I am not yet used to this vacation thing, and I’m posting this late, so I’ll just go fro the cheesiest of copouts – the list post. To be a little fair, I’ll stay within the bounds of cool things for monday and use today to rattle off 5 sites that might be worth visiting. I might never have gotten around to doing a full post on any of them, but they rattle around in my mind, and I want to get them out there.

1. Knowledge Games – This is another one from Dave Gray, who writes a lot of really interesting stuff about the presentation of information and the nature of the book. This particular project is all about taking game thinking and applying it to business situations. Like all good experiments, the results are hit or miss, but it’s a fantastic perspective on the nature of games, and worth checking out.

2. Cool Tools and Holycool get treated as one topic. Both are basically just blogs of neat stuff. Banal, I know, but it’s really, really neat stuff, and I like stuff!

3. Tumblr – It’s a free microblogging site, which is a fancy way to say it’s ideally suited for posts that are longer than twitter but shorter than a full bore post. Thing is, the clean interface and the robust handling of media (it imbeds photos and clips and such very smoothly) have resulted in a lot of people starting to look at it as an option for full time, hassle free blogging. Even people with fulltime blogs often keep a tumblr blog as a place to dump things that don’t really merit a full post, but are still worth capturing.

4. Peter Bregman is a blogger for the Harvard Business Review, and most of what he does is pretty much summed up right there except, well, he’s actually really good. He doesn’t write a lot, but his hit rate for posts I save for later reading is very high.

5. Quest for Fun is the blog of the Black Diamond Game Store in Concord, CA. It’s interesting and informative, sure, but it’s especially noteworthy because the owner of the shop really goes out of his way to provide an eyes on the ground view of how things work in the game industry form his perspective. He recently did a series of graphs breaking down sales by brand in various categories (RPGs, games & minis) which were wuite informative.

I was listening to a theater review on the radio this weekend, and it made my brain feel squishy. It was kind of a reminder of everything I hate about review culture: for every enthusiastic or experienced voice out there willing to talk about the subject, there are two who want to use the subject as a launching point to tell the reader how awesome they are and how they would have done things. The ratio varies a bit from subject to subject, and a lot of what allows this is that the standards for how to talk about things like shows and books are fuzzy at best. There’s a certain amount of academic practice related to analysis and deconstruction, but even that’s hit or miss. It’s a mix of useful insights and self-referential hoo-haw, and good luck telling which is which.

And it is with all that in mind that I realize I am all the more amazed by today’s cool thing in the internet, TVTropes.org.

If you’re familiar with the site, then you know it’s horrible power. It may be one of the most interesting things to read on the entire Internet, and once you start on it, you often find yourself 2 hours later with 20 tabs open as you go through the stuff. But if you’re not familiar with it, then you may both thank and hate me for opening this particular door.

See, TVtropes is the best analysis of television in the world, at least through a certain lens. It’s a wiki of, well, television tropes – elements and ideas that come up often enough to be recognizable. In addition to entries on these ideas like “The Eigen Plot”, “Applied Phlebotinum” or “Authority Equals Asskicking” they include extensive cross-references to where the idea appears (or is subverted) in TV, movies, anime, manga, comics, roleplaying games and very nearly anywhere else anyone can think of. I know it sounds dry when described, but the proof is in the reading. Just go poke around a bit. You’ll see.

I love this site on a few levels. First, it’s just tremendously fun to flip through, and that should not be underestimated. Second, it’s an example of crowdsourcing that actually works – a lot of wikis on other topics end up much less interesting for an array of issues, but while TVTropes has its warts, the whole is magnificent. Lastly, I love it in an academic sense – the site represents a level of thought and analysis of the topic that I have yet to see an equal of, and I have bugger all idea how that fits in the standard hierarchy of knowledge.

Awesomely disruptive change is, well, awesome.

This has been the kind of week that reminds me why I insist on writing about something good on the Internet every Monday. I’ve got a backlog of ideas – I played the new Warhammer this weekend, and I’ve been kicking around more dice ideas, but the simple ritual of stopping and thinking about the good things out there is too important to my sanity to stop.

Today I want to talk about Angie’s List. This has been on my mind as people on various vectors have been talking about buying or repairing their houses, and my thoughts go back to our own very mixed experiences. I only heard of Angie’s list because they’re an NPR sponsor, but that worked out better for them then buying a radio ad would have. It made me curious enough to check out their website, and I’m glad I did.

Angie’s List is one of those ideas that reflects the practical application of the things that technology promises us. It’s a review site, but what makes it noteworthy is that it’s a review site that focuses on local workers (contractors, repairmen and so on, though they’ve recently been branching out to things like doctors). The ‘local’ part means they don’t cover every area, but their definitions of metropolitan areas seem suitably flexible.

The model is very simple. You hire a plumber and, after he’s done, you can write up a review of your experience on Angie’s List. When someone else in your area needs a plumber, they can hit the web site and see all the reviews of local plumbers. Simple as that. It’s even a little crude, since user generated data can create weird redundancies or crossovers, but it works, and it works well.

It’s been going for a couple of years now, and the amount of information on the site has gained a nice level of depth. Yes, that also means its accrued some false reviews and otherwise been gamed, but it’s nothing that a little critical reading can’t get you past.

Now, the rub is that it’s a paid site. They were smart and had a long free period so they could accrue a lot f data before going paid, but eventually they needed to make money. On it’s own, the price is a little high ($60 for a year, $7.50 for a month, with a $15 signup fee to deal with the sane and reasonable folks who would just pay for a month when they need it) but given the cost of most home repairs, it’s very small as a percentage of total cost, and especially small compared to the cost of having a bad job done.

In many ways I consider an Angie’s List membership as something comparable to a subscription to Consumer Reports online. I don’t bother to remember it when I’m not using it, but when the time comes that I do need it, it’s a very cost-effective investment.

So, if you’re in a position where it will matter that the people who install your windows or fix your plumbing know what they’re doing, it’s definitely worth your while to check out Angie’s List.

As excited as I am to get onto dice variants and Warhammer 3e, I need to maintain discipline. Monday posts exist primarily to remind myself that the internet has cool and wonderful things within its bounds. This offsets the other 6 days of the week when I face reminders of the cesspit parts.

There’s a lot of good stuff to read on the Internet, but the simple reality is that it’s a pain to keep track of it all. An RSS aggregator, like Google News or NetNewsWire goes a long way towards making the good stuff easier to keep track of, but it doesn’t give me any extra time to read. That becomes a problem on those occasions when something very long and very thoughtful merits reading.

Historically, my solution was to see if they had a print view (because nothing says fun like clicking through 6 times to get through a piece) and either bookmark that or print it out in hopes of getting back to it later. Sometimes it worked, but even when it did it tended to result in a pile of stuff. That’s not terrible, but it’s lossy.

I’ve been much happier about these things since I found Instapaper.

So, Instapaper is sort of a clipping service, a lightweight and smartly designed one. It works like this: I find an article I’d like to read later, and I click on the Instapaper bookmarklet.[1] I get a little popup, and that’s that. Later on, if I go to the Instapaper site, they’ve got the article archived for me, either in its original format or with much of the formatting stripped out (which makes it much easier for screen reading).

So far that’s nice and convenient, but where it really shines is in how it works with other technology. First and foremost, you can export bundles of the articles you’re reading into a variety of ebook formats. I have a fat batch of articles stores on my kindle to make for random reading anytime I need.[2]

Perhaps even better, there’s an iphone/ipod touch app (both a free and paid version) which syncs with your account and keeps the articles on your device. As a touch owner, this has been a godsend. Because it archives them locally, I can read my articles while I’m offline.

Instapaper is the brainchild of Marco Arment, a name that might be familiar to folks who pay attention to Tumblr development. He is my current nerd rockstar, because so far as I’m concerned, that’s a fantastic 1-2 punch.

Anyway, if you have a lot of stuff online you want to read, and you want to make you’re life easier, then check out Instapaper. You’ll know pretty quickly if it’s the thing for you or not.

1 – That’s nerdy term for a bookmark that does something. It’s nothing technical that calls for installation or anything weird. It’s just like any other bookmark in your browser.

2- It won’t mail directly to the kindle, but that’s more a function of Amazon’s policies than a technical limitation.

I’ve got nothing against Microsoft Word. I use it almost every day, and it’s really good at doing what it’s supposed to do – make documents that look professional enough for a business context without needing all the overhead of a full-bore layout program. Sure, that wasn’t how it started: back in the days of wordstar (and CUTTING EDGE ascii art) the big deal was that we could write these things on a computer, and edit our writing rather than re-writing everything. I grew up as this transition was taking place, and it’s still pretty miraculous to me. As much as I enjoy writing things by hand, I can’t imagine going back to needing to do so for everything.

I mention all this because software has evolved with time. As we got used to this idea of writing on computers, the software came to reflect more than just the need to write. Writing was easy, after all, so why not start adding useful things like formatting, indexes, styles and so on. The actual writing is all well and good, but anyone can do that, right? The computer can make your writing look better (and in the case of things like spell-checkers, might actually make it better).

It’s a little cynical, sure, but it’s been a good thing overall. Yes, programs like Word allow for people to create layout abominations to raise up on the altar of Comic Sans, but it also means that Joe guy can make a layout that’s good enough with very little time, skill, or knowledge. The impact on layout is very like that of sophisticated photography software: the folks who could only do a few tricks get overshadowed by software, but the people with real talent end up really standing out.

The problem with this is that the actual writing tends to get lost in the wash. Not to say it’s impossible to write in something like Word, but there’s a lot of noise to deal with. All the options and buttons are there on the screen, begging to be used, and that’s bad enough, but the real danger is more sinister. When you write something and lay out out at the same time (which is what you can accidentally end up doing in word) then it tends to feel done, and that’s incredibly dangerous. Editing and rewriting are critical important to any kind of quality writing, but when you have something your brain thinks is a finished product, it’s easy to gloss over it, or hesitate to make a change because it will throw off the pagination.

This was a big problem for me, and I tried a bunch of tricks to try to deal with it. My Word interface is incredibly minimal, and I prepared equally minimalistic stylesheets to keep the text looking raw. It worked ok, but it was occasionally a pain, especially when Word decided to explode in helpfulness all over whatever I was writing.

I found relief in the form of writing software. Not Word Processing or Text Editing, but honest-to-God writing software, programs designed with the actual act of writing in mind. The first I came across was Writeroom, and it changed a lot of how I do things. See, Writeroom and a number of programs like it are fullscreen text editors – they were designed to remove all the distractions that come from working on a computer, like pop up windows, chat and mail notifications and so on. You fire it up and your whole screen goes black, except for your little green cursor. Yes, you are effectively using software to make your too-expensive computer look and feel like an old CRT Apple IIe, but as counter-intuitive as that is, it works REALLY well. Those distractions (and the temptations that come with them, to just check a website or the like) are absolute killers, and being able to shut them out let me really focus.

Since then, a number of similar programs have come out, including Darkroom (which may have predated Writeroom, I don’t recall), Writemonkey and Q10. These had their own small gimmicks, and they all had the advantage of working on Windows, so I tended to view them as roughly interchangeable. But my poking around also revealed that there was a whole category of programs dedicated to writing novels or other long-form works.

This is a weird category because there are a number of really robust and interesting options available for apple, but there are almost no comparable programs available for windows. The closest I’ve seen is people who have adapted Microsoft OneNote to writing, and while they do so to good effect, it’s definitely a case of making use of the tools available.

On the OSX side there were programs like Ulysses, Copywrite, Storymill and my favorite, Scrivener[1]. There are fine distinctions between the features of these programs, but the basics are the same. You create a collection of documents (which might be documents or media or whatever) which you can organize and edit as you see fit. Sounds simple enough, but it means that you can do things like keep your research notes, character thoughts, random ideas and your actual writing together in the same place, where it’s easy to edit, hide or shift around whatever parts you need in a way that suits your writing style. There’s very little in the way of formatting – headers, bold and italic, though footnotes tend to get good support – and the bells and whistles are much more about things that make writing easier, like offering a fullscreen mode.

All these functions sit on top of a database, rather than a collection of documents, which offers a lot of benefits. Most notably, you just don’t worry about saving your work – it just happens. The database architecture means that you can also do robust version control, and while that may sound unnecessarily technical, it’s incredibly handy to realize you can save your work like you would a video game and, if you end up with the writer’s equivalent of a TPK, you can revert to the save without disrupting your current ‘game’.

The upshot of this is that I started writing on the mac unless I absolutely had no choice. Now, “no choice” comes up more often than you’d think, especially if you’re collaborating with others, since you need to use the software that everyone has. This got exacerbated when I picked up a netbook – I love it, but it runs windows, so Scrivener was not an option. So I went back to where I started and grabbed a full screen editor (as it turns out, they’re very well-suited to netbook use).

I started using Writemonkey for the most frivolous of reasons: One of its options turns on typing sounds as you write. Actual typing sounds – you can choose between an old style typewriter, an old IBM keyboard or a bunch of other options. I’m an absolute sucker for that sort of thing, but it turns out to have been a good decision. WM was rock solid. It supports markdown for minimal formatting, it exported without problems, and it did everything I asked of it, but it was still a choice I went to out of necessity rather than any real desire.

That changed with the latest release of Writemonkey, as it added “Focus”. It’s a little rough to explain, but the idea is this: imagine you’re writing a very long doc, and you are looking through it and realize you need to expand on one section. In WM, you can highlight that section, hit f6, and the rest of the document vanishes while you work on that one section. When you’re done, just hit f6 and you swap back to seeing everything, but with your new writing now tidily in place.

Now, maybe it’s just me, but I find it very easy to get a little bit overwhelmed by very long documents. This ability to just zero in on a specific section and work on it without giving any thought to the rest of the document is an absolute godsend. There are some other nice implicit uses for it – it helps with writing off an outline for example – but the bottom line is that it offers the same sort of advantage that the full screen editor does, the ability to focus on the writing without distraction.

Now, hold my hand in the fire, and I’ll acknowledge that Scrivener is still my first love. I paid money for it, and it’s got many more features, but it’s not entirely without warts. I’ve heard of problems syncing the DB with dropbox, and that makes me kind of nervous. Plus, the one downside of the whole database model is that I need to export anything if I want to share it. But despite these small things, Scrivener is still the single best program I’ve used for organizing and writing a project, but when it comes to just writing, Writemonkey may actually be my favorite. The simplicity of it (it’s just editing a text file) makes it much easier to just jump into writing something.

The good news is I never really need to choose. Circumstance tends to dictate whether I’m going to be on a Mac or Windows box at at given moment, and I now have a tool for each one which I am absolutely delighted to use to write.

1 – For the absolute best list of writing programs for both windows and mac, check out the link page at Literatureandlatte.com (the guys behind Scrivener).

I had a good round of character creation on Saturday, and we’re going to run a prologue this coming Saturday, so much of my brain is in that space now. I’ll probably be using that for fodder for this week’s posts so you all get to see how I turn this stack of notes into something to play because, well, we did chargen in the absence of system, and I will hack the system to match the characters in time for play. That’s going to be fun, but challenging. But that’s a topic for tomorrow.

Today I want to talk about Abulafia, which thankfully has the now easier to remember url of random-generator.com. It is basically a giant wiki of random generators, so if you need to create a B-Movie Title, a Superhero Name, a Secret Society (or go a step further and make your own Splats) , or possibly every In a Wicked Age Oracle you can think of, this is your one stop shop.

As useful a resource as this is, it’s worth noting that because it’s built on wiki guts, it allows for people to constantly create new and interesting lists. There’s a bit of a performance hit that comes from this – because there’s a lot of referencing various text tables in different places, the page loads can be a bit slow – but the sheer depth of content is more than worth the lag.

I’m a huge fan of these sorts of randomizers, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. It is a rare game that I don’t dip into some sort of rich randomizer (like Tarot, I-Ching, Oblique Strategies or the like) to see what it shakes loose. Abulafia has the advantage of being more diverse and outright wacky than any other option, so it’s a good tool for a GM to keep in her back pocket.

Like most of the rest of the world, I am totally freaking hooked on Dragon Age: Origins. My one line summary is that it feels like a campaign GM’d by Fred Hicks. Fred is a mean bastard of a GM, so this is high praise indeed. That sense of a GM’d game is one of the hallmarks of a Bioware game, creating a world that responds to the actions of play, and Dragon Age really turns this up to 11 – the technology for the graphics and stuff is nice, but the real benefit of the tech can be seen in just how many choices the game can now support.

So, with about 40-50 hours of play under my belt, split between a few characters, I feel like it’s time for a list of 10 things to know about Dragon Age:Origins.

1. Fighter’s are the simplest class to play, and there’s a lot to be said for starting with a fighter to try out a starting background and to get familiar with the rules and controls (especially if you’re on X-Box because the manual pretty much exists to convince you to buy a strat guide). Once you have that familiarity, you can try a rogue or mage. So far my sense is that Mage is probably the most interesting to play.

2. This is a Bioware game, so get the intimidation/persuasion skill. Lacking it will greatly diminish your options in play. Also, as a Bioware game, do not buy into the idea that there is some “right” decision the game is expecting you to make. There isn’t. There are rails, certainly, but they are very wide, and your leeway within them is much more than you might expect.

3. There is no way I won’t be trying all the backgrounds, and I expect this game will probably get 2 or 3 playthroughs out of me at a minimum. I’ve tried 3 so far (Male-Human-Fighter-Noble, Male-Human-Mage-Circle and Male-Elf-Rogue-City, my primary) and every now and again something from one of the other backgrounds shows up in play, and it really makes the world feel more organic

4. Oh, God, Backpacks. I have bought every backpack I could afford and I am still short on inventory space. This gets really annoying because I tend to be deep in a dungeon when I’m running out of space. The soldier’s peak expansion helps with this, but it’s still pretty maddening.

5. The resolution of one of the big plot knots involved a lot of watching two NPCs talk to each other. As it turns out, this is not much more fun on the console than it is on the tabletop. It’s well written and interesting, but it comes off as a bit of a sour note. I don’t mind watching cut scenes of events taking place elsewhere in the game – that’s part of the genre – but watching my character watch a scene makes me wonder why I’m there.

6. It’s the small choices that kill you. I have yet to have any huge, sweeping choices that were particularly hard (or even terribly moving), but I have had innumerable small choices that left me staring at the screen, paralyzed, totally invested in the result. Bioware’s always been good at this, but this takes it to a whole new level.

7. The game combines of a lot of voice acting talent, quality writing, and an engine that allows them quickly generate visually distinctive characters. That’s all well and good for the heroes, but it’s much more important for the support characters. It is far harder to play “Spot the named character” by looking for the one with better graphics or voice acting, and that’s fantastic, because it really drives home the sense that things can change at the drop of a hat.

8. The downloadable content has been worth the price (though I got some of it free for pre-ordering). Soldier’s Peak adds an extra dungeon that has a solid story to it, which also serves as a base once you’ve cleared it out. Sadly, I have not been able to recruit people to come work there, so my dreams of this being Dark Suikoden have not yet come to fruit. The more expensive pack, which adds the golem, Shale, is possibly even more worth it. First and foremost, it’s not a Bioware game until you throw in a killing machine with a dry wit. He’s fun to have in the party, and he’s incredibly useful. I have so far had at least two boss fights that I’m pretty sure I would have lost if he had not been tanking for me.

9. I am pretty sure I’m missing a lot by not reading every codex update, but honestly there’s just too much, and the console is not ideal for it, especially since when I get a codex update I need to go track it down deep in the menus. In theory, this is helped by new things being highlighted, but the way navigation works, if I have to scroll down to something new, I un-highlight it without realizing it. This is a pain, and while I recognize that there are limitations to the interface that come from playing on the console, this (and some inventory management) are close to genuine frustrations. This is exacerbated by the gameplay being so fun that I already resent needing to drop out into the land of menus, so having that be a kind of rough experience is unfun.

10. I’m pretty happy with the graphics. I can niggle about things like the palette or compare it to other games that do this or that better, but the simple truth is that the graphics are good enough to convey a strong sense of place without impeding on the gameplay, and they are capable of generating the occasional moment of wow from a surprising vista or a unique animation. Sound is similarly impressive, though I find I greatly miss hearing my hero speak, a la Mass Effect.

I’ve been sick for days, so I’ve had plenty of opportunity to marathon this game and I am hooked enough that my wife has started developing a deep loathing for it. Likely I’ll have to drop to less frequent play now that I’m starting to recover, but I look forward to working through it. So far I’m really excited – I’m a console RPG nut, and so far this has blown a lot of previous contenders out of the water in terms of play experience. But I am also well aware that I’m not done yet, and it’s entirely possible that it could all come crashing down, or end with a whimper rather than a bang, but for the time being I will hold out hope.