Geek Girls Rule! #106 – Sorry about the radio silence there.

Wow!  Life has been nuts.  Some good, some bad. 

Last Wednesday we had to put the Elderly Cat to sleep.  Ronin was 14, and when he started exhibiting the symptoms of kidney disease we did what we could to make him comfortable and then took him in once he wasn’t.   After going through heroic measures with Punkin 3 years ago, we decided that it would just be better not to.  Ronin wouldn’t have stood for subcutaneous fluids, and it just would have made his last days even more miserable than they already were.  He got his extra special elderly cat gooshy food, and lots of loves and the heated kitty bed, and last Wednesday when he started having trouble walking, we took him in and held him until the end.  The last couple of days I carried him with me everywhere and prayed we could stave it off, but really when it comes to kidney disease in cats, all the treatments do is rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic until the water hits your neck.  We just couldn’t do it again. 

Also, at work, we’ve been going through Accreditation.  Accreditation is the process by which the powers that be decide if you should be allowed to grant degrees in your field or not.  It is a long, painful, agonizing process.  And, it has occupied the majority of my brain for about the last 6-9 months. 

Now, the big fun oh boy! news of the month is that the weekend before last was Ambercon NW!  Ta DA!  Brilliant, as always.  Many thanks to Simone, Guy and everyone else who works so hard to make that weekend so awesome and such a freaking success!

Thursday night was the Porn Game, in which I played professional dominatrix Martina Votkanova.  The porn game is usually really light and fluffy, and as we started one of the players, Joe, laughingly said, “I bet there’s really a ’save the pattern, save the universe’ plot in here, but we’ve just been having so much fun with the smut that we’ve never found it.”  Well, we found it.  The game climaxed (pun intended) with an orgy to save the Serpent in Chaos and the Universe. 

Friday morning, I took off to hang out with my friend Karrin, affectionately known as the Keeper of the Other Half of my Brain.  Friday afternoon Karrin, myself, and our friend Madelaine, who are apparently known as the Trifecta of Female Gamer Evil, played with several other folks in a game called the Hooded Men run by Jules, and using a system written by Ben Lehmann.  We played bandits in Arden during the time of the Black Road, charged by Julian with destroying a terrifying monster or being eaten by his hounds.  Of course, Madelaine, Karrin and I decided that we were a lesbian bandit love triangle, and hilarity ensued.  Ben Lehmann came up with the idea, as a shaman, to essentially hit the reset button on Arden by sacrificing himself to the forest at it’s heart.  I got to sacrifice myself for true love, by dying in flames with Karrin’s character, while Madelaine looked on and said, “Wow, glad I got out of that relationship.”  Much fun was had.

Friday night, after a freakout brought on by concern for the elderly cat, I ran Attack of the B-Movies, using the 2-die or Bridge System written by Jordan, Chris and Ogre.  I had my four players play elder Amberites as horror movie tropes.  We had Dierdre the Cheerleader, Corwin the Sexy Outsider, Brand the Accidental Hero and Benedict the Hyper-Competent guy.  They killed Werewolf Julian.  Brand was attacked by Vampire Fiona.  Corwin got suckered into a trap by Flora tied to a bed.  And ultimately they faced down Vampire Master Caine with Corwin tied to an altar, Fiona and Flora crouching at Caine’s feet.  A lot of fun, very silly.  I described the scene of the final conflict as “Caine, as painted by Frank Frazetta.”  Having been bitten by Fiona, Brand had to obey Caine, but Benedict killed Caine just as Brand lunged, and so Brand stopped up short in his attack, dusted off Benedict’s lapels and said, “Good job.”

Saturday morning I played in Nursery Crimes PDX game run by my friend Jen.  Again, a blast.  This was based loosely off Jaspre Fforde’s Nursery Crimes books.  I played a vet who had developed an allergy to cats and dogs, who signed on with Nursery Crimes because she could still deal with talking bears, horses and lions.  We faced off against the Evil Mayor and Shere Khan from the Jungle Book, helped by Bagheera and the Lion from either Daniel in the Lion’s Den or Androcoles and the Lion, not sure which.  Lives were saved, man-eating tigers were caged, Evil Mayor was arrested.  Truly epic. 

Saturday night I ran the Amber/Harry Potter crossover game for the fourth year running.  This year the players decided that it was time to wreak some havoc on canon.  Usually I’m pretty careful to run them parallel to the books, but not intrude on canon.  Oh, not this bunch.  They got to save the day.  And I got introduced to the wonder that is the Bourbon Furnace.  Oooo, amazing drink. 

Sunday morning I ran Amber Family Therapy.  This is an idea that Debra Donoghue and Ogre came up with at our first Ambercon, and I got tired of waiting for her to come back and run it.  Ogre asked me if I were going to play the therapist as “the one true family therapist, or some poor clueless therapist out of Shadow?”  I opted for choice two as I found it far funnier, and Oh it was, therapist Harmony Stone.  I had Karrin as Brand “There’s always room on Team Destroy Them All, Harmony.”  Also a Corwin (sleazy), Martin, Fiona, Llewella, Merlin, Gerard, and Julian.  Oh, Julian.  My buddy Craig played the creepiest most fucked up Julian ever, with repressed homosexuality and incest issues, an unnatural attraction to Morgenstern and REALLY inappopriate crush on Flora.  Craig won the game.  One moment both Karrin (out of character) and I just wanted to hug him because he was so pitiable, and then he’d say something just… WHOA! and we’d recoil in horror.  Everyone else was awesome as well, but Craig went the extra distance.  After about two hours of that we declared Craig the winner, and then just talked about sex, Karrin and I performed dramatic readings of bad porn from the internet, and laid around the room nursing our hangovers. 

I now have a request to run Amber Family Therapy up in Seattle for people up here, and I’m considering banning Craig.  I don’t know if I’m up for that much more icky in my life.  Kidding.  I love sharing the wrinkles in my brain with everyone else. 

Ok, that’s about it.  Sorry again about it taking so long to do stuff, but damn has life been crazy.

AmberCon NW!

Ok, so I just posted, but I’m so excited!!! 

For years, because of a conversation between Deborah Donoghue and Ogre, we’ve been joking about running Amber Family Therapy. 

This year, I’m doing it!  And I just got my player list.  This is going to be amazing!!!  I have so many excellent gamers involved!!!  Holy crap, there are not enough exclamation points in the WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I’ll be refereeing as the therapist.  This should be a blast.  I’m thinking of advocating booze during. 

The Harry Potter game, in it’s forth year, also looks incredibly promising.  That game’s always fun, but this year we’re full with about a 50/50 spread of new and old players.  I’m pretty excited. 

My first game, Attack of the B-movies, is a little smaller than I’d intended, but I may well just give everyone a fist full of characters and start slaughtering them with horror tropes as quickly as I possibly can. 

Amber Family Therapy, though.  I could not ask for a better bunch of players for that game.  I hope it lives up to and exceeds expectations.

Geek Girls Rule! #101 – PAX

PAX was interesting.  Our friends Kate and Aron who run the Dreaming here in Seattle had secured some tables for RPG demos.  I only ran one game, because after my game I did a turn through the expo hall and came back sort of stunned. 

People were, for the most part, very well-behaved and polite at PAX.   There were a few cos-players, but not as many as I’d feared, and mostly young guys showing off their HALO armor.  There were a couple of Waldos (of Where’s Waldo? fame), several Mario and Luigis, and a scattering of Moogles, I think someone called them, from Final Fantasy.  For having 75,000 nerds crowded into a four block radius, the crowds were exceptionally well-mannered. 

So, after running a game of 1,001 Nights, which went very well, and having lunch with some friends, I decide that I need to check out this here expo hall I keep hearing about.

The expo hall is like a cross between a nightclub and a battlefield.  It’s dark.  There’s loud music and flashing lights, and the press of many, many bodies, and, periodically as you pass certain booths (and calling some of these set-ups booths is a vast understatement) gunfire sounds right next to your ear.  I wandered up to Kate at the Dreaming’s table, and I must have looked absolutely stunned.  She laughed and said, “What do you think?”
“I think this is an ADD nightmare,” I answered.  “I can’t fucking think.”

The majority of the booths were for videogames, videogame consoles, or computer game companies.  I did get to see Diablo III.  Eeeeeeeee!!!  Didn’t play the demo, the lines were kind of long.  I also got to play around with the Warhammer MMORPG a bit.  Thought very seriously about picking up a PacMan necklace from the Namco booth.  But mostly I just wandered around in a daze.  I did get a demo of the Hello Kitty MMO, which I am so very, very tempted to load up and play, just for the sheer absurdity.  A friend of mine was one of the beta testers for it, and she says it’s actually pretty fun. 

My friend Rachel, who goes to San Diego Comic Con, said that PAX was far nicer.  People were more polite.  There were far fewer booth babes.  She didn’t fear being sexually harassed.  And PAX has an anti-harassment policy printed in big letters in their programs. 

 The PAX Enforcers, who act as security and guides for the clueless, are all very able, polite people.  They are incredibly helpful and have a surprising amount of agency.  They are encouraged to act first, and ask for forgiveness from management after defusing a situation or resolving a problem, rather than having to track someone down first.  In fact, as we packed up the gaming stuff from the room the Dreaming ran demos in, we just flagged down a random Enforcer who helped us load stuff into the storage closet across the way. 

I only went the one day, because I do not have a temperament that can handle those kinds of numbers for more than one day in a row.  The Husband What Rules, however, went back on Sunday and ran Mouse Guard and Lady Blackbird all day.  Oh, and I finally got to meet Luke Crane, the creator of Burning Wheel and the Mouse Guard game. 

I’d like to congratulate the Penny Arcade guys for running a damn fine convention, particularly considering the scope of it.  And to congratulate the Enforcers for being genuinely nice, helpful people. 

Oh yeah, I did find time for one round of Rock Band, in the Rock Band lounge.  A group of us did Ratt – Round and Round.  It was kind of fun, if nerve-wracking.

Geek Girls Rule! #89 – Miscellaneous crap and symptoms of the mid-30s hormone rush…

I know it’s been awhile.  I kind of blew my wad with the Joe Quesada drinking game et al., and I’ve been blogging on geeky topics over at the California NOW blog.  Topics include the LA Times’ “Girls’ Guide to Comicon” (the resulting aneurysm wiped out 3rd grade), the Today show segment on the fact that Gosh, Golly and Don’t You Just Know It!,* girls play videogames!!!  And how they managed to interview the founder of the Frag Dolls without once mentioning what Frag means and what game they’re most famous for playing (HALO) I’ll never fucking know.  The most recent blog post there is about why my hobbies courting “normal” girls pisses me off so damn much. 

That’s not all I’ve been up to.  Tonight is the kickoff for Go Play NW!  The Geek Husband What Rules and I will be at the kickoff feast, and then gaming.  I have no idea what I’ll be playing.  I never sign up for anything ahead of time.  Instead I usually see who needs a player, or barring that, see who else is leftover and we’ll form a game in a lobby or something.  I’m so moody about my gaming, as in I need to be in the mood for something to really dig on it, that signing up ahead of time really doesn’t work out that well for me. 

Now, as relates to hormones…  As much as I adore Nightcrawler of the X-men (eXcalibur, etc…), is it wrong that every time they come up with a “bad” or, let’s just say, less moral version of him in another timeline (gotta love the multiverse), that I develop a mad crush on that version as well.  Maybe a fiercer crush…  A friend just gave me a copy of the orignal miniseries with Ilyana Rasputin, where she’s taken by Belasco and… Nightcrawler in a loincloth… sigh… 

Yeah, I’m a walking mass of libido, which to be honest has not changed since adolescence.  It’s one of the many reasons the Mister married me. 

The Geek Husband What Rules will be at DragonFlight this year, I might be there for a day.  My partner in crime over at Geek Sisterhood, Sophie, will also be up for Dragonflight!! 

I’ve also got a podcast I’m editing for here.  An interview with my friend Karnythia about her new publishing house, Verb Noire. 

*Why yes, I am originally from the Midwest.  How’d you guess?

Geek Girls Rule! #82 – R.I.P. Dave Arneson 1947-2009

Mr. Dave Arneson created Dungeons and Dragons with Gary Gygax, yet many geeks do not know his name.  Mr. Gygax was by far the more, ahem, vocal of the two.  Yet, according to sources, the whole idea of playing a single character instead of, say, an army or unit, was Mr. Arneson’s.  I am sad to say that I really don’t know a whole lot about Mr. Arneson, mostly just that, unlike Mr. Gygax, he hasn’t been credited with saying anything egregiously sexist. 

However, I do thank Mr. Arneson for his contribution to creating my favorite hobby.  Thank you, Sir.  You will be missed. 

For those of you in the Pacific Northwest, I am doing an absurd amount of panelling at NorWesCon this weekend in SeaTac.  I’m primarily on the Goth and Alternate Lifestyles panelling, so if you’ve ever wanted to hear me say “Dildo” in person, track me down.  I will also be doing a panel on getting tween girls interested in gaming.  Hopefully I’ll have a chance to run into a few of you as I race between panels.

Geek Girls Rule! #65 – Emerald City Game Fest

Yesterday Mr. Geek Girl What Rules and I ran the Story Games Lounge at Emerald City Game Fest yesterday.  ECGF is a free gaming event in the Seattle area.  They usually get somewhere between 100-200 people.  Yesterday’s Game Fest was at the Northgate Community Center.

I spread out the indy games we brought with us and hung out until I could sucker some folks in to playing some games.  I got four guys to jump in for a game of “In a Wicked Age“, with a fifth joining partway through.  Since one of the players looked to be under the legal age of consent, and there were other children about, I informed them we would not be using the “Blood and Sex” oracle.  So we used the War oracle.  I’ve never had a bad game of IAWA, and this was no exception.  Even Mason, who’d never played it before, got into the spirit of it, as did Denisson (Sorry if I’m spelling it wrong).   Andy, Dave, Jackson and I had all played it before, but it was the first time I’d ever tried running it.

What you do in IAWA is that you extrapolate characters from the oracles you draw.  We began with the deserted campsite of a travelling army recently abandoned, the ghost of a tyrant king strangled by his daughter, a demon of atrocity bound for a thousand years who senses a minute loosening of its bonds, and a speaker of ancestors with messages from the dead.  Our list included the army, the demon, the speaker, the ghost, his daughter, the ghosts of the ancestors, and probably a few others I can’t remember right now.

Andy chose to play a wounded soldier abandoned by his army because he could not keep up, looking for a place to hide.  Jackson played the dead king, Andy his daughter, Mason the speaker of the ancestors, and I played everyone else until Dennisson joined us and took over the demon.  And in spite of my insistence on not using “Blood and Sex,” Andy’s character still wound up raped by the demon.

I had a few moments of uncertainty with the dice mechanics.  The problem with IAWA is that the text explaining the dice mechanics is less than clear, and the examples don’t help as much as I think they’re supposed to.  It’s a viral game, really.  Most people who play IAWA learn it from someone else who has already played it, usually with Vincent or someone he’s played it with.  It isn’t real intuitive at least to me.  But we muddled through and had one hell of a good time with it.  Being as I have played it with folks who know the dice mechanic, I think I need to sit down and really study the text, maybe take some notes on it.  I don’t think it’s unlearnable from point zero, just that it isn’t written in a way that jives with my brain.  That said, the game itself is amazingly fun and the oracles are incredibly evocative.

After the break, I ran the Keep again for Kingston, Mike, John Bradley and Denisson.  For the first time no one took the Blacksmith’s son.  We added my friend Kate when she showed up about midway through the slot.  The original four were the only ones left in the Keep and created a plan for destroying the Keep as it was breached and fleeing, which involved falling into the midden pile and setting the Keep on fire on their way out.  Everyone had a hand in destroying the big bad guy, and I hope got their moments of glory.

I think this game highlighted, for me, a problem with my gm-ing style.  I’m too nice.  I have a tendency to let players get away with stuff that maybe I shouldn’t, such as re-writing what they did before they left the Keep.  I finally got to the point where I’d leave it up to a die roll, even yes, odd no.  And really, maybe I shouldn’t have.  I also have a tendency to fudge die rolls when I’m rolling too well.   Mostly this is because I want them to have a good time and to succeed.  After the Keep and after the LARP last weekend, I realize that I could stand to be a little more ruthless as a GM.  Particularly after last week’s LARP at Ambercon.

I did have a fantastic time running and meeting folks.  I also made some new friends and got some Transporter 3 swag.  For those of you who may not know, any movie in which Jason Statham removes the majority of his clothing is a good movie.

So, for those of you who I promised I would have the info on next week’s Meet-up for, here it is:
Saturday, November 22 at 11am the Wayward Coffee House on Greenwood.  Bronwyn who owns and runs it is made of pure awesome, and even if you can’t make the Meet-up, you should stop in and say “Hi!” at some time.

I’m going to close now and watch the awful mummy movie on Sci Fi right now.  I’m feeling a bit poorly, and I think horror movies and soup on the couch are just what the doctor ordered.  Oooh, someone just got beat up by gauze!  Yay, bad movies!!!

Geek Girls Rule! Podcast #7 – Emerald City Game Fest with Sophie Lagace

Talking about the upcoming Emerald City Game Fest, November 15th in Seattle, a free game day event.

Podcast #7 – Emerald City Game Fest with Sophie Lagace.

http://sirriamnicast.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=393970

Oh, we talk about a lot of stuff. Gaming as women, trying to build community amongst gamers, gaming conventions, lots of stuff.

Geek Girls Rule! #63.5 – Emerald City Game Fest

http://www.emeraldcitygamefest.org/

Guess who will be running at least one game, and Hosting the Story Games Lounge at Emerald City Game Fest this year?

This girl!

The game fest is a free event on November 15th, please follow the link above for location, directions and all that good stuff. 

I’ll be running a session of The Keep.  And if you think you know the plot because you read my earlier post on it, you are WRONG!  It’s different every time I run it.  So it won’t be werewolves this time.  Neener neener.

If you’re in the Seattle area, or planning on it, come on by, play a game or two, say hi!  I may bring the laptop and record a podcast, as may the Mister, who I believe will also be running a game or two during the day.  And depending on her work schedule, I may be able to coax the GeekMachine into coming out, too.

Geek Girls Rule 43.5 – LGBT Sci Fi/Fantasy & Comics Fandom and Gamers

For those of you who don’t know, for the last couple of years I have done the Alternate Lifestyles programming at NorwesCon, a Seattle-area SF/F convention. What this means is that I get to do the programming for Polyamory, BDSM, Sexuality, Goth, Fanfic and a whole lot of other things that don’t really fit anywhere else. This includes the LGBT programming (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender/sexual).

Now, SF/F conventions on the whole are pretty comfortable and safe places to be Out, that is, to be openly Gay/Queer. I can hold hands with my girlfriend, for example, and mostly not have to worry about anyone reacting negatively. I have Trans friends who can dress as whichever Gender they are more comfortable as, and be safe. However, as someone pointed out in one of the LGBT Panels I ran this year, the Convention, while safe, is still a largely Hetero-normative space filled with Straight guys and Straight or Bi- girls. My first instinct was to blow this off and be all protective of the Con-space. But after thinking about it for awhile, I saw that the gentleman in question was right, and thankfully he gave me the opportunity to apologize to him.

Because when I really thought about it, he was right. Most of the Con programming, apart from the very few panels on the Alt. Lifestyles track, when they do deal with Gender or Sexuality, deal only with the Binary model of male and female, usually Heterosexual. And then someone brought up the issue of Queer Gamers, and honest to Gods, apart from myself and some of the girls in the Girl Game, I couldn’t think of any Queer Gamers. Now whether this is due to an antipathy toward the LGBT from Gaming culture, or due to an antipathy toward Gaming on the part of Queer culture, I don’t know.

Partially, I blame this on a lack of Queer characters in the SF/F media. I mean, let’s face it, for mainstream media Inara’s Bisexuality on Firefly (if you blinked you might have missed it) and Capt. Jack Harkness on Dr. Who and Torchwood are about it for Out Queer characters. In comics you have Batwoman and her former partner, Northstar in Marvel, and… there’s a few more, but no names are immediately leaping to mind. (Granted after I write this I’m going to get about a bazillion replies giving me more Queer characters I’ve missed. Which is awesome!) While there are more to choose from in SF/F literature, they are still vastly under-represented, and WELL written Queer characters are even more rare.

Gaming itself has a relatively bad reputation for Homophobic behavior, if not actual Homophobia. Now, now, don’t get all defensive on me. It pains me to say this as much, if not more than it pains you to read it. I love Gaming, but there are some behaviors I could decidedly live without.

In the next panel, I asked everyone what they wanted to see, and they overwhelmingly said that they wanted more LGBT panels (held during daylight hours), they wanted a Gay Social or Mixer of some sort. I, however, have decided that maybe we need to have a teeny bit more of a presence than that. I’m looking to start up an LGBT Fandom group to just be present, offer support to anyone coming out or thinking of coming out, organize things like the Queer Mixer, etc…

But I’d like to hear from you guys, Queer or Straight, what do you think? Do you feel that Cons are a safe place? Would you like to see more LGBT programming, or at the very least, an attempt to make sure that all Gender possibilities are covered in panels on Gender and SF/F? Are you a Queer Gamer? How do you feel about that? Are you Out to your gaming buddies? Do you think my assessment of perception of Gamers is fair or true? Do you think that having a more visible or Out presence at Cons (SF/F and Gaming) will help? Would you like to join my treehouse gang, either as Queer or as an Ally? Do you think I’m just being ridiculous and all us Queers need to get over ourselves?

I want to hear your opinions, people.