Life Unconstructed

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19 September, 2010

Trailer: Space Battleship Yamato

Posted by blackcampbell under Movies, Science Fiction
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Wave cannon for the win!

7 September, 2010

A Few Books…

Posted by blackcampbell under Books
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A friend of mine did a post today on his current reading that led me to write a wee missive on what I’ve been reading of late:

Right now, I’m making my way through Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House , a novel set in a near-future Istanbul. the book revolves around a few themes: nanotechnology start-ups, terrorism, and the search for a Mellified Man. It combines the beautiful prose and ability to bring to life some of the world’s different cultures, while combining science-fiction sensibilities. I can also recommend his River of Gods and Cyberabad Days , set in a 2048 India. His Brasyl is decent, but suffers from being disjointed and ultimately unfulfilling. His Mars-based Desolation Road and Ares Express have a strange, mythic quality to them that reminded me heavily of Faulkner or Steinbeck in their quality. One thing about McDonald, however, all of his books feel about 50-60 pages too long.

A few other authors I can heartily recommend are Jonathan Letham and Arturo Perez-Reverte. Letham has a wide variety of genres he works in, but always with a strange twist to them. His Gun, With Occasional Music is a science-fiction detective novel, a Raymond Chandler hardboiled detective meets anthropomorphic animals mash-up that evokes Who Killed Roger Rabbit? or Cool World, without the cartoons. His two best, however, are Fortress of Solitude, a coming-of-age story set in Brooklyn of the 1970s/1908s, wrapping comic books, the music scene, and childhood angst together; and the other is Motherless Brooklyn, a detective novel where the protagonist has Tourettes Syndrome. It’s a fascinating look at the disease, and it’s probably his best novel.

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s catalogue is so good it’s hard to go wrong. I would suggest Queen of the South , a novel about a Mexican drug moll that becomes a successful smuggler in Spain, as a good starting point. Also his exceptional The Club Dumas, about a book hunter that searches for rare volumes for his customers. He is hired to find a sorcerous tome, and the danger begins. It was made into a movie that was nowhere as good. I’d steer clear of his “I want to be the next Alexandre Dumas” series (Captain Alastride), but that’s just me.

28 August, 2010

Things Fall Apart

Posted by blackcampbell under Life Unconstructed, Roleplaying Games
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There are a couple of different types of gamers, I’ve noticed over the years. There’s the casual player: usually someone who enjoys the occasional game more as a social occasion, rather than as a hobby. This is most often the girl/boyfriend or spouse whose partner games and they join in from time to time, the busy former gamer who doesn’t really have time or interest for more that the occasional session, and the curious who haven’t really gotten into the hobby. There’s a “hobbyist” gamer, to quote Fear of Girls — people who enjoy gaming, do it regularly or often, but still have other disparate interests that do not have to do with the gaming community. I say this is the vast majority of the hobby. There’s the hardcore gamers — people whose life is tightly bound to gaming, with most of their friends and other interests intersecting with the activity. These are often the sliver of the community that attracts to more interest, ire, ridicule, etc. from non-gamers.

This piece is mostly aimed at the last two groups.

There are few things that cannot be escaped in the universe: death, entropic collapse, gravity, taxes…the first two are mirrored in the collapse of a gaming group. There are plenty of reasons for the death or contraction of a group — people move away, they start having families, they get time-intensive jobs, get sick, get divorced, find new hobbies, or have falling outs over various and sundry things. Almost inevitably, one of these things will happen and your gaming group will lose players, or fall apart altogether.

The collapse of a gaming group can be traumatic — with responses ranging from mild annoyance and inconvenience (“But we were so close to discovering the mystery of the Lost Temple of Badu!”), to alienation (“Geez, I didn’t know that dumping my girlfriend would lose me all my friends in the group!”), to feelings of despondency and mourning (lets face it…we all know this guy/girl…) As with all things mortal, it’s okay to feel disappointed by the collapse of a group, a storyline not finished, a group of characters never to be seen (in that configuration) again. Look at the response of fans to the cancellation of Firefly …very similar.

So what to do? First, be disappointed, feel sad the gaming group broke up for a day or two then press on. It’s a hobby; it’s not your life. Find new players: there’s sites like Access Denied, RPG Finder, and the like. Hit the game stores and see if you can find people (although this is getting harder as shops are more rare and people either buy online or purchase .pdf products from DriveThru and their ilk. Gather up the remains of the last group, if you haven’t moved away, pissed off everyone in the old group, or even still have an interest…press on.

If you can’t do that? Get a new hobby. I motorcycle, I shoot, I hang out in coffeeshops and talk to people, I’m in grad school…plenty of people to meet and the likelihood is a few of them are gamers in one of these other activities you take on. Maybe you don’t go back to gaming and become one of the first group of gamers I mentioned. Life goes on.

In my case, two gaming groups have imploded in the last week — all my fault — and while I was the GM for both, that doesn’t mean the groups will coalesce around me again. C’est la vie… I have a few players that are still interested, and the groups wil be truncated, requiring me to reformulate my storylines, or ditch campaigns altogether (gaming is, at this time of dissertational annoyance, my only real creative outlet). It sucks. C’est la vie… I’m hoping I can cobble together new groups. If I can, great; I’m already thinking of new campaigns, characters, stories to tell (and story-telling, as the great Ferenc Szasz once said, is the point of history). If I can’t..? C’est la vie… I have a Triump I can ride, I have guns to shoot, things to see in the Albuquerque area, movies to go to, work to get done.

Ultimately, you can’t let the games become your reality or life.

PS: If you’re in the Albuquerque area, I’m looking for GM/players.

UPDATE: In a particularly interesting turn of fate, it looks like most of the gaming group I thought I was going to lose is coming back to the table…even the person with the most reason not to. I love it when everyone acts like an adult.

25 August, 2010

Ferry to Mull

Posted by blackcampbell under Life Unconstructed
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The ferry ride from Oban out to Mull — it was super windy and the storm just missed us.

Just a taste…

25 August, 2010

Oban

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Took the train out to Oban…

Just a few pics to get the taste of the place. Great, fresh seafood on the wharf, Oban distillery, and fantastic vistas.

24 August, 2010

Eulogy

Posted by blackcampbell under Life Unconstructed
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Once upon a time…

…there was a young man that met a young girl. The girl was pretty, smart, and married to a man that didn’t appreciate her. She knew at the first instant that he was “the one.” The pair began to see each other, and soon she left her husband for the boy. They moved far away and started again, hopefully for ever after

The couple eventually married, and the boy joined the Army. They moved a lot, he was under constant stress, but they had each other. The Army ended and they moved back to their home far away. For a time, everything was as it had been — they were both in school, and while poor, they had enough to scrape by. For that time, they were happy.

The boy however, had changed in the military. He wanted to improve their life, but seemed incapable to making it happen. He felt increasingly guilty that he could not break through in his chosen profession, and as their debts piled up, he began to worry incessantly. The girl managed to get a decent job and they continued to scape by, but their financial situation continued to deteriorate. The boy returned to school to get a better degree and gave up trying for his dreams; he knew they would not happen. He now was determined to be — if not successful — responsible.

They moved to a house they couldn’t really afford. They kept a lifestyle that was lower middle class…but could barely afford. The girl for her part worked hard, and had taken over the mantle of responsible one. Her hard work seemed for nought: she worked hard and made a good, if not great, wage, but the money was always gone. The boy, who was trying to salvage their situation hadn’t communicated the issues to her. For her, she worked and worked…and nothing improved or changed. She was a practical woman, now, and becoming a bit bitter. She became sick from the stress, and for several years she was a shell of who she had been, trapped in an endless loop of pain.

The boy, now a man, had no clue what to do to improve things and blamed himself for their situation and her illness, and he hoped she would come back to him. When she finally did, he found that his feelings for her were changing — between the stresses of life, health, career, and schooling, he had let it all fall apart — but he kept trying, kept doing his best. However, he knew that he was failing her, although she denied it and tried to placate him.

As happens in these tales, things reached their nadir. They were perpetually broke, in deep debt, he was failing (again) at his schooling and in holding a job — hardly the responsible figure he was trying to be. He desperately worked to improve their financial standing, understanding that their mountain of debt was waiting in the wings, and not trusting his ability to make the situation right. He shored up debt, he lowered their expenses, he did nothing but live for plugging the holes in their financial ship, all the while knowing that — in the end — he would fail. As he always had.

Then one day, he reconnected with a girl they had known. At first it was just friends, but soon he realized that there were deeper connections with the new girl that he had lost with his wife. He began lying to her about where he was and who he was with. He lost himself, dishonoring the girl now a woman that he had once rescued and had hoped to have a life with. Trapped between staying to avoid hurting the girl now woman that he still loved and cared about, and leaving to join the woman he had fallen in love with, the boy now a man came to hate everything about himself.

Eventually, he could bear it no longer and walked away from the girl now woman, and joined the other that helped him find some of the spark of his old self that was left. He continues to feel he failed the girl, continues to care about her and hopes that she will be well, and will find the happiness he couldn’t give her.

The story of the boy and the girl is not over, but their paths sadly diverge.