Awful Green Things In The Dungeon

After many months of being like Oh man I gotta do that, my friend recently dug up the copy of Awful Green Things From Outer Space that he first played as a child--originally printed in Dragon Magazine in 1979 and with the chits originally glued to little pieces of linoleum or something by some 12 year old of his acquaintance back in the day. 

To be quick:

1. It rules.

2. It is highly D&Dable.

So the basics are this:

-There's a ship (above)

-There's little counters for Player One: Crew members with what a gamer will recognize as different Move, Attack and Health stats who can move around the ship.

-There's little counters for weapons they can pick up (pool cues, knives, stun guns, cans of rocket fuel, etc) which have different characteristics.

-There's little counters for Player Two: Aliens who invade the ship starting in a random location. The aliens start as eggs, then become babies, then become adults--all 3 stages with different stats.

-They fight.

If you are familiar with the Warhammer family of games, you may recognize all these elements from the Warhammer 40k-derived game Space Hulk, where one side plays Genestealers (Alien alien knock-offs) and one side place Terminators (big guys in oversized extra-cool space marine armor).

Space Hulk replaces chits with miniatures (cool improvement) and replaces the map-ripped-from-Dragon-Magazine with a board full of cardboard tunnels you can make yourself (cool improvement), however, unless Space Hulk has been upgraded since I've played it lacks the one super-cool thing that makes Awful Green Things really special and replayable:

Weapons are scattered all over the ship when the aliens invade--and each one has one of a variety of totally random effects. Everything from a blaster to an electric fence can do one of about a dozen things and you don't know which until you use it on an alien.

Some do a ton of damage, some do almost none, some shrink the aliens, some grow the aliens, some make the aliens burst into tiny fragments which then grow--it's scary using weapons but you will lose if you don't experiment with them. It makes for a new experience every time.

There's later editions and an expansion game for Green Things--I don't know if they added "randomly teleports you to another room" or "turns out the lights in the corridor no-one can see" to the weapon effects, but they should.

Smear Math for Morons

 One very weird thing I've noticed when people discuss the smear campaign is people saying these two thing, often in the same breath:

• lol Zak is so cancelled we sure destroyed his life lmao!
• lol Zak is suing people saying he lost millions, what an idiot lmao!

Now, if you're not a moron (and it should go without saying that anyone participating in the smear is a moron) you'll realize these are basically opposite statements.

If you smear someone and so completely destroy anybody's ability to earn a living doing their job as long as there's an internet, you've likely cost them over a million dollars. That's not about me specifically, that's anyone.

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The math:

Let's say you, like me, live in California.

Minimum wage is 16$ per hour.

That's 128$ per day.

That's 3,840$ per month.

That's 46,080$ per year.

Assuming the person lives a minimum of 30 more years and (like most artists) never retires, that's 1,382,400$.

That's assuming no inflation and just using minimum wage--and I did make more than minimum wage.

(Just for the development of I Am The Weapon alone, I was making 3000$ per month before the smear. If that less-than-minimum-wage figure seems high remember I'm contracted for all the writing and all the illustration. If you would like the documentation on that--just ask. This is also in every court record. I also had two projects in development with LotFP at the time--Bards and Violence in the Nympharium. Both of those included a cash advance and then I make a percentage after. Or ignore all these numbers and look at how much the artists and writers make on literally any mid-tier indie RPG kickstarter.)

Now, I am publishing again and so that income's not all lost, but that's only after having successfully sued three people who smeared me.

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And here's probably the main thing seem to forget or not realize:

RPGs isn't my main job, I've never claimed it was. I am a painter. I paint paintings for a living that people are supposed to buy. That is my job and was long before any game stuff I did ever existed.

Just because the people who smeared me were themselves in RPGs doesn't mean that I only lost RPG work. You'd have to have brain damage to think that only people in games noticed your smear campaign. All that work disappeared as well.

This is all in the article Dr Weisman wrote (missing audio here).

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And, of course, on top of that, destroying someone's reputation doesn't just destroy their income, it destroys their entire life.

And the non-monetary damage to their life is undeniably worse than the loss of income.

Since death is preferable to my current situation, if you're me, basically this cost me however much my entire life is worth. That's a price higher than any dollar amount. The only reason I am sticking around is the very slim hope it gets undone.

Again: this isn't special. I assume you think your life is worth a lot to you, too. If someone offered you a million dollars to die, you probably wouldn't take that deal.

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There are a lot of things that are really obvious about the situation the hatemob created that seem to be lost on everyone talking about it online, this about money is just one of them. But it fits in a blog entry so there you go.

If you lie about someone being a felon and put it all over the internet and that person's entire life is working in public, you did way more than a million dollars worth of damage.

It's not about me being special, that's just life.

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How To Fix Everything

This is a really interesting article about how some people managed to talk like adults about a piece of art they didn't like. Whether or not you like their solution: it appears they came to a solution that made a variety of people who disagreed but who all cared happy.

Basically, they solved this thorny public art problem by not allowing drive-by comments.

Without fail, people arrived at these events primed to make public comments, only to be surprised when they could not find a formal body to make a speech to, as there were only small-group conversations to join. They didn’t want to spend their time having to speak and listen at human scale. Indeed, listening, in small groups or one-on-one, over long periods, tried the patience of some participants. But it also bled out the cursed public discourse that had surrounded the issue for so long—exhausting those who had just one point to make and no interest in connecting or communicating, only in winning.

They point out that the usual process--people lining up to give a speech to an assembly of other people (most of whom were also there to give speeches) was tried and, as usual, didn't work. 

It's worthwhile thinking about how many online platforms are basically that: someone who will monologue but is not expected to engage getting access to a big audience of people who all want to engage or, themselves, monologue. Forums are like that, Twitter is like that. (People who write blogs but don't answer the comments are like that.)

And it's worth thinking about which kinds of people thrive in specifically those environments--people who have a deep belief in one-way communication and not being fact-checked. People who are twitter-famous or familiar forum-faces but not well-known as creators tend to be, basically, righteous trash.

So that's that.

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Anybody curious about court news with Gencon--it's on appeal to the higher court now. If you didn't see that coming you haven't been paying attention.

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