California Fires

Brutal stuff. What jumped out here was the description of the fire as a Hydra – perfectly apt, though I’ve never heard it used that way before. Is this a common term in firefighter-lingo?

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 23 — More than a quarter of a million people were urged to flee their homes on Monday as wildfires ravaged Southern California for a second day, destroying hundreds of homes and businesses and charring swaths of scrub and forestland.

The fires, a Hydra with at least 15 separate burns in seven counties fed by gale-force winds, burned some 267,000 acres from Santa Barbara to the Mexican border. Engines and firefighters from as far as Nevada and Arizona were summoned as resources were stretched to the limit.

Houses burned with no firefighters in sight as emergency crews on the ground and in the air struggled to keep up with shifting wind that fanned new fires and made others recede and reignite.

Posted in Current Events on October 23, 2007 by Jesse
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HG 100 Redux (Shameless and Proud of It)

I wrote awhile back about my contribution to Hobby Games: The 100 Best.

(I wrote an essay on Fantasy Flight’s excellent A Game of Thrones board game. Of course, I’m extremely biased on all things ASOIAF, but still, Boardgamegeek says good things about it, so I’m in good company).

Speaking of esteemed company, Jim Lowder got 99 great folks to write articles for the book – not sure how the hell I ended up in there, but the book rocks, and I’m pleased as punch to be in it.

I’ve been slowly reading the essays, and have been very impressed. I also showed it around the (new) office, and I think we’re getting a copy of Dynasty League Baseball on the strength of William Connors’s essay alone. Not too shabby.

Anyway, in case you don’t believe me, here are smarter people reviewing the book:

The Armchair Critic gives us an A+.

And the aforementioned Boardgamegeek gives us an average of 7.8/10 so far…

Check ‘em out…and if you pick the book up, let me know what you think.

Posted in General on October 22, 2007 by Jesse
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Ack grack gack gack grackk!

Never enough time, is there?

Been meaning to write a few more meaningful posts, but the new job (writer in the creative team at Ganz – the makers of Webkinz, in addition to Eyes Only Secret Projects) has kept me busy for the past month.

However, I’ve also been working on a chapter for an upcoming pen&paper RPG game to be published by Green Ronin. I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it yet, but if you’ve followed my work in the past, I’m sure you can make an educated guess. It’s been fun delving back into that world, though my work for the core book is pretty small. How sharp is that sword, anyway?

In other gaming related news, I’m a regular player…scratch that. I have an open invitation to attend Robin Laws’s weekly gaming/playtest sessions, changing to whatever game Robin is working on at the moment. I just often have conflicts.

But anyway, I’ve played a bit of “American Empire” (where we played both the President’s Cabinet of an intergalactic version of the current regime, slightly exaggerated, and also played the members of a special forces squad – the Seven Dwarfs, not completely unlike agents of Blackwater or Delta Force). It created an interesting dynamic where the politicos would send the spec forces guys to perform a mission that sounded plausible from the high-level view, but looked impossible from the ground. Then, the spec forces guys would send back “mission accomplished” reports, embellished as much or as little as success and failure dictated. Then our administration characters would make new policy based on progressively “spun” information and create even more impossible tasks for the forces on the ground, etc.

After that, we played Law&Order meets Heroes. I’m not sure I can say much about that, as it’s a project that will be published, but the concept was very cool, and Robin makes some nice innovations in procedural/mystery gaming.

This week we started a brand new game, which is, as they say, a little bit lighter in tone. I haven’t laughed this hard at a session for awhile. It’s more a miniatures game with a bit of role-playing than a serious RPG but it would be a fun game to play between more dramatic campaigns. Our invasion of Earth was curtailed by our inability to overcome Earth’s first line of defense…a peep of chickens.

I’m told changes will be made and our psychic powers will be bolstered. The brood shall rue the day it ever stood against us!

Posted in Games, Writing on October 20, 2007 by Jesse
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Heart of Texas

Anyone who knows me knows I’m not a sports nut – hell, I’m not even much of a sports fan. I’ve watched the occasional World Cup game or Superbowl or whatnot, but that’s about it. However, for all sorts of reasons, I was captivated by Friday Night Lights (the series, not the movie) last year.

I would argue it was one of the best written series of all last year, and I was looking to the premiere of the second season with much anticipation last Friday…and was very disappointed.

Heart of Texas

Fans of Texas high-school football, as those of us who were strangers to the ways of Pigskin Planet learned last season from the NBC small-town drama “Friday Night Lights,” live in the hope that their team will “go to State”—play in the state championship in Dallas, in the Cowboys’ stadium—and make their home town’s dreams come true.

…

It’s hard to say what’s great about “Friday Night Lights” without feeling that you’re emphasizing the wrong thing, because although the show’s particulars are distinctive and special, it seems not to be made up of parts at all—to just be an organic whole. In short, it feels like life. The show isn’t merely set in the world of West Texas football; it is that world. Watching it, you have a feeling of total immersion—in the (fictional) town of Dillon, in the lives of the football players and their parents, and in all the elements that determine people’s fates in that dry, desolate, and depressed part of the country. This sensation is triggered in part by filmmaking technique and in part by the writing and the acting; but much of it is simply alchemical and wonderfully indefinable.

(more…)

Posted in TV, Writing on October 10, 2007 by Jesse
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