing as a woman woke me up to something I guess I must have known, but never really realized: there is intense pressure on women in our society to look good. I mean, I knew that, but I kind of imagined it was overblown. It couldn't be *that* bad, could it? But stepping into Francis's life, and seeing the same world through her eyes let me see that pressure in a suddenly personal way. Suddenly, the apparent 'normal' level of beauty in TV and movies and commercials and magazine covers wasn't some scale set up to measure other people: I was suddenly on that scale myself. And on that scale, I was a failure.

But mostly, what it made me realize was that without even knowing I had done it, I had bought into the hype. The main person who was judging Francis by her ability to look good... was me. Before that moment, I would have told you, with a certain amount of superiority, that *of course* I didn't care about what women looked like. How superficial! Sure, some women are more attractive than others, but that's not what matters about them! But... no. Francis is an interesting woman, with strengths and weaknesses and quirks and skills, but the #1 feature that I instinctively cared about was her looks. Do I do that to other women? I think I might. And that makes me feel worse than being called ugly did. I think somewhere along the way, I became part of the problem.

And I don't know what to do to fix it, either. It's an attitude I've had for a long time without realizing it: it's not going to evaporate instantly in the sunny light of realization. I'm really really hoping that this is one of those cases where 'knowing is half the battle', because then I'd at least be 50% of the way there. But even if I'm that far along, I have no idea what the next step is. Pay attention, I guess? Try to at least not lose ground, by finding a way to remind myself periodically that this is something I want to change?

I guess one obvious first step is for me to cut Francis some slack. She may look ridiculous, but I don't have to let that define her, at least for me. I can do what I can for her as far as makeup and hair and gait (and she does care about all of that), but beyond that, I can let it go, and focus on all the lovely things I've discovered about her over the course of doing this play. And to Cristie, our director: thank you so much for believing in me, and giving me this role. It's been an honor.

Refuting Memes: the King James edition.

2012-06-28T23:38:49Z

Now we get to the post I actually meant to make in the first place ;-)

So, a friend posted this picture on Facebook:

There's only so much space in the comments on Facebook (not literally, but socially) so after I finished spluttering and going "argh!" to myself, I finally just posted that the graphic was filled with misrepresentations and inaccuracies, with 'no two alike' being the most egregious. To my friend's credit (and her other friends who joined the conversation) we subsequently had a pretty interesting conversation about bible translation, the biblical manuscript, and biblical canonization, (hi, friend and friend's friends!), but I felt bad that I was never able to explicitly address what I found most annoying and inaccurate about the graphic. But, this is my own blog! And it's sitting here fallow; might as well take advantage of it, right? So, here we are, with Lucian's Line Item Breakdown Of Why This Graphic Lies To You!

The King James version of the New Testament was completed in 1611 by 8 members of the Church of England.

Status: Inaccurate! I actually thought they were going to get this right when I started writing this post, but no. There were 47 men at three institutions who worked on the Bible as a whole, with 8 working on the gospels, Acts, and Revelation, 7 working on Romans through Jude, 8 working on the other epistles, and the rest working on the Old Testament and Apocrypha (ref). But 8 sounds like a much better number for a conspiracy than 23, don't you agree?

There were (and still are) no original texts to translate

Status: Accurate! Elided is the likelihood of there being such documents, by which they mean 'the actual pieces of paper that were hand-written by the authors', but I'll give that a pass for now.

The oldest manuscripts we have were written down hundreds of years after the last apostle died.

Status: Inaccurate! The last apostle (John) died around 80-100 AD (ref), and the oldest manuscript we have (the Rylands Library Papyrus P52) is dated to the first half of the second century (ref), which puts the spread here in the 10s of years, not the 100s.

There are over 8,000 of these old manuscripts,

Status: Sort of wrong? It doesn't say whether they're just counting Greek copies or not; if you just mean the Greek, there are over 5,800 of those, but if you add in Latin and other languages, there are another almost 20,000 to add to the list (ref). So where they got 8,000 from, I dunno. It's at least the right order of magnitude, which is more than I can say for the rest of this Graphic Of Gross Misinformation.

with no two alike.

Status: Inaccurate! There are, in fact, some manuscripts that are short and fragmentary that do indeed match identically with other manuscripts. But more generally, this is the most vexing of all the lies in this graphic, because it implies that nobody has any idea what the original might have said, so people are free to make up whatever they want. This is simply not the case. While there are indeed many differences between the various manuscripts, in the majority of cases, the differences are "accidental errors made by scribes, and are easily identified as such: an omitted word, a duplicate line, a misspelling, a rearrangement of words." (ref) There are indeed some puzzles left over, like whether John 1:18 should read 'only begotten Son' or 'only begotten God' (ref). Do these changes make a difference in the nuance of the text? Yes. Do they make a theological difference as far as 'what Christians believe'? No.

The King James translators used none of these, anyway.

Status: Misleading! This line makes it sound like the translators had 8,000 manuscripts lying around that they chose to ignore. The fact is that they used every translation and every manuscript they could get their hands on (ref). That was, indeed, the whole point of the exercise: to produce the definitive English translation of the Bible.

Instead, they edited previous translations

Status: Weasel words! To call their efforts mere 'editing' is insulting to the amount of effort that went into that endeavor.

to create a version their king and Parliament would approve.

Status: Unlikely Ascribation! This is a claim about their motivation, which is obviously not directly provable or unprovable, but it was certainly not their stated intent to do this just for the king and Parliament (ref) and it seems to me that if you had claimed this at the time, you would have either been laughed out of town or challenged to a duel of honor. Perhaps more importantly, it was not received as such: it was used nigh-exclusively by the English-speaking world for over three centuries of differences in politics and theology, and across many different denominations up to and including the Mormons, of all people.

So, 21st Century Christians believe the "Word of God" is a book edited in the 17th Century

Status: Inaccurate! Even setting aside the many non-English-speaking Christians plus Catholics (who have never used the KJV), if what this actually means is '21st Century US Protestants', it's still wrong, because most US Protestants use a modern translation like the NIV or NRSV. Modern translations may use the KJV for inspriation, but rely on modern scholarship and the 5,800 ancient manuscripts written in the original language for accuracy. This is probably the line in the graphic that annoyed me most of all, because if unintentional, it is incredibly sloppy, and if intentional, it's a carefully-crafted lie. The whole argument here is built around trying to tear down the KJV, but the KJV isn't even used by modern US protestants anyway! And, the 'Word of God' is generally taken by most denominations to be the original text, and not (directly) any translation at all! W, as they say, TF.

from 16th Century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of 4th Century scrolls that claim to be copies of lost letters written in the 1st Century.

Status: ??? Again, I don't know what they're referencing with their '8,000' number, but many of the 5,800 manuscripts we have today were discovered in the last 50 years, so it's hard to see how 16th century Christians used them to create their translations, unless perhaps they traveled through time to the 22nd century when we will indeed have 8,000 manuscripts, and used them, which begs the question of why they didn't instead travel to the 1st century and just copy the originals. I don't even know any more.

That's not faith. That's insanity.

Status: ... Yeah, well.

Thanks again to [friend] and [friend's friends] for listening to me rant about this, and for providing some of the references I used above. The full list is:

http://www.av1611.org/kjv/kjvhist.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_the_Apostle
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_manuscript
http://av1611.com/kjbp/faq/holland_joh1_18.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_canon

Belated bus report: "A Year of Living Biblically" and "The Unlikely Disciple"

2012-06-28T20:35:19Z

I went to go post something, and when I did, livejournal asked me, "Do you want to restore from a saved draft?" Surprised, I clicked 'yes', and got the following unfinished post, from maybe a year ago:

So, I just finished reading two books, both with a very similar slant. Somewhat unsurprising, since one is by a New York Jew and the second by his Quaker slave. But let me back up a bit.

A.J. Jacobs is an editor at Esquire magazine, and writes books based on projects that he devotes a large chunk of his life to. His book-before-this-one was one where he read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica alphabetically and wrote about both it and the experience. This time, he looked at fundamentalist Christianity and Judaism, thought, "You know, they *claim* that they're biblical literalists, but I bet if you really followed everything in the Bible to the letter, it'd look a lot different. Hey, I know! I'll try it and show them up!" So he did, for a year, and he tacks on his thought-of-at-the-start moral at the end and on the book jacket, and if that was all it was, it'd basically be a goofy book about a guy acting like a nut for a year, with an obvious conclusion: 'don't be a nut!'

Happily, he was honest enough with himself that he took the job seriously, and the project ('try to follow all the rules in the Bible as literally as possible for one year') took him a lot of interesting places. He followed a lot of interesting rules, got help from a variety of interesting sources, and talked to a lot of interesting people.

Oh, and he's funny, honest, and insightful.

...and that's where my draft ended. There's a lot I've since forgotten about that book, but I do remember several interesting stories from it, and would still recommend it. But I really did feel that the moralizing at the end did not at all flow from the rest of the book, and wished that he had concluded with what he actually learned from his year-long experience, instead of concluding with what he set out to prove at the beginning of his year-long experience.

The second book, 'The Unlikely Disciple', came about because of one of the experiences of the first book: there were a lot of rules in the Bible about how to treat your slaves that A.J. couldn't follow because he didn't have a slave--until Kevin Roose (a freshman at Brown University) contacted him asking if he could be A.J.'s intern. Unpaid labor! The perfect solution! A.J. happily agreed, on the condition that he could call Kevin his slave, and Kevin worked for A.J. for several months, doing research and baking Ezekiel bread.

As part of that work, they visited Liberty University, the very conservative Christian school where Jerry Falwell was president. That bit fascinated Kevin, who decided to transfer to Liberty for a semester and write a book about *that*. And he did!

Like A.J., Kevin (raised a fairly subdued Quaker) approached his cultural immersion with compassion and honesty, and unlike A.J., he didn't have a preconceived moral to his tale, which really strengthened his book. He had a lot of interesting experiences, and talks about them with insight and humility.

In brief: Oh, yeah! Those were pretty interesting books! You should check them out if you're interested in the borderlands between secularism and Christianity.

One Year Later

2010-06-13T07:51:46Z

On Father's Day of last year, Sandi came and visited us for the first time. We became her foster parents a couple short weeks after that. The more extreme behaviors we had heard about from her former foster parents never materialized, thanks to (we think) those families helping her work through a lot of it, and the fact that she was one of only two kids here in our home, letting her absorb more of the attention she so desperately needed. In January of this year, she became what they call 'legally free', and we started the official adoption process. We had a slight scare in late May, when it looked like her legal status might be rescinded, which worried Sara a lot, but which, for whatever reason, I wasn't as troubled by--even if that bit had gone through, the likelihood that it would be reinstated relatively soon thereafter seemed like a certainty to me. But it looks like it won't even come to that, so we're going ahead with the official adoption--she'll become a Smith on paper as well as our hearts on June 14th--just two more days! And on Father's Day next week, we'll have her Adoption Party! A fitting ending for that phase of our lives, and the beginning of the next.

Sandi's been excited (particularly about choosing a cake) as the day has drawn closer, but she's also been getting a bit more anxious as the finality of it has started to sink in. In her former households, she was living with them 'for a while' because her mother 'had a job to do'. But her mother didn't do her jobs, and when we told Sandi about that back in January, she had a rough couple of weeks at her daycare. So from then on, she's sort of known that she won't get to live with her family any more, and she misses them terribly, even though she gets to see her siblings relatively often. In the last couple weeks, she's been testing this, especially at night when it's time for bed. "I want to live with my sister. I don't want to live in this family." "I know you love your sister, sweetie, and she will always be your sister, and you will get to visit her. But you can't live with her." Or, "You're not my daddy." "Yes, I am, kiddo." "You're not my *double* daddy." "That's right; right now I'm your foster daddy, but *next week* I'll be your double daddy! I'm pretty excited about that." "<giggle>"

Last night, it finally crested. We were talking about "Momma E-----" (I can't use her full first name here, but that's how Sandi refers to her), and how she wants to live with her. I told her again that she hadn't done her jobs, and that she couldn't. And finally, her five-year-old heart broke, and she wept. "Mommy..." she cried. "I want my mommy." I held her and sat with her in my arms on the side of her bed. "Of course you do," I whispered. "Ow," she cried. "Ow."

This was pretty rough on Sara, as you might imagine. Sandi never really had a dad, so she bonded with me basically the moment she walked in the door. It's been a longer road for her bonding with Sara, and though it has happened, Sara gets more anxious about it more easily. I had the strong instinct that we should let Sandi grieve her age-zero-to-three mother for a while, but from the way Sara was hovering outside the door, I think that was a lot harder for her. Kudos to her, though--she let us sit there and cry.

After a good long while--probably 20 minutes or so--she was still crying, but was finally able to talk. And we talked a lot, about things that make us sad, and how we deal with them; about her family, and her memories of living in a small room with her sister, sleeping in a bed in front of the closet; about her friend at daycare whose mother had just died of cancer; about how I was sad when our daughter Abagail had miscarried, many years ago, and how I still carried some sadness with me about that, but was glad I hadn't forgotten about her, and the joy she had brought us while we were expecting. I told Sandi to hold on to her good memories of those times, and not forget them. That times change, and other things happen that make us happy again--the sadness doesn't go away, but life is more than that sadness. I told her one thing that had helped me was to write about Abagail, and she said she wanted to write about her sadness, too. I said we could do that the next day, and this is what she dictated to me this morning:

I miss my family because I didn’t get to see them. And it wasn’t really a happy day at night. But me and my daddy talked and we talked about different things like Abagail dying, and my daddy was sad. And I was really sad. And it was also past my bedtime, so we were talking for a little bit and then I went to bed and started to feel better for a time when I was happy again, and it was a very good night, then. I liked it. So, it was time for me to go to bed, and I went to bed. It was a good day. I love you all in the family and it’s a good thing that we talked about it, and it was things that were happiness and sad. For things I know, you know too! And this is how you’re supposed to feel when you get happier. The End.

Then she had me print out a copy and she wrote a sad face on the top half of the page for the sad things we had talked about, and a happy face on the bottom half of the page for the happy things we had talked about.

I think the 'things I know, you know too' is from when we were talking about Abagail, and I said that I didn't want to forget her, because if I didn't remember her, who would? And Sandi said, "Ellric remembers." "Well, this was several years before Ellric was born." "But you told Ellric about it, and he told me." "That's... true," I said, surprised at the insight. I tend to keep things like that to myself, and forget that there are others out there who are willing to carry our memories, in case we forget them. But Sandi knows about Abagail, and won't forget her for me. And I know about Momma E-----, and won't forget that for Sandi, either.

And now I've told you. And if you have a little space in your memories for the sadness and happiness of a little girl, see if you can tuck this in and hold it there for her. She--or someone else--might need it one day.

The cats

2009-11-16T06:12:21Z

The mouse that the cat brought in to the basement was still weakly shuffling along the floor after I chased the cat away. I wasn't sure whether it was more merciful to kill it or to put it outside, but it was way too cute to kill, so I put it in the shed under the pile of sticks. It wasn't actually bleeding anywhere I could see, so who knows, maybe it'll survive.

I have also discovered that if your son gets a science lab-y thing where you chip away at a block of compressed sand to get at the stones inside, it is a good idea to cover the resulting pile of sand after one is done for the evening, lest the cats mistake it for their litter box.

*shakes head*

Relative Sadness

2009-09-17T07:00:03Z

Recently a couple friends have related stories about their kids being sad. One friend's son was wailing when he was supposed to be in bed ("I! Want! Waaaaaaatteeeeeeeer!"), and another friend's son was distraught about a broken fish eraser. ("I want to see him whole again and I just can't!") I felt a little guilty, hearing those stories, because while I have similar stories I would like to share, I can't without it seeming like I'm bragging, or possibly belittling my friends' stories. Because when Sandi cries at night, she wails, "I want my moooommmmmyyyyyy!" and she gets distraught about her broken family. ("None of my family lives together and they're all broken up and it's not *fair*!")

But to the children in question, the emotions are the same level of intensity. And as a parent, you use similar techniques to deal with them. My friend with the eraser-deprived child writes, "Oh, my son, such is the way of the world. There is nothing to do for it but weep and cling to each other." She writes this knowing that we, the adult readers, will be amused at the incongruity between the inconsequentiality of her son's sadness and the depth of the response, but what she also knows is that this lesson is indeed the lesson her son needs to learn. And I took comfort in her story, and found wisdom in her response because it's the same lesson Sandi must learn. And if an adult would be as distraught in her situation but only slightly annoyed at a broken eraser, it's merely happenstance and fate that separate my girl's sadness triggers from those of my friend's son.

Now, lest you think a cloud of tragedy hangs heavily over our newly-expanded household, I will tell you that it's never such weighty issues that *start* the crying. Tonight it was the fact that she chose to not eat much of the dinner we gave her, and later we wouldn't give her a snack. It's only after the tears have crested that the "I want my mooommmyyy!" starts. And I suspect that at least in part, she may have learned that she gets more sympathy crying about her mother than she does crying about snacks. And so, I try to separate the cause from the effect and dwell instead on the aftermath. It's reasonable for someone her age to be sad about not having snacks, and it's reasonable to be sad about being separated from your mother. How, now, do we deal with our sadness? I told her of times I was sad, and I told her the fish eraser story. None of us need weep alone.

Father's Day

2009-06-30T07:34:05Z

Man, what a father's day weekend.

I kept thinking I should write about it, but it's all so unexpected yet long anticipated, frightening and exciting, confusing and simple, how do I possibly express everything in words?

Maybe I'll keep it simple.

Sara and I have wanted to adopt since... OK, I'm backing up even further. Sara and I have *planned* on adopting since we were dating, though obviously those plans were very nebulous at first. If you look at http://lpsmith.livejournal.com/tag/adoption you'll find a series of three posts (well, four now with this one), the first of which was from February of 2007. 2007! And there, I talk about how the first time we went to an adoption introduction seminar it was early 2006. In 2007 we finally started the process in earnest, going to classes and figuring out what route we wanted to take. We found an agency, Antioch Adoptions, which focused on the foster/adopt process, where you become licensed both as foster parents and as adoptive parents, and take in a child who is still in the foster care system and not 'legally free' to be adopted, but the people involved with the case know that that's where it's heading. So by accepting some uncertainty into your own life (the child may end up going back to their biological family after all, or a stable relative may be found, or who knows what else), you give the child the chance to have a stable home, something they desperately need.

So we took the classes and became licensed to adopt, and then we were wiped out for a while and put off getting our foster license, and then we tackled that stack of paperwork and found it much less onerous than we had anticipated, went through more interviews and home studies, and finally became an official foster home in December of 2008.

Then nothing happened for a while, as Antioch was going through some sort of upheaval. Then finally in April, we got a new social worker, who came and interviewed us *again*, and then in May she contacted us about a girl she thought might work! That one fell through (her social worker didn't think she was ready for daycare yet), and then we were contacted about a second child, and then a third, and those didn't work either, but there was definite forward momentum.

Then she contacted us about... well, hmm. Since I would rather not make this my very first friendslocked post, for the sake of her privacy I will call her Sandi. Sandi was four years old, of mixed race (black/Hispanic), and loved to sing. She was exhibiting some difficult behaviors, but all of them seemed to Sara and I like ones we could easily deal with. Things moved forward sort of tentatively; there were a couple other families that also were interested in fostering her too. After a few emails back and forth , a reschedule or two, and talking with her foster mother on the phone a couple times, we finally ended up going to a meeting up in Everett (where she was living) to meet with her current foster mother, Sandi's social worker, our own social worker from Antioch, and a few others. We expected the other families to be there too and to maybe talk about the differences in our homes, but once we got there, it turned out the other families had bowed out. And in the next hour or two, we basically determined a) that we knew what her current behaviors were, b) what sorts of things would need to be done with her in our house, and c) that she would visit us that weekend and the next, and then move in with us on July 5th.

Move in with us! This was it! For something that took over two *years* to happen, this was just ridiculously quick. We went to the park with Anna (the foster mom) to meet Sandi and watch her play some, so we at least could say we had seen the child once before accepting her into our home. She was adorable. We waited in line with her at the bouncy house and chatted with her and her current foster parents. Then we drove back home, periodically looking at each other in astonishment.

Father's day, two days later, Sandi was over at our place for a sleepover. We went to the pool, which the four of us almost had to ourselves--we caught it at a perfect sunny window in an otherwise grayish day. When Ellric and I had a pillow fight, she gathered the stray pillows to give back to Ellric so he could throw them back at me. We all had dinner together. Then she wanted to play dress-up, so she got on her Princess Ariel dress, inspiring Ellric to get on his Blue Power Ranger uniform. Then we danced in the living room, and designated one half of the room for just dancing, and one half for dancing and pillow fighting. We all brushed teeth together, and since she had forgotten her toothbrush at home, we gave her the choice of the blue toothbrush or the blue toothbrush. She handed me back the blue toothbrush and took the blue toothbrush instead. Then I read Sandi's 'Disney Princesses' book (her favorite) to both her and Ellric and put everyone to bed. Reportedly, she will resist going to bed. She was asleep in half a minute.

At one point, Sara came up to me and asked, "How are you doing?” "I'm in love," I replied. Ellric, knowing this was sort of the 'trial run' before deciding for sure to have her join our family, told me as I tucked him in. "I think today was a pretty good day. We should ask her tomorrow if she thinks today was a pretty good day, too."

I drove her back to Everett the next morning after sharing breakfast with my folks, and then this last weekend she was back for two more days. Since everything had been working out just fine, Anna, Sara, and I sat down with her when she arrived to tell her she would be living with us next week. That was kind of hard, because I wanted to ask if she wanted to live with us, or at least would be okay with it. And while she almost certainly would have said yes, Anna and others thought that unfortunately, that might give her unreasonable expectations for the amount of control she has in her life. As a foster kid, she really doesn't have any say in what happens to her. As much as she would want to, she can't go back to living with her mom right now--probably not ever. And she shouldn't *have* to make those decisions anyway--she's only four! As she gets older and can handle more responsibility, our job will be the same as any parent's, to give her the responsibility she can handle.

Most of the drama was in my own head, of course, as Sandi only protested, "But I like my bunk bed!" and after a bit of explaining some of the reasons we felt our home was a better fit for her, she was fine, and headed off to play. We went to the pool again, and hung out around the house. Sunday we went to church and later borrowed my folks' van to go get some furniture for her bedroom. After that, we went to my folks' house for dinner, and both of my in-town sisters were there with their families. We were pretty tired before going, and weren't sure if Sandi would be up for it either, but afterwards we were very happy we went. She had a great time playing with her two younger cousins, and even joined in the pig pile climbing all over my soon-to-be-a-fireman brother-in-law. She asked to sit next to my sister Miriam at dinner.

So she's absolutely been on her best behavior the whole time we've seen her, and it hasn't looked like it's even been that much of an effort for her. At this point I'm waiting for her worst behavior just so I can see it, calibrate, and move on. It might take a few months--they told us in our classes that there was often a 'honeymoon' period when the kids first move in with you.

And there are other storm clouds on the horizon--things I probably shouldn't talk about her out of respect for her privacy, but basically summed up in 'things from her past continuing to affect her future'. But I'm not worried. We'll deal with each issue as it comes up, just as we have with Ellric.

And some day, she'll probably find this and read it, if I don't thrust it on her unawares. Hello, sweetheart. I can't imagine what the years since now have been like for you, just like I can't imagine what your life was like before today, though I'm beginning to piece together bits and pieces. But I know that you're still a beautiful child, and that four minutes with you would be enough to make me fall in love with you all over again.

Be safe. Be well. And be strong.

A small moment of found tragedy

2009-04-29T07:01:33Z

A few days ago, a mostly-deflated helium mylar balloon declaring "You're Special!" showed up on the ground near my morning bus stop. After a couple days of seeing it sit there, I finally sighed and decided to throw it away myself. I picked it up, and as I was deflating it, I noticed that there was a note attached to the string:

I'm sorry I was annoyed at your balloon, dearheart. I kept the note.

Blast from the past

2009-04-28T07:10:41Z

This last Sunday, 'Club Floyd' (a group that plays IF games collectively on a MUD I frequent) played my own game, "The Edifice", a game I wrote when I was in grad school in 1997. This game, and the article I wrote about it, turned out to be instrumental in getting me a position at the UW years later as a post-doc: Mary Kuhner, my new boss, had happened to play and review the game back in the day herself, and the article proved to her that I could program.

Happily, the group managed to get through the whole game without resorting to hints, and the general consensus was that it held up well. The transcript of people playing the game is up at the Club Floyd site, but of course you will find spoilers there. If you haven't played the game yourself and are interested in doing so, you can try playing it online directly using Parchment, or you can go visit the IFDB to download the game file directly and get an interpreter (click the 'Show Me How!' button in the upper right).

It was fun watching people play the game--back when I wrote it originally, it wasn't yet common for testers or players to send transcripts to the author, so this was only the second time I've seen a full transcript at all, and the first time I've seen anyone play through in real time, complete with extraneous comments and chatting about what they were thinking. I was generally happy that it didn't take too long for people to get the idea for how to solve the puzzles relatively quickly, and that most of the time, when people had an incorrect but reasonable idea, the game would respond appropriately. It didn't all the time, of course, and those times were really annoying for me--I wanted to go back and fix it!

Sara keeps telling me I should write a new game, and I have had a few ideas over the years that are languishing in some state of not-actually-a-game-yet-ness. It'd definitely be fun. And who knows, I might need a new job someday.

I should also remember to thank Rob Wheeler for the cover art, and Emily Short for hosting the IF Cover Art Drive which inspired Rob to make it. Thanks again, you two!

Valentine's Day

2009-02-17T06:46:57Z

For Valentine's day this year, I sang Sara a song I wrote:

(and here's a direct link.)

Back last October, while walking to the bus, I was inspired, and came up with the basic 'I want you to know' motif and tune, and wrote the middle chorus (about the PhD.) I had been listening to Jonathan Coulton at the time, and if you know him, I think you can probably tell I was inspired by that (Sara in particular was reminded of 'Code Monkey'--the melody is different, but some of the chord progression is the same.) In fact, I wasn't entirely sure if I hadn't heard the "I want you to know" line from some other song, so I googled the lyric and didn't find it anywhere. (Now if I could google the melody, I'd be all set.) Over the next couple days in spare moments I wrote what would become the first chorus, and noodled around various melodies in my head to try to come up with the main melody. Nothing particularly stuck, and I filed it away, thinking, "I should sing this for Sara for Valentine's day at the thing the youth group does."

Eventually, January rolled around, and my sister Miriam emailed me and asked if I'd be willing to sing for the thing the youth group does. I said I would, and pulled out the song again. I wrote the first verse as I finalized the melody (which sounds a lot like the opening line of the theme from 'Friends', oddly enough), and wrote the final chorus. I also knew I wasn't going to be able to sing it a capella, though, so I asked Miriam for a guitarist (the tune had a guitar with it in my head), and she sent me to Pete Montemayor. He was great. I recorded myself singing what I had so far, including me basically inventing a bridge on the spot as I recorded it, then recorded myself singing a sort of bass line for it, and emailed him the result. Over the next week or so, I finished up the second verse, came up with the final form of the bridge, and had myself a working song!

Pete and I found a time we could rehearse together, I took a couple printed copies of the lyrics with me, and we hashed out the accompaniment. This was a particularly interesting process for me, since I basically know nothing about guitar chords, but had definite ideas in my head for what the guitar should sound like in a couple places. Mostly we went with what Pete had come up with from my recorded version, but there was one bit in particular in the chorus where after a couple sing-throughs I just knew it should be different, but didn't have the vocabulary to say *how* it should be different. (This was the bit at the end of the first and third lines in the chorus: 'stronger every day' and 'since the day we wed' in the first one.) I knew I wanted three chords for those lines, and Pete tried a few options, but nothing quite sounded right. Finally, he picked out the particular notes I was singing, then played a series of three chords. "That's it!" I shouted, and if it was a Peanut's cartoon, that's the point where he'd have ended up tumbling backwards like Schroeder. Then we tried it, and we both agreed it worked great.

After that, the biggest challenge was to not sing it in front of Sara, since the song was basically constantly in my head at that point. Fortunately, the week passed relatively quickly, and, well, then I got to sing it to her! It was pretty cool.

And while I pretty much was singing it to an audience of one, there were a few other people there, too. You can hear them laughing in the video, and their response was basically everything I could have hoped for. They even laughed at the references to things Sara and I had shared that I didn't know if anyone else would find amusing like 'fermented ketchup'. My hope was that the in-jokes would sound like in-jokes, and could be appreciated as a sort of window into our shared history. You can imagine a story about fermented ketchup, and the story you make up in your head is probably pretty close to reality.

At any rate, it all came together perfectly, lots of people told me they liked it, and most importantly, one person in particular told me she loved it, so I'm happy ;-)

I love you, babe! I think you're wonderful.

Edit: There was a request for the lyrics, so here they are:

I still remember the first time I saw your face,
Making you laugh as you tried to eat.
And half a year later on Chicago's windy streets,
We talked for fifteen hours straight.
Who could have guessed that sharing
Fermented ketchup, wearing
That bright pink jacket was the start?

And I want you to know
My love for you gets stronger every day.
Well, I guess that's not literally true,
I just couldn't resist that old cliche.
But it's certainly grown
Much deeper ever since the day we wed.
So I guess that the next time
I'll just say that instead.

I've learned so much from you: some problems don't need my help,
They just need a sympathetic ear,
When people depend on you, you owe them all your heart.
If you don't make time, time disappears.
Have an opinion sometimes.
Embrace the good and bad times.
It's never too late to buy ice cream.

And I want you to know
I love you even though my PhD
Took a little bit longer than we thought,
And I know that it made you quite distraught,
But you know in the end
I made it; got to wear that goofy hat.
Don't you think it was worth it?
Don't bother answering that.

And now there's three of us,
Together in our home,
Though way too many of the walls are cream.
The seals on all the windows leak,
The carpet's old; the shed's antique.
But I don't care, I'm living in my dream.

And I want you to know
My love for you's grown deeper o'er the years.
We've shared each other's joys.
We've quelled each other's fears.
And through it all, you've kept me warm
My outpost in the snow
So I though that I'd tell you
[spoken:] I love you.
And I thought you should know.

Icon meme

2009-01-12T21:54:00Z

I got halfway through the followup post about my cat dying and stalled, so while I'm working on that, here's a stupid meme.
MY ICONS.

default	oldest	newest


saddest	happiest	angriest


cutest	sexiest	funniest


fave ship	fave fandom	fave animated


best quote	best textless	best stolen idea


use the most	favorite

HOW MANY ICONS DO YOU HAVE: 2
OUT OF HOW MANY AVAILABLE ICONS SPACES: 6
IF YOU COULD BUY SPACE FOR MORE, WOULD YOU: no
DO YOUR ICONS MAKE A STATEMENT: yes
WHAT FANDOM DO YOU HAVE THE MOST ICONS OF: lpsmith
AND THE SECOND MOST: smithlp
WHAT SHIP DO YOU HAVE THE MOST ICONS OF: left eye/right eye
ARE YOUR ICONS MADE MOSTLY BY OTHER PEOPLE: no
DO YOU MAKE ICONS: no
ARE THEY ANY GOOD: yes
ANIMATED ICONS ARE: blinking

DO THE MEME.
Coding can be found here

Our cat died

2008-12-11T08:05:13Z

[This post ended up being about me, and about our cat dying. I still need to write about the aftermath and about Ellric's reaction (using 'need' in the literal sense here), so I'll probably put that in a second post.]

Last week, we noticed that Ember, our black cat, was acting sick. Not eating or drinking as much as usual; a bit listless. Saturday, Sara took her to the vet, who told us she was dying, and had maybe a week to live.

This is the cat that I caught with my bare hands over thirteen years ago, under a friend's apartment's pool deck. The cat who hid under our couch that afternoon, but explored the apartment that night, making little 'mew's every time she moved from one area to another. The cat who hissed in anger for weeks at our second cat, a grey kitten we had hoped was her litter-mate but wasn't. The cat who would come up next to your chair and mew at you for attention, then arch her back away from your fingertips juuuust out of reach. The cat who I dubbed 'stealth kitty' for the fact that I would find her in my lap purring, but have no recollection of her actually jumping there. The cat who would sleep on the bed in the comforter valley between my legs, before Ellric came along and we evicted them from our bedroom at night. The cat who, with her 'brother' Ashes, we shipped across the country when we moved to Seattle to all live with my parents, and who hid in their unfinished basement for weeks before eventually consenting to explore the rest of the house. The cat who eventually got comfortable enough with my father that she would jump up in the little triangle of space behind him in his office chair when he was working on his computer. The cat who loved to chase bugs, and rattle her teeth menacingly at birds on the other side of the window. The cat who... The cat who...

I remember when the pets of my childhood died, but what I don't remember is the dying. A dying member of the household looms large, and I found myself trying to pick my way through what felt like a field of landmines of potential bad decisions and regrets. Where do we put her that will make her the most comfortable? Do we force her to eat or drink? Did we make the right decision to let her die at home, and not have her put to sleep? How much talking about it is too maudlin and how little is too aloof?

She slept her last few nights in Comforter Valley again, and we held and pet her a lot. Sunday we were able to spend most of the day at home, with her either in our laps or nearby on the heater vents where she loved to curl up. But Monday it was off to work and school for the three of us. Monday morning I fed her some tuna water out of an oral medicine syringe left over from Ellric's last antibiotic regimen. Though she was hardly moving at that point, when I came back to check on her five minutes later, she seemed more alert, and I gave her some more. I hoped I wasn't prolonging the agony, and conversely that I wasn't shocking her system. I left her on the bed where she had slept and turned the electric blanket on low, hoping it would help keep her warm.

Of course, once at work, I felt like an idiot for leaving on an electrical appliance when not in the house. I came home on an earlier bus that night, partly to beat the rest of my family home in case she had died, and partly because I had visions of fire engines surrounding my house. When I finally turned down our street and found no sirens or flashing lights, I sighed in relief.

And when I rushed into the bedroom and saw Ember jerkily raise her head to look at me, I burst into tears. I apologized for leaving her alone, wrapped her in a soft blanket, and sat with her in the living room, gently petting her.

That was when I received my first gift. As my hand rested on her side, I could feel her purring. That's all I wanted--for her to be comfortable. You can't ask a cat that, though, and I had felt so helpless, not knowing if what I was doing was even noticeable. But she responded, and I knew I had done the right thing.

After dinner and storytime and brushing teeth, Sara and Ellric when to bed, and I stayed up at the computer, the cat on a pillow and in a blanket on my lap. She was barely moving at all at this point, sometimes stretching or twitching, but never so much as rolling over. I made plans to work from home the next day, on death watch with the cat if necessary. I couldn't leave her alone again, not this close.

As the night got darker, she would be so still that several times I wondered if she had already died. I'd rest my hand on her side, and feel her heart. About midnight, she started to act uncomfortable, and I fretted as I tried to help. Lift her head? Lower it? Readjust something? I did the best I could, and scratched her ears.

And that was when I received my second gift. As she relaxed again and I scratched her left ear, her left hind leg started twitching in that familiar sympathetic scratching impulse. She had responded! She was happy to have her ears scratched! At the very least, she wasn't thinking about any pain she might have had. I slowed down the scratching and stopped, and she stopped too, relaxing. And a minute later, when I put my hand again to her side, I could only feel the reflection of my own heart beat. I kept her in my lap a while longer, just to be sure, but soon there was no doubt. She had died. And, wonder of wonders, I had done the right thing. I had been there with her when it happened. I eased her passing with the right decision at the end.

The whole process was quite existential for me. I thought a lot about dying and death and other members of my family. I thought of my mother's struggles with her declining father. I imagined what I might do when my parents get old, or if Sara's health declines. I thought about my own death. What's the equivalent of purring? What does 'comfortable' mean to a human, to Sara, to me? I don't have many answers. I might feel, like I felt at times with Ember, that I don't have any answers. But even without the answers, if you're paying attention, you can be there when the gift is given.

Grace and peace to you all.

One vote at a time

2008-11-04T08:34:29Z

My sister has been in Florida this past month working for the Obama campaign as a bilingual field organizer. She's actually one of the few paid workers there, though she's been working 14-hour days all October with literally zero days off. And no, I asked, and she's not getting paid by the hour.

She talked to me this evening on the phone, and told me this story before signing off to go collapse for a few hours. I'll try to recreate what she told me; it's not exact, but the basics are at least all there:

I was out canvassing with one of our new volunteers in an old Cuban neighborhood. It was one of those places where you ring the bell at the gate, and the person has to come across the yard to get to you. We chatted as an older Cuban woman came across the yard up to us, but it turned out she was voting for McCain. I was about to say goodbye and go on to the next house, because this is the type of voter you usually can't persuade, but the girl I was with asked her, "Can I ask you your reasons?"

"Well, my driver made me promise I'd vote for McCain," she replied, and I suddenly realized the cause might not be as lost as I thought. She asked if it was true that Obama was a communist, and were able to tell her no--one of the main strategies the Republicans have been using here is to paint Obama as basically the same as Fidel. To my surprise, I've been defending the free-market economy more than I ever thought I would. "No, really, he's a great defender of free enterprise..."

We talked for a bit more, and she told us her story, how she had left Cuba many years ago, and had been unable to ever return and see the family she left behind. "When I left, one of my relatives told me, 'Cry now, because you'll never see your native country again.'"

Up until that point, the discussion had been very academic, but the emotion of her story really got to me, and my eyes started to well up with tears. She looked at me more closely, and asked, "What's wrong with your eye?"

Soon after I got here, I got an eye infection, and it was pretty red. "I have an eye infection," I told her.

"You should go see a doctor," she replied.

"That's one reason I'm voting for Obama--I don't have any health insurance!"

"No health insurance! Wow."

"So I'm voting for Obama for health insurance, and you should vote for him because maybe it'll mean you'll get to go visit your home again," I said, trying to get my emotions back in control.

She shook her head, smiling a little. "No, I'll see my home when I'm free of this body." We knew how old she was from the report we had with us, and she looked pretty frail. "I'll see my family again and we'll all be free."

We talked a little more, and she admitted she was worried about her Social Security.

"Tell you what," she finally said. "My driver doesn't have to know who I voted for. I'll vote for Obama for your health insurance and my Social Security."

If Obama wins Florida, it will be because of stories like this one, played out across the state. Good luck tomorrow, sis. And take a well-deserved break come Wednesday.

Hong Kong

2008-10-14T03:36:36Z

The conference I was at is done, and now I'm off exploring the city:

Group Participation Post

2008-08-07T04:25:20Z

I'm back from vacation! I had a lot of fun, but first things first. I have to know what was in this truck we saw on the way:

Dr. Horrible, Act III

2008-07-19T04:58:51Z

Dr. Horrible, Act III is up. I'll probably post spoilers in a different post, but I will mention on Yoon's behalf that there are more prominent PoC this go-round.

Iron Man vs. Dr. Horrible

2008-07-17T14:50:11Z

It's Y2K week here at lpsmith central, which means we post nothing but links! First up, an absolutely astonishing Iron Man (the movie) fanfic, The Kids Aren’t All Right", written as a Vanity Fair article by that reporter woman. Well-written, insightful, funny, and pretty long. Highly recommended.

On the other end of the superhero spectrum, we have Joss Whedon's "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog", Act I and Act II. Saturday should see the posting of Act III, and it's all going away again Sunday, at which point you'll have to buy it on iTunes or the inevitable DVD or something if you want to watch it.

I was pretty meh about Act I. The great thing about the Buffy musical was that all the characters were established already and the songs were really insightful. Act I had to introduce everyone, and the songs were all surface-level. While there were some funny bits, it mostly left me flat. But maybe it's just that Joss isn't that good at introductions, because Act II was much, much better. Now we know what's going on, the songs are more layered, the dialogue is snappier (and more trademark Joss, somehow), and everything is working together much more smoothly. From the opening shot on, I was hooked.

Just to check, I went back and re-watched Act I after seeing II to see if there was any foreshadowing or something that would make me appreciate it more. But no, still left me flat. Act II rewatches have been interesting every time. (Also, pay attention or rewatch Act II 1:30-2:00; there's an extra bit in there that both nothings and I totally missed the first time.)

Halflife 2: Alyx

2008-05-12T07:50:07Z

So, I requested and received the Orange Box set for Christmas, mostly because I had heard it had this cool game called 'Portal' on it, and that there were also other games on it that were probably worth playing. I played and greatly enjoyed Portal, but don't have a lot more to say that I haven't already read somewhere, so I'll just note that it was a lot of fun, and that the technique they used of hinting at a backstory without being very explicit about it was very effective.

But after I played Portal, there were these other games in the set from a series called 'Halflife 2', so I went ahead and played them too. I'll admit that half the reason I played them was because I had heard that it explained some of the Portal backstory. And it did, but it turned out that it was also pretty fun! The first time I played it I gave up in frustration, and then a few weeks later decided to give it another shot and gave up in frustration *again* (though after progressing a bit more), and then I found out there was a cheat code that would keep your minimum health at 1, so I figured with that I could at least wander through the game ignoring all the annoying people who were shooting at me, and gave it one last shot. I never did use the cheat code, but I finally figured out how to play the game, and after that I breezed through the three games on the disk: Halflife 2, HL2 Episode 1, and HL2 Episode 2.

But what I really want to talk about is the character of Alyx. Spoilers below for the whole series, so I'll give you some space here.

So somewhere around the middle of HL2, I realized I had developed a huge crush on Alyx. And the fact that this had happened in the midst of a videogame--a videogame wherein the major gameplay element is 'shoot things until they fall over'--really impressed me. At that point, I started paying more attention to what the game designers were doing with the character, and how they managed to make her so appealing. This sort of spoiled the effect, but not entirely, so now on the far side of the games I still like Alyx a lot, and I know many of the reasons why.

-The Meet Cute: Gordon (the protagonist, aka you) meet Alyx in the time-honored tradition of boy-meets-girl: he gets tased by the bad guys, his vision goes black, all hope seems lost (I had just about reached for the 'restore' button) and then Alyx shows up, kicks some butt, and rescues Gordon. If you're a female video game character, you couldn't really ask for a better introduction.

-Competence: Alyx is highly competent at the things she does. She shoots, she hacks into enemy computer systems, she scales buildings, she gives good advice. Interestingly, she complements Gordon on all four levels--while both of them shoot stuff, only Alyx does the other three, leaving it to her to accomplish those sorts of tasks while Gordon does the brute thing (or the puzzle-solving thing; we have to give him that). And while she doesn't do a lot of shooting stuff in the first game, she does a lot of it in 'Episode One', but never steals the player's thunder--the two of them often work in tandem in a variety of situations, including the player shining a flashlight in the dark at the zombies while Alyx shoots them, or Alyx covering the player with a sniper rifle while the player makes his way down a heavily-fortified alley. Alyx's building-scaling abilities can be a bit frustrating to the player because Gordon can't do the same thing and follow her--he has to tediously stack boxes to climb up to places Alyx simply jumps to--but on the whole, it's a net win. In the commentary track, the designers reveal that they don't like having Alyx do that very often, and when they do, it's for game design purposes (they need to get the player separated from Alyx, if only for a little bit). On the whole, though, I think it's a net win for Alyx's characterization.

-Other people like her: I'm not sure that this shouldn't actually be first on the list, as far as effectiveness of game designer tactics to get the player to like her goes. As Photopia showed the IF world, there's little that's more effective in conveying that someone is cool than to show them through the eyes of people that adore her. There's her father, of course, who thinks the world of her, but Dr. Kleiner and Barney both have easygoing positive relationships with her, and are always thanking her for doing stuff (like rescuing Gordon). Then there's Dog, her mute but adorable robot companion that basically steals all the scenes where he shows up. If anything, Dog is more devoted to Alyx than her own father is, and when he's tearing through Combine soldiers and ripping open walls to let us through so we can rescue her, it's hard not to just assume that she must be worth that effort.

-She likes us: She never actually *says* this, mind you (which frankly increases the appeal in a situation like this), but she's glad to see us when we've been gone, worries about us when we're in danger, compliments us when we do a good job, and jokes with us in our down moments. The original game and Episode Two have an easier time of this, since we spend large portions of the game apart. Episode One takes a pretty big risk by having her by our side throughout the entire game, where the sheer length of our interaction with her is much more likely to reveal that she's a piece of software. Happily, that never happened for me, and while I did feel it faltered a bit in places, it was due to choices the designers had made rather than her robotic nature being exposed. The moments that didn't quite work as well for me were mostly when it seemed to me Alyx was laying things on a little thick, particularly after we had won some big fight. The director's commentary mentioned that Alyx's compliments were one way the player was rewarded after a tough battle, and perhaps that's why it didn't quite feel as real to me as it could. I don't mind her being happy we survived or impressed by how we beat the bad guy, but having her enthuse, "You're my new hero!" was a bit too cheesy for me. Similarly, the occasional implied double entendre made me roll my eyes a bit--at one point in Episode One, we have to wade through some nasty water, and Alyx envies us our environmental hazard suit. "I don't suppose there's room in there for two?" she asks. Ooooo-kay. Interestingly, she makes a very similar joke in Episode Two about how we never take the suit off, and that one I found funny. Maybe it was the inflection or something.

-Strength: At least in 'Easy' mode, Alyx is basically immune to damage, so while she sometimes calls for help when she's being absolutely swarmed, it's much more often the case that she's out in front, dispatching the bad guys with or without us. And in Episode One, we get to see her taking out some of the zombies that get too close with a boot to the head or some other bit of ju-jitsu, and that was so much fun to watch I would forget to take out the zombie next to me, gnawing on my head. Keep your mind on the game, Gordon!

-Vulnerability: In the original HL2, Alyx rescues us first, and later gets captured so we can storm the citadel and try to return the favor. I was a bit wary of this at first--was it really necessary to give us a strong woman only to go and put her in jeopardy, ready for the man to come to her rescue? Happily, Gordon gets captured as well, and both Alyx *and* Gordon (along with Alyx's dad) are rescued in turn by a different woman, at which point Alyx and Gordon team up again to go take out the bad guy and save the world. So that was nice to see. So 'being in danger' isn't really what I mean by 'vulnerability', though it was kind of fun to go charging to her rescue while that lasted. But the more endearing moments Alyx gets are when she's nervous, or sad, or disturbed by things that are indeed nerve-wracking, depressing, and eeeagh-worthy. So when she's about to test out the teleporter and Barney says he 'still has nightmares about that cat', she has reason to worry, and while she goes though with it anyway (bravery), it's nice to hear her be as nervous about it as I would be. There's a bunch of these moments throughout the series, but the biggest one (for me) came in Episode One. We've ended up in a train car full of these creepy modified humans (the ones who 'resisted, or were just at the wrong place at the wrong time'), that are all basically in storage. Then the train crashes, Alyx and Gordon are separated, and the creatures all erupt in the freakiest moans and shrieks ever committed to computer speakers. As Gordon stumbles from one end of the car to the other, we find Alyx pinned down by a creature, still in its metal container, shrieking right in her face. We manage to pull it off of her, and Alyx retreats up into a corner of the train car, and basically curls up into a fetal position. The two of us manage to escape the car, and then Alyx sinks against a wall, telling us she needs a moment to recover. I've never felt more hampered by a set of controls in my life. What can I do to help? All I can do is move forward, back, left, right, jump, or... crouch! I can crouch next to her! That's as sympathetic as I can get with these blasted controls, but it'll have to do.

Episode Two falters a bit here, resorting to the 'woman in danger' scenario for the main section of the plot. Alyx is critically injured, and we team up with a Vortigaunt (a sympathetic energy-weilding alien) to find the material needed to save her. I felt a little less sympathetic here and a little more jerked-around-by-the-game-designers, but it could have been worse. Interestingly, it was after she had been saved but was still in a weakened state that my sympathy turned back on full-bore: watching her limp along behind me, apologizing for not being able to do more, while I'm trying to fight off giant alien insects was particularly effective. And then when I tried to scout on ahead to find a safe place for her to rest only to turn around and see her running after me (slower than normal) while shooting at the bugs--I had to shake my head in amazement. Jeez, woman, I know you're normally up for these sort of encounters, but you were just brought back from the brink of death! You'd think you could ease up a little.

-Appearance: OK, right, I can't honestly make a list like this without mentioning that Alyx is an attractive woman. Fortunately, she wasn't sexualized at all. She's wearing practical clothes (well, perhaps her shirt is a half-inch too short, but I can live with that), and she's not impossibly-endowed. She's thin and lithe, has beautiful skin, and perhaps her ammo belt is slung a little too perfectly off-kilter, but in general, she's simply realistically attractive, and not some male game developer's idea of eye-candy.

And somewhere at Valve is someone whose job it was to make the area of Alyx's forehead just above her nose scrunch up when she was concerned. If I ever find out who it was, I am going to go out and buy them a donut, because that was basically the cutest expression ever.

The upshot is that Alyx is a remarkable character, all the more so for being in a game. I'm looking forward to Episode Three (which is supposed to basically wrap up the story from One and Two), partly because it's just been a fun set of games, but also just so I can find out what she's going to do next. If you're a game designer, there's a lot of thing here you could do worse than emulate, and if you're a game player and haven't played it yet, I think you're in for a treat.

Games

2008-03-24T19:12:05Z

As some of you know, I wrote an IF game called 'The Edifice' for the 1997 IF Competition that won first place. Inspired by Emily Short's IF Cover Art Drive, Rob Wheeler made a cover for it, which is awesome! Thanks, Rob!

Also, I've been playing 7th Sea for several years now, and 'Actual Play Week' over at rpg.net inspired me to dust off an old unfinished review I had of it, clean it up, and submit it: it's now up http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/13/13699.phtml