The Burmese cyclone called Nargis has killed tens of thousands of people.

The earth is trembling beneath Taipei, Tokyo, Illinois and, now, a killer earthquake in China is felt in Thailand.

Hundreds of unexplained earthquakes in Reno baffle scientists and delight suburban families.

In Chile, there’s an exploding volcano spitting lightning at the heavens.

But everything’s fine.

Hoping to catch up on blogging a bit, I wrote the following short notes to myself while I was in Athens, GA this weekend. They are a poor excuse for actual writing, but what’re you going to do? A reminder, too, that I am posting links and short items to my Tumblelog, which is also reachable via the button near the top of this page.

Anyway, here’s what Athens was like:

• Sitting in an independent coffee shop in Athens, Georgia. It’s miserably hot in the sun. This place has The Most Uncomfortable Booth in the World—I do not fit between the wooden seat back and the table. The staff at this coffee shop doesn’t think very highly of it. That much is clear.
• Bringing the dog with us to the show? That was a mistake. She’s spending the whole day in her crate, under the table, because she cannot stop being a jerk to everyone who comes by. Still, it’s cooler under there than it is on this side of the table. Lucky bitch.
• Next I think I’ll be looking for a pub to sit down in. Get drinking, if I can. Finish re-reading Thirteen, either way. I want to be more familiar with it in time for my interview with Richard Morgan this week. (Note: I never did find a pub that wasn’t a bar, so I did a lot of reading but no drinking. Bah.)
• The game store out here—Tyche’s Games—is a mix of typical problems and good service. The place is overcrowded with material, with lots of out-of-print product on the shelves that could be moved on eBay. (Looking for the full-color first-edition of Feng Shui? They’ve got it.) Books on the floor, books out of order, that sort of thing. But the guy behind the counter is informative, intelligent, and reasonable, which would make up for all of the clutter were this my FLGS. Best of all, the place is carrying indie RPGs. I picked up Unhallowed Metropolis if only because I finally found it in the flesh (and because I like to patronize local game shops). Also, to be fair, I’d been looking to pick up this gas-mask-chic book since I saw a proof of it at Gen Con last year.
• Yeah, this booth is pretty uncomfortable. I’ve got to get out of here.
• I’m reduced to using a ubiquitous Starbucks, which gets me a green-tea frappuccino and some funny looks for ordering one. I may have to head back to the uncomfortable place later, just for the free WiFi. I’m really not sure how to kill all of this time before the wife’s craft show closes in… seven hours.
• It’s hard to work in public sometimes. Eventually I can find the flow, but I have to work at it. I feel like I’m being watched over my shoulder. Maybe I am.
• I end up back in the uncomfortable coffee shop (which was closed in the middle of the day, thanks very much), but this time I have a terrifically made iced coffee and a table to myself. Vast improvement. Also, this evening-shift guy seems to like his job well enough. That makes a big difference.
• With a comfortable environment and almost two hours of time to work, I bang out some revisions to a freelance assignment and sketch out a budget for the D&D 4E GSL project I may or may not take up after I’ve seen the new rules and the license. Nicely productive two hours, but not enough to make up for a lost day of work.
• Huh. I forgot to eat anything today. The good news is, I am absolutely fine with losing my appetite of late. Let’s see if I can casually start fasting and get some pounds off, huh?

Music: Brad Sucks, “Making Me Nervous”

The missus and I love the magazines put out by 8020 Publishing: JPG and Everywhere. These are community-driven magazines with reliably eye-opening content, from photos to essays. JPG is all about photography. Everywhere is all about travel.

Members of the online community (like, for example, me) submit pictures and short articles of their creation, retaining their own copyrights, and then cross their fingers. Other members vote. The editors select. The magazine is put together from chosen submissions received during the months between issues. Everyone whose work gets featured gets paid a bit and a free subscription. It’s nice.

It’s also sort of an open editorial process, not that different from a public slush-pile that welcomes community input. Simple and brilliant. The photos these magazines manage to get are remarkable—there are a lot of people out there with cameras, and lots of them are taking stunning pictures. It’s actually more than a little intimidating.

So you can imagine that the missus and I were pretty excited when we had a piece chosen for inclusion in Everywhere magazine this month. This newest issue (Issue 3) publishes a picture taken by Sara, which I tweaked and then wrote a caption for. (I’m in this picture, and you know I don’t like to have my picture taken.) The magazine credits me with the whole thing, which is my fault (I didn’t correct the attribution on the website), but you should know that Sara took the original picture.

Want to see it? The editors have just posted a sneak peek inside Everywhere #3 over on their blog. Nice work, Sara!

Here’s something that I wrote this morning on RPGnet in response to a question about how much the World of Darkness game world should resemble the real world. The World of Darkness is, of course, the setting for games like Vampire: The Requiem and Changeling: The Lost. This piece is being cross-posted to Gameplaywright, which I promise to do only rarely:

The secret monsters of the World of Darkness are still the fault of humankind. If humans were more vigilant (uh… Hunter), they wouldn’t get away with it. It’s ultimately our fault that the world has gone to shit because we aren’t solving the crimes, we aren’t cleaning up the bad areas, we aren’t admitting how bad things are, gargoyles or not. That’s part of the central metaphor, and it’s why Morality is a key trait for normal people.

I see the World of Darkness as the real world with the contrast dialed up. I think Damnation City shows this—the bleak areas are more bleak and the nicer areas are more isolated, more obtuse, more willing to ignore what’s wrong. In the nice part of town, it’s Panic Room, where things are cleaner but the crimes are just as bloody. In the rest of town, it’s as much like The Crow or Se7en as you like. (Rag on it if you want, but the design work behind The Crow: City of Angels is fucking brilliant.) Ultimately, as a toolbox setting, you can dial the game world as far toward Sin City (high contrast) as you want. I, personally, leave it a lot closer to Se7en, where your home is a refuge but the industrial callousness of the outside world makes the dishes tremble as it rattles by.

I, personally, don’t think fictional evil necessarily trivializes real world crime. It can have a profound dramatic impact as metaphor or allusion, and it can enable us to talk about things that we otherwise might not. To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, what do we talk about when we talk about vampires feeding and changelings fleeing? At first, this stuff begins wholly imaginary, maybe even silly in its Blade-like escapism with high action and melodrama. But, every now and again, it can lead to serious consideration of the issues these games represent.

As I’ve said before, Vampire’s horror manifests, in my experience, more on the ride home after a game than it does during the game. I think that vital reflection is key to understanding how the World of Darkness works. The Morality and Humanity mechanics are designed to provoke that reflection (which is why I generally do a Morality survey at the end of a session rather than during, with necessary exceptions to prove the rule).

The conversation you have that reveals the potential relevance of issues brought up in the World of Darkness might be with yourself, it might be with your gaming group, it might be here, but the game is capable of provoking that, and that’s pretty remarkable when you consider why we tend to play.

So the World of Darkness might be, to quote Belloq, a shadowy reflection of us, but I do think it is cosmetically, graphically worse than the real world. Or, and this is essential, it is worse than the real world as we, the game players, so often experience it. The real world can spike into the fearful symmetry of the World of Darkness (which is not only plagued by fearful symbolism but is fearfully symmetrical to our own world, while symbolizing it) and the inexplicable, near-supernatural horror that comes from not understanding our surroundings, but the characters in the World of Darkness face it more often.

To go back to Wilde, though, what do we talk about when we talk about the real world? My real world is lifetimes different than the real world in Somalia, Myanmar, or Iraq.

An elemental part of the horror of the World of Darkness is that our world can inspire its kind of stories. Its meant to be different enough to lure us into thinking its escapism, but real enough that we discover we’re brushing up against real issues like kidnapping and abuse, rape and murder. But the key is that the moral dilemmas… are the same.

Music: Kasabian, “Empire”

For the last two weeks, I’ve been trying to write a memorial and failing.

Thus, all commentary about writing and endings is blown up to twice its size for me lately. It’s all swollen with injected poignancy and bent out of proportion by a lens of fish-eyed grief between me and the subject. So, for me, from over here, the following comment by writer Matt Fraction has double meaning. Both meanings—the practical and the dramatic—are good:

I’m not leaving anyone behind. I’ve stopped writing a comic book. I write lots more. If people reading it liked what I did, they can come read other comics I write. If they like the character, the character is still there. [The] implication that leaving a book is tantamount to abandonment is melodramatic at best and completely ridiculous at worst. Did Dickens abandon you at the end of GREAT EXPECTATIONS? Did Welles at the end of CITIZEN KANE? Picasso, at the far right edge of GUERNICA? No. Stuff ends. Really IMPORTANT stuff ends, not just goofy little comics. It’s what stuff does.

[From Warren Ellis’ White Chapel Forums]

Note: Substantial edits made.

Today, it was all lies. Everything I tweeted on Twitter, except for one Ficlet announcement, was bogus. Eventually, you figured it out—there was no fire, no blood, no parachute, no gunman, no circular saw. All lies.

This is my reaction to the hipper-than-thou, explain-your-fun, anti-Twitter talk that’s going around, I suppose. Specifically, it was this entry in Wired’s Alt Text blog that got to me. I’m not alone. Wil Wheaton made mention of this article in the eleventh episode of his podcast, “Radio Free Burrito,” too.

In his article, Lore Sjöberg comes down on Twitter, and himself, with a kind of detached self-loathing that normally wouldn’t bother me. I’m all about the self-loathing; not so much the detachment. But Sjöberg equates an interest with Twitter with a kind of pathetic loneliness:

Like an elderly widow keeping the TV on for “company,” I keep a Twitter window open whenever I’m online, and accept that as sort of, kind of communication.

His simile’s good, but I say he’s missing one of the essential elements of the Twitter dynamic: We don’t have to be alone when we’re apart anymore, and we don’t have to be apart to be widowed. Twitter gives me a chance to keep up with people I seldom see (or have never seen in person), but whose work or lifestyle I find interesting or inspiring.

I work alone, and so do a lot of the people whose work I follow, not just through their publications but through their tweets. Twitter creates an odd, semi-translucent bridge between us, letting us work alone, together. It’s a semblance of the cubicle-wandering check-ins that go on in offices everywhere, but it happens despite workplaces or miles. Somehow, when I’m bored or tired of working, I find it encouraging to know that others either feel the same way… or I find it motivating to know that others are working at that same moment, even if they’re on the other side of the continent.

Twitter, more than blogging, makes me feel like I’m sitting around with people. The banality simulates casual reality in a real, weird way.

Sjöberg continues:

I think one reason Twitter leaves me unsatiated is that it asks the most boring question possible: “What are you doing?”

So, today I chose to lie to that question. Is that better?

I don’t think so. I think it’s the honesty of Twitter that makes it interesting—even comforting. Even the authors and designers, politicians and performers that I follow periodically send out a tweet that reminds us that, say, air travel is a pain in the ass for everyone. Or that we all have hard drives crash on us.

If Twitter asked a better question it would be a better app? What does a blank piece of paper ask? (You could say, “Everything,” Zen master, but bear with me.) Twitter ostensibly asks what are you doing, but people are using it for a lot more than that. What I love about Twitter, it turns out, is the way it’s appropriated by each tweeter. Even still, whatever you put into that empty box, whatever 140 characters you use, you’re still somehow answering that question. It is not the question that matters, but the answer, grasshopper.

But judging Twitter based just on its question and not on its method misses fully half the point. Twitter isn’t about every tweet being personally revealing or dramatically executed. Each one is an atomic component in someone’s larger life. A single Tweet might be telling or hilarious or whatever, but many Tweets over time contribute a larger picture that blogs and Flickr streams don’t get across. The rapid-fire style of an avid Tweeter, or even the casually occasional tweet of someone too busy to blog, can eventually lead to a kind of easy honesty that blogs and podcasts and photos might not. Instead of seeing just the best or most rehearsed parts of your cohorts’ lives, you get to see the moments in between, which have their own fascination.

One tweet may be a mundane snapshot of a banal moment, but put them together and you have something akin to a moving picture made out of words and time. A frame of film is to a tweet what a movie is to a Twitter stream. Not every shot is going to be a gem. Not everyone is going to have fun with Twitter. So it goes.

I think the genuineness off Twitter at its best replaces any shine the banality takes off.

Now mash that atomic quality together with the weirdly ubiquitous and equalizing nature of Twitter. Everyone gets the same 140 characters to make their point, whether it’s Barack Obama or Henry Rollins or you. The rigidity becomes part of the craft, like a haiku. (Coincidentally, haiku games from back in the day weren’t much more artful; the question was simply, “What do you see?” and played out in slow motion with paper and ink.) Riffing within a box is a part of so much play, and for some of us, Twitter is play.

This kind of friendly surveillance can provide a kind of neighborly oversight that spans miles and borders. Consider the kid who Twittered himself out of Egyptian jail with a single word:

On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter.

The message only had one word. “Arrested.”

Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt — the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier — were alerted he was being held.

And, so, sometimes Twitter is great because we share things in a moment that we can’t or won’t if we had to compose. We get to share in moments.

Yes, I find this kind of voluntary surveillance scary, on some level. Here we are volunteering to be both the citizen under the lens and the eye on the other side of it, watching each other all the time. When strangers follow me on Twitter, I look over my shoulder.

But it is voluntary, and it’s not so different from passing a neighbor on the street and seeing them painting their fence, or whatever. The difference is just that your Twitter-neighbors show you only what they want and might be half a planet away.

This is the card I ended up going with for Re: Paper, my wife’s photography and book-crafting operation. The top is left blank for writing notes, and because she often punches holes in her cards and ties a ribbon through to make them into little bookmarks. The off-center design in meant to be forgiving in the event of off-center whole-punching, and also ’cause she likes that organic look.

Maybe I don’t get it. I’ve been reading a lot of short fiction lately in an attempt to learn more about the form—and also to hone some of the articles I do in game writing—and the best I can figure is that it’s all subjective. Part of me, I suppose, suspected this, but I’m sort of shocked to see just how little form there is to the form. It’s not just a matter of subject and voice, but a difference in the very ideas of what a short-story should strive to do.

>> Click to read this one

This author’s note is in no way endorsed or approved by White Wolf Publishing and is in no way “official.” This is self-involved stuff, but you can scroll to the end if you want behind-the-scenes trivia. Go to the official Vampire forums if you want to discuss the book with White Wolf staff.

I was unsure whether or not to post this. It’s a very personal bit of writing, this note. But smarter people than I reminded me that writing is about honesty, and about reporting what you see. So here you go.

My last Vampire book is here.

Even though I wrote the design document for it and what I think is safe to call the vast majority of the actual text, this is a confounding book for me. This is a heavy book for me, too, full of messy feelings. The copy you’re going to get is going to be gorgeous because it’s simply a gorgeous book, but mine will always be some mysterious thing, warped and funny-smelling, like it was someone else’s waterlogged magazine.

For one, it was transmuted from manuscript to book after I left White Wolf Game Studio in October of 2007. For another, everything that I didn’t write was written after my material, without my help or input. Not that it would matter.

>> Click to read the Author’s Note

My short story, “Griefer,” appears in this week’s issue of The Escapist. This is the magazine’s inaugural fiction issue, and I’m honored to be a part of it.