Thursday randomness

Had my first iPod crash today. Foo. Was easy enough to follow Apple's instructions and fix it, but it still sucked.

We got to see irana and family last night! Yay! We sat around and watched Shrek 2 and I dozed off because I am teh suck, but it was still fun. Yay!

Also watched the big cross-dressing gender identity episode of Popular, which was just wonderful (and more powerful because it didn't take the easy way out at the end). So damned good.

And between last night and this morning, I finished watching the recent History Channel broadcast of The French Revolution on my Tivo. Anyone with any interest in history, or even current world affairs, should try to catch a rebroadcast of this one. It's one of the best overviews on the subject that I've seen. And it's narrated by Edward Hermann!

shadesong is off to Arisia today, where she'll be meeting up with at least a few of you. Have fun, all!

Not much else of interest, link-wise. But tell me that this cartoon isn't a wish-fulfillment fantasy for anyone who's say through a horrible Matt Lesko commercial.

Laurel K. Hamilton and Squaresoft: The similarities

[Warning: If you are offended at the idea that LKH's recent books have shown her to be talentless hack who alternates between just phoning it in and writing Mary Sue fanfic, you should probably read another post, preferably one about fluffy bunnies, or maybe one about fluffy bunnies having kinky sex with gorillas and an albino giraffe.]

So, jet_li_wannabe, shadesong, and I were talking about the latest Anita Blake, Supernatural-Creature Fucker novel today. And jet_li_wannabe mentioned that he thought that there was about 100 good pages of reading in the 500 or so pages of "novel." shadesong mentioned that even as someone who enjoyed reading porn, she found that a sex scene every few pages was just a little much.

That's when it occurred to me:

Laurell is writing the horror/porn equivalent of an early Squaresoft game.

Background: D&D (and many other early RPGS) had a Wandering Monster Table. The theory was that, to avoid the games always playing the same, the DM would roll randomly to see if the adventurers encountered a wandering monster in a dungeon. I honestly can't remember if the 1st Edition Rules required constant rolling, or if it was an option (my first DM certainly used it a lot, but he was as new to DMing as I was to playing). Either way, no DM really wanted to roll a die every few seconds just to see if an orc would randomly pop up, especially if they had a really nifty trap/encounter that they wanted the adventurers to get to. So most GMs ended up using the Wandering Monster table only when it helped move the characters along, or punish them, or give them some experience (depending on the DM and the players). This made a lot more sense than simply wandering down an empty hallway and encountering twelve kobolds and a bugbear out of nowhere.

When Square (and, to be fair, many other makers of Electronic RPGs) started releasing games for the second-gen systems (the NES/Sega Master System/etc), and continuing, to an extent, even now, they incorporated the Wandering Monster Table. This meant that you could move your little party representation across a map, and, in spite of not seeing anything, and having plenty of alternate routes (say, if you're crossing the countryside), get pulled into a random monster encounter.

At first, this was a good thing. After all, characters needed experience points to boost their characters, and there needed to be a palpable sense of danger.

But the problem with a random encounter table is that it's, well, random. And in some games, you'd encounter a group of monsters, beat them, walk a step, and get drawn in to yet another battle. It could take thirty minutes to cross two inches of a television screen, the video game equivalent of the end of a football game.

And if you're actually trying to advance the plot and get to a planned encounter, there's no DM to decide, "hey, let's not bother rolling on the Wandering Monster Table," and Murphy's Law seemed to guarantee that such times were when you'd be forced to waste time against another stupid band of thieves. It's the sort of thing that has driven many a gamer nuts, and caused more than a few to swear off RPGs (although games like Diablo and others have done a nice job of randomizing without removing the ability to see monsters coming at you and avoid encounters).

Which brings me back to Anita Blake. You see, that 100 pages of plot and character development (using the terms as loosely as you'd imagine) are interrupted time and again by random sex encounters, most of which are as believable than the random sex encounters you might find in a porn move (I swear, I expect the next LKH novel to have a scene in which Anita enters a shoe store to buy new Nikes, and ends up flashing the clerk, then blowing him in the stockroom while bad '70s music plays). One can only imagine a little electronic 8-bit Anita moving along, attempting to get from, say, her house to a cab, only to feel that pull (called "The Ardeur"). The player would mutter "oh shit, not again" as the screen spins, and she's tossed into a random sex encounter with a werewolf and a goat. Upon finishing the encounter, she moves along as if nothing has happened and enters the cab. The 250 experience points gained from the encounter can be applied to increasing her "resist gag reflex" skill the next time she levels up.

Man, how come this video game license hasn't been snatched up? It's a natural.