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| Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 | | 3:24 pm |
| | Sunday, November 1st, 2009 | | 7:40 pm |
I'm active in NaNoWriMo.
Hey folks. I'm officially registered for NaNoWriMo, following a friendly challenge from...well, a good friend. http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/579080That's the link to my page on the main site. I'm looking for sponsors!!! There's a link on the home page for any of you zany cats who'd like to throw in for yours truly. Keep it in mind! I could use the extra incentive. :D C.T., aka Aidan C. Bell | | Thursday, October 22nd, 2009 | | 3:44 pm |
| | Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 | | 11:27 pm |
| | Thursday, October 1st, 2009 | | 10:56 pm |
Everything Old (Wod) Is New Again
In an odd confluence of events, it seems I'm a Vampire Storyteller again. I basically gave up on the game back in 2003 after my last group. I'd run with people of varying quality over the years but a series of malcontents pushed me entirely out of the gig. I didn't even add the events of that chronicle to the Master Timeline I've kept of all the vampire stories I ran in the 90's. And with White Wolf folding the old World of Darkness a year later, well, seemed time to hang it up and move on. Obviously, I've been feeling nostalgic for the old days of late. It happens; I'm a creature of rampant sentimentality. Carousing some old relics at Bookmans, as I mentioned doing in my last blog, I ran across a couple other gamers - a husband and wife - who were pleasantly social, clean and intelligent. (After my final group especially, this was such a breath of fresh air. Literally.) And so it's come to pass that starting this appropriate month of my beloved Halloween, I'll be running vampire again for the first time in years. And I don't see why not, really. I've shown myself pining for the old school of Vampire from back in the day and not without reason. I like having a little busywork to do preparing for a game on the side, as long as it doesn't interfere with my writing (which if you've tuned in lately around here, you can see has been going quite well). For many years, my Master Timeline has languished, since so many of the players who threw into it moved away, started families, or darkly, were ousted from my life for excess indecency. It's rather trippy that I'll actually be adding to it again. That it's not the completed work I thought it was; there are still some stories of blood, passion and darkness to be spun into it after all. In fact, purely for shits and giggles, I may even post some of the stories run here, for your collective entertainment. Maybe I should post the Master Timeline again just to have it online somewhere. Well, it's been a long time since my vampire days and my entire life has changed on multiple levels. We'll see if the old saying is true, if you really can't "go home" again. I'll keep you posted. If you turkeys even care. :) c.t. | | Saturday, September 26th, 2009 | | 10:16 pm |
Old World of Darkness: Memories
Ahhh, Bookman's. Bastion of literay relics, haven for the biblio-archaeologist looking for a specific print run of his favorite books, drunk on the vapors of a bygone time. From time to time I roam Bookman's, just to see stuff long since gone. The particular print run of The Vampire Lestat, for example, with the red cover and the gold script on the front; the same as the one I devoured in a single day of heavy reading when I first discovred it sometime in '92. Early editions of my beloved Dune, editions I didn't even know existed. And in the game section, where old times like me (in a fit of pique or delusion or whatever) cast off their treasured collections once and for all, I see relics from my gaming 90's. For example, the Battletech: Technical Readout 3050. That thing was huge news for me and my friends back in '91. It's been buried by eight or nine Technical Readouts since then, and this poor, dog eared, beaten up copy would be the best condition offering I'd see for a long time. No more mint condition, fresh of the press, smells like a new book aura anymore. For any of it. I spend my time in the game section mostly, visting old ghosts. In the 90's I ran years worth of Vampire: The Masquerade and it's satellite games, like Mage: The Ascension. I see books I bought from the now non-existent bookstore at the now non-existent Christown Mall, glossy and fresh in their day, scuffed and weather worn like friends who've aged noticeably after fifteen years of not seeing them at all. Each one brings back memories of those old games. Every Wednesday night for months, mark it on your calendar. Me perched over Sheila's huge wooden desk in her apartment living room, wearing tight pants and either a tank top or shirtless with a vest, playing ringmaster to an ever increasing crowd of players that sat in a circle on her living room floor; the smell of burning candles in gothic candle holders, incense, and hot pizza when it arrived mid-game to feed the bolstering army of the undead I'd unwittingly ended up running for. And awesome April in her very low cut black dress, her costuming for Lady Julia, the Toreador elder. Good times! (Footnote: I've always hated the term "Game Master" or even worse yet, "Dungeon Master," two words that ensure that a gamer can look forward to a life of celibacy if they're ever mentioned in his presence. White Wolf's term was "Storyteller" - pretentious as hell, but they upsold it with a philosophy to thier games that I embraced wholehearted along with their very simple and easy to roll with system. The story was first, the story was everything, tell a god damned story. I was the go-to guy for local vampire Storytelling for a while and I half wonder if it was called anything less than that, if I'd been so eager to embrace it). I remember how my inner circle from that game - me, Sheila, April, a couple others how rotated in and out with their schedules or our imperial favor - would gush over the storylines, plot twists, and revelations in each new sourcebook White Wolf churned out to keep their game worlds moving. Some found their way in game, some didn't, but it was fun stuff in its era. In '96, I started a years long historical game in 1497 France and over a few years of real world game time - once a week, Wednesdays, for about three years - we game through history itself unto 1997 America. Although the steep incompetence of one of my main players for that small game was a constant source of grief and stress, the game remains one of my great works in the hobby. (For his part, the player in question eventually alienated every dice thrower we knew - all of them - to the point where nobody would ever game with him again. Makes me wonder what the game would have been like if I could have spent the energy weathering his temper tantrums on a better quality experience for everyone. To this day, after one key incident, nobody I know ever has, save his wife. And do not get me started on her.) That was when my collection was at my peak. It was huge and encompassed most of the game lines and their books. I became an almost encyclopedic authority on the old World of Darkness, specifically in Vampire and Mage. When I started dating my marathon ex, Emily (longest relationship to date at 2.5 years), it hit it's highest point. Emily was a fan of the game system - one of the few truly hot gamer chicks out there! - so it didn't hurt that I was a Storyteller for this stuff, though I never managed to run anyting private for her like she wished. At that time, I was burning out on Storytelling. It was fun and I'd done some great stuff but I also got sick of spoiled players, tantrum throwers, attention whores and what have you, and it hollowed out my verve to embrace the hobby. My collecting slowed down and besides a unique one-on-one Mage game I ran with just one other player (easily the best game I've ever run to date), I shut down as the people's Storyteller. Emily would eventually cheat on me with another gamer; this was to be expected, as her pattern was to cheat on every boyfriend she was with. That's how she traded up, and the next three guys after me got cheated on too. So I don't feel particularly bad. But to reward her for the good times in the relationship and because I'd finally gotten sick of the hobby's overpopulation of bad gamers, I sold her my entire legendary collection at a decent price. Bad idea. She conveniently left that vast collection with one of her subsequent ex's, someone I personally loathed to death, entirely for free. I don't think I've ever forgiven her for wasting such a treasure trove. It's only recently that I started looking at the old books again and remembering old times. I've returned to collecting them, harvesting the best editions at the best price I can from amazon.com marketplace and ebay - and Bookman's, museum of the gaming past. See, White Wolf ended the entire World of Darkness in 2004, putting everything out of print in favor of a new and improved World of Darkness. So now there's the oWoD or "Old World of Darkness" and the nWoD, or "New World of Darkness." They are very different animals. I bumped into a pair of White Wolf enthusiasts at Bookman's last week. We were all scouring the shelves for forgotten treasures of a lost era. I was impressed with the fact that they were clean, socially competent and intelligent; we've been talking shop about the old WoD like college professors judging history. It's been a breath of fresh air from what had become the tragic norm in my day. I've kept in touch with them and told them outright that it's great to see some old timers like me keep the Old World of Darkness alive. Meanwhile, the collection on my shelf is small, as it was once upon a time with it's original incarnation, but slowly creeping along with new acquisitions. It doesn't feel like collecting so much as Archaeolgy now; these books were from another decade in another century, when the entire world looked, felt and acted so far, far differently than it does now; I'm a completely different person on most levels. But there's always a place for nostalgia and I'm a creature of sentiment. Best wishes to White Wolf and it's new World of Darkness; I wish them well. But the old World of Darkness - that was my world. Those were my game lines in a manner of creative gaming ownership I never achieved with Battletech. Carousing these ancient books for the first time in many years, savoring that lost ambience and unique feel that seemed so complimentary to a decade of grunge rock, punk vibe, midnight parties with seedy people and encroaching millenial hysteria - takes me back to a simpler, easier time in my life where I held roomfulls of people spellbound with a great story arc or two. Ahhhh, the good old days. Lift a drink with me, those of you on my friends list who were there or remember the golden days of White Wolf. We'll never see it's like again. C.T. | | Thursday, June 4th, 2009 | | 12:40 am |
Movie Update #1
Tuesday night we did our first shoot for the film. Well, it isn't really the first shoot. The entire movie is already in the can (completed) and was being shopped around to distributors when the director and the company decided to add some extra scenes for more running time to get it a feature length distribution contract. It would also fill in what they felt was a gap or two that could set up a sequel. We met on location in a fancy double-wide trailer that was actually quite neat and cozy. This served as the interior of the house scenes. In my part of the script, I get into a sort of a snit with the two gals I'm going to a Halloween party with (we're all in costume) when I foolishly wander into the scooby doo house and meet my fate at the end of an axe. The costumes were left up to us. I went to the legendary Burt Easely's Fun Factory, probably the best costume shop in history. Or the history of Phoenix at any rate. I spent almost an hour shopping every inch of the place to find the right look. I decided to do something monochromatic for the ease of cinematography so I looked for something in black and white. Eventually I found a jester outfit. This was not my first choice; I wore a black and white jester outfit (a much more simplified version) for Halloween my Junior year in High School and for some stuff I did with the SCA in the early nineties. For the record, I will never go near those greasy nutjobs again in my life, but that's another story. Finally, I gave in and went with the jester outfit because it was the only thing that seemed reasonable, plus having worn one very similar to it way back when I knew it would be amenable to any weather we were going to have. Just warm enough to be cozy if it was cool, just cool enough to be cozy if it was warm. The director later praised the costume and said another cast member had gotten one just like it in red and black. Good omen, methinks. I jump into costume and watch them shoot the first pick up scene when my two co-stars arrive. Holy shit, were they smoking hot. Good GOD. One olive skinned, raven haired beauty with piercing eyes and an intelligent lilt to her words that easily exposed her higher than average intelligence. The other was a statuesque blonde with clear blue eyes and a sparkling smile. They were both fairly tall, and they looked to be about 24 or 25. In fact, according to the raven, they were 19. 19!!! I was floored. Not only for the fact that they looked far more advanced for their years, not only for the fact that Hugh Hefner would probably die to meet these gals, not only for the fact that their costumes followed a minimalist philosophy my last ex might have praised mightily, but for the fact that here I am - playing a 35 year old man - and one of these girls, the raven, is my character's love interest. I pointed that out to the director. "What's a 35 year old like me doing running around with a scantily clad 19 year old? What kind of guy is he?" It was in good humor. The answers were, "Having fun," "Getting luckier than me," "becoming my hero." Well, I'm a professional, whatever anyone says. So I was in the trenches. I actually spent most of the shoot hanging out with them and talking to them. The raven was absolutely brilliant, and the blonde was charming and fun. So it did make the shoot painless. Oh, because I know the lads might be dying to know; their costumes. The blonde wore this great Jason Voorhees themed black and red minidress that was so tight the seams were starting to tear after a couple of hours, with a plunging neckline and a hem so short a miniskirt might have been seen as conservative. The raven wore a microscopic white miniskirt and an equally tiny, very flattering white midriff top; she picked the "hot chef" costume but we lost the hat somewhere along the shoot. We ran our lines here, watched the shoot there. I would occasionally step in to move something like a bottle of windex out of the camera shot or to assist some of the other actors in delivering the menace of their performance, but largely I was hands off and letting everyone do their thing. We got to my shoot and filmed my approach and murder quickly. The next 45 minutes or so were spent with the raven (who turned out to be a model with an impressive resume already) using her knowledge of make-up to apply a vicious head wound to the left side of my forehead. This comically included about 15 minutes of her gently blowing on the wound to seal the latex. Men, let your imaginations roam, but we joked about how ridiculous an eye blowing fetish would be for anyone. That done, the girls filmed their scenes and did so quite admirably. They really sold it and I enjoyed watching them work. They were definitely a good casting choice. For my part, I sat in the chair I'm discovered in motionless for their shoot and then extra motionless for my death scene close up. I'm happy to say the crew was awed by my absolute stilliness. Apparently I sold the death pretty well. I'm skeptical and my own worst critic, so we'll see if it was all that in the final product. We're to meet Thursday to wrap the shoot at a new location to represent the outside of the house. Meanwhile, the director and I have really hit it off and he wants to see some of my screenplay work. He wants to work again in the future and it seems we respected each other's professionalism on the set. Stream of consciousness: Such a breath of fresh air, this whole thing. I remarked on facebook that I'm surprised now that I ever became so disenchanted with acting. I took to this like a fish to water and felt truly at home. It's strange how we can mislead ourselves, sometimes, from what we're meant for or what we love. Cynicism is everyone's enemy as we get older; we're told not to dream, just to do, and to do what's practical. That was Carolyn's ultimate thrust; go fuck yourself for dreaming, Chris; do as I command or your life is shit. Well, I consider this moment to be one of my finest acts of revenge. An opportunity that came out of nowhere that has serious legs and may go a great distance for me if I milk the opportunity for all its worth. The fresh air taught me how calcified, how complacent and overly comfortable I've become. I may just write about that feeling, how complacency in a thing is only a brief comfort before it becomes a gilded prison. I already know, resuming my day job and the grind of day to day monotny as I've been pretending to deal with it over the last several years, I'm going to feel smothered and frustrated and anxious. Well, I've learned my lesson. And I'm going to take this as far as I can. So it is that once again, for the first time in years, I'm a writer and and an actor. And you know, a guy like me, he should be doing something, anything, expressive. Not locking himself down into self sustaining patterns of mere acceptability and tolerance. THis is good enough, don't rock the boat. Tashia, this is what they were saying in WANTED, both the movie and the graphic novel. Grow balls and seize life by the throat and stop living like a moron who takes his fate lying down. Tashia also believed that 2008's excruciating procession of events was a cosmic thing, cleaning my slate, rearranging the House of Turco, rearranging me emotionally and spiritually to be something now. And now, here we are. Because as we were shooting, you know what? I realized what Carolyn would have done if I'd told her there was this opportunity. She would have gunned me down in cold blood like a rampaging psycho. Or close enough to it. She run off all the reasons I'd be a complete idiot to chase any kind of dreams, how moronic I'd be to seize an opportunity like this when she had my life plan so meticulously, boringly, drearily drawn out. She would have done everything in her power to stop this. Isn't it cosmically convenient, then, that this dead weight and the dead weight of other poisonous people isn't there to drown me anymore? Revelation upon revelation, I tell you. 2009 is truly enlightening. PS - Im collecting resumes from people I know ground-level who are musicians, artists or writers. It's common for someone on the production team to turn to you and ask "Do you know someone who..." and if you do any kind of music, writing, graphic design, even computer drafting specializing in special effects, I want to hear from you. I can upsell you to my new masters if the need arises. I'll take care of the people who took care of me over the years. :) | | Thursday, May 28th, 2009 | | 4:53 pm |
I've been cast in a movie.
I'm not kidding. Local production company headed up by some industry vets. 200 dollars a day, speaking role, non-sag (I'm the only non-sag role) and the casting director wants me to read for some other projects coming soon. Wow. This is one of those "happening fast" things. But do I want to be a security guard my whole life? Fucking BRING IT. :) c.t. | | Thursday, April 30th, 2009 | | 3:50 am |
Impending Matrimony
On Friday, my little sister goes from being Allison Turco to Allison Ashford. We couldn't be more pleased, the whole lot of us; she landed one hell of a catch. In typical me form, I knew this was coming before anyone in the family (including the betrothed) did. Shit, I should be a sideshow attraction, the number of times I've seen things like this coming ten miles away. I have to admit, when I heard the news she was getting married, I felt sad anyway. I immediately thought, "Well, she doesn't need her big brother anymore," and I felt somehow that my usefulness to the world had just taken a hit. I was the protective brother, the safe zone; through my junior high, high school years and first part of college, when she was still very young, mine was the bed she'd crawl into at night when she woke up in the night and got scared from bad dreams or the usual dark fears we have at that age. I looked out for her during the day too; sometimes when my mom or dad started to fight with her, I'd deliberately jump in and get them to fight with me to get them off her back. So here she is now, at 25, getting hitched. ANd it's a fantastic thing, but it still makes me feel old and unimportant. At a ripe age of 35. I can already hear the rumblings of discontent, by the way; I'm rolling my eyes and gritting my teeth in grim anticipation. "Chris," everyone will say, one by one when they think they have me cornered somewhere, "When are you going to get married?" Well, the question isn't without some merit, and I promise you it isn't through lack of trying. I know a tremendous number of married people (or ex-married people) who have not only been together a few years with their spouse, but have started families. Hell, Lauren, Erynn, Brooke, my brother, even Carolyn was married and expecting when she had her psychotic break - I'm surrounded by new parents and happy nuptials (or the desperate attempt to play at that from people who are anything but happy) and it's on the verge of giving me some kind of complex. Truly, however, I've never had a problem getting feminine attention, and I'm still turning heads and making waves now, which I'm both thankful for and a bit mystified by, all things considered. Few of us in our mid thirties still have the sharp looks and raw energy of our early twenties. Still, I've been compared with increasing frequency to Kiefer Sutherland in look and poise, and I don't consider that an insult by any stretch. So perhaps I've still "got game" as the youngsters like to say today. I even drew in another stripper over the last few months of 2008, and you know famously cynical and hard to charm those gals really are. (Never set out for one; like the other one, we just sort of fell backward into each other. In fact, we argued about whose job had less respect from society to no end - we really haven't come to a conclusion on that one yet). Oh, and she's married and expecting now too. We only parted ways on new year's. Wow, that didn't take long. But all the same, I've been in a tired number of relationships with a wide variety of gals. There's the strippers, yes, who the scandalous like to focus on, but also a born against christian, a pagan, a political science major, a couple of actress/model aspirants, and so on. The quote I usually use is "I cast my net far and wide" and that's really the truth; it honestly hasnt been through any lack of effort on my part. Fact is, I'm 35. I hate that, and it's not ancient, but I'm no spring chicken anymore. I'm running out of time to find The Ideal Woman and start a family. Even in high school I imagined I'd be married with some squirts of my own before now. If I said I'm not feeling a jarring sensation by my puzzling lack of good fortune in this arena when so many other people (meaner, not so decent people at that) have struck gold with so little effort I'd be lying. Badly. I'm coming closer and closer to resigning myself to the idea that this loner thing isn't temporary. It may simply be How Things Are for the rest of my life. No coveted and dreamt-of soul mate, no family. Just the usual lonely walking, endless solitary patrols through the corridors of life. That's actually got me a bit scared. I never signed on for long term isolation. Fifteen relationships I've been in, not counting crushes (and my traumatic high school love - well, I really don't know where that falls into the number crunching; I've never loved anyone as passionately and selflessly like that in my entire life, and for all our mutual tension, I ended up villified and attacked and smeared like never before in my days. Catastrophic and transformative, but where that factors into my personal statistics I really don't know). All I can say is, you know, before you even dare to ask "When are you going to do this, Turco?" All I can say is, "I've been trying all along, leave me the fuck alone." It's not as easy for me. Be it a curse, bad luck or fate or whatever, it just hasn't happened yet, and before someone declared the excruciatingly obvious "Well, you're not getting any younger," nobody feels the jackhammer ticks of the life clock like I do, I promise you, as I look around the neighborhood I grew up in and see it sandblasted into something alien by the cruel torrents of Father Time. I don't need the reminders. It just isn't as easy as "Hey, why don't you go out and get a wife?" You're not SUPPOSED to do it as easy as going to Circle K to pick up batteries for your walkman or getting a soda from that vending machine, and I for one would never, ever trust a relationship begun so easily, a companion one so casually as that anyway. None of those I did turned out anything but apocalyptic anyway. So, onward, I go. Still looking, still dating around, still getting attention but still not finding anyone Real. And I know better than anyone else in my life the grim truth attached to this search and my withering age. I know goddamn good and well I'm running out of time. | | Wednesday, March 25th, 2009 | | 8:07 pm |
| | 12:16 pm |
| | Sunday, March 22nd, 2009 | | 8:00 pm |
A letter from Anne
Four and a half years ago, I responded to a whirlwind of contempt surrounding Anne Rice's book, Blood Canticle, on Amazon.com. I wrote to Anne...and got a response. First I leave what I wrote, and then I'll leave what she wrote back. ---------------------------------------- ------------------- Anne - > > I have just read your response on Amazon.com to the folks who have been so brutal with Blood Canticle, and felt compelled to respond. (There's a debate in some circles that it still isn't the real Anne Rice, but it sounds literate enough to be the real thing, so here I am). > I am sorry to see the fandom come to a point where they're rejecting the vampire chronicles out of hand. For my part, I consider "The Vampire Lestat" one of the finest books I've ever read, and rank it behind "Dune" as the biggest influence on my own writing. (I'm on amazon as well, but no reviews of yet, and after carousing the nastiness left hither and yon by posters on pretty much every book I've read up on, I must say I'm quite relieved for that fact). I enjoyed both Blackwood Farm and Blood Canticle, and I feel that they are a suitable ending note to the series, should this truly be its finale. I found a remarkable sense of closure in the fact that Lestat didn't put Rowan to the fang - a restraint he's never showed in any vampire chronicle I've read to date. > I guess it comes down to the idea that the larger a fan base becomes, the more hostile its fringes become towards the work it supposedly favors. Witness the backlash against Star Wars, the new Dune books...everyone has their own view of what these stories are meant to be, but they are often projecting themselves into the stories a bit too far. They fail to see any interpretation/presentation of a thing that defies their own view as being anything worthy, and attack it out of some knee-jerk reaction - a knee-jerk reaction born mostly of their own personal entrapment. (Who is it, really that *doesn't* want characters to change and evolve or stories to take on fresh permutations? Who really wants to see exactly the same thing over and over again? Entrapment - living in a loop.) > It must be unpleasant indeed knowing that, according to the fans who should be supporting the diversity and growth of the characters they've taken to heart, you'll always be wrong to some degree. I'm sure Lucas feels it, Brian Herbert and Kevin J Anderon feel it, and you must feel it. And I can't imagine even bothering to write anything else with such hostility as the norm. So, bravo for forging ahead with Lestat in these final two books - they were a fun read. > It's my hope that you will not take these people and their unfairness to heart. I know how hurtful it can be when people miss the point on something you've invested so much of yourself in, but if the internet age has any one great (and dim) moral to it, it's the magnitude of human stupidity. The relatively new invention of the internet now allows that ignorance to travel at light speed across the world, God Bless America. Sodom and Gommorah are now emblazoned on computer screens and microchips. > Don't let them bring you down. They're definitely not worth the trouble. > My best wishes and good graces always (and sincerest condolences on Stan), > > - Christopher Turco > > ---------------------------------------- ---------------------------------------- - THANK YOU for a really thoughtful and interesting letter. I've been flooded with positive responses and I'm beginning to realize I can't possibly answer them all. But it's certainly made me aware of the internet in a way that I wasn't before. A few people have sent me links to the most amazing sites -- those posting there appear obsessed! Of course they're critical and silly, but the heat of it all seems utterly deranged. I'm finally beginning to "get" all this. I've spent the last year doing research on the web, but I move in relatively staid circles -- Bible Gateway. com, and the Independent Movie Site, things of that sort. I had no idea all this madness was floating around. And to see myself in the vortex is a bit sobering. I can't say I have much of a reaction. But your thoughts sure were interesting. I guess the mystery of who reads my books and who tells me about it just deepens and deepens and in truth I'm thankful for all of it. I'm thankful to be on the shelves. I've always maintained that if we really believe in free speech we have to defend it when people are saying things we don't like, and that's where I'm at now. What an education. Thanks for writing. Anne Rice, Little Paradise, Louisiana. | | Friday, March 20th, 2009 | | 11:14 pm |
Galactica
Goodbye, Galactica. Thanks for four of the best frakkin' years of TV you can imagine. | | Thursday, March 19th, 2009 | | 5:24 am |
| | Thursday, March 12th, 2009 | | 6:40 pm |
VERY scary
Well, this scared the crap out of me as a kid, and it's still pretty good now. | | Monday, March 9th, 2009 | | 6:52 pm |
| | Monday, March 2nd, 2009 | | 10:00 pm |
Gaming: reconsiderations
I've given my entry last month a lot of thought and talked to both old players (the cool ones) and other points of contact in the hobby. They got me to think that maybe what I'm really angry about isn't the hobby, just the bad player base I had. Perhaps what I really should consider it finding a way to enjoy the hobby the way I used to, bring some of that enthusiasm and fresh creativity back to the fore. After all, those people ARE all gone now. It isn't as though no opportunity exists to start fresh. To that end, I began lightly talking the hobby with a friend of mine who's been interested in throwing dice for some time. I showed him the Master Timeline and he was floored. Hard not to take pride in that. Practically speaking, most people who weren't in the Timeline somewhere don't read it, and I don't blame them one speck. God knows I get bored to tears hearing some foo describe his 4th generation Celtic Gangrel loner with the hidden sword and black trenchcoat with some riff on the name "Conner" (my least favorite being "Khnyyr" - yes, that's real) as being the apex of originality. I ran my final game of anything in 2003. I would have added it to the master timeline but I was so burned out by the group's powergaming that I just retconned the whole story arc. However, Gehenna never officially occured (or hasn't occurred yet) so there's no reason why I can't, at some point in time, go back and add more - potentially even do a closing story arc for the entire thing, something I'd discussed with some of the original players before they got on my Really Bad Side. Or, just as good if not better, start a new legacy altogether through the new WoD stuff. Re-imagine certain characters and events of old in the vein of a franchise reboot, BSG style, but generally create a whole new epic. Right now, I'm just lightly considering it. I don't jump whole cloth into anything anymore. But if I could find a way to enjoy the hobby again and without the attendant regrets that dealing with nightmare gamers/people cause me - well, wouldn't that be ideal? We'll see. I'm definitely studying this in great detail and talking with my friend at length about the possibilities. But perhaps my disregard for the hobby was too hasty, and I may have blamed the hobby more than the people it attracted. Can't help the quality of the people around me beyond kicking them out of my life when they screw me over one time too many, perhaps. But I can control the quality of the storytelling experience itself, something that was my specialty once. We'll see. We'll definitely see. | | Sunday, March 1st, 2009 | | 5:02 pm |
The Great Dictator finale speech - BRILLIANT!
This is from Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator," a movie he made to ruthlessly mock Hitler (interesting stories about those two) and the only movie in which his famous character, The Little Tramp, actually speaks. And he had something fucking brilliant to say. I follow the conjecture of others that this is not the Little Tramp speaking. This is Charlie Chaplin breaking character to deliver one of the most passionate and well made speeches I've personally ever seen. Very worthy of your attention. | | Thursday, February 5th, 2009 | | 11:01 pm |
Vampire Game Master Timeline
non-gamers: This uses a lot of jargon and setting info you might not be familiar with. Feel free to skip this entry and keep on your merry way, no insult is done if you do. :) Just so you have a choice in the measure of confusion you're about to receive. I mentioned putting up the vampire game's timeline, so here it is. Mainly because I'm bored and have nothing useful to put up in its place for now. Hey Dan, I'd love to know what you think of this one. Perhaps what I really need to offset the cynical vibe of my last entry is to find a way to appreciate the hobby again. This would prove to me, as I read it, that it can be fun, can be epic. Perhaps what I really need to find the *right* people to throw dice with. Who knows. Maybe I'm not so done yet after all. We'll see. ---------------------------------------- -------------------------------------- ( Read more... ) | | Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | | 6:49 pm |
Gaming Retirement in a box
A Gamer's Retirement So, get this. I plug in my old hard drive to go spelunking. The archaeology was scheduled to excavate stories I thought I might still have on the thing. With my computer having taken a massive shit mid-year, a lot of valuable stuff was lost. I was hoping to find some of my old work and see if there was anything there I could expand into a new idea. While poking around on that machine - which was mine at the turn of the century and occasionally upgraded, but woefully behind the curve now - I found some old gaming notes. See, once upon a time, yours truly was one the biggest names in the local Vampire RPG scene, during early college. Don't think that's exaggeration. Sheila and April there, and they could tell you about how that game I ran exploded in population to an obscene degree, how people on other college campuses were talking about the "Phoenix College Game with that Guy" and you know, it even landed me a couple of strippers and one of my longest running girlfriends, though the former I'm not thrilled with in retrospect, and the latter was given a permanent leave of absence mid-yer last year as part of my Crucible Year. And weren't these memories. Two files total. One was nightmare gamer tales; Storytellers for the White Wolf System ("Storyteller" is what they called us folk who ran the game - deliciously pretension for us writing types) liked to have pissing contests about who had the worst gamer in history. My stories about the husband half of the demonic husband/wife disaster team usually shut down all further conversation. In fact, people knew me on other forums for those stories. "oh, YOU'RE the guy that had to deal with that?" A great reminder alone about why I left the hobby. And the other was the long-lost Master Timeline. That was the name given to the running sequence of chronicled events that every game I ran in the nineties plugged into. Nothing was stand-alone; everything connected to everything else. When I started a retro game that began in 1497 France and ran into 1997 America (we gamed for three years of real world time no less) I threw that on top of it all, creating a timeline that covered multiple centuries and featured the efforts of countless gamers across many of White Wolf's systems. If I sound proud of it in retrospect...well, I am to a point. Only to a point. Because I spent much of that time out-of-character trying to control the neurosis and attention whoring of an extremely debilitating player (the husband I mention above) and when I think about what those games could have been without him burning me out with his psychosis, it chafes me a bit. Talk about unrealized greatness. Eventually, though, I deleted my original copy of the master timeline when I realized that....you know that list of people I kicked out of my life? Totals 26 now after the events of last year (added three, I think). Well, 22 of those people were all gamers, and all people I met in the hobby. I deleted the timeline to erase the presence of those people from my lives. Taking a page from the Egyptians I feel so identifiable, I chiseled them off the stone pillars and let the sands of time bury the rest. And isn't it sobering? The best game I **ever** ran, the one that exceeded even my best expectations, featured (by polar contrast) one of the two shittiest human beings I've ever met in my history. One was that rat bastard, mister kill-yourself-so-I-can-get-attention in high school. This guy was #2 and what a #2 he is. Ironic that he played such a heroic character so brilliantly, channeled his energy into a game that was so engaging and intense that we went entire game sessions without rolling dice at all - only to be an absolute, souless, control-obsessed, pathological liar and sadist the likes of which none of us ever met before. Really, what other reason IS there? What other reason do I need? The momentum of all that convinced me the hobby was inheriantly poisonous. For all the potential it promised on paper, the promise was broken by the stunted minds, losers turned vicarious winners and general human sewage that cleaved to it. When people talk about going into 'gaming withdrawl' I get a bit sketchy. I once likened gaming to an addiction like internet addiction or alcohol consumption. People feel rewarded by things that happen in game that give them a sense of accomplishment, and that accomplishment releases those charming little endorphins that make us feel so neato. The same way people hook into that effect from other sources (like the ones I mention above) they hook into this, creating a literally physical dependancy on the positive reinforcement the game world offers them. Take into consideration so many of the mallrats I used to bust in my early career as a mall cop at Christown in the late nineties. They were all vampire wannabes. Some of them bragged about ripping off stores my friends worked at, boosting their white wolf catalog book by book under their coats. These were runaways, drug addicts, drug dealers and the like. Powerless people desperately looking for an escape. So of course, the game was magnetic to them. That dumpy, unkempt, short little beast of a woman with rotting teeth, bloodshot eyes and perma-odor just had to fill in the traits on a character sheet she wanted to have herself. Suddenly she's got 5 dots in appearance and 5 dots in seduction, Presence powers up the ass, and enough resource dots to buy three malls. Rich, powerful, and beautiful, and the other players in the game had to treat her as such for the sake of the game's reality. Instant gratification. And that just led some of these poor souls to overlay the game reality over their own, and that's when things get really scary. Witness an ex-friend of mine who decided that the RPGs he was playing were actually memories of some prior life in which they (the game troupe) were sorcerers and warriors dedicated to freeing the world form five evil dragons of corruption. Yes, he actually believed this, apparently; the RPG was going "exactly as he remembered" and it was meant to train them to seize their destinies and save this world. And that's where my stories about that sort of derangement simply begin. To be fair, many people with broken minds fill the cracks with some obsession or other, something that resonates with them. It isn't that Ozzy Osborne made someone kill themselves or Dungeons and Dragons or what have you; that's putitng the cart before the horse. That's someone blaming an outside source for an internal deficiency. That guy who tried to kill Bjork way back when? He was crazy before she came along, she just became the trigger. The Columbine Brats? Those two twits that thought shooting up a high school was a great idea? They were shattered minds before they tried Battletech or Vampire (and I heard them linked to both.) And so on, and so on, and so on. (For the record, anyone who ever sees my coat and calls me a member of the "Trenchcoat Mafia" better have a great pair of legs and top of the line running shoes; I've been known to rip people's teeth out and pour them into their stomach using a slit throat and a shoe horn for that kind of shit). But it all mounts up. You look at all that and you shut down. You look at some bloated mess of a human being in his 40s wearing an Anime shirt that doesn't even cover his entire stomach, no social aptitudes and an aversion to soap and water and you do NOT want to be counted among them. You see some sad, slow witted sack become obsessed to the point of unbalanced by that hot chick in the game or who wants to discuss the anatomy of the girlfriend you were gaming there with last week (oh, that last one made my skin crawl when it happened) and the last thing you want to do is introduce new people to the hobby - let alone, keep going. And you know what? Time did the rest. The psycho parade that I kicked out of my life explains itself, but those well adjusted, well cleaned and responsible players I enjoyed grew up, got full time jobs, started families, and generally plugged into the real world. And that's how it should be. That's how it should always be. Recently I watched/read the Twilight phenomenon and the new Underworld movie and never, ever, ever, ever once, even fleetingly, conformed anything I saw to White Wolf terms - a bad habit of many old world of darkness gamers. So I moved on myself, didn't I? And White Wolf did itself in. At one point, the company did what it said it would never do: It actually published end-cap books that ended the story. Oh shit, the Antedeluvians WERE real! They got up and ate everyone in sight, and neither the Cam or the Sabbat could do anything about it. In fact, they were too busy falling apart and became far more evil than ever in the midst of it. And so the final curse of god unraveled and the entire Cainite race ceased to exist. Humanity was freed from the scourge of the vampire forever. And that was just the Vampire finale. White Wolf grew up a bit, though. It started a New World of Darkness, a completely rewritten and reimagined setting. Everything is different, but so high quality and captivating and well put together that even in spite of my disgust with the hobby and initial reejction of the New WoD, I've been collecting the gorgeous hardcover books for a rather impressive library. Do I ever use them? No. Never. They're bits of nostalgia. Bits of the past in new form. Something to say "what if" and "oh, what I could have done in that day with that" and so on. And then, you know what I do? I go to my computer, start writing, and let the books gather dust. For my own shits and giggles, I may post the Master Timeline here, just to do it. Even if most of those contributors were foul folk, I feel nostalgic. All I can say is, if not for permanent babysitting, it could have turned out even better. Being an adult can't be undersold, anyway. Fuck Peter Pan. Give me a soda and let me write something interesting. |
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