I didn't take very good notes last night, but I hauled myself out of bed this morning for a session on e-book readers. The topic was fairly broad, but we ended up spending a lot of time talking about the publishing and business side (unsurprising, since the panelists were all authors doing e-pub).

There was an interesting disconnect between how I perceive this marketplace and how many others in the room did. I've only recently started to seriously consume ebooks, so my focus has been more on the big streamlined distributors (Amazon, Apple, B&N, Sony). It was pretty clear, though, that there's a midrange and long tail market that I was unaware of.

Specifically, there are specialty markets (the example here was erotic romance) that fill niches that big publishers don't. These gap fillers tend to be focusing on the electronic format as the first or only release, whereas the big publishers tend to focus on the print path first. This path tends go look more like:

1. publisher publishes on their web site first, no distributor involved. Author royalty is substantially higher (35% was example given)
2. then, the publishers sends it to the broader distributors. This includes amazon-level distributors, but there are apparently also smaller distributors that are willing to take bigger risks. (omnilit, all romance ebooks)

There was a lot of optimism around the long tail aspect of all this—the idea that the smaller publishers can compete more effectively in this space against the big established publishers. There was also a lot of excitement about ebook price points versus physical books, although I didn't think that people gave a lot of credence go the raw power of amazon's power over loss leading pricing right now. Still, amazon's "low" prices are relative to print prices; the electronic-only publishers can still to get under that $9.99 price point.

Finally, a lot of people were excited about the cheap/free books aspect of ebooks. I found myself distressed by this, because it's easy to see the withering of the library in this worldview.

So what's the best use of smart paper (ipad, whatever) with tabletop gaming? Dice, shared boards, and rule checks are obvious but unsatisfying answers. How far do they take us? Better answers seem to revolve around simplifying repetitive tasks, but D&D4 already does a nice job of this with the character builder & the cards it prints out. So where's the sweet spot?

Week One: Spreadsheets

The first week, I focused on making a character sheet, using a spreadsheet. I entered most of the statistics supplied from the standard D&D character sheet, with a thought towards having a convenient reference. On a whim, I also created a sheet to track damage done to monsters, and a simple formula to guess total monster health based on when the monster is bloodied.

What was most interesting to me was it was the last piece that was what I used the most. The recapitulation of stats was fine, but it didn't add much to what I could get from having a physical piece of paper in front of me. Tracking the combat, on the other hand, gave me a fairly visceral way to see what was going on in the fight.

Week Two: Web Apps

Yesterday, I decided to try a different tack. My DM has frequently talked up a web application named "iPlay4e," which takes the ddi files generated from the Character Creator app, and turns it into an interactive, web-based character sheet.

I had tried iPlay4e before, but it hadn't stuck. The iPhone view is pretty nice, but you just can't see enough information. Also, while you can "share" character sheets, only the original owner can use it interactively. By interactively, I mean that they can do things like track health, which abilities have been used, how many action points have been used, etcetera.

I finally uploaded my character sheets to my own account, and tried the interactive features out. I was pretty surprised to find that they were real game changers. There were two important differences between my spreadsheet efforts and iPlay4e. The first was the general level of polish for tracking all of the little details that one has to track in a gameplay session (and support for the normal ways of refreshing those resources, like short and extended rests). The second was a little thing called the D&D Compendium.

The D&D Compendium is a part of a subscription-based service offered by Wizards of the Coast. It contains all of the snippets of rules texts contained in all the 4th Edition D&D books, including errata. It has a searchable and filterable database of rules, items, classes, etc.

I've subscribed to this service for a few months now, but I didn't use the compendium much. It was somewhat awkward to use on a phone's screen, and lugging a laptop back and forth to gaming is not the best solution for me. (More on this topic later.)

Using it with a larger screen was again, a revelation. Suddenly I wasn't dragging four or more books around (I've taken to leaving the books in the car, for convenience). And the best part is, the compendium is integrated with iPlay4e, so suddenly my character sheet is directly indexed into the books.

In short, I loved iPlay4e. I made a donation to the author during the play session, because I thought it was so cool. I wish I'd listened to my DM earlier.

Why the tablet?

So... why don't I just lug a laptop? I have in the past, and have worked up elaborate spreadsheets & dice roller apps (ranging from GUI-based to perl-based). The reasons can be summed up as follows:

• My laptop bag is heavier than carrying my D&D books.
• If I'm using my laptop, I'm secretly browsing the web.

The latter point is the biggest issue: attention span. Having lots of windows means that if the game slows down, you've lost me. And there's a big damn wall in front of my face, so you don't even know if you had my attention in the first place. Laptops suck, because they take you out of the social interaction.

I've been using my phone, since the iPhone and other modern smartphones have finally introduced real web browsers and chat tools to a small form factor. But the tablet is big enough to use data visualization, and small enough to carry around without it being a thing. The battery life on the iPad in specific is also a huge factor -- there's zero chance I'm going to bother carrying around extra crap like a power adapter, because there's zero chance I'm going to run out of juice. From this morning's charge to this evening's writing of this blog post, I still had 30% left after a day's usage.

Also, new nerdy toys are fun. I like to dip my chocolate in my peanut butter.

Why not paper & books?

I will say that I'm resisting the urge to use dice rollers. After using many over the years, I currently feel like if I'm not actively rolling the dice, I'm not playing the game. The D20 is iconic to this game in particular, and I'd like to hear it hit the table.

The WOTC software tools for D&D4e are great, if regrettably not available for the Mac. Being able to print out character powers and items with the roll formulas computed for your character is huge. I honestly didn't feel the need for any kind of software solution for quite a while. That started to change as I hit level 10 and higher though, and the number of cards I was juggling became difficult to manage. If iPlay4e did nothing else, it wins by sorting my power "cards" by what phase they can be used in, and how often they recharge, and then letting me "check them off" as I use them. This does solve a real problem that I was having trying to use the cards, once the number of cards got unwieldy.

The spreadsheet is nice to have, although I freely admit it's mostly me trying to reverse engineer the monster stats based on observable phenomena, since I don't get a running hit point count or monster defenses level. I used to track that on the whiteboard that we game on top of, but as the maps got bigger and the number of cards grew, I lost valuable whiteboard space.

The books have just gotten heavy, now that I own four or more. I'd love to avoid having to carry them all.

So what have I learned so far?

• The web tools for D&D are far better than I realized; if you're using a web-enabled device of any stripe, you should check them out.
• I'm interested in toys & tools that keep me in, not out, of the social aspects of my gaming.
• I'm still a pretty far cry from my initial desire: getting beyond the obvious ways these tools can enhance the experience beyond what pen & paper can do, and into what's novel about something like a tablet. I look forward to finding more answers out, though.

In 2001, I found the analog photos that I took of the trip, and finally put the e-mails & scanned images together into a Paris 1997 travelogue.

(The next big trip like this was Paris in 2005 with Carrie, but I phoned that one in a lot more, with just a few shots posted to my blog, apparently.)

The next whack I took at this was the Christmas 2008 trip to England. My approach this time was to take a large number of photos during the day, then upload & edit them that night, and make a coherent blog post for the day with -- usually -- no more than three photos as highlights. This shows up on the December 2008 and January 2009 archive pages of my blog, although, regrettably, the reverse chronological order suffers for later reading.

The trip to Hawaii we just returned from, on the other hand, has no tangible record, because I posted it mostly to Facebook, which is generally walled off. You can piece it together from my Facebook wall, since I generally don't use the privacy settings, but it's still not put together in any kind of coherent form.

Granularity and Community

Of the three, I think the first one stands up best as a piece of writing. Yes, I have ten years more experience under my belt now, but it was actually written to be read later. It probably tells the best story for someone who's interested in the trip after the fact.

On the other hand, the Facebook entries were the most satisfying for me. Since I was working from a facebook-enabled cameraphone, I felt like I could show interesting things as I encountered them, and getting comments as we explored gave me a real sense of remaining connected to community. I recognized that I was probably splatting out about twice as much information as people really cared about, but we were having fun and seeing interesting things, and I wanted to share that enthusiasm. In a very nerdy way, it was sort of like the kind of community I get from being in an MMO -- I can engage in my own activities, but I can share those activities and use it as a springboard for conversations.

By contrast, the blog entries generated almost no commentary, making them feel much more sterile to me. I got a sense of craftsman's pleasure from making them, but once they were out there, they already felt somewhat adrift and context-free.

Technology Evolution

Obviously, a number of these technologies have shifted on the spectrum: digital cameras have become portable and have great quality now. The very idea of being constantly connected to the network is plausible in a way it wasn't even a few years ago. And being able to take a picture and post it to Facebook from the open seas encourages both a spontaneity and a logorrhea that still demand a new kind of a writing style to be worked out. As I write this, I realize that I'd really love to have a good way to take snippets of writing that I'm -- for lack of a better word -- beta-ing on Facebook, and pull them back together into a narrative that stands alone.

The GPS angle is also somewhat interesting, although I rarely used Twitter to tell any of the most recent narrative, and Twitter has the most robust geolocation. I used Gowalla to some extent, but I have the suspicion that people either find geo-social-blah-blah either fascinating or incredibly boring, and there's almost no in-between. I also messed around with an app called "Trip Journal," which tries to produce a map of your journey along with associated pictures. It's reasonably well done, but in the end it was too much of a hassle (and too much of a battery drain), and the options for getting the story out of the app didn't really fit my needs.

I'm curious to hear others' reactions to these different forms of storytelling. Is it interesting? At what point does it become too much? What ways do you document & retell your stories and adventures as or after they happen?

In Conclusion...

...here are some badass pictures of humpback whales that I took:

• The first 15 minutes feels like "Playstation Home: Drama!" The graphics and environments are detailed, but also somewhat sterile. It gets less sterile once it gets rainier.
  
• The "Simon Says" aspect is much better this time out. The PS3 controller is used well, including, to my great shock, the accelerometer.
  
• Similarly, the timed aspects feel more about a way to generate naturally occurring narrative and conflict. I haven't felt punished yet by missing a timed element, and missing a button press doesn't necessarily fail a sequence. There's at least one sequence where I intentionally missed some presses because I wanted to "fail." In another, the missing of some hits mostly just added flavor.
  
• Even though the voice acting is mediocre, and the writing is kind of ham-fisted, a sequence where "I" cheered up a little kid by playing with him was surprisingly emotionally effective.
  

My main:

My eeeeevil alt:

...and the somewhat camera-shy in-game standin for me:

Unfortunately, two decades later, the show's flaws are more evident. The "Rubber Science" of Star Trek is, of course, a long standing joke. But what's truly striking to me now is how pervasive the problem is. In literally every episode, some dramatic new technological event occurs. I've just watched two episodes in a row where eternal life gets invented. In the first, the ability to download brains to computers! In the second, the ability to use the transporter to filter out old age!

These are interesting and deep ideas, well and truly explored throughout the sci-fi literature. But in Star Trek, they're just part of a fusillade of the sci-fi smorgasbord that's being hurled at us. In a good sci-fi, these kinds of ideas are used as a backdrop, and what becomes interesting is the exploration of the societal impact. But Federation culture is impervious to change. The Prime Directive seems to apply more to the Federation itself than to the noble savages they continuously encounter. Disruptive technologies assault the crew of the Enterprise on a daily basis, and yet they rise above, serene, impermeable.

Perhaps this is why Babylon 5 was so attractive; it was arguably the first modern sci-fi show that acknowledged that change happens. Re-watching Firefly in the past few days (in between discs of ST:TNG, since Firefly was so mournfully short) also demonstrates a sci-fi universe where technology has cultural implications.

Here are some examples in the past two decades of ideas that would have been throw-away plot devices in ST:TNG:

• laptop computers
• pervasive high speed networking
• dramatic improvements in visual rendering
• the web
• pervasive mobile access to data

For example, seven years ago, the iPod was just coming out. Now, iPhones, Droids, and Pres have dramatically changed the way we look at computing. Where, in ST:TNG's seven year run, is the impact of ANY of their throwaway ideas shown? I'd argue the closest Star Trek ever comes to this is the Holodeck, a technology introduced with the first episode, and which ends up having great impact on the social interactions of the crew.

The show is nice to re-watch, largely because it does harken back to a simpler time. After a stressful year, it's nice to watch a fairly low-impact and innocuous fantasy, where people are just fundamentally trying to be nice to each other. But the elephants in the transporter bay are hard to overlook.

D&D4e has streamlined a lot of the combat from previous incarnations, and, dare I say it, made it actually fun. In earlier incarnations, I had special abilities, but I never particularly felt encouraged to use them. In 3rd Edition especially, I felt I spent most of my time doing auto-attacks. 4th edition almost falls over itself to throw a variety of powers at you, though, and most of them are one-time-use, so you're actually encouraged to mix up what you're doing. Because the combat is more fun (and also because good GM software tools are provided to ease the creation of encounters), we find we pull out the grid map way more often then we ever did before.

At some point when we were doing this, Kevin -- our GM -- started trying to take pictures of the board as we were going. He'd been inspired by the Penny Arcade d&d session twitters. I found this to also be pretty interesting, especially with the following combo platter of geek tools:

• camera on iPhone
• twitter & facebook apps on iPhone
• decent photo editing tools on the iPhone (like my current favorite to abuse, TiltShiftGen)

I do have a blogging app on the iPhone, but it's way more annoying to use. So I thought I'd take the time and put together a longer entry on the phenomenon and output of this.

Beginnings

I started using the camera just to document stuff that I'd put on the tabletop whiteboard, in case it got erased before the next week. For example, here was an experimental system we used to track a particularly amoral character's swings to and from the dark side:

I took the shot as a quick and dirty way to make sure I knew how the points were laid out between sessions. This actually predates GM Kevin's interest in the PA twitter feeds.

Here's another example, where I was tracking gold & XP for my character on the whiteboard (our GM has moved to tracking this stuff via a D&D oriented wiki space):

The dapper gent with the multiple legs and the top hat is the famed "pattern spider," who likes from time to time to jump into our games and dump lots of exposition on us. (As I recall, the in-joke here is mostly making fun of me, for badgering Kevin in an early game to explain the whole mystery through this one NPC that had the grievous loophole of having an omniscient viewpoint. For some reason, the spider had a fancy hat and a cigar and a Brooklyn accent.)

Action shots

Here we see my first effort. Note how masterfully I tank the dragon away from the group, putting all of my hard-won World of Warcraft experience to bear. (A few turns earlier I'd let the dragon turn and toast everyone >_< )

Later on, I picked up Camera Bag, which had handy pre-canned photo effects. I became a quick fan of the vignetting here:

At the end of the day, the iPhone camera is fine, but it's not going to shine in a room that's only lit by some normal light bulbs. So I'm kind of trying to embrace the grainy, cruddy nature of the cameraphone with this. Also, it's in Fantasy Past Time, and thus should be colored in the style of a Wild West Poster, which was pretty much the same timeframe.

Later on, GM Kevin picked up the aforementioned TiltShiftGen, and started FBing pictures that were clearly manipulated with it. A tilt shift lens (or software program used to fake the effect) provides a very distinctive dollhouse style, as you can see at the linked website.

I've only used it a bit, and I will freely confess that I actually am using it even more for the color sliders. But being able to fake a depth of field effect is pretty nice. The main problem I have with it is that it degrades pretty quickly at the cruddy resolutions & qualities that I'm capturing in this environment. But still, I was pretty happy with the ominous result obtained here:

So here's something from Flickr, double-clicked in from the media manager:

It looks like it also supports uploading & inserting, but it's more annoying -- it doesn't integrate with my iPhoto media panel, and it has no support for resizing the image on upload. Meh -- I just upgraded my Flickr account today too, so that remains a perfectly great option for me to get images up to the web. Streamlining the Flickr integration is worth the $10 upgrade alone for me.

Most of my online output is going to Twitter (@tilt) or Facebook these days, but I wanted to dust this setup off a little bit for the purpose of a few essay ideas rattling around in my head.

Update: Mars Edit 2 has done this since 2007, it turns out. I just failed to pay much attention at the time. Whee!

No, I'm here because I want to share about a game that wants to crush your soul.

So, I keep hearing about this game, "Demon's Souls." I keep hearing that it's hard, it's unforgiving, and then -- my favorite useless piece of information -- that "failure just means your strategy was wrong." Nobody actually described what any of this stuff means. So here's first impressions, if you're wondering about this game. Sneak preview: it's cruel, but captivating.

First off, this game does not want to be your friend. There are absolutely no story breadcrumbs in the first few hours that I've played. At some point, when the game wants to introduce you to a particular gameplay mechanic, it just puts a boss that will one-shot you in your way. "But Eric," you say. "OMG spoilers!" you say. To you I say, shut your damn pie hole, this information is not going to actually help you in any useful way.

Character creation is terrible -- you have lots of sliders, all of which affect other sliders in obscure ways, and all of which basically turn your character from Moon Boy into The Kid From Mask with the merest flick of your wrist. There is literally no setting of the face sliders that doesn't result in a deformed creature from beyond the widdershins dimension -- which, now that I think on it -- may just be another metaphysical statement the game is trying to impart.

The game prizes exploration. Almost nothing is explained. Any explanations you find are going to come from your fellow players. Because, in a way, this is the most lonely MMO you will ever, ever play. Did you die? Your bloodstain will show up in my game, and if I see it and click on it, I can watch you vainly fighting against an unseen foe, and perhaps gain insight from it. You can leave me messages. The messages are from a heavily templated menu-driven system, so your messages will actually all be grammatically correct, and filled with thees and thous, but if your message is helpful, I can send you a heal. Sometimes your ghostly form will appear on my screen, going about ghostly and mysterious tasks.

So when we play, we play in the same world, and we see each other -- but only in dim echoes that remind us purely of the futility of our own struggle against the demons. Also, there's no /trade chat, and that's pretty cool.

The game kind of starts when you're dead. Dying causes you to leave a bloodstain on the floor and restart life as a ghost -- a ghost that can basically do everything your living self can do, but just has half the health to do it in. At this point, the game will remind you of when you played Rainbow Six, because you'll have to venture through this dungeon to kill the big bad at the end. And on your way you will die... a lot. And when you respawn, you'll re-fight through the same dungeon with the same enemies doing the same things. So when people talk crap about how "dying means your strategy was just wrong," they basically mean "dying means you didn't remember that the one guy with the flaming eyeballs jumps out from behind the wall when you get to step 413, and you didn't counter with the witty repartee maneuver... GOD."

Should you manage to win your way back to your bloodstain though, well, good news: you can get the XP back that you left in a puddle on the floor.

So, nothing is explained. The manual is useless. Mana doesn't even regenerate unless you start out as a coddled Royal, who's looted the royal treasury for some nice gear. Progress is a combination of exploration, experimentation, and memorization. At any moment you could be set back to where you started and have to replay 10-15 minutes of your ghostly life again. Why the hell would you even play this game?

What can I say? The combat is BADASS. Blocking, riposting, parrying, combo moves, some magic thrown into the mix -- it's exactly the kind of fake-fantasy combat RPG model I've always wanted. The inner loop of this game is more fun than the cruel outer loop, and that's what drives me on.

Also, I think about that poor ghost still wandering around that castle and I feel bad -- maybe this time I can win through and re-unite my avatar with her mortal coil. Maybe. I'll probably just get pissed again though and play something else.

And I wasn't. But they put a videogame inside my car, and it's not my fault.

I've had Saturns since I've had cars. This is my third car, and the first two were both variations on the Saturn sedan of the time. At first, I really liked the philosophy of Saturn, but over the past several years Carrie & I have both become fairly disillusioned with the increasingly poor customer service. After spending several hundred dollars to get an issue fixed with my Ion that ended up not being fixed anyway, requiring further repairs, I pretty much gave up. The Ion had been a Fine Vehicle, but I was ready for something... sexier. Cooler. Dare I say... Nerdier.

When I went shopping for the Ion in the early part of the century, we test drove the first version of the Prius. Regrettably, it kind of sucked for such tall and leggy people as ourselves. That, plus the incredible waiting lists for hybrids at the time, caused me to put the idea on the shelf of wistfulness. But now that a car replacement was on the table, Carrie's research found that the current cars had been substantially re-worked inside. We went to go test-drive a second generation Prius, and were pleasantly surprised. It felt roomy and awesome, handled well, and it was full of status displays and readouts.

Far forward to a month or two later. Research had been done. Pondering had been pondered. Hate for current car had escalated. Remaining administrative details necessary in order to unload old car had been dealt with. My car title was in hand, Apple stock was reasonably up, and I was ready to enter the future.

Technological Terror

Those who know me will be unsurprised to know that I'm a fairly pragmatic liberal. My general rule of thumb is "try not to suck." I'm also probably the very definition of technocrat. So ever since I first heard about hybrid cars, my first thought was, "well, duh, that seems obvious -- why doesn't every car do that?" I mean, when I was 12 and didn't understand about things like entropy, I didn't understand why a car couldn't just run off the friction from spinning the wheels.

Well. Happy day.

It's important to note that the futurecar is not a magic bullet. Despite being rated at something like 50mpg, it'll still perform in fine mediocre fashion if you're spending lots of time between stoplights, accelerating a lot. (Where "mediocre" here is defined as "still better than my Ion" -- but more like 30mpg than the advertised 50mpg.) It'll also be totally happy to perform like a dancing pig if you drive it like one.

But they put this videogame inside my car, see.

It's a little bar. And when I accelerate, the little bar fills up. And if I can keep that little bar in the lines then I get more experience points! Or something like that. Maybe my combos fill up faster. All I know is that suddenly my car has a competitive angle.

I can also flip to this other display where I can find out how fast my XP is piling up:

Yeah -- a bar graph that breaks down my XP gains over the five minutes, or even by every minute. Honestly, I don't know why they didn't make the graph continuous like a CPU meter. Oh right -- it's because I'd never watch the road, and crash into a bus full of school-children who were on a science field trip. Because irony works like that.

So like I said. It's not my fault. They put a video game in my car. And now I'm determined to do better than that lame-ass 30mpg showing I have from the first 200 miles. Seriously -- what a noob.

Geek Luxury

But like I said, that's not actually why I bought the car. Remember that picture from the top of the entry? I bought the car because it looks like a goddamned spaceship. I seriously feel like I should be able to dock with a Federation starship in this thing. I'm continually searching for the laser beams.

My favorite feature -- especially in light of a problem I had with the Ion involving keys -- is that this thing is essentially keyless. I have the little keyfob, but in day-to-day operation it never comes out of my pocket. Here's how you unlock the car, assuming the keyfob is near the car:

Yeah. You pretty much just put your hand on the handle and pull. Here, then, is how you lock the car:

Words cannot describe how giddy this makes me.

Inside, the car looks like a spaceship as well:

You can't really see it in the picture, but there's actually a fair degree of three-dimensionality to the console display. Including, if you hold down buttons on the steering wheel, you get a little heads up display around the MPH readout:

Generally, the car just feels comfortable to ride in. It feels spacious on the inside without feeling like an SUV or a truck. The driver & passenger seats feel like little spacepods... but in a cool, comforting way. The built-in bluetooth smoothly picked up my phone when I sat in the car, and flipped it over into the car's speakerphone. The car starts by depressing a big power button, instead of making me mess around with juggling keys in addition to whatever else I'm carrying.

Seriously, it feels like I bought a laptop I can drive. I keep wanting to find some website where I can download new software for it.

The fireworks over the castle were incredible:

Followed soon after by a light show:

The next day, we took the train back home. On our way back through King's Cross station, we saw Platform 9 3/4, of Harry Potter fame:

Jan 2nd:

Attempted to return home -- faulty plane and many annoying travails caused the 2nd to slip into...

Jan 3rd:

...in which we got up at 3:30am to catch a 7am flight, and finally got home. Hooray!

Except for the travel bees at the end, it was an awesome trip. I'm very glad to be home though, now :).

Tonight is Hogmanay -- and we're in Edinburgh for it. And it's frickin' cold.

We wandered around today. Edinburgh is an amazing city. The combination of centuries-old architecture and a vibrant city core is enthralling to me in a way that London and Paris haven't been.

I don't have a lot of text for this entry; just three pictures I took today.