Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Dude’s got a pretty good job.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

BJÖRK IS SO FUCKING CUTE OH MY GOD CAN I MARRY HER SEVERAL TIMES

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

In Xenon: the world is made of a map that’s created by the World Player as the travelers leave their home behind. Technically, the map is a relationship map with broad categories. The Xumph prey on the Canwana. The Canwana raise the Xumph for ritual sacrifices. The Canwana trade Kogantaw wax with the Feihun, who return to them Choum that they steal from Yikl merchants on the Siaia Way. The Canwana are at war with the Treloudon and their kings Protu, Behun, and Goksh over the idol of Great Nadwhu, the primordial Xumph.

Now, what’s neat about that is that you wind up with a physical map of the world in the process. Just writing down a people on the map gives them not only their relationships to others, but also where they are in the world, how far you have to travel from a place to get to them.

Consider the map at the top of this post. It’s a Renaissance European map of the world. Note that the cartographer is under the impression that Europe is as big as Asia and Africa. He’s drawing it from his perspective. It’s not literal, and the guy knows that you couldn’t navigate by it, because the real world is much more complex than all that (never mind not knowing about three whole continents and only knowing the tiniest amount about one, which is shown as an amorphous mystery at the edge of the world-ocean), but it conveys what you need to know.

I’d like to see a lot of map making in Xenon: and will probably take a page from The Dragon Killer in that regard.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Xenon: is entering real playtesting tomorrow night. I’m very excited. Dare I say Gen Con 2010?

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Hey, everyone! Shock:1.2 pre-order PDF deal!

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

It’s no secret that I love the movie Contact.  Ellen Arroway, played by Jodi Foster, is one of my favorite scientist characters in fiction. She’s clever, moral, complex, and her motives are deeply human. I had always assumed that she was based on some real life character, but I didn’t know who. It turns out, she’s based on this year’s TED prize winner, Jill Tarter.

I think her fundamental thesis — that the Universe is far larger and weirder than we know, and seems probable that some of the weirdness in that vastness is living weirdness — is excellent. The search alone tells us a lot about ourselves, not to mention what the possible eventual discovery will tell us.

She makes a mistake though, and it’s one I hear often from my fellow intellectuals in positions of privilege: that if we could just set aside the things that make us distinct from each other, we’d be able to somehow work together to achieve enlightenment. But in setting aside those distinctions — those philosophical and procedural differences that make cultures distinct from each other — then we will have lost what makes us human. It is not our ability to agree on a single best mode of thought that makes us great. It is our ability to pull truth and beauty from distinct, often contradictory perspectives.

It is not the dissolution of distinctions that can make us enlightened. It is the recognition that distinctions are lines drawn on the surface of the Universe, not the Universe itself. Erasing the lines just deprives us of the map.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

This is a project I want to do. It looks like it involves skills that might require a partner, but I know partners.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

“In the emerging digital culture, the Axio will allow composers, perfomers, musicans, artists of all kinds, the expression that will be needed in the various new media.”

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

TV is so much better than it used to be.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

This is Rallycross. It’s exactly what Burning Rubber is, only in Burning Rubber, when you’re falling behind, you shoot the guy in front of you.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’m happy to say that this is pretty much how skids work in Burning Rubber. Also, you see how, on a lot of these corners, the dude is laying down tread? That’s where he’s skidding. He’s still in control of the car, but he’s skidding. And you see how all of a sudden, the car snaps and the tire tracks stop and suddenly he’s accelerating? That’s where he’s lined up his car with his vector.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I’m pretty sure I had a Matchbox Lancia Stratos as a kid. It’s an astonishingly cool car. Apparently, it was pretty dominant in the mid-70s as a ralley racer, which is really neat, given its street car looks. I guess it held on to the corners as tightly as the other top racers, then took off on the straights and pavement.

The only thing cooler than the Lancia Stratos Ralley, though is the Lancia Stratos prototype. Holy crap.

… and the only thing cooler than that is the Kraftwerk knockoff music followed by actual Kraftwerk.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

(see also Burning Rubber 0.1)

Got together tonight with Rob Bohl, Emily Care-Boss, and Epidiah Ravichol for a first round playtest of Burning Rubber. We weren’t shooting at each other. I wanted to see if the driving game was fun, and when, if ever, you’d wish you could shoot. Each of them gave really solid feedback. Thanks, guys!

The big things we noticed:

• Skidding and crashing work great. They’re reasonably intuitive and make a really solid, comical mess.
• The ruler design is critical. Units were twice as long as they should have been and there were about half as many as there should have been, resulting in everyone achieving their top speed on turn 2 and having no problem keeping it, even around the tightest curve on the course.
• Driving is too easy. If no one gets aggro on your ass, you just drive around.
• I have to be clear that you can’t accelerate with Yellows.
• You need two rulers to keep from losing track of stuff.

The following rules supercede the previous post on the matter. They are much simpler. My sacred cow of “facings” is by the side of the road, trying to hitch a ride to a different game.

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Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I really like racing games. I like Formula D, I like Burnout, and I played the shit out of Car Wars as a lad. What Formula D (née Formula Dé) and Burnout have in common is fast, sleek gameplay. What Formula D and Car Wars have in common are vehicle construction rules (otherwise excellent 5th ed. notwithstanding). What Car Wars and Burnout have are frenzied automobile combat. You will note that those don’t overlap.

I’ve been kinda trying to figure out how to adapt Vincent’s Mechaton rules to car combat for a couple of years now. I’ve got a couple of specs that make it non-trivial.

• You’ve only got one car. Instead of having 3-5 guys to spread your resources around, you have one complex guy.
• Facing has to matter. It’s a car, so it’s all about maneuvering, for both offensive and defensive gain.
• You have to go forward. You accelerate and have a speed.
• The game is about racing, not just blowing each other up. One of the great things about Mechaton is the objective system; it makes fighting a matter of tactics rather than one of bashing. In this game, I want the fighting to be about winning the race, or if you can’t do that, crashing your car really spectacularly.
• Build a car in 30 minutes
• Play in about 90-120 minutes
• Have good crashing rules! Losing should be fun and funny!

So I started writing this up. What I got so far is under the break. Maybe you’ll get a chance to play before I will!

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Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

Matzah is only slightly more fun than dreidl. As a lot of folks know, I’ve been trying to invent a dreidl game that’s any good at all for several years now, to no avail. But I’m all up ons with the matzah thing.

Here’s what you do.

• 2c flour
• 1/2ts salt
• 1/2c olive oil. Use something good. I like Star, but we just went through a bottle of extraordinary yumminess that I can’t remember the name of.
• 1/3c water

1. Preheat oven to 350°F
2. Start your timer. This has to be in the oven in under 18 minutes or it’s no good for Pesach. 18 is the gemmatria for “Chai”, which means “life”, so it’s “alive” in 18 minutes, and that means it’s leavened.
3. Don’t sweat the time. This takes like 5 minutes.
4. Combine the flour and salt.
5. Sprinkle in the oil while tumbling around the flour. See if you can get all the flour stuck into oily, crumbly chunks.
6. Sprinkle in the water while turning over the flour/oil mixture as little as possible. Don’t knead it. That’s the key. Just get it mixed so everything’s damp with oil or water.
7. Oil up some baking sheets.
8. Roll it out just as flat as you can get it, ideally 2mm thick or so. I rolled it out on my baking sheets so I knew it would fit, but it was a little awkward because of our rolling pin’s shape.
9. Bake for 25 minutes.
10. While it’s baking, clean up the flour so you don’t have chametz floating around the kitchen. Also, it’s a mess.

The result is much like a pie crust. It’s awesome with meats and I want to try it as sort of an eggs-and-biscuits thing, too. When I did it, it was just as good the next day. There wasn’t any to test on day 3.

I checked with our favorite rabbi to ask about it’s KFPness, and he said he couldn’t think of any reason it wouldn’t be OK, though seder matzah has to be just flour and water. Since I was baking this so we could eat dinner (all the grocery stores being totally sold out of matzah), rather than as a ritual object, he figures it’s fine, since people fry matzah all the time.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

From The Viscous Platypus comes this link to a study in empathy. Robots (using the term very loosely) are built to these specifications:

• Roll forward
• Have the body proportions of a 1-year-old
• Have a flag that says where they would like to go, asking for help

… and people help them. To date, no robots have been lost or damaged.

To me, this shows not only human empathy, but the incredible processing power available to the world by interfacing with that empathy. Think about the distributed processing we could perform but withhold because to use it puts us in jeopardy to use it. And we’re usually right. But somehow, by assuring us that we are not being endangered through our evolved social senses, that processing is tapped.

Perhaps the future is not the Modern ideal of total autonomy, but one of free giving through the robust and extremely high bandwidth interface we’ve slowly developed over the last four million years. It’s given us open-source software, it’s given us a method of donating meaningfully to political causes $20 at a time, and it’s given us the tremendous power of social networking on the Internet. Maybe that power can be tapped for future endeavors of humanity, as well.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

I just watched Children of Men with Carrie. I’ve been asked if I’ve seen this movie by approximately every single person who’s ever played Shock: and for good reason. But I’d been avoiding it. I was avoiding it because I knew it was going to be good, but the Grid of the movie was all stuff that I felt so strongly about, I was worried that it would come up short of what might have been impossibly high standards.

The Shock is that humans can no longer conceive. In the course of the movie, you discover that it happened across the world over the course of a couple of months. It has no apparent cause.

The Issues are Immigration Policy and Terrorism, synthesized nicely into several threads of xenophobia. It’s very much a post-9/11 movie, but it’s also a movie made by a Mexican director for an American audience.

If you know me, you know that this is a perfect brew of fears for me.

The movie didn’t disappoint me. It’s full of humans acting very, very badly toward each other from the institutional to the personal level in ways you can understand. The world is in despair. You hear the sentiments of the movie echoing your friends, your enemies, talking heads on Fox News, crazy people on your favorite internet fora. At one point, it makes you complicit in a racist statement and then shows you that it was you making that assumption, not the film, not the situation. This character’s humanity is in the balance exactly as much as any other character’s, and it’s defined by their actions and desires, not their obvious otherness.

It’s a sad movie that doesn’t blink. At one point, while watching it, my body physically hurt from the tension.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

In 1998, as part of a drawing class, I made a book called A Trip to Europa in which I “edited” the works of a Dr. Kesling Frankh about his exploration of the oceans and life forms of the vast world-ocean of the Jovian moon Europa.

Europa is covered in ice and has a small rocky core. Tidal forces of Jupiter cause constant shifting of the ice, which releases heat and keeps liquid the vast world-ocean 2 kilometers beneath the surface liquid.

Click images to see closer.

There is only one “species” of life on Europa but its stages of life fill all available niches. Life “starts” as small, striated Spores that hatch into mineral-consuming Plankton. They become and are consumed by Foxes, small predators that, in turn become and are consumed by Wolves, the next phase. Wolves, when their local population becomes too great, are consumed by scavenger Foxes, Plankton, with the remainder becoming Whales, who consume minerals, Plankton, and any other organic detritus in the water. They lay Spores that eventually hatch into Plankton, restarting the process.

Originally published at xenoglyph: the alien writings of designer joshua a.c. newman. Please leave any comments there.

As Xenon: takes form, I’m discovering a small but elegantly creative “speculative evolution” and “worldbuilding” communities. They’re intensely creative and often collaborative environments, and there’s just as often a set of standards about authorship. You might even say that these communities have developed System for such endeavors.

One such really incredible world is called Snaiad. It’s remarkable not just because of its creativity, but also because of the extraordinary skill with which it’s been created. The paintings are rendered with amazing texture. Some textures, you recognize from animals you know. Some seem to be vegetable. Some body parts look like you’d expect. Others aren’t at all what they look like.

Enjoy your visit to Snaiad. When you get back, I’ll have some comments about other worldbuilding sites and projects, including my own Europa project from 1998, newly edited.