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Stephen Lea Sheppard's LiveJournal:
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| Sunday, April 12th, 2009 | | 2:55 pm |
Goddamnit I am too old to be listening to Adam's Song on loop. | | Friday, April 10th, 2009 | | 3:17 pm |
Another One Gone
Dave Arneson died on Tuesday, as many people are now aware. Never as famous as Gary Gygax, we may owe more to the former than the latter. As I understand it, Gygax was responsible for adding fantasy elements to his medieval combat game, but Arneson was the one who contributed these: 1) "Hey, what if we each play just one character, instead of a whole army?" 2) "Let's make it open-ended, so the game keeps going and you don't just stop and declare whoever wins the fight the winner." Both of which define roleplaying games for me far more than guys in plate armor ducking fireballs do. Gygax got most of the credit, and it took a court order in 1981 for Arneson to be credited thereafter as co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. The settlement bound either man from speaking of the details, and now they're both dead; we will probably never know the full story of who came up with what, when, and with whose help, why they fell out, etc.. I don't wish to disparage Gygax's name -- he seems to have been the driving force behind D&D's original publication and its spread, if not its inception. We owe him a lot, and he was by most accounts I've read a great human being. Business, or so I gather, can be hard on friendships between even quite reasonable people. And, I mean, I never knew either of these people personally, nor even met them. I can only remember them in a very abstract manner. But I do feel compelled to remember them somehow, these people whose actions in the 1970s have shaped almost every aspect of my current life. Thanks, Dave. | | Saturday, March 21st, 2009 | | 3:47 am |
Man, I am so glad I never started watching the new Battlestar Galactica. Judging from descriptions of the final episode, if I'd watched the whole series the finale would have left me screaming and throwing things. Standard disclaimer: This doesn't mean I think it's bad or that I'm maliciously judging it without having seen it fully or whatthefuckever; people I respect seem to think it was well-executed, and I can respect that as well. But, Christ, it pushes pet peeve buttons that would have left me angry. Hell, even contemplating a hypothetical version of myself that started watching the series back when it began is making real me angry right now. | | Sunday, February 8th, 2009 | | 12:33 am |
My room is rapidly reaching a point of organization where I'm happy to be living in it, especially with today's addition of a new set of shelves: 31 feet of space for movie discs and video games. About twenty of those feet are already filled, which means all my discs are now on dedicated shelves and not cluttering up dressers or bookshelves, and I have plenty of room for the new games I get sent to review every month. There's a curious freedom afforded by having everything organized and in plain view—I may now get around to watching shows and playing games I've owned for ages but haven't ever seen or which I started and never finished, simply because I can easily access them. The second half of Boogiepop Phantom, for example. | | Thursday, January 1st, 2009 | | 3:00 pm |
| | Friday, December 26th, 2008 | | 1:14 am |
So I just watched a really excellent Christmas movie: Die Hard. This is the first time I've actually sat down and watched it from beginning to end, although I've seen bits and pieces of it before. What I find most interesting is how 80s it feels and how gory it is. Die Hard is the father of the modern action movie -- everyman hero instead of shirtless Stallone (although Bruce Willis spends much of the movie in a tank top or shirtless while carrying a machine gun) and with a lot of blood squibs exploding in people's pants. But although it's the father of the modern action movie, it's very much also a movie of its time. It's neat seeing the early work in a new creative movement, before it completely rejects the tropes of the old. It's interesting noticing all the things post-Die Hard action movies reject that Die Hard itself didn't. | | Friday, April 25th, 2008 | | 11:57 am |
Agamemnon is a bit of a jerk. Was a bit of a jerk. ... Big helping of books arrived over the last three days or so—the Robert Fagels Iliad, Odyssey, and Aeneid translations, Lord Dunsany's The Complete Pegāna and The King of Elfland's Daughter, and Exalted's The Manual of Exalted Power—Abysssals, Scroll of Kings, The Compass of Celestial Directions, Vol. III—Yu-Shan, and Dreams of the First Age, the latter two of which I worked on. This means I have a comp copy of DotFA and three comp copies of Yu-Shan, in case any other author is reading this and wants to discuss book trade or something. My room is starting to look like Yomiko Readman's loft. I mean, it has a long way to go, but it's definitely taking the first steps. | | Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 | | 2:17 pm |
R.I.P.
So. I got my first job, a paper route, because I wanted money to buy RPG books. oWoD books in specific, but the oWoD wouldn't exist without D&D, and D&D wouldn't exist without Gygax. My second job, improbably, was acting on a television show. I would not have gotten it if I hadn't been staying at a friend's house while my mother completed her medical education. The friend in question I would not have met, save for striking up a conversation with him over his Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. books he brought to school one day. On the television show in question, Freaks & Geeks, I played a Dungeon Master. It's possible the show wouldn't even have existed, if Dungeons & Dragons hadn't done its part in creating a cohesive geek culture with which the show's creators identified. Without that second job, I'd not have been able to afford a computer. Using the computer my acting paid for, I met my best friend, Richard Clayton, on alt.games.whitewolf, discussing roleplaying games. Outside of my immediate family, I can think of no single element with more influence over the course of my life than the existence of the roleplaying hobby, which would not have been without E. Gary Gygax. Thanks, Gary. | | Friday, February 29th, 2008 | | 8:54 pm |
X down, Y to go.
So I just finished reading The Book of the New Sun and A Canticle for Lebowitz. That was a trip. Now my mind is once again more full of ideas for Exalted than ever before. Now to get back to reading The Domination. | | Thursday, February 28th, 2008 | | 2:36 am |
I had the most awesome horrible dream.
I'm pretty sure it was an anti-drug commercial or something, up until the very end. It was modeled after the sort of anti-drinking or anti-smoking ads we have up here in Canada (and for all I know, elsewhere as well), all grimy and Se7enish. There was a suited business guy walking through an old big wrecked apartment building, only as he stepped on the floor, it CGIed into horrible tarry gunk, the surface of which, undisturbed, looked like the dry and rubble-strewn floor of an old big wrecked apartment building. (To be as vivid as possible, the sort of horrible tarry gunk that's like Jello in that it keeps its shape and springs back to it when disturbed, unless it's torn, and not so much like actual tar, which runs.) So he wades through the rubbery, tearing floor, and as he goes he sinks deeper, I'm thinking "Okay, this is a metaphor for how drugs or drinking or smoking or something makes your life difficult in ways you cannot immediately percieve." Then he gets to his goal, which is a window into an indoor room, set with bars, and behind the bars is some vulnerable girl who's entirely immersed in the tarry gunk, so that it's sort of bulging out between the bars but not actually leaving the cell, in a disgusting parody of surface tension. She's clutching the bars and her face is poking between them, also covered in gunk in the manner of someone being eaten by The Blob. And she takes business guy's hand and whimpers "You'll stay with me, right?" And I think " Oh, it's a metaphor for how drugs imprison you and make your friends wade through ugly crap." At this point I don't quite realize that I'm asleep. I think I'm watching a show or something. Then my viewpoint switches to the girl's, and the guy's face goes horrible and fangy, and he stares right into my eyes and says "No" in a demonic bass-shifted voice, and I wake up and realize, to my terror, that my legs aren't under the covers and therefore a monster might eat them. I haven't had a nightmare that vivid or shocking in months. My brain rules. | | Saturday, January 26th, 2008 | | 8:56 pm |
Quarter of a century. Man, I have not got enough done. | | Friday, January 4th, 2008 | | 6:34 pm |
Why do I feel compelled to say I played Harris on Freaks and Geeks, and Dudley in The Royal Tenenbaums? Why are things on television, but in movies? I've started a new blog. It's called More of the Same. | | Monday, December 24th, 2007 | | 6:15 pm |
This whole year has been an object lesson in the consequences of leaving things until the last minute. On the plus side, it makes my New Year's resolution obvious. | | Thursday, November 29th, 2007 | | 4:23 pm |
I'm on Xbox Live again. Apparently it's impossible to recover a gamertag if the account tied to that tag is canceled, so I'm not Stephenls anymore. I cannot believe that's the way it works, but Customer Service Lady wasn't being helpful, so enh. My new gamertag is S Lea Sheppard. | | Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 | | 1:49 am |
A sudden realization: From my years of French immersion during grade school and my high school classes, I retain just enough to feel frustrated and ignorant when I look at French text and hear French being spoken, rather than just ignorant but not frustrated. Books written in French exist. I am infuriated that I cannot read them and comprehend them as well as I can comprehend English. I'm gonna need to fix this. Thanks, today's Three Panel Soul news update! | | Friday, November 2nd, 2007 | | 1:45 pm |
| | 2:50 am |
Author Book Trade Thingy Update
Because people responded to my earlier post. I finally went and ordered Oadenol's Codex on Amazon, so I don't need that one anymore. I have an author's copy of The White & Black Treatises and The Manual of Exalted Power: Sidereals. Also, my comp copies of Gods & Elementals should arrive soon. I'm missing a large number of nWoD books, though. | | Wednesday, October 10th, 2007 | | 6:36 am |
Note to self: Sketch more. Sketching clears the brain and relieves stress. | | Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 | | 3:14 am |
Back in November, 2005, Ninjawookie asked if I was going to talk about Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface. I did not, because I hadn't read it. I've since read it. This is me talking about Ghost in the Shell 2: Man/Machine Interface. The confusing thing about this manga... well, okay, the chief confusing thing, is that the actual plot of the story doesn't show up until the last several issues. All the stuff at the beginning about the floating carrier thing and Motoko Aramaki? And the pig disease? And everything that follows from it? Minor subplot! The actual plot of the manga is this: the Major, having merged with the Puppetmaster at the end of the first manga, now "lives" in a cryogenic tube in an orbital habitat. She's trying to decide what she should do with her life. Her posthuman solution to her conflicted opinions on the subject is to bud off various elements of her personality into separate bodies, and then plant them in the world and set them to fighting each other so she can observe the relative merits of each approach. Once one of them wins, she'll know what to do. Motoko Aramaki is one of those personality fragments, representing a desire for social justice and possibly reconciliation with Section 9. The other Motoko, I forget her name but she ends up being the secret mastermind behind the pig disease thing (IIRC, anyway she ends up being the secret mastermind behind something or other), represents the possibility of the Major doing something else (probably freedom from boundaries, including boundaries of ethics). They fight, Motoko Aramaki wins, and then she investigates the original Major (body and all) on the orbital. When Motoko Aramaki hacks the Major's ghost, the latter subsumes and reintegrates the former's consciousness, and then leaves the orbital and goes back to meet up with Section 9. That's it. The whole plot of the manga is just the Major externalizing an internal debate over what to do with a posthuman existence, and whether she should return to Section 9 or not. Every other element of the series not pertinent to that debate is extraneous, which is why none of it is resolved. I think it's a cool idea for a story. I don't like it because I think it's poorly executed. Issues of art quality aside, all the computer stuff is just meaningless technobabble and while I can respect the author's decision not to spend energy wrapping up subplots that don't actually have to do with the story's point, I think making 10 out of 12 issues deal with those subplots exclusively and then dropping them for the real plot in the final two issues is sort of lame. | | Monday, August 13th, 2007 | | 4:55 pm |
My copies of the Anthony Yu translation of Journey to the West, the Sidney Shapiro translation of Outlaws of the Marsh, and the David Hawkes and John Minford translation of The Dream of the Red Chamber arrived. I would put them next to my Moss Roberts translation of Three Kingdoms, but I am running out of shelf space. [/brag] |
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