Progress made: a long way still to go

Show number one is about 70% assembled - actually, it's about 50/73rds assembled, whatever that works out to as a percentage. Show number two may possibly go faster, as I should be able to get Adobe Premier Pro 2 installed on my laptop (my school's discs showed up again - now all I need is the serial number (which is neither on the discs nor the case). Short film has been watched again, and notes made. Managed to tidy up the first 20 minutes to near-presentation level yesterday.

I edit a lot

Now I have 2 shows to edit. And a 45 minute short film to finish off. I am busy, and expect much eye-strain in the next couple of weeks. On the plus side, soon the 45 minute short film we shot in the holidays will be entirely in the past. We're screening it in a couple of weeks, so it will have to be done and dusted by then. We will then make a few souvenir DVDs of it, delete the 180Gb+ project from our hard drive, and never have to look at it again. That will be nice. In other news, I have stabbing pain in my head, and should really stop looking at a screen. But I think I'll do some more editing instead. Dammit, why haven't the painkillers kicked in yet?

Footloose rocks

Footloose rocks. Footloose is sweet. Footloose is awesome. I love Footloose. Flashdance sucks. Flashdance is lame. Flashdance is crap. I hate Flashdance. (for Jenni) Note: Flashdance is actually pretty weird - almost too odd to be classified as lame. It has ASS instead of EXPLOSIONS, but is in many other respects what you'd expect from the director. And it has weird dance bits that melt my brain.

Busy times

It's been a busy week already, and that was with a day off in the middle! Actually, the day off was the day of 2 rehearsals for the major production (dress rehearsals), so it was only a bit of a day off. The show is quite fun, and is only one act, so it should be very easy to edit once it's been filmed. It looks like I'll be at the show for the next three nights, doing a rehearsal run of the filming tonight, proper filming tomorrow (with some extra borrowed gear), and seeing the show with my family on Saturday. I hope not to be filming on Saturday, but could always take up that role if needs be. If it's anything like last year, I may not be able to film on Saturday due to unavailability of camera operators - though I think this year I only need 2 kids to do filming, and I have 4 signed up, so hopefully they'll come through. Watching films in class continues to be awesome - laugh out loud response from my Year 12s to some parts of Shawshank, and the relatively powerful ending scene for today's viewing of Tommy being shot (about 20 seconds before the bell). Man, Shawshank is a great film, and I never get tired of watching it.

Films are great

I'm watching films with 2 classes at the moment (and studying a film with a third), and it's wonderful. I love watching good films, and rewatching them, and trying to get students interested in more than the most shallow of surface readings. I rambled a bit today about the difference between viewing for pleasure and for study, and how in a classroom context you should pretty much always have a pen in your hand when you watch a film. I think it's a sound practice, given that we lack the luxury of time in which to watch the film multiple times. It's a busy world, and there's always work waiting to be done. Anyways, the films of the day are Shawshank Redemption, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I felt a little bad when a teacher came to visit me during one of the brutal prison rape scenes, but the teacher stayed a good 10 minutes after his questions had been answered, watching the film. It really is 'a corker'. Debating will finish off the day - a subject I'm not hugely knowledgeable about, but which is fun, and inclusive. Here's hoping the kids see it that way!

Friday already?

It's been a great holidays, and I'm already looking forward to the next set of holidays. Term 2 looks like it's going to be quite busy, starting off with parent-teacher interviews and the filming of the major production in week one. Luckily there's a day off in there too :) Armageddon is on tomorrow in Wellington, but I don't think Debbie and I will be going. Neither of us is feeling particularly well (we both have the traditional holiday colds and flu), and we've both procrastinated with marking and prep. I don't think either of us has more than a couple of hours of work to do this weekend, but a quiet resting up before term 2 is probably wise. With that exciting update, I go to eat a pepper-steak sandwich (one cool thing about being on holiday is that we get to make interesting lunches - I'll be back to peanut butter sandwhiches and apples next week).

1 Week Down

Things Accomplished this Holidays: *Made one 49 hour film as practice for the 48 hour film contest *Many hours spent editing school horror film (assemble edit complete, most sound effects in place, some ADR added, colour correcting mostly done. Completing ADR, music, final sound FX to come) *Sleeping in achieved twice, I think (where sleeping in is defined as staying in bed for more than an hour after one’s usual getting-up time) *Watched several DVDs/Films – 300, most of QI season 4 (thanks Jenni and Lee), some of The Wire season 2, rewatched V for Vendetta, Underworld…) *Did much ‘research’ for the 48 (watched the remainder of 2005’s DVDs that we hadn’t seen, watched disc one from last year) And the one that gets the most attention today, *Played an excellent game of PTA (Prime Time Adventures – a roleplaying game where the story you’re creating takes the format of a TV show, and you act as writers and ‘actors’ in your creation) Phoenix (season 2, episode one) Phoenix is an ongoing game about a small town where a cult coexisted with the town for many years, before withdrawing its children from the local school and becoming more sinister. The first season (of which 3 episodes were played out, the rest only discussed) dealt with the build-up to a confrontation/siege at the cult compound, and how certain children inside the cult, the sheriff, and a local school teacher dealt with the events. I was an audience member for the final session of season one – the climactic siege at the cult compound. I found the game to be incredibly tense, really moving, and very well acted and constructed. As an audience member I got to frame scenes (players take turns doing this – choosing whether the scene will be plot or character focussed, where it will happen, who will be involved, and what the agenda is), and play occasional NPCs. It’s one the most hard-core gaming experiences I’ve seen, with people deeply in character, whilst simultaneously working together to create a compelling TV structure, knowing that a suitably awesome climax had to be coming, but not knowing what it would be until we got there. One technique that was oft used was the posing of question after question, to delay the final reveal of what was going on. I loved this – you find the medical file for the sick character – it says he’s currently at Stage 5. You ask the technician what stage 5 is – he tells you that he doesn’t know because he’s never heard of anyone going past stage 4. They’re answers that aren’t really answers. They just make the audience want to find out the next piece of the puzzle. Working this way allows different people to layer aspects into the mystery or plot, that can be explained later on. When you reach the moment when someone sees a way to connect several pieces of the puzzle in a satisfying way, everyone present gets the sense that there’s something coherent going on, that it all means something, and that informs everything that has already happened. You get to have the audience moment of “ah, that’s what was going on”, enhanced by the authorial satisfaction of “man, all that stuff I put in has really paid off, in a way that is way cooler than I could ever have imagined.” As you can tell, I was well impressed with the game, and felt like I had really tuned in and was contributing during that episode. Season 2 was a slightly different experience, as I joined as a cast member/writer for the show. The cult compound had been destroyed, the cult leader arrested at the end of season one. This meant that season 2 was going to have to be a little different in terms of focus. After 1 hour of recap (what happened last season), and 1 hour of prep (what do we want to see this season, how have things changed), we started the episode. I was playing a doctor who had adopted one of the cult children (Saul, played by Luke). I have much I could say about the experience, but I suspect other people will be talking about it over on NZRaG, so I’ll finish briefly here. The game was cool. We hadn’t planned out much of what would happen in season 2 (we had a general feel, some issues to kick around, and a set-up), so the first few scenes were tentative, exploratory ones. And they were awesome. Debbie’s character wagging her first day of school to go to the ruins of the compound and mourn for her dead boyfriend (whom she accidentally shot at the end of season one) was incredibly chilling. Morgue’s character Boyd, a teacher, being confident and in charge at school was a refreshing contrast to his doubt and uncertainty in season one. Saul, the 8-year-old protégé of the cult interacting with adults as if he were one of them continued to be creepy, and the sheriff Molly struggling with her new fame as a Hero Cop, and with the responsibility of being Debbie’s character’s guardian, was fantastic to watch. Best thing? The show keeps on surprising me. We talked about aspects of the show in advance, but it keeps coming out of left field with powerful ideas and unexpected revelations about characters. The other best thing? My character fit into the show well, and despite the intimidation factor of joining such an awesome game, it all went well. More Phoenix is planned for next month, and I can’t wait.

Moderately well-laid plans of mice and men go slightly awry

Tuesday – Shooting day

Now I thought we were pretty well planned and prepared for our film shoot. The main actors had their scripts and had learnt most of their lines, we had a shot list and had storyboarded most scenes. The props and costumes were all packed up neatly in crates and I had gone through with Matt the exact details of each location down to what types of lighting each room had and which walls/corners etc would be good to use for various shots.

Naturally, it was all too good to be true. So when we pulled up at school at 9am ready to start our first scene, I was a little surprised to see that there were several huge trucks behind a row of orange traffic cones next to the main admin building.

They were of course concrete cutting with jack hammers and other incredibly noisy machinery. I scampered around the key locations I was planning to use. The grinding rumble sound move from deafening in the conference room and staff office area (scratch 2 scene locations) to vaguely irritating in the office and kitchen (still too loud for film – scratch another two locations). Matt and I walked over to the Hall which we were planning to use for the ‘dancing with the dogs’ scene and, to our complete lack of surprise, it was unusable as well.

We sent some texts around and got the cast/crew to meet us in D block. Thankfully the other half of the school was free from sound. We used one of the Geography rooms for our office (just had to carefully pull out several maps from the wall), the gym as the hall, the Year 13 student centre* as the conference room and office area.

We started filming the first few scenes in the quiet haven of D block and got through a lot of script at quite a pace.

Unfortunately, then we found out the two of our lovely male models could not (or would not in one case) be around for filming. This meant that our Camera operator Matt had to act not just as one character but two in the modelling scene. We decided to reschedule shooting that until last so that Matt didn’t get held up taking off make-up and costumes when we needed him.

We got quite a bit done in the morning and then at 12 the concrete cutters took a lunch break. We decided to seize the opportunity and moved over to the main block quickly for the Plastic Surgery Grandmas and Kitchen interview scene.

I had been pretty keen on having at least a cameo in the film. I got to be the Plastic Surgery Grandma. Worst makeup ever. And I did it to myself. I’m pretty used to wearing makeup but the amount of stuff I had caked on for this felt very unpleasant. I also had ludicrous fake boobs but the floral dress seems to have obscured the ridiculously huge breasts on film.

So we were walking over to the main block with one person dressed as a nurse with a giant injection and me with comedy boobs, floral dress and hideous make-up. Such a Kodak moment. We got to the conference room and opened the door only to find a group of students were in there planning activities for Youth Week. They were a little surprised** to be invaded by teachers clad in their unusual costumes. We chucked them out to set up but a couple hung around to watch the scene. We shot that scene very quickly. But I, always hungry for more screen time, added the line ‘I can’t feel my lips’ to the scene, so now I have a speaking part.

We finished all the scenes except the night break in one by about 5pm. We were exhausted. It was a good kind of tired though. It felt like we had got a lot done and had heaps of fun. My sides hurt from laughing at some points. The funniest point for me was probably we I decided to be OTT photographer at Matt while he was modelling. I was strange but hilarious. "Ah, yeah, that's it. Now give me seductive. Yeah, now you're innocent, a good girl. Yeah, now fierce. Ooh, you're wild animal."

We decided that we would have a couple of hours break for dinner and rest and then the actor required would come around to our house film the break in scene after dark. This gave enough time to capture all our footage (just 2 tapes when filming with two cameras***) and have showers and much needed food. The break in scene was relatively easy (although we discovered that it takes _many_ lights to make one after dark shot visible). We had finished the filming by 7.45pm. Yay!

* Given the cleanliness of students this did have the unfortunate result of one of the scene in the TVO network offices having very dirty windows. Obviously, networks cannot afford as good as cleaners as they used to.

** Although probably not as surprised as they should have been. I seem to be developing a reputation for being weird.

*** We discovered that our microphone was not compatible with the Sony camera we were using, so I operated the nice Sony 3CCD and Matt used our camera with the microphone and got more close-ups and hand-held footage that worked quite well in some scenes. 

48 Film Practice

On Monday this week, Luke and Sam supplied us with an envelope containing a genre, character, line prop for a practice 48 hour film for Cow Wins, the team Debbie and I are helming this year. Debbie has blogged about the process somewhat, so I’ll make my comments brief: * The elements were awesome: Lysney Rogers, a compulsive risk taker; a toothbrush; “I’ve done this a million times before”; Reality TV * Script writing is made much easier when you have a wireless keyboard, and a big LCD TV in the lounge. Everyone could read what we’d written, and everyone could take turns typing, without having to swap seats (not that swapping seats is a bad thing, except for the team member who’s still in a moon boot from a sporting injury – a torn tendon in the ankle I think). * 5 people is a small number for a team, but is a great number for scriptwriting. We are all teachers, so we’re used to turn-taking, and twisting student answers to drive towards the point we have in mind, so we worked well together :) Actually, the group are all friends, and really do work well together. Contributions were very even, and criticisms or scepticisms were expressed in a straight-forward way. * Having the script finished by 10pm leaves a good amount of time to get ready for the shooting day. * Writing several graphic design type gags (like fake album covers, magazine covers etc.) may be a little unwise if your 2 graphically skilled people are also your editors. * Arriving at your location (school) and finding cleaners, concrete cutters and huge drain-clearing trucks parked in various locations, all using noisy machines (concrete cutter especially) is not cool. Luckily a school is a big place, and with a bit of investigating and set dressing we were able to find some quiet spots to film in. * Having one actor play twins, using only eyelines and screen positioning to sell the gag, can work surprisingly well. I may even be keen to investigate split screening at some point (tripod the camera, overlay one of the shots, then crop the one that’s on top – should be very simple). * It’s a good idea to go grocery shopping before the 48, so you don’t have to spend part of the editing morning going to the supermarket. * Using really tacky filming tricks like the aforementioned twins, and faking skydiving (in a way not dissimilar to Jenni’s flying in WMP) is fun to shoot, and can be convincing enough to be worthwhile. I want to revisit all the cheesy effects stuff Adam (and to a much less skilled extent, I) played around with as a teenager. * Voice-over is fun to record, and can really help with exposition. Obviously it’s a tool that only suits some genre. * Overall prognosis for the team: good. We’ll have a bigger cast on stand-by for the real 48, Debbie and I will make sure we’ve got all our shopping done ahead of time, another team member is going to be learning some basic editing skills this holidays, and we managed to write, shoot and edit our film to a respectable standard in only 49 hours. Sure, we were a little over the deadline – by about one shopping trip, give or take. I think if our script is as easy to shoot as this one was, and we push ourselves just a little harder in editing (like getting an hour or two done on the Saturday night), we should have no trouble getting a decent film in on time. Barring, of course, the dozens of unforeseen complications that we’ll have on the real weekend :)

Trial 48 hour film

 As a fledging team in the 48 hour film competition, our team has decided that we needed to test ourselves by trying to put together a 48 hour film between 7pm Monday and 7pm Wednesday this week. I asked Sam and Luke to provide us with the ingredients and genre just to add the random suspense element. Sure enough, I was provided with a sealed envelope which I opened at 7pm on the dot with the writing team (which is really the bulk of the team who aren’t away on holiday or busy). Our ingredients were: Character – Lynsey Rogers – a compulsive risk-taker Line – “I’ve done this a million times before.” Prop – toothbrush Genre – Reality TV We started brainstorming ideas, first talking about Reality shows we could put a spin on and then making up some crazy new ones. We quickly decided that we wanted to focus on the host or hosts of Reality TV and combine behind-the-scenes with snippets of the actual show. For a while we were certain that we were going to have two hosts – one the adventurous, risk-taker and the other more business-minded and practical. As we talked through the storyline it seemed that it was proving too difficult to have two opposing hosts that work together to pitch a new show yet are in conflict over their different styles. The non-risk-taker character also seemed hard to pin down. Thankfully one of the team made the really simple suggestion that it would be clearer if there was one host. We decided that the other character was the manager. That meant that the manager could be conservative and business minded but still working with the host for the pitch. The rest of the storyline and structure came together quickly after that. We decided to cast the Geography teacher as the manager. She has a broken leg at the moment so it meant that we would mostly have that character sitting down for interviews and one hand held shot of her hobbling after Lynsey at the end. We also wrote the broken leg into the script by having a scene of Lynsey tandem-parachuting with the manager where we could use the line “I’ve done this a million times before.” This would show Lynsey being a risk-taker outside of work as well. The main reason was that one of the team member’s husband is a sky-diver and we knew we had the gear. After about 50 minutes of brainstorming and then planning the story outline plus a few key scenes and how we might shoot them, we started writing. It felt good to have the first scene in the first draft going as the clock turned 8 o’clock. Our premise was that Lynsey is a host of many risky B-grade Reality TV shows and after being out of work for a few months her manager and her were having a reality show made about their attempts to pitch a new show to the TVO network. It would be done as a combination of interviews with Lynsey and the manager, clips of her about to pitch and flashback segments from her previous shows. Matt was good at making sure we discussed practical considerations (how would you film that, what would the audience actually see to understand what was happening) as we went. It was easy to get into some pretty crazy ideas for reality TV shows but we tried to keep coming back to ideas that would be easy enough for the audience to ‘get’ from a few second clip. Either the title had to convey the idea and/or you needed a strong visual to portray the concept and feel of each show. We finished the first draft just before 10 and people were getting tired and wanted to go home. We quickly discussed costumes, props and locations and arranged when and where to start the first scene the following morning. A few extras we were using were texted with times and places. After the others left, Matt and I went through and storyboarded the key scenes and flashbacks. The storyboards forced us to be very specific about what we had in mind for how each scene would be shot and cut, and hopefully that time will pay off in terms of shooting and editing. Technically it shouldn't be too hard (well the interviews are just piece to camera style), we just have a few crazy set-ups and costumes for the flashbacks to shows. There are only a couple of scenes that have slightly tricky camera movement. I then packed up a crate of the props we needed to take and Matt designed and printed out the TVO logo and another picture that was needed for a scene. We are pretty much a team of 5 this time with an assortment of various people coming in as extras for different flashback scenes. I’m looking forward to the shoot today but I’m actually quite nervous considering it isn’t the real thing. Matt and I both woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep before 6.30, which, in the holidays, is definitely sign of nerves or excitement or both.

One more day to go!

 Just one more day until the Easter holidays. Hurrah! The chocolate, the sleep-ins, the not going to work! Such joy to be had. The last few days have been ridiculously busy crammed with insanity such as two nights of Parent-Teacher interviews and overnight marking of 31 creative writing assessments! Nearly over though. I must plan my Easter well and use it wisely. For far too many years have I gorged on Chocolate on Good Friday thus leaving being unable to face so much as a marshmallow Easter Egg on Sat/Sun. The problem that it boils* down to is just I just cannot handle my cream eggs anymore and there are too many delicious flavours. Bakc when I was a child, there was just the one original cream egg. Back then my chocolate eating fitness was superior. I could happily scoff 4 cream eggs and then hunt around for any other choccy to be had. These days I struggle to actually eat 1 cream egg in 1 sitting and there are so many delicious types, mad about choclate, dream chocolate, minty and original. I may have to devise a cunning plan to eat about a 1/3 of an egg and then pass it onto Matt thus allowing me to snarfle my way through a variety of cream eggs. * vague egg-related puns probably are not as effective when you are discussing Easter eggs

Humilation as punishment

I heard a snippet of a news story this morning on Breakfast, and became rather curious. It seems that a school in Christchurch makes students wear orange overalls when doing detention cleanup. There has been a complaint that this is a form of humiliation, and therefore shouldn't be done: The New Zealand Parent Teacher Association (NZPTA) says the practice is unacceptable humiliation that makes the students stand out unfairly. It begs the question of what the purpose of punishing students is. Is detention a deterrent, to stop other students offending, is it reparation for crimes committed against the institution or other students, or is it some sort of rehabilitative process? If it's a deterrent, making it unpleasant is a basic requirement. Taken to an extreme this would entail all sorts of Abu Ghraib atrocities, but the question remains - if you want to put other students off, is making an example of students who've done stuff wrong acceptable? If it's a matter of paying society back, then wearing overalls whilst picking up rubbish may have a practical side to it that allows the students to really throw themselves into the tasks at hand. If we aim to reform these students, then getting up close and personal with rubbish may be an eye-opening experience. To me, it comes down to two conflicting drives: *We all want our students to learn to do the right thing (gain academic skills, not damage other people's property, be acceptably respectful in their interactions with others), and a lot of the time that involves coercing them into doing things they don't want to do. *NZ has a very high rate of teenage suicide, and we all remember how painful it was to be singled out or ridiculed as a teenager (most of the incidents of ridicule I remember came from my close friends, then the year-group as a whole). Our society has decided that physical punishment is not acceptable, so depriving students of time, contact with friends, or other liberties are the main tools we can use*. So, do we accept clean-up duty with overalls? Are we crushing the self-esteem of fragile children by making them conspicuous? If so, does it serve the greater good of making detention an effective deterrent? *Actually, a stern tone of voice is far and away the most often used, and arguably most effective tool for correcting errant behaviour in teenagers that I've come across. PS - A colleague suggested that all detentions should involve the student completing a punctuation and close reading worksheet, or writing and proof-reading a piece of work. Those are the school-wide literacy focii for the year.

48 Team

Debbie and I had to come up with a team name today - a harder task than one might previously have thought. A few suggestions had been made by other team members, including ones involving the names of pets. But I came up with a simple lame pun, which allowed us to make a neat logo. We sent out a text for final suggestions / approval, then filled in the application form. If accepted, we will be registered as 'Cow Wins!'

Our team logo is going to be something like this:



but probably with a less masculine looking cow. The team has more women than men, so a super-butch cow is probably not the best look (though it was the handiest for throwing the sample logo together).

We have plans to make a practice film during the holidays, since we are pretty much a teacher team with a few students on stand-by.

The horror... the horror....

Actually, there's little in the way of horror to lament. It's a sunny Friday afternoon, I have but two classes to teach before the weekend, and only... um... 13 classes next week? Short weeks are great. I am really looking forward to Easter-y goodness. So, what exciting things have been happening lately in the world of Matt? Well, that depends on how you define exciting... I bought a tablet and stylus for my computer, and have been playing with that a little this week. It's an interesting substitute for a mouse - very cool for graphics programmes, of limited use for applications where a combination of mouse and keyboard are used. One of the best things has been the ability to sit back from the computer with the tablet on my knee and draw. It's nowhere near as good as drawing on paper, but it makes colourising a little easier, and is a fun toy. Now that the fascinating story of my tablet has been shared, I suspect there's no follow up that could hope to match it. Perhaps I should talk about navel fluff? Or the speed at which my toenails grow? Well, on the subject of growing, I have been enjoying the TV show Weeds. Debbie and I are about half way through season 2, and it's a fun show. Very, very liberal leaning, quite profane and explicit at times, but good. Lastly, I have been playing with the school's spiral-binding machine. It's fun, when it works, and I now have a nicely bound printout of Best Friends, and one of Inspectres. This means the little hand bound booklet of Inspectres is kinda surplus to requirements, so I may give it to Hix (who also owns the pdf, but hasn't printed it out nicely to the best of my knowledge). Oh, and I've been torn between two 48 hour film festival teams - the awesome Jenni's Angels, and a local team mostly comprised of the Pink Ladies from Debbie's work. The local flavour has won out in the end, so I guess I'm going to be camera-person, co-editor, co-writer and driving-into-town-to-hand-in-the-taper. Neat!

7 days to go

Ah, to be sure, 'tis a grand fine thing that the holidays are approaching. The next week and a half are insanely busy at school (interim reports, several standards to assess, marks to get in etc.), but after that is the glorious relaxation of Easter and beyond. I've been doing a lot of talking about roleplaying in the past couple of weeks, a little bit of talking about film-making, and a lot of teaching. I'm looking forward to changing around the proportions of some of my activities in the near future - including upping the amount of sleep I'm getting. I have come to feel that teaching is a good career for many reasons, and whilst it is quite stressful at times, and has its frustrations, these are made up for by the much-needed holidays, the real lack of boredom, and the pay (which, once you've been teaching for a few years, is not too bad - getting up around $50,000 a year).

Censorship is fun and Borders makes me feel like aHillbilly

 Monday was a pretty fantastic teaching day. I took my first sole-charge field trip. I ventured out with 20 senior Media Studies students into the Wellington Censor’s office for the Censorship day event. It was exceedingly fun and educational. Fun-ucational? (Not as good a neologism as edutainment). We had a talk/lesson from Bill Hastings (one of the best speakers I have heard in a long time) about current censorship law. The students were briefed pretty thoroughly on the Films Videos and Publications Classification Act 1993 and then watched ‘the notorious Betty Page’. After a quick lunch break, they had to discuss and rate the film. Happily, my students came across as highly intelligent and dominated a large amount of the discussion (they got Chocolate fish for insightful answers – chocolate is a strong motivator it seems). The film was pretty good but it made for a fascinating discussion as it dealt with some nasty content delicately (implied but never actually shown child abuse and rape) and also had a lot of nudity and posing in bondage gear etc. Betty was so naïve that she didn’t view her posing as sexual, let alone sexually deviant, so much as harmless fun. The hypocrisy of the era with regard to censorship was also interesting. There was a brilliant quote about how pornography might be almost as big a threat to the nation as communism. The movie also went into a great deal of the fear that was had in those days about the effect of pornography on young, impressionable minds. It led to a lot of interesting issues about porn. The different perspectives based on the makers versus the audience, and female and male perceptions of pornography as well. It was fascinating to see how many issues have to be weighed up in giving a film a rating. Too many to go into in a brief post but we came out of the event with a 90% agreement that it should be an R16 which was what the censors gave it. Apparently, in more rural areas, they tend to be more conservative and the average ratings were more like R18. Bill Hastings referred to the Wellington session as a ‘hotbed of urban liberalism’. The day finished a little earlier than expected and we had about 30 minutes before our train left. I unleashed the kids on Lambton Quay and told them to meet me back at the train station. This left them free to hit McDonalds and BK, and me free to check out Borders. I’ve been to Borders in Christchurch and Auckland, so I had pretty high expectations. I was happy to see that Borders was suitably huge and packed full of lovely books. I question some of their categorising (Jilly Cooper in the Literature section? Really?) but drooled over several books that previously I had only found in Arty Bees and similar. I had interestingly been a part of a conversation up here about when you live in Kapiti, every time to visit Wellington it seems to have changed (a new bar, shop, restaurant or a place you like has closed down) and it can give you small-town syndrome by making you feel out of touch. STS also happens when someone talks about a new club/bar/restaurant and you don’t know it or even the place next to it. Sample dialogue Hip Urbanite: Have you been to ‘Swanky trendy place’ yet? Kapiti Hick: No, is it good? Hip Urbanite: Oh, it’s OK. Not as cheap/cool/random adjective as ‘other trendy place you have not heard of’ but it is better than ‘mystery bar x’. It is right next to ‘yet another cool hip place that you probably won’t ever get to before it closes down’ on Cuba St/Courtney place etc. Kapiti Hick: Oh. Sounds nice. (Or similar inane response) We joked about how we should fill up a mini-van of Kapiti Hicks and drive down and just be really loud and hillbillyish. We came up with hillbilly names. Matt was Matty-Lee-Dean and I was Debbie-Sue. However, this was meant to be a joke. I didn’t actually think I was at the stage of being impressed by inside toilets and running water. Borders, however, made me feel like a hillbilly. How was I to know that the large desk with computers and a Borders staff member standing behind it wasn’t a counter but an information desk. What the…? Why does a book shop need an information desk? Anyway, Debbie-Sue wandered over with her purdy book to pay for it with her money which she done earned with hard sweat and such, and then they done told her that they ain’t no counter but an in-foe-may-shon desk. Well, shucks, she had to scamper off to their big counter at the front of the store like a bobbycat with its tail done stuck between it legs.

ICT: Computers will save us!

I have been profoundly professionally developed this week. I am a swollen vessel of professional goodness, and no doubt every student I teach is already reaping the benefits. I attended an ICT in Education conference on Tuesday (basically - why the internet is so powerful and important, even if you can't get your class into a computer lab or have access to the internet in your classroom; toys your school can't afford that are cool like interactive whiteboards and video-conferencing). It was OK, but neither as high-falutin' nor as practical as I had imagined it would be (neither inspirational nor useful. I'd hoped it'd be one or the other). Then I had more ICT PD (Information and Communication Technology Professional Development) yesterday, which was quite inspirational. I still don't have access to the internet in my classroom (despite having a laptop with wireless, and there being wireless routers all over the place), and I still have a hell of a time getting my classes into a computer lab. Last year I couldn't get my Year 9 students into a room with more than 13 computers in it until November. 13 computers is heaps, really, if you're working in pairs or groups. Except that the mini-lab is really mini. There are 13 seats, and about 2- 4 square metres of floor space (with a table in the middle) not taken up with desks and swivel chairs. It's a little smaller than the principal's office, and that's not that big. Still, I am now Living In the Future, even if I don't have all the modern conveniences that would suggest. It's a brave new world, that has such ICT in it.

Game Chef Comp Begins

Despite not actually being all that good at game desing, I have entered the last 2 Game Chef challenges. I am now once again tempted. The goal is to write a complete playable RPG in 2 weeks, using 3 out of 4 indredients from either Camp A or Camp B below: Camp A...............Camp B MEMORY............SACRED DRUG.................ROSE PALACE...............THREAD CURRENCY..........INCONSISTENCY Details here

The working week grinds on...

But that's a rather boring thing to talk about. So instead, I think it's time for a little reminiscing. Teen Boy Hobbies Having once been a teen boy, I can dimly recall some of my hobbies from my teenage years. I was a little surprised to find that, when talking with some students yesterday, many of the hobbies that I engaged in 'back in the day' are still fairly common now (or at least were among the sample of teenage boys I was talking to yesterday). Wanting to be in a band This is the starter hobby for many youngsters who actually do end up being in a band. I spent quite some time 'wanting to be in a band', and then a tiny amount of time actually being in a band. And an even smaller amount of time performing. Actually, I can think of only 2 occasions when I performed 'in public' as a teenager, and neither of those was anything remotely resembling 'cool' or even, really, 'public'. One was over live radio during a call-in show, the other was busking. That's pretty low when it comes to rock-star dreams, but that didn't stop me practicing the guitar and reading about bands and pursuing the hobby of band aspiration. (In my post teen years I repeated a similar level of band-success, but with a lot more actual practicing. Performances outside the lounge of the flat = one). Wargaming Playing Warhammer 40K, and Fantasy Battle, took up a fair amount of my time when I was in high school. It was a fun hobby, and though I was never very successful (I lost a lot, and was both beaten and mocked at the one tournament I played in when I was 13 - but that's a grudge far deeper than this blog post could hope to encompass), I had a great time playing war with little painted figures. Painting Little Figures This goes hand-in-hand with the wargaming, and was a nice bonding experience with a couple of my friends - we'd thrown on some Sisters of Mercy or Metallica, grab some paints and miniatures, and chat for an hour or so. Much like fishing, I guess, but with more eye-strain. Playing Computer Games And arcade games, and Nintendo and Sega games, and later on Playstation. Actually, I don't remember whether Playstations were around when I was at high school - wikipedia to the rescue! ...and... no, Playstation was not available when I was in high school. So it must have been, maybe, the Sega Megasystem? Back to wikipedia... Yes, the Sega Mega Drive was a popular rental from our local video store. In my latter teens, there was a quantity of recreational drinking and so forth that went along with console gaming, as well as a general 'drop round and chill out' kind of vibe. Caring what kind of music people listened to This wasn't an all-consuming hobby by any means, but finding new bands to listen to, discussing musical styles, and generally being nosy and judgmental about the music people listened to kept my mind occupied and my conversations flowing when I roamed the suburban streets of an afternoon or evening. Falling off a skateboard I never developed any skill at skateboarding, but I did like riding around on a board, and falling off from time to time. The falling off usually happened when I tried to a) do something more interesting than go round a gentle bend or b) had been indulging in recreational beverages. Making Stupid Videos Such as Death Chicken 2, Goldilocks and the 3 Beers, and videos of my friends being drunk. What's changed? Um, the games are a lot cooler on consoles and computers. Video editing has become a lot easier, what with computers being all highly specced and easy to use. And... um. I'm older and wiser than I used to be, and no longer judge people based on musical taste. Now I look at their DVD collection ;)

More shading

I have been playing around with shading on the Evil-genius pic I posted a few days ago. I don't think the shadows are exactly perfect, but I like the effect of lots of little shadow detailing. It was mostly done by hand, though I did copy the shapes of the robot, tree and zeppelin and then free-rotate/transform them, then make them into masks to adjust brightness. The shadow stuff on the main character was all done freehand (well, freemouse anyway).

I think I like it as a technique, and I'm a little curious about ways of adding shading like that in easily - by drawing in guidelines on the original image in another colour, for example. I tend to find pen-and-paper drawing quite quick these days, as I mostly operate within my comfort zone. Adding shading lines will be an interesting challenge.

OTOH, drawing all the elements separately (eg main character, robot, background etc) would probably allow for some very fast drop shadow creation using existing tools in the paint software. It's not the way I currently operate, but I could play around with it as an idea...

Picture, No Words

Well, a couple of words. This is based on the evil Genius Summer Camp game which inspired the monkey picture I posted last month.

MRW 3

This weekend was the third Mega-Roleplaying Weekend Redux, up in Kapiti. I like to call them Kapiti Roleplaying Weekends, since they aren't in the same place, or organised by the same people as the original MRWs. They are certainly in the same spirit though - get a bunch of friends together for the weekend to stay in a house and play a whole bunch of RPGs. We have 2 houses close together in Kapiti, rather than one bach, but the good folks and lots of RPGs elements are the same. This time round I ran one game, played in 3. Every exerience was awesome, and there were a whole lot of cool moments: Price of Freedom First thing Saturday I ran the introductory adventure from Greg Kostikyan's Price of Freedom . It was a cool, OTT game of American Patriotism in the face of evil Soviet invasion, set in the 80s (it was written in the 80s). I had 4 players to start, with 2 additions after the first scene. Debbie and I had spent Saturday morning downloading patriotic mp3s like 'Born in the USA' and the top 10 American Idols singing God Bless America and such. They made a pretty inspirationl backdrop to the game. The game was a lot of fun, with overwrought NPCs, chaos in the streets, and a fun board-game style hex based combat system. It was really quite fun to visit the old skool and really enjoy a well written tunnel-of-fun scenario. I managed to kill 2 of the PCs (one blew himself up with a grenade as a heroic last action - the other was caught and gunned down by Ivans). One noteworthy thing was how much I enjoyed a board-game style combat. It wasn't large in scale, but it had a dice-based tension that was really fun. And it was really clear where characters were in relation to one another, since we could all just look at the map. It reminded me of a lot of combats in games that were very satisfying, and was a strong contrast to a lot of the indie games that I've also enjoyed over the past year. Wonderquest After some chatting and hanging out time, we played a second round of games. I got to play in Donna's Wonderquest game, which I missed out on at Kapcon. It's a game in which 2 magical kingdoms are unexpectedly united by a portal, and one starts sending tourists into the other. I was playing an American tourist, passing through the magic kingdom of Disneyland, into the fantasy world of Reath. 2 of the PCs are tour guides, the rest are tourists, and it's a very cool game. I was playing an IT professional and fantasy buff, hoping to discover my destiny, or even better magic powers, whilst in Reath. Debbie was playing the manliest man around, and there was a lot of conflict between us - enough that I tried to shoot her character with a crossbow at one point. Much hilarity and fun was had, as well as some tasty tequila based cocktails. Very fun, and the walk between houses was awesome too. Best Friends - Superheroes and Villains Big Brother This was the stand-out game of the weekend for me - a fantastically funny and occasionally moving game about a group of heroes and villains living together and forming (or re-examining) friendships. It had some of the best one-liners, and some really awesome characters. Jenni wrote down quotes, so hopefully some of those will show up soon on Stonesoup. My favourite (paraphrased) quotes? Bella Donna (incredibly beautiful villain with poisonous powers, but no smarts): I don't know why I never get chosen for eviction. I'd be a great evicted person. I could represent evicted peoples... Bella Donna, to Stellar, one of the villains up for eviction: If you win, can you tell me what the eviction prize is? I also like that my character, Blue Steele, a robot-like tough-girl with black and white morals, became friendly with most of the villains. She also got an unsuccessful makeover, and got to demolish and eat most of a steam-hut (sauna) in a 'construct a vegetable garden' challenge. The insane 'voice-of-Big-Brother' was awesome too! Frisbee and Hack We spent part of Sunday morning on the now-traditional throwing of frisbees (I'm getting slightly better, though I am still pretty terrible), and kicking of hackey sacks. It was grand fine fun, and it was really hot out in the sun. The hack turned into a silly string of one-liners and jokes that caused several people to miss the hack due to laughing too hard, so that was neat. We discussed marching order and what kind of characters we each were on the way back from the park. We decided that the Andersens were not PCs, but generic followers of a high level character. There were more available, but the two we had weren't a breeding pair. "To get more, you need to kill stuff, take its gold, then take that gold back to the Queen Andersen." Inspectres We finished off the weekend with a game of Inspectres, set in Beaumont, in the 1980s. We played 'Inspectres versus Footloose', essentially, and it was a lot of fun. There were some dark character moments, fairly strongly encouraged by the GM Hix. My character, Town Councillor Thomas Aquinas, turned out to be the father of one of his employees, the teenage 'daughter' of the Reverend. Her brother had died in a car crash, and she was constantly being ignored. Some mean person gave her the characteristic of 'adults don't remember who she is', so even after I found out I was her father (when I rekindled the affair with the Reverend's wife and she walked in on us), I promptly forgot. Debbie's character ended up pretty much insane, Fraser's character was suicidal, I had rekindled an affair that was likely to end my marriage, and the franchise had gone out of business. Jenni's Milly had lost her new dress to the clutches of the zombie, Nick's Jack had been beaten at his own game (Baconning Out - to dance manically in the manner of Kevin Bacon). On the positive side, Paul's wheelchair-bound ex-astronaut had run down the zombified corspe of the drunk driver who put him in a wheelchair (Debbie's character's brother), and felt he finally had closure. It was pretty dark for an Inspectres game. All up, a fantastic weekend, and one which has given my RPG batteries quite a boost. I felt pretty crappy yesterday and took the day off work, but I'm back in the saddle again, and looking forward to running Inspectres myself some time.

Gaming Weekend!

I am very excited about this weekend. A sunny, relaxed weekend of RPGs with good folks - bliss. I am about to start writing my relief lessons for Monday - just in case I'm too wiped out to make it in to work. Chances are fairly high ;) I am very impatient, though. It's hard to concentrate on cerebral tasks, which makes planning hard to do. I have the attention span of a teenager - quite literally, I suspect, in that I was happy to print out, trim, cover and staple a copy of Inspectres, and then repair a copy of 'The Silver Sword' (by photocopying a page from another copy and cellotaping it into the book with the missing page), neither of which were short tasks. But they were physical tasks, of the kind that teenage boys can happily concentrate on. Gah, even my typing is bad. Brain not work good. Manual tasks are acceptable, thinking be hard. Buh.... 1 non-contact, 1 lunch eating supervision, one lunchtime, one Y11 Alternate English class, and 1 Year 12 English class to go. Roll on 3.30 I say!

Youth of today - Too much Dr Phil or the work of the school counsellor?

 As I was strolling through the grounds of school with my lunch in hand on route to the staff room this lunchtime when I overheard some frightening conversations from some young students. They appeared to be third or fourth form but I didn't recognise them. "You know your behaviour is getting self-destructive." "I know, but I feel like I need some closure. I guess I still have some unresolved issues." "Yeah, but it isn't fair to Devan to put your relationship baggage on him." "Yeah, I guess we just need to talk it through..." What the hell? Since when did 13 year olds start needing closure and having relationship baggage? I guess they find it hard to trust and be open after being burnt by relationships in primary school. Comfortingly, some 13 year old boys ran past making siren 'woo-woo' noises not long after. At least they aren't all scaringy mature.

Debbie blogs about teeth

Well, dentistry actually. Here.

In which I am cruelly forced by fate to do that which I would rather not...

 Firstly, denists. While I’m sure it is possible be a perfectly nice person and pursue a career in dentistry, I have, I’m afraid, allowed my own substantial but not unreasonable fear of pain to cloud my judgement. For years I have considered that most denists must be crazed, sadistic psychopaths forced into the profession since the alledged* disbandment of the Spanish Inquisition. Whilst years of letter writing at High School for Amnesty International and such showed that there are still many torturers in the world today working industriously, I have assumed, however, that the salary and other benefits of becoming a denist are generally considered more appealing to the young up and coming sadists looking for a career in the pain industry. So my opinion of denists was possibly not the most enlightened of thinking. As a result no doubt of two factors of my youth. Firstly, repeatedly watching ‘Little Shop of Horrors’. Secondly, a particularly large and fearsome dental nurse at my primary school. This dental nurse believed in 3 things. One, the spike. A long, wiry hook used jab gums, fillings, cavities, or any thing else that could bleed or cause pain in your mouth. Two, the drill. She loved her drill. Maybe it was the sound it made, maybe the look of terror in the eyes of children but whatever it was that drill made her grin. I wondered then as I wonder now if I actually needed half the fillings I actually had as a child. I suspect it was her insatiable lust for the drilling, not any candy-caused cavities that led to some of those fillings! Three, her third belief? That any amount of pain and suffering inflicted on a small child would be instantly removed if she gave you a tampon** with a bit of string and gauze tied around it to look like a butterfly. Anyway, last week one of my teeth broke. I was contentedly chewing a piece of toast, not even a particularly thick or chewy piece of toast, when part of my back molar broke off. Having half a tooth missing is not comfortable or convenient, so I had to concede that a trip to the dentist was necessary. I hadn’t been in many years. Possibly not even in this millennium, but it had to be done. I was pretty nervous by the time I got to the dentist. I had had visions of root canals even though I wasn’t even that sure what a root canal was. However, I have to report that the experience was actually not that bad. I was given a large injection of anaesthetic in the gum and wow, it actually works! Even the drilling (well, ‘shaping’ as it was euphemistically called by the dentist) didn’t hurt. If this wasn’t bamboozling enough for my brain to comprehend, there were also a dazzling array of fancy gadgets. Tools and gadgets rather than implements. No wiry spikes or anything. The dentist too was a nice, amiable chap. He was friendly and made jokes. I left after 35 minutes substantially poorer but my tooth was filled up and I couldn’t feel anything in my left cheek for several hours. Hurrah! So as well as having my tooth fixed I learnt some valuable life lessons too. Denists are people too. Some of them are even nice. Drilling doesn’t hurt if you can’t feel half your mouth. Funky, plastic looking gadgets are less scary to have stuck in your mouth than metal spikes. Denists cost a lot more than dental nurses but they don’t give you tampon crafts. * I have my suspicions but alas to validate them with any evidence may lead to my capture and death. ** OK, they are not tampons but what is the term for those cotton tampon-like things denists shove in your cheeks?

Ivory Tower Egg-Head Prejudice

If you can't spell very well, or if your writing lacks punctuation, some people will not bother to read what you have to say. If your writing is really sloppy, people may take pains to misunderstand you, just to teach you a lesson. The same is true of speech - there are speech patterns that, to me, reek of a lack of education, or a knuckle-dragging unintelligent persona. Knowing that you are prejudiced is an important step in managing your prejudice. I had a fantastic 6th form History teacher (almost missed out the capital letter for the subject name there!). One day he asked the class - "Who here is racist?" understandably, nobody wanted to put their hand up. His follow up question was, "Who here is prejudiced?" Then he put up his own hand. The class (a good mixed Waikato class, about 60/40 Pakeha/Maori) were a little shocked, but he went on to calmly explain his position (obviously I'm paraphrasing here - it's been about 14 years): "If I see a person walking down the street, and they are of a particular ethnicity, or are dressed a certain way, or are listening to a particular type of music, I make assumptions about them. I can't help doing it - we all do. Now, I don't cling to those assumptions - I'm happy to change them. But if I see a huge guy wearing a gang patch and dark sunglasses, covered in tattoos, I won't start talking to him about historiography. In fact, I probably won't even make eye contact with him. I don't know that he's a dangerous guy, but my best guess is that he might be. We try to fit people into categories that we are familiar with, so we can know how to interact with them. Prejudice is not always a bad thing - especially not if you recognise it, think about it, and are prepared to change your mind as more evidence comes to hand." That was the gist, and I thought it was really refreshing to hear someone being honest about the fact that we do judge people based on how they look, that racial stereotypes exist, and that we shouldn't be ashamed of the fact that we have those reactions - as long as we control them, analyse them, and change them when we can (and it's appropriate). Now, poor punctuation or typing can make an otherwise reasonable comment come across as particularly simplistic or shallow or pig-headed. Punctuation and care in typing help to create the writer's 'voice', as is shown by the use of CAPS below: "You shouldn't believe everything he says." "You shouldn't believe EVERYTHING he says." "YOU SHOULDN'T BELIEVE EVERYTHING HE SAYS." "YUO SHOULDNT BELEIVE EVEYTHING HE SAY" I'm now going to quickly reread my post, make sure it actually says what I think it does, and check for errors. Being human, some may well still be there after proof-reading, but it will be a lot neater and more coherent than it would be had I simply typed furiously then hit publish.

My cat taught me how to use Firefox better

Huh, I never knew that you could enlarge text in firefox so easily, until my cat helpfully sat with her stumpy tail lightly pressing the control key (unbeknownst to me). Roll the scroll button of the mouse whilst pressing control, and apparently all the text in Firefox gets bigger or smaller. Nice work, puss.

Flying Robot Bee?

Colourising is fun!

I have photopaint on my laptop now, and happen to have my old hard drive (in an external enclosure) with me today, so I have spent some of my free time colourising an image. It is quite a fun process, and it's nice to see the end result looking a lot cooler than the starting image:



and in greyscale:




This is one of the pictures I drew with Mike's Badass Space Marines game in mind. I think it's probably a little cartoony for his purposes, but I'm happy with how it turned out. I was remarking to Debbie just last night that although I'm not exactly a pro, I've really improved my drawing a lot over the past 10 years. It would be charitable to call my early comic efforts rough, but I've come a long way since then. It's satisfying to be able to look at a skill and say - yeah, I've stuck at it and gotten better.

On the other hand, I was once OK at playing the guitar, and my skills in that area have completely atrophied. So it's swings and roundabouts really. Either way, the weekend is nearly here - one tough class, one easy class to go. And, for the first time this week, no detention duty at lunchtime! I may even take a stroll about in the fresh air :)

The ache in my brain is a signal to sleep

It's Wednesday, I'm pretty sure, and I am damnably tired. For some reason this week is kicking my ass. I guess Monday was athletics + 2 lessons, so I stored up a whole bunch of tired right there. And the rest of the week has been the usual teaching stuff, which is an uphill battle more often than it's not.

Some things are great. In no particular order:

- Having hard drive space. The upgrade from 160 to 370gb has left lots of lovely room, which will no doubt get filled up in short order.

- Walking to school. It's not actually fun, but it's healthy and fresh-air getting, and only makes the journey about or 8 minutes longer than the automobile version of the same.

- Weekends. More please.

- Veronica Mars and Heroes. More please.

- Drawing. I haven't been doing a lot of drawing recently, but I've really been enjoying what I have been doing. Here's a picture of Hix's character from a game called 'Evil Genius Summer Camp' that Debbie ran:

RPG Art

I saw a request for a piece of artwork on RPG.net, and had a few spare minutes during my day. Well, OK, I had some minutes where I was procrastinating about marking. So I drew this:



I drew it on the whiteboard, and then took a photo of it. I then colourised it using Corel Photopaint. The person who requested a picture has already found someone else to do the drawing (and probably a lot more seriously and well than I did), but I'm pretty happy with what I produced. And I feel I've honed my white-board drawing skills further.

The Joys of Collaborative Writing

Over on NZRaG.com I am helping a small group to write a scenario, possibly for the scenario design contest. I am enjoying the healthy flow of ideas, the permutations and spins that other people put on ideas, and the sense that we are writing something with a clear sense of purpose, and tangible results to date. A small sample: To set up the baby-eating, we need babies. Therefore, the castle should be home to a SUPERGENETIC BREEDING FARM where the most genetically superior people in the world meet to have many many secret babies. The thread is here, but if you're interested in playing in the finished scenario, you might want to resist the temptation to click on that link ;)

friendlycomputer.co.nz are great

I have bought a few things over the past year from Friendly Computer Online Store, and they have been great. Very fast service, friendly emails, very helpful when a cable for my USB hard-drive was playing up, all round good service. And their prices are good too :) So, I thought to myself, why not officially record my good experience on the interweb. That way if someone's wondering whether friendlycomputer.co.nz are any good, they might stumble across my comments / review. Stuff I bought: 40gb USB hard drive (notebook hd in a 2.5inch enclosure) (cost about $100, early 2006) 3.5 inch 200gb hard drive in an enclosure (cost about $165 including postage, mid 2006) 3.5 inch 250gb hard drive + an enclosure (um, about $180 last week) a 1gb usb flash drive ($20?) The only trouble I had was with the usb cable for the 2.5inch hd, and I've heard that's a common fault with those particular types of cable (1 usb to 2 usb). They sent some helpful emails, then I sent the drive back, and they got it working no problems (it was a dodgy cable that would work for a few minutes at a time, then crap out - so it had been tested briefly, but not for long enough for the fault to show up).

Haven't blogged for some time.. Here's the Heroes meme thingee

 

Eden McCain

You scored 45 Idealism, 70 Nonconformity, 37 Nerdiness

I think you really want a donut.

Congratulations, you're Eden McCain! You've got a colorful past, and your persuasive abilities are second to none. In addition, you're a quick thinker with a solid amount of guts. Your best quality: The art of persuasionYour worst quality: A fondness for some stereotypically "bad" behavior

He dodges dung!

This cheeky chap is outfitted for a dangerous sport - dung dodging. Beastmen fling handfuls of dung at a team of 'dogders', who may either dodge the dung (to stay 'safe' and in the game), or punch the dung out of the air to score points.

I meme a book meme.

Since I am curious to see what the words are (and whether I've read far enough to recognise them yet): (from Mash's LJ) "and let them go to page 123 of the nearest book and transcribe sentences 5, 6, and 7 onto their blogs." For his part, Tom Leyton remained silent and remote, yet a little of his initial apprehension appeared to have subsided. It wasn't until the beginning of the second week of the holidays that the door opened once more into the private world of Tom Leyton, and it was to be the secrets lost in the cluttered room under the Leytons' house that would provide the key. By this stage the silkworms had more than doubled in size and even with ten shoeboxes they were becoming overcrowded. Huh - 2 pages past where I'm up to, but no spoilers. That's good. I should be finished reading The Running Man shortly - I plan to read a few pages whilst walking home today.

Study class 2006

Having to supervise study is a great chance to read, or occasionally draw:

Cosplay page has 6,000 hits?

I couldn't remember where Debbie and I had written up our adventures in Japan, and was feeling slightly senile, when I came across a hand-written message in the anthology comic I made a few years ago (2000, I think), which I had just gotten back from Hix. It mentioned the old unskilledartworld webpage, and that's where Debbie and I put our Japan proto-blog. It's also where I put the write-up of our cosplay experience at Armageddon. And now the hit counter says 6,135 hits. That's a lot of bots trawling for email addresses. I suspect having a link to it from the Armageddon website means that some of those hits are real. But gee, 6000? Anyways, school is a very exciting place to be, as always. I suddenly value weekends a lot more than I did during the holidays :) I found out that I'm being sent on a conference at some point this year - an expensive one too! Why can't the school just give me the cash, and let me buy toys? I'm sure the net result for the school would be about as beneficial - I'd buy video making toys after all (well, I might buy myself an LCD monitor for home too, but that's editing related and therefore likely to be used in making the school production video). It's an ICT conference. At least it's in Wellington, so I don't have to be away from home. Right, Debbie just got home, so I'd best be off.

Paperwork? We don't need no steenkin' paperwork!

Ah, the joy of photocopying: 1. Spend 5 minutes waiting for the school computer system to accept your login. Chat idly about holiday activities with random staff members as they wait in line for the photocopier. 2. Try to find the stuff that you saved somewhere last year - either on your personal drive, or the shared drive, or (for some mysterious reason) on the shared student drive. 3. Give up looking, and make the damn handout again. 4. Hit print. Wait with baited breath to see if the printer will jam. 5. Open printer flaps, clear paper jam, close printer. 6. Repeat steps 4 and 5. Hit printer. Marvel at success of this technique. 7. Log out, take freshly rewritten and printed handout to the photocopier. Choose to use the trusty ole risograph, as there is no queue for that machine. 8. Spend 5 minutes waiting for the photocopier system to accept your login. 9. Unplug the control box for the photocopier system, plug it back in, and log in. 10. Place handout face down on photocopier. Choose number of copies. Hit go. 11. Realise that there is no paper on the paper tray. Walk to main office, collect ream of paper, return to prep room, load paper, log in again, choose number of copies, hit go. 11. Clear excess waste paper from the paper catching tray. Hit reset. Choose number of copies. Hit go. 12. Press 'drum release' button, open the risograph, clear stuck paper off the main drum. Go wash hands. 13. Log back in, choose number of copies, hit go. 14. Watch 4 or 5 blank copies fly out of the machine, before some half-way decent looking duplicates start coming out. Celebrate how fast the risograph is at copying compared to a regular photocopier. 15. Run off 5 additional copies to make up for the ones that didn't work. 16. Log off. 17. Remember something else you needed to copy off for class. 17. Goto 1.

Prep done for interview

Hix asked what prep I did for the interview about Kapcon. Since comments are playing up for me, I thought I may as well make a post of it. First, I got some good advice from Idiot, who's done radio interviews a few times over the past couple of years. His advice - try to anticipate the sorts of questions you'll be asked, and write down some key phrases or answers you could use. He also gave me some cool phrases - 'friendly competition' and 'smorgasboard of gaming' being 2 that I used. Second, I got Debbie to ask me some questions, so I could practice answering them. I also asked her a few questions, to see how she phrased her answers. It was extremely helpful. I then talked about it with Luke and Sam, and sent emails to Luke, Paul and Idiot as well. I then set about writing myself some well thought out answers. As it turns out, I didn't have time to read anything during the interview - not even to glance at notes. So I was going from memory, but having prepared fairly thoroughly. Here are the questions and answers I wrote the night before the interview (I think I spent about 15 minutes writing these): What is Kapcon? Kapcon is NZ’s largest annual roleplaying convention. It’s a 2 day event, held in Wellington every Wgtn Anniversary weekend. There are 6 rounds of ‘tabletop’ RPGs, plus a big 60 player game on the Saturday night. What is a roleplaying game? A roleplaying game is part storytelling, part acting, and part game. It’s a social activity where you get together with a group of people, and you each take a role or roles in a story, which you use your imaginations to create. It’s a lot of fun, and one of the great things about it is that it’s really active. Movies or books are great forms of entertainment, but they’re passive – someone else does all the work for you. Roleplaying games let you get involved, take hold of the story and really drive where it’s going. What kind of games do you play at Kapcon? There’s a huge range of games – 6 rounds, with about 10 different games running in each round. There are fantasy games like Lord of the Rings, modern horror games, kung-fu and samurai games, even a Jane Austen inspired game this year. It’s up to the wonderful people who write or bring along games to run, really. One popular game this year was a game that plays like a slasher horror movie – and uses a Jenga tower to decide whether characters survive. Any time you want your character to do something difficult, or not do the typical, dangerous horror movie thing, you have to pull out a jenga block. If the tower falls, your character dies. It’s a great fun game. What’s this 60 player game? It’s called a Live Action game, or LARP, and it’s a little heavier on the acting side of things. Each person is assigned a character, and they have to try to act as their character for the whole evening, whilst also trying to achieve certain goals that the character might have. People often get costumes to dress as their characters, and it’s a lot of fun. Obviously with 60 people playing it can get a little chaotic, but really that’s all part of the enjoyment. This year’s LARP was set on the Hindenburg, in the 1930s. The characters were pretty varied, from famous politicians, to actors, to evil Nazi’s. The costumes were great, the stories that unfolded were really fun, and man – everyone loves to hate a Nazi. They make perfect bad guys. How has roleplaying changed over the years? Well, roleplaying has been a popular hobby for about 30 years now, and it’s grown up a lot. Early RPGs were mostly fantasy or SF based, and while those sorts of games are still popular, there’s a lot more variety around today. Cottage industry publishers are putting out some really cool games, and the hobby is thriving in terms of ideas and range. Also, the people who grew up with roleplaying as a hobby are having kids now, so it won’t be long before the next generation of gamers start coming along to Kapcon. We already have a couple of father/children sets who are regulars, and it won’t be long before we see more. Who runs the games? The people who play in the games also run the games. We offer discounted entry to anyone who runs a game in one or more rounds. We have a few regulars who like to run games more than they enjoy playing in them, but most of our GamesMasters as we call them like to mix it up, running a game in a couple of rounds and playing in the other rounds. Who runs Kapcon? It’s run by a committee of volunteers, with a new head honcho taking over every couple of years. We have a different team each year to write the Saturday night game – which is a lot of work. Are there other events like Kapcon? Kapcon is the biggest RPG convention in New Zealand, but there are lots of similar events around the country. Battlecry in Auckland is on in a week and a half, February 10 and 11, at the Freeman’s Bay Community hall. They have roleplaying, plus strategy games using little figures, and collectible card game tournaments. Christchurch has Buckets of Dice in July, and Dunedin has regular gaming cons. There are others too, in Hamilton and Palmerston North – all over the place.