App of the Week: Trello

Less fancy-gaming fun this time, more function. This isn't just specifically an app - more of an overall service for project management (it's more exciting that it sounds). Trello lets you build index-card style project boards, add details, comments, due dates, etc. to the cards, and move them between lists as required. Simple concept, very versatile.

I've got to give credit to Jack for putting me on to this one. I'm using it for more and more at the moment - it's been my go-to to-do manager at work for a while (To Do, Doing, Done, and some other specific lists), but I now use it to organise stuff for this blog and other writing (Ideas Stack, Pending, Doing, Done), and even now for books/games/films that I want to list/track.

It's a free online service, with excellent apps on iOS and Android - so check it out at www.trello.com.

ReKindling

I got a Kindle! I previously used a Sony Reader, which did a fantastic job, but sadly has been on its last legs in terms of draining battery and increasing latency in reading/page turning, which sadly made it very difficult to use to read regularly.

My Amazon-inclined friends have all been pointing me towards the Kindle Paperwhite (with curious chants of 'one of us! one of us!'). Amazon has been instrumental in the proliferation of ereaders and digital reading for the masses, and I've rarely heard a bad word spoed about them - at least from those who don't dislike using ereaders at all.

First impressions - it's great. Amazon know how to nail it in terms of user experience - it shows up in a stylish, minimalist (shades of Apple) black box, meaning that it's open and activated in your hands in seconds. Awesome.

It's really cool - enjoyable to hold and read on, buy books (*cough* sales funnel *cough*), and has some great ancillary features. I'm sure I'll share more on it as I continue to use it, but very impressed so far.

Guess what I'm reading...

How the Other Half Read: Children's Fiction is Not Just For Children!

George and I were exhorted by his mum to read some books written for the younger reader. I have three offerings so far, the first of which is Treasure Island. I'd never read this before, never seen a film of it, and I finally understand who Blind Pew is. This is a great swash-buckling adventure, although, I have to say, I think I enjoyed the beginning when Jim Hawkins meets his very first pirate at least as much as I enjoyed the second half of the book when he's creeping around the island humming 'fifteen men on a dead man's chest' (or so I imagine that's how he creeps). An oldie but a goodie.

Second, is a book I have read before, but could barely remember: Hideous Kinky. The title confuses everyone; yes, it *is* a children's book; the two girls in it just happen to really like those two words. This book transports you all the way to Marrakech and its young narrator tells you of her adventures with her big sister, Bea, as her mother does a whole bunch of stuff that, reading the book as an adult, seems pretty irresponsible. However, since I discovered recently that the story is actually autobiographical, I shan't publicly question the mother's actions further. I tried to list my favourite bits, but there are just too many of them; this is a great book which makes Morocco seem all the magical since its wonders are seen through the eyes of a small child.

Thirdly, (appropriately enough) comes the third book in a series: Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse.  I know, I'm a Classicist; this is probably why I find these books so enjoyable, as I notice all the little references (which are clearly put there for Classics teachers to find), but my pupils love these books too, so there must be more to them than self-congratulatory allusion-spotting, I don't want to spoil the first two books, so shan't say too much, but basically, dark forces are rising against the Olympian gods and it's up to their (very much put-upon) illegitimate, half-blood children to save the day. One of the things I really loved about this book in particular is that the gender balance was right on the money - in the previous two books there is one excellent, prominent female character, but there are two male ones - in The Titan's Curse the girls are running the show. It's a shame that we're so used to there just being the one main girl that having equal, or superior, numbers of female main characters is comment-worthy, but there you go. The whole series of books is highly enjoyable and well-worth a look; they're a quick read and a great reworking of the Classical myths.

Check in next time for some seriously screwed up fiction!

G xxx

Books completed in chronological order of reading:

Stabat Mater, Tiziano Scarpa (2011)

Facing Violence, Rory Miller (2011)

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville (2007)

Open Secrets, Alice Munro (1994)

The Dragon Queen, Alice Borchardt (2001)

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Walters (1998)

The lost books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason (2007)

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, (1937)

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman, (1991)

The Hypnotist, Lars Kepler, (2012)

The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), The Night Eternal (2011), Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman (2010)

Angry White Pyjamas, Robert Twigger (1997)

50 shades of Feminism, ed Lisa Appignanesi et al (2013)

Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid, R O A M Lyne (1987)

The Journal of Dora Damage, Belinda Starling (2007)

Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud (1992)

Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse, Rick Riordan (2007)

Disgrace, Jussi Adler Olsen (2012)

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Romanitas, Sophia McDougall (2005)

Selected Poems, Sophie Hannah (2013)

Playing a Role

Given that my last two posts on gaming rapidly spiralled out of my control and became rather compendulous in length, I was planning on resolving to keep this one shorter. Then I remembered I was going to be writing about roleplaying games (or RPGs), and realised that on this, of all topics, I am quite likely to have a lot to say. As I start to write this, I'll try and keep it to a sensible length (not least so there's a chance that someone might actually read it!), and failing that, may split it across one or more posts.

For those who might not know what an roleplaying game is - in a broad and generic sense - it's quite self-explanatory. It's a game in which you are somehow projecting yourself into a different role. While that can actually end up applying to a lot of different games that aren't truly RPGs (such as some of the 'big box' tabletop games I mentioned last time), specifically, an RPG is a game where you play a character and describe their actions. 

Generally, though not always, there is a rules element to the game, with varying degrees of complexity, which are used to resolve actions. If my character is trying to break down a door, for example, I could roll a number of dice, factoring in the strength of my character and what the door is made of, to see whether or not they succeed. 

These games usually feature one person acting as a game master (GM) to describe the world and facilitate the players' interaction with it. As a player takes on the role of one character, the GM takes on the role of EVERY non-player character in the world. 

The first roleplaying game - the absolute classic, which most people will think of when you mention RPGs - is, of course, Dungeons & Dragons. Created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in the 1970s, D&D introduced a whole new form of gaming to the world, which has grown and grown ever since. D&D is an epic fantasy world, complete with monsters, magic, heroes and villains. The GM is referred to as the 'Dungeon Master'. There is a heavy emphasis on combat and exploration, but this really depends on the group - it would be easy to run a politicking, balance-of-power campaign, Game of Thrones style. 

If this book could talk...it would probably say 'I can't get rid of these NERDS.'

D&D is by no means the only system available, though - far from it. For any style and setting you can think of, there will be either a fully-fledged game, or a system which would lend itself to it. Horror, science fiction, fantasy, comedy, superheroes - you name it. All it takes is a group, a GM and the imagination to get started. 

One of my personal favourites is the 'World of Darkness' setting by White Wolf. It's actually an old system which was updated in 2004. It represents a gothic horror setting in the modern world, with various rulesets for different aspects of the supernatural - vampires, werewolves, mages, and stranger things - each of which lends itself to exploring a different broad theme. 

The settings are masterful and give you scope for all sorts of different game styles, from mortals against the odds and unknown horrors, to vampires vying for political control of a city. One of the things I love about it is that the rule system is simple, effective and satisfying, letting you tailor it more towards a cinematic style of play or a more gritty realism. It's easy for new players to pick up, and the fact that it is anchored in the modern world makes the setting very accessible too. Sidenote: my favorite side-series in this setting (which I've never had the chance to play/run) is 'Requiem for Rome'. VAMPIRES IN ANCIENT ROME.

You also end up with lots of gorgeous books.

RPGs are perhaps the strongest examples of something I referred to in my first post - escapism. You are trying to put yourself in the place of a character different from you, with the agency to act and explore a whole different world. This can be anchored with pictures, maps, even props, or a simple grid representing the game world, but it is firmly routed in imagination and descriptive communication. The job of the Game Master is to set the stage, your job is to act on it. The show Community actually does a very good (though sideways and humorous) job of capturing the essence of this, in the episode Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (yes, that one). This is enhanced by the fact that, the majority of the time, you create your own character, defining their background, personality and nature, and bringing them to life within the game system. 

Since first being introduced to Dungeons and Dragons by a friend's dad when I was about 11, I've become pretty firmly ensconced in a GM role. Throughout my my teens, I was DM for various D&D campaigns (and sundry other games) with a group of friends, spanning a series of epic adventures over the years. 

Also in my teens, I ended up running a couple of play-by-forum (World of Darkness) games with other interested people from around the world. I did this for about three years. Playing this sort of thing by forum is actually pretty impractical - it lets you take a lot of time to work on descriptive writing, but it means that any sort of gameplay progresses glacially slowly. Now I'm running another online game (D&D, via Google Hangouts and the excellent Roll20 virtual game board tool) with a group of friends. 

As I mentioned in my first post, it's easy to write off gaming activities as pointless. There is certainly a culturally ingrained reaction when people hear Dungeons and Dragons mentioned - that's it's the purview of extreme geeks, something fundamentally sad that's perhaps even worthy of scorn. It's a byword for sad geekery. 

Seriously, what's geeky about this? These are literal bargain-bin adventurers.

This almost invariably, as with so many things, seems to come from a lack of understanding or familiarity, but that's usually hard to convey to people in brief. The time I've put into GMing over the years has taught me a whole lot, such as thinking on my feet (you really need this…), various writing skills, world- and setting-building, and, in a weird way, presentation skills (I have a natural aversion to putting myself on the spot in front of people, but that's precisely what GMing requires). 

I'm sure I could go on with this topic, but I'll cut myself off there, in the interests of brevity (though the number of paragraphs tell a different story). My parting thought is that I view RPGs as one of the most under-appreciated, yet accessible, forms of gaming. If you have a GM who knows the score, it is possible to play (enjoyably and completely) with practically no knowledge of the system at hand. At its purest, you describe your actions, and the GM helps you resolve these within the framework of the game. This also makes it one of the most liberating forms of gaming. Even sandbox-style, open-world video games are naturally restricted by their nature. Boardgames impose rules restrictions for simplicity or style, but in roleplaying games, the only limitations are those imposed by your character or the setting. 

Back again next Monday for some thoughts on the major blockbusters of the gaming world - the video games. 

It's the forehead of MYSTERY!

App of the Week: Forbidden Island

The full board game of Forbidden Island was featured on Tabletop a month or two ago - I finally got around to catching up on this one, and love the look of the game. Whenever it is mentioned that a game like this has a mobile version (in this case, iPad), I always check it out, but the quality of these tends to be mixed.

Forbidden Island is a fantastic game - an excellent port, it would appear, of the original (though I haven't played it), supporting up to four players - single player if you control multiple players yourself. I'm always slightly skeptical about people's willingness to play these things multiplayer round a tablet (unless you're travelling or something), but it's a fun and mentally challenging game, even single-player. I can see there being a lot of replay value to this, and it's a reasonably quick and complete game.

Check out the Tabletop episode here: http://bit.ly/19K7o6x
Find the game on the App store here: http://bit.ly/13e4jgi

Screenshot

Source: boardgamegeek

A Million Parallel Earths

I feel like I've got my momentum back. It's a good feeling - I would attribute much of this to giving myself freer choice of books, and to happening to have picked a few awesome ones recently.

Today, I'm mostly focussing on one of these - The Long Earth, written collaboratively by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter.

Sir Terry casts aside his hat

I picked this up almost on a whim, with the generously-loaded Waterstones card which was a birthday gift from the team at work (thanks, guys!). I wasn't entirely sure what I wanted to pick up, but this caught my eye on a display stand, and looked like good flight reading. 

I had assumed that this was a new book, having not heard of it previously, but it transpires that it was being promoted just ahead of the launch of the second book in the sequence. 

It's very a sci-fi novel, making it feel like a bit of a departure for Pratchett. At a recent talk at the Institute of Engineering and Technology, he revealed that the concept was something he came up with even before Discworld, but her set it aside and only rediscovered it recently. He decided that it had been a great idea, but that he would need someone with a working knowledge of the 'quantum bollocks' (actual quote) to execute it - hence the collaboration with Baxter.

The premise is actually very simple, but opens up so many questions and interesting scenarios to explore that the series, I'm sure, could feasibly be spun on and on and still remain interesting. Pratchett and Baxter indicated that they've got solid material to explore for about five books, and are not sure about going beyond that at this point.

Right from the start, we are introduced to the 'Long Earth', on what becomes known as 'Step Day', the population of earth discovers an unknown number of parallel earths, trivially easy to reach from this one (dubbed 'Datum Earth'), through a process called 'stepping'. Each is effectively a copy of this world, with some small changes - most notably, that each world is untouched by the presence of humanity.

This makes each world a rich haven in its own right, a sort of natural paradise, rich with life and animals. There turn out to be some simple but crucial limitations around stepping which make the inevitable exploration and expansion more interesting - people aren't just able to port their entire houses across.

This turns the book into an exploration of frontiers and survivalism for humanity, and raises plenty of interesting questions - suddenly, scarcity is not the issue it once was. What does that mean for how people develop and fan out across the long earth. It is a great representation of what sci if can be - a sort of thought experiment with a relatively simple concept (though one with interesting characters and story to hang it together).

The main plot of the book follows a few characters aiming exploring the Long Earth and answer some of the many questions that it raises. This gave it, for me, a very 'Jules Verne', adventure novel feel - venturing out in the unknown. This is part of the reason I'm trying to discuss it rather elliptically here (with mixed success, I'm sure), to avoid answering too many questions, and leaving that for you to discover, if you choose to explore the book yourself.

From the title of the sequel 'The Long War', I'm expecting to find something rather different. I'm very much looking forward to breaking into that - though I'm reluctant to pick it up in hardback, so it will be one for audiobook or ebook formats.

If you've enjoy science fiction or adventure stories, or Pratchett or Baxter's previous works (though this feels nothing like Discworld), I'd recommend that you give this one a try. 

How the Other Half Read: Reality Bites

So, I have a lot of books to tell you about. As usual, I'm going to group then thematically, so this post is all about non-fiction books. I've read three and a half of these so far (the half will be explained shortly).

First up is Angry White Pyjamas, a book about a really irritating, sexist man who decides that, since he's done nothing worthwhile with his life since moving to Japan to teach English, he'll join the Japanese riot police course and learn aikido, grading from novice to black belt in nine months - and taking the exam to become an instructor (sensei) three months after that. Words cannot express how much I dislike the writer: for his portrayal of the only two female aikidoka he meets as sex-crazed loonies who are each obsessed with their sensei; for his infantilisation of his Japanese girlfriend; for his offensively generalised and objectifying assertion that what Japanese girls lack in breasts they make up for in skimpy skirts.  (Perhaps the book should be retitled Angry, Right Feminists.)

If you can see past this twattery, the discussion of his experience doing the riot police course is quite interesting. The senshusei (students on the course) are a fascinating mix of varying manifestations of crazy, and it seems the course itself, run largely by sadistic sensei (fainting will earn you burpees; leaving bloody patches on the mat is a good thing; broken bones earn you mere days of convalescence...) is designed to make you more machine than human. I found the whining of the author ("I'm in pain, but I can't quit because I hero-worship one of the sensei, and if I stop now my life means nothing") quite tedious, and his description of the injuries which were wilfully inflicted by sensei horrific; however, all in all, the huge culture shock made for fascinating reading. Seriously, what sane person puts themselves through that?!

Thankfully, the next book I read was a balm for my offended XX chromosomes: Fifty Shades of Feminism.  (When discussing this, you have to say the title really quickly, otherwise people make snap judgements about your taste in literature...). This book is fab; it's a collection of fifty very short essays, written by notable women, on women's lives and experiences in 2013. They are all great, I'll just mention two which I found pertinent to my own politics. Firstly, Juliet Stevenson's discussion of how, in acting, the older you get, the more interesting the parts - if you're a man; if you're a woman they are few and far between and pretty simple in terms of character. For studies on this, look at the Geena Davis Institute's work. The second was Jeannette Winterson's pithy and deeply uncomfortable discussion of objectification being enforced by pornography. For studies on the under- and mis-representation of women in the media, see the resources produced by the EAVES charity. Fifty Shades of Feminism's greatest achievement, in my opinion, is that it concisely and articulately provides a starting point for a huge range of issues that, really, ought to be seen as important to (and by) everybody.

Here is where I explain the half book comment, and apologise to my father. Dad recommended that I read "anything by Stephen Jay Gould". I have tried.  Honest I have.  I downloaded Leonardo's Mountain of Clams (1998) and have been working my way through it, and I have really enjoyed some bits (for example, the history of the aquarium - they started in Victorian times, before that stable, watery communities did exist but were always viewed from above, consequently diagrams of sea-creatures changed in perspective with the introduction of aquaria, there are some hilarious anecdotes about the lengths people went to to populate their glassy mini-seas...it's fascinating stuff); however, I find it really hard to read long essays about non-Classical material - I feel like I'm missing so much of the background that it takes me a long time to process. Having said that, I just looked at the contents page and the essays I have left to go seem much shorter than the first half of the book - maybe I will finish it this year!  For now, though, it is on the iBooks shelf.

The final non-fiction book so far is Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid, which I borrowed from a library at university for an essay but only had time to read the relevant section.  This book is amazing.  The basic premise is that there is an epic voice (the one telling the story of the Trojan hero, who founds the Roman race) and then there are further voices - little hints and allusions to previous Classical authors, inviting us to question the validity of the story - saying, for example, is it all good? Is it alright to kill an enemy who has already been defeated? Is it okay to leave the woman you've been having a relationship with without so much as saying goodbye, just because your superior tells you to stop procrastinating and sod off to Italy? This is a great book, which has some really interesting ideas (eg, that bit in Aeneid IV when Aeneas is described as Apollo, looking good, with his clashing weapons, because he's so fit? Yeah, that's totally a reference to Apollo as the PLAGUE-BRINGER in Iliad I, because Aeneas is bringing DOOM to Dido. In fairness, I probably should have spotted that one myself, but it's still a great call.). I shan't go on, but if you've read the Aeneid, this is great, and if you haven't, do read the Aeneid, because it's a seminal work of literature and, although Aeneas is pretty much a dickhead (or, perhaps, *because* Aeneas is...), it's an awesome story.

To sum up, I find non-fiction slower-going but very interesting. Now, go and read Fifty Shades of Feminism. Off you go!

G xxx

Books completed in chronological order of reading:

Stabat Mater, Tiziano Scarpa (2011)

Facing Violence, Rory Miller (2011)

Un Lun Dun, China Mieville (2007)

Open Secrets, Alice Munro (1994)

The Dragon Queen, Alice Borchardt (2001)

Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Walters (1998)

The lost books of the Odyssey, Zachary Mason (2007)

The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien, (1937)

The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes, Neil Gaiman, (1991)

The Hypnotist, Lars Kepler, (2012)

The Strain (2009), The Fall (2010), The Night Eternal (2011), Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman (2010)

Angry White Pyjamas, Robert Twigger (1997)

50 shades of Feminism, ed Lisa Appignanesi et al (2013)

Further Voices in Vergil's Aeneid, R O A M Lyne (1987)

The Journal of Dora Damage, Belinda Starling (2007)

Hideous Kinky, Esther Freud (1992)

Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse, Rick Riordan (2007)

Disgrace, Jussi Adler Olsen (2012)

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)

Romanitas, Sophia McDougall (2005)

Selected Poems, Sophie Hannah (2013)