Wis[s]e Words

Romance ALL the things!

Published on November 24, 20141 Comment

Richard Cobett talks about Bioware’s continuing evolution of sex ‘n romance in their games:

With each game though, Bioware has gone out of its way to Do Better, and not always by heading down the obvious path. Dragon Age 2 for instance infamously made all of its romanceable characters (the entire party save for Varric and Aveline) bisexual so that any player would be able to get with anyone they wanted. Dragon Age Inquisition and Mass Effect 3 reverses that approach, deciding that sexuality is an important part of the characters and that it can be as jarring for everyone you meet to be an option as to be politely refused. Some characters are still bisexual. Most now have their preferences, with Dragon Age expanding on gender to factor in species as well. Qunari especially seem limited in who they can give the horn.

From a Watsonian, in-game point of view I can understand this, but from a Doylian, gamer point of view I’d rather the gaming world did reshape itself around my romance preferences. One of the greatest disappointments coming to the Mass Effect series years after everybody else and hearing so much about the incredible romance options –some of which may have been sarcasm, in hindsight– was finding out that actually, my options as Femshep were either Kaidan, the Dullness that Walks Like A Man, or Liara, with no options to woo Garrus, let alone Ashley. From a game playing point of view, for games like this, I’d like the option to romance everybody, even if this doesn’t make that much sense from within the game world. I don’t want the game to decide for me who is and isn’t romanceable, just like I don’t want the game to do decide what I look like.

That’s the whole point of open world RPGs like the Dragon Ages, Mass Effects and Elder Scrolls after all, that freedom to create your own character within the larger storyline. Freedom of romance fits in with that.

And no, the idea that everybody you romance has to be bisexual if you can romance them in both your female and male persona is wrong, though an understandable error. It’s just that in one leg of the trousers of time Ashley happened to be gay, in another straight…

Blind book dates at ABC

Published on November 23, 20141 Comment

So yesterday I went to the Blind Book Date at the American Book Center. This was an idea that their sf book buyer Tiemen Zwaan had come up with, an extension of his own experiments in selling books wrapped in brown paper with only crypic clues to reveal their identity. Now it was our turn to both baffle our fellow readers and crack their own codes. It made me realise one thing: I’m woefully under read.

I’d expected only sf or fantasy books would be represented, but in fact there was a wide spread of books, both fiction and non-fiction being offered by the 17-18 or so participants. Some of the clues were obvious, some obvious with hindsight, some had me racking my brains trying to remember what book this had to be, while some were brilliant but impossible to guess, like the book shown above. The woman who brought the book on the left had actually hidden her clues in the wrapping paper itself. Clever but perhaps too clever and it was only because somebody else brought the same book with more conventional clues, that people were able to guess which book it was…

As for my book, the clues I brought were:

Secret History
Kim Philby
Cold War Magic
Mount Ararat

Can you tell what book it is?

Incidently, the smartypants at Making Light have been hosting their own blind book date party, not just writing cryptic clues, but writing them in the style of a different author, which is far too clever by half.

Better than Spider Robinson’s fanfic any day

Published on November 22, 2014Leave a comment

The person who wrote this little The Rolling Stones vignette really has Heinlein’s writing patterns down pat:

“Chief Engineer Grandma?” Meade said sweetly, ducking her head into the room. “Would you please tell Buster to stay out of my garden? He may think he’s clever, but he’s killing my broccoli. I’d tell him myself, but he obviously doesn’t listen to me.”

Hazel looked across the chessboard at Lowell. “Best do as she says, Junior,” she commented.

“But she’s wrong about the salinity gradients-” he protested.

“Grandmother dearest,” Meade said, her hands on her hips. “Why does everyone aboard this ship assume I am incapable of doing math?”

“Beats me,” Hazel said. “I tutored you myself; you can handle a differential with the best of ‘em.”

Really. The voices, the way the characters speak, that mixture of banter and infodumping, it’s all prime Heinlein and Kalirush has done a great job capturing it. I wish they’d do more Heinlein stories.

Broken Homes — Ben Aaronovitch

Published on November 20, 2014Leave a comment

Cover of Broken Homes

Broken Homes
Ben Aaronovitch
357 pages
published in 2013

Peter Grant was a normal copper until he noticed he could talk to dead people in Rivers of London/Midnight Riot. Now he’s part of the Folly, the Metropolitian Police’s special unit for magic, which apart from him consists of one elderly but backwards aging survivor of the glory days of British wizardry before the war, as well as his colleague Lesley May, Toby the dog and Molly, the folly’s housekeeper of indefinitive species, currently experimenting with cooking from one of Jamie Oliver’s recipe books, to mixed results.

Broken Homes is the fourth novel in the Rivers of London series. There has been a mini boom in London based fantasy these past few years and Aaronovitch isn’t the only one either who has his protagonist working for the Met. There’s a sort of inevitability about the idea. London with its long history and dominant presence in the psyche of not just Britain, but arguably the world, just fits as a nexus of magic in a way that say Amsterdam wouldn’t. Of course the Met would have its own magical police force, some hangover from Victorian times, staffed with aging public schoolboys, into which the thoroughly modern London figure of police constable Peter Grant fits awkwardly. That tension between the gentlemanly tradition of magic and modern policing is part of the charm of the series.

Vuurwerk Vijftig!

Published on November 19, 2014Leave a comment

Whoa. Nostalgia. Back when I was a young metalhead, in the long ago days of the late eighties/early nineties, every Tuesday night I would listen to the one radio show that actually played metal, Vara’s Vuurwerk, presented by Dutch singer and media personality Henk Westbroek, with occasional guest presenting by the network’s big boss Marcel van Dam. Hearing that jingle for the first time in years brings back memories, especially of the programme’s annual Top Fifty Metal Songs, broadcast over Christmas and chosen by the listeners. The 1990 edition especially, extended to 65 songs because that was the network’s 65th anniversary year, molded a lot of my tastes in metal. Now, thanks to some enterprising soul, a selection of Vuurwerk programmes, mostly from 1987 but with excerpts from that 1990 list, are available on Grooveshark.