So I finally played Lupus In Tabula (a.k.a. “Are You a Werewolf”) at Further Confusion, and last night we finally broke out Arkham Horror. I suppose now all that’s left will be to play Settlers of Cataan and my initiation will be complete. (NOTE: I may have actually played that and forgot.)

What to say about Arkham Horror…? Well, first, it’s long. Really long. Really, really long. Being a bunch of newbies, we chose Yig, the Ancient One specifically mentioned as making for a “shorter” game, and we still went from 7:00ish until midnight.

Have I mentioned that it’s long?

The other thing is that it’s complex. Really complex. Pointlessly complex. Why bother with money, for instance? With all of the “Gotta find a clue! Gotta seal the gates! Gotta get back home from the Plateau of Leng — again!” going on, the time spent getting to a shop and then actually shopping there, hardly feels worth the effort for what you get out of it. There are lots of other ways it’s pointlessly complex, but that was the one that most felt like extra baggage to me.

This is a game that’s packed to the gills with stuff. There are something like 16 characters, each with their own sub-rule, eight Ancient Ones, each with their own sub-rules, 10+ different decks of cards that all do different things, six different skills to make checks on, modifiers to every check, rules about how many monsters can be on the board, rules about how to fight or evade monsters, horror checks to see if monsters drive you insane, rules for which shops close down in which order as monsters start to take over town, rules about what order you have encounters in, rules about which player goes first on any turn, rules about how many times you may change your characters’ skill allocation, rules about different ways the different monsters move, fight, or lurk around — oh, and the cultists all have different stats depending on which Ancient One you’re fighting, and so on.

And yet, with all that, we still ran into situations where the rules didn’t cover it and we had to come up with an answer. Specifically, at one point my character (the nun) encountered a monster. Being a nun, my character couldn’t fight worth a tiddlywink and the only weapon she had was a cross — which was only useful against undead. But she did have a spell that negated damage from a single source, and cast that. So she couldn’t hurt the monster, but the monster couldn’t hurt her, either.

And so … what? The combat system in the game assumes that the monsters generally beat the snot out of you unless you manage to single-shot them. So normally if you can’t hurt a monster, it just means you get mauled. They don’t seem to have a contingency for what happens if the monster can’t hurt you either. We took a vote around the table and decided to treat the encounter as if I’d evaded the monster instead, just to keep the game going.

During the first hour or so of the game, half of the people around the table were saying, “This should be a computer game!” because of all the fiddly stuff to keep track of. Honestly, tho, I can’t imagine it being a very fun computer game, even if I can totally see how that would work. Progress is too slow and too nebulous — “Am I doing well? Am I doing poorly? Am I just wandering around wasting time because I don’t know what I should be doing?” I realize that, being based on Call of Cthulhu (which is in turn based on Lovecraftian horror), that “slow, nebulous, and uncertain” is exactly what they’re going for. But y’know, I could get that just from running an actual game of Call of Cthulhu and do a lot less dice-rolling and card-shuffling.

So, net result? Unless people specifically ask for it, I doubt we’ll be doing Arkham Horror again; the amount of fun delivered doesn’t justify the amount of work.

-The Gneech

Until recently, when I heard the phrase “The Big Mistake” in reference to gaming, my first thought was of the release of 4E, which I dislike intensely. But when I heard they were going to use the same system as a framework for a new edition of Gamma World, I decided it would be worth a try. After all, a lot of what irritates me about 4E — characters are a random bunch of powers that don’t really make any sense, storytelling has been systemically shoved aside in favor of a series of pumped-up encounters that may or may not be related to each other, and so on — are actually core conceits of Gamma World and have been since 1978. And though I’ve been a gamer since the Reagan administration, I’ve never actually played Gamma World before, so it seemed like a good time.

The premise of Gamma World, for those who don’t know, is that reality broke a long time ago (nuclear war in previous editions, a “Big Mistake” with the Large Hadron Collider in this one), and your characters live in the crazy post-apocalyptic world that arose from it, encountering mutants, monsters, and wacky high-tech stuff in the ruins of Ancient cities and installations. And of course, reality is still a bit wonky, causing you to mutate randomly during the course of play. It’s two parts Logan’s Run, two parts Escape From New York, and one part The Muppet Show, although you could also think of it as Fluxx: The Roleplaying Game.

The new boxed set includes a smallish (and a bit flimsy) rules booklet, a deck of Alpha Mutation and Omega Tech cards, a sealed booster deck of same (more on that below), a pair of battle maps showing several encounter locations in the starter scenario, two sheets of heavy cardstock character/monster counters, and some (smallish) character sheets. Aside from the usual selection of gaming dice, the box contains all you technically need to play, although I recommend you download the character sheet and print it at full page size. A 4E D&D GM screen might also be handy, and as I have a wide variety of miniatures, I used those instead of the counters, but that’s a personal preference.

Character generation, at least if you do it “right,” is completely random. (The game allows for you to have some choice, if you really insist on it, but has no qualms about calling you a big baby if you do.) Thus, my players ended up with:

• Lee: A gravity-controlling android with a high Charisma and a Dexterity of 4, named Downshift.
• Jamie: A permanently-on-fire cat-anthro, sort of a furry version of The Human Torch, named Blaze.
• Josh: A radioactive swarm of rats who share a hive mind, named Mick.
• Laurie: A huge human with telekinesis, named Gina.
• Me (NPC): A superfast human who can create duplicates of himself from alternate realities, named Buzz.

Due to the random generation of gear, almost everyone in the party ended up owning 5 gallons of fuel — but nobody had a vehicle aside from a couple of horses. Mick (the rat swarm) did have a canoe, which I thought would make a cool chariot pulled by the horses, but he traded it in for two rolls on the Ancient Junk table, ending up with a boardgame and a string of Christmas lights, which he actually liked much better. (“I can make them light up, see!” *bzzt*)

Unfortunately, one big problem Gamma World shares with 4E is a philosophy that “roleplaying is that boring stuff that happens between encounters,” and this is reflected in the starter scenario. A paragraph informs you that robots have been randomly bothering “the village” and so your characters are on the first encounter map because they’ve tracked the robots up here.

Um, what village would that be? Why should the characters give a flap about that? What is the world like when there are no dice involved? The game doesn’t care. Heck, they didn’t even bother to give the main “boss” of the starter scenario a name. That annoys the heck out of me, because I care a lot more about that stuff than I do about whether combat is balanced or not. So, in the two hours or so of prep time I had, I whipped up the village of Dozer Hole, including a saloon called “Let ‘er Rip” and its hawkoid owner, and even (*gasp*) came up with a working name and backstory for the baddies.

With the help of the randomly-determined gear the party was carrying, we worked out that they were a traveling band of adventurers who used to have a car, but that it underwent some sort of catastrophic existence failure. So they scavenged the fuel and are now looking for another car, which is what brought them to Dozer Hole. However, Dozer Hole operates almost entirely on a local currency called “bucks,” which the party naturally had none of. Fortunately, Kaziza (the owner of Let ‘er Rip) would extend them 500 bucks worth of credit if they’d take care of the problem of robots trundling down out of the hills and blowing up at their town.

A couple of skill checks in the book provide a little more information, but not much. There are raiders in the hills; the robots are products of “Stupendico” (Kid-Tested, Mom-Approved!). A while back some people came around Nameless Village asking about robots and were rebuffed. If I’d had more time to flesh out this part, there could have been a lot of wacky fun interacting with the colorful postapocalyticish eccentrics of Dozer Hole — but the book didn’t provide any and I didn’t have time to come up with ‘em. So we breezed over this bit and went right to the first encounter (and by extension, right to the first fight).

I won’t detail what they found in the mountains to avoid spoilers, but Gamma World is powered by the 4E engine, so combat, apart from being just a hair sillier, felt pretty much the same. Lots of random shifting, lots of trying to figure out some kind of power to bring to bear instead of doing a “basic attack,” and so on. Although one improvement here is that doing a basic attack feels less like “a turn wasted” in this version; I think this may be because there are fewer powers generally (and no feats at all).

There is also a lot less fluctuation in hit points; although you can still take a Second Wind, there are no Healing Surges — and no cleric — so for the most part hit points go in only one direction: down. This means you have to be a lot more careful about surviving any given encounter (and take your second wind as soon as you’re bloodied), because there’s no healer to pull your bacon out of the fire. On the other hand, you regain all of your hit points whenever you take a short rest, so assuming you stay up longer than the bad guys do, you’ll be fine at the beginning of your next encounter.

“Treasure” is awarded in the form of draws from the Omega Tech deck, representing high tech stuff you find either on your dead foes or lying in the corner of the room ignored. Omega Tech tends to be stuff that alternates between being very useful, or blowing up in your face, such as the little buddy robot Downshift found, which follows him around and shoots at his foes, but if it misses his foe shoots at him instead. (I used a miniature of K-9 from Doctor Who for that — it seemed appropriate.) At the end of an encounter, any piece of Omega Tech you’ve used has a certain chance of breaking, although some of them are salvageable as less-powerful permanent versions of themselves. The idea is that you will gain and lose and gain and lose Omega Tech cards a lot over the course of the game.

Similarly, Alpha Mutations (powers which are things like growing an extra pair of limbs, or suddenly developing laser beam eyes) change at the start of every game session, during every extended rest, and can theoretically change during the course of the game if there’s some triggering event (referred to as “Alpha Flux”). The powers are on cards, and whenever Alpha Flux occurs, you discard your current one and draw a new one.

Players can (and the WotC marketing department hopes they will) create their own personal deck of Alpha Mutations or Omega Tech by buying booster decks — and is anybody surprised by this? There are rules as to how a personal deck must be built, so you don’t just build yourself a deck of nothing but Fusion Rifles over and over, but it does allow you to create a themed deck that will work with your character. If you’re a psychic, for instance, you might build a deck heavy on psionic mutations. Of course, if your character croaks and you then roll up a timeshifted seismic, all those psi cards are going to be less useful. But given that it would probably take three or four booster packs to build a workable deck, you’ve probably got spares to reconfigure with.

So! What’s the overall impression?

The Good

If you’re an old-school gamer, you are probably already familiar with Gamma World, or at least familiar enough to know if you’ll like it or not. Jamie, who is an old-school GW player, says that it works much better with “a more modern rule system,” and certainly the inherent weirdness of the setting is the only thing that can make 4E work for me. The fact that the critters are on-level compatible with those from D&D is a big plus — all you need to do to create a funky new mutant for your characters to face (since there are only two modules announced and they won’t be out for months) is pull something out of a 4E adventure and re-skin it with more psychotropia added.

The Bad

The starter scenario included is, in a word, weak. It’s a super-linear dungeon crawl designed to escort players from fight to fight with no background to speak of and almost no flavor at all. Considering how wild, crazy, and awesome the world is described as being, this is a very lackluster way to introduce people to it. The rules are 4E nonsense, but the world is also nonsense, so it fits. I will say that although the idea of booster decks of cards is a very blatant “Actual Game Sold Separately” mechanic, it doesn’t bother me because the game is perfectly playable without it and the constant fluctuation of powers and gadgets is part of the world. I can also see how, if you’ve been playing a while, seeing the same cards over and over would quickly get tiresome. Whole splatbooks full of nothing but new origins for players who don’t want to be another mind-reading hawk-man would not be out of line for a hardcore group.

The Ugly

The stat blocks for several monsters are wonky at best — I was transcribing foes from the adventure into WordPerfect so I could have a print-out handy instead of having to flip pages during the course of the game and I encountered badly-calculated ability score bonuses so many times that I had to double-check they hadn’t changed how those were figured. Who knows what other, less-obvious problems there were! I didn’t have time to refigure stat blocks, so I don’t know how off the numbers actually were. (The good news is, at first level at least, +1/-1 either way is probably the largest variation, so it wasn’t really an issue.) Also, the main book is small (5″ x 7″ -ish) but was clearly laid out for full 8.5″ x 11″ size — so the type is tiny and can be hard to read. On top of that, the binding is cheapy … one read-through and the spine was already broken.

Final Verdict

It’s OTT, silly fun, and is worth rotating in to your game schedule. However, at least until the modules come out, you’ll have to do a lot of the heavy lifting of making a viable campaign out of it, and if the starter scenario is any indication, you’ll still have to do a lot of the heavy lifting then. On the other hand, character development tops out at 10th level (no Paragon or Epic Gamma World, it seems), so campaigns will tend to be short and sweet, which is probably for the best. Like the MST3K mantra says, “Just repeat to yourself, it’s just a game, I should really just relax.”

-The Gneech

PS: Josh’s mini-review. Same conclusions, many fewer words.

You may recall that I recently blasted the David Suchet Murder On the Orient Express — and I stand by that blasting. However, while I was researching that, I found out about a “modernized” 2001 made-for-TV version starring Alfred Molina, mostly by way of people shouting “Stay away! Stay away!”

Well, my curiosity was piqued to the point that I had Netflix shoot it off my way and took a look at it. And given my reaction to the last one, it may surprise you to hear that my verdict is: “It’s not that bad.” Or possibly, “It’s not bad for what it is.”

Is it Hercule Poirot? No. Let’s face it, the character of Poirot doesn’t really work outside of his historical context, and even if he did, Alfred “Throw Me the Idol, I’ll Throw You the Whip” Molina doesn’t really work as Poirot. He’s huge, he’s earthy; he’d make a great Larry Talbot. But a prim and dainty little detective? No. And for what it’s worth, the filmmakers seem aware of this: they downplay the eccentricity of the character, and instead introduce a pointless “exotic love interest” character to try to set up a sort of “Hercule Poirot, International Man of Mystery.” That doesn’t work either, but it’s not any fault of Alfred Molina’s, it’s just a dumb idea.

Made in the dot-com boom, a lot of the modernization revolves around technology: Daisy Armstrong’s father becomes a sort of Steve Jobs-ish software guru (as does his college pal, Arbuthnot), and Poirot finds several clues by looking up the Armstrong case on the internet — much to the outrage of many of the commenters I found about this film. But I didn’t have a problem with that: if you’re going to modernize a story, modernize it! I also think it’s worth giving the filmmakers points for addressing the fact that the “real” Orient Express has been more or less defunct since the ’70s [1], by having M. Bouc talk about his company’s revitalization of the line.

So, why am I more forgiving of this low-budget clunker than I am of the David Suchet version? It’s all about where you set the bar. This version makes no pretense of being a faithful adaptation of Christie’s work. Like the Margaret Rutherford “Miss Marple” movies, it uses Christie’s work as a launching pad to create its own thing. Does it succeed brilliantly? Well, no. There is some seriously clunky exposition and the only character to really make an impression is Ratchett himself. But at the same time, it’s not the slap in the face that the Suchet one was, either, and so I find myself feeling a lot more friendly towards it.

-The Gneech

[1] “The Orient Express” has a complex genealogy. You can still ride “an” Orient Express today, but it’s not the one Agatha Christie was writing about.

Some twenty-ish years ago, the BBC (and by extension on this side of the pond, PBS) began running a TV series based on Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, starring David Suchet as the quirky little detective.

And it was brilliant. David Suchet perfectly captured the strange mixture of warm, insightful playfulness and cold calculation that made Poirot so formidable a detective, not to mention nicely embodying Poirot’s long list of idiosyncrasies without becoming quite the grotesque that other actors had tended to turn him into in the past. Hardcore Christie purists might grumble about the way Col. Hastings, Inspector Japp, and Miss Lemon were crammed into every story with a crowbar because they were “part of the regular cast,” and there may have been moments when the series veered a bit towards being a situation comedy that just happened to have detective stories in it. But on the whole, it was brilliant. And many people, myself included, said of this series, “Man, I wish they’d do Murder On the Orient Express!”

But that was twenty years ago. Poirot had a great run in the U.K. and over here, but eventually was cancelled as all good shows must someday be. Like so many other great TV detectives, David Suchet’s Poirot moved on to the occasional “movie special” instead of the regular weekly offering, allowing them to take on Christie’s longer works without abridging the heck out of them. Unfortunately, something changed along the way. Hercule Poirot, the quirky and offbeat Belgian detective who winked and chuckled at English society, became POIROT, ZEALOUS DEFENDER OF LAW AND ORDER! And his cases went from being charming parlour games, to GRIM CRIME DRAMA.

And thus, twenty years later, we are finally presented with David Suchet as Poirot in Murder On the Orient Express … and the series that used to portray Poirot so perfectly, instead gets it all wrong.

We start on a sour note with Poirot solving a case which results in a young and promising military officer blowing his brains out, spattering gore all over Poirot’s face. This scene, while unpleasant, at least has a hint of a precedent in the actual book; the scene that follows, in which Col. Arbuthnot and Mary Debenham happen upon a woman being viciously stoned to death for adultery, not only didn’t appear in the book but is completely contradictory to the deliberately-pedestrian way in which the the book starts. Things keep going from grim to grimmer as Poirot boards the train, meets Ratchett and turns down his job offer, and various characters begin throwing religion at each other and praying all over the place. (Do what now?) And Poirot finds himself telling Mary Debenham that the woman who was stoned to death “knew the rules of her culture” and that by breaking them she invited being brutally stoned to death in the street.

Wait, what?

The train may stay on the rails, but this script sure didn’t. 0.o The screenwriter (or director, or whoever it was making these decisions) was so intent on making a Big Damn Point about “justice” vs. “law” — whatever that point was, I never could quite figure it out — that they were perfectly happy to twist Poirot from a likable ex-cop who did amateur sleuthing as a mental diversion into a cold zealot who cares only about The Law (in capital letters) and believes that the slightest slip leads instantly to anarchy and barbarism. On top of this, all of the charm, all of the pleasant “conversationality” of Christie’s writing is thrown completely away, leaving only a bleak landscape where what little humor there is seems like a bitter jab instead of a friendly nudge. This Murder On the Orient Express has Poirot scowling and barely able to stomach the presence of Ratchett during the job offer and essentially refusing even to speak to him, instead of the book’s lighthearted exchange of, “At the risk of being personal, I don’t like your face.” By the end, both Poirot and the suspects are all nearly frozen to death, croaking at each other in grim darkness, and the presentation of the “right” solution to the Yugoslavian police is an angsty dark night of the soul for Poirot, instead of gently handing the decision to M. Bouc, the director of the line, and “retiring from the case.”

SPOILER ALERT: In one of the most egregious twists of character, even if it is a supporting character, Col. Arbuthnot, the steadfast British officer who was so upset that Ratchett was murdered instead of being sentenced to death by a jury of twelve, “the civilized way,” pulls out a gun with the intent to murder Poirot in order to prevent him from telling the police what actually happened — thus not only perverting the character, but also the whole damn point of the story. This, to me, falls under the heading of the screenwriter (or director, or whomever), putting themselves and their own desires above the work, which is something I always resent in any adaptation.

I don’t know the motivation behind turning Poirot from light whodunnit into bleak melodrama, and honestly I don’t care. But one idea that occurred to me was that they may have done it deliberately to distance themselves from the 1970s Albert Finney version of Murder On the Orient Express. That version is a grand symphony, a tribute not only to Agatha Christie but to the glories of old Hollywood and pre-war Europe, with the Orient Express itself all but waltzing across the screen in its own exuberance. What better way to be different from its exalted elegance than to be harsh and grim, right?

Unfortunately, for all of Albert Finney’s chewing the scenery in the 1970s film, he is at least chewing the scenery in ways compatible with what Agatha Christie actually wrote. The 1970s Murder On the Orient Express is an extremely faithful adaptation; one that even Dame Agatha herself was pleased with, after a lifetime of seeing her works hacked up and generally mucked around with. (And crying all the way to the bank, it’s true.) Admittedly, that leaves the makers of the Suchet version in a tough spot: how do you make a faithful adaptation of such a famous work, without simply doing again the extremely faithful adaptation that’s already been made? The key there I would think would be in letting it ride on David Suchet, with his subtle, nuanced, warm and humorous Poirot taking the stage instead of the eccentric, french-horn-laughing, wild-eyed Poirot of Albert Finney. Twenty years ago, when I was wishing for the David Suchet Murder On the Orient Express, that was what I was wishing for. The 1970s version had everything right except Poirot himself — the new version seems to get everything wrong including Poirot himself.

C’est la vie!

-The Gneech

CORRECTION: I should mention here that Agatha Christie’s Poirot is made by ITV, not the BBC; my apologies. It’s all “British television” to me.

Well, I’ve been waiting eagerly to see how the Wired app would perform. After all, if there was ever a magazine set to lead the tablet-mag revolution, Wired should be it.

So it was released this morning, I shelled out my five bucks, and started playing with it. Until I got so annoyed I gave up on it.

The problem isn’t the content — that’s the same standard as you’d expect from Wired, plus a few random movie clips. The problems are all in the interface. In short, it doesn’t do what I want or expect it to do, and worse, does stuff I don’t want or expect it to do.

Start with the most basic function of a magazine: reading. I’ve only been using ebook readers for a few months now, but they’ve already trained me that “tap on the right” = “next page,” while “tap on the left” = “previous page.” Not so, with the Wired app. This app expects you to swipe up and swipe down. Tapping on the right moves you to the next advertisement. (Did I mention that there are LOTS of advertisements? I haven’t counted, so I can’t say for sure that there are more ads than articles, but it sure felt like it.) Tapping on the right seems to be the equivalent of a “next track” button in a music player, because the app uses a model where every item is a column, and you’re moving from column to column when you tap right or left.

If you want to browse through the magazine, you can tap the screen to pull up a slider at the bottom, which just slides you along the columns. Or you can tap a little mystery-meat icon in the upper right corner that looks a little like WiFi signal strength bars to call up a broader layout bar where theoretically you can slide from column to column and pick what you want. Except that the slider always skips the one you’re trying to land on and jumps to the next one unless you get it lined up juuuuuust right — and tapping on the column when it’s not in the center just slides it around. This rapidly goes from irksome to annoying, from annoying to irritating, and from irritating to infuriating. I shouldn’t be fighting against the interface in order to see the column I want to see!

Oh, and forget about zooming. You know how in the iPad web browser and most applications you can pinch or stretch to zoom in or out? Not so in Wired, unless a given article happens to specifically enable it, which you have to tap first to “turn on.”

But those aren’t the only interface fights. There’s a small Quicktime video that lists the various missions to Mars, which has a little icon that reads, “Swipe to see a history of Mars missions.” All well and good, except that if you do swipe it, it thinks you’re doing the “next track/previous track” thing and moves you to an advertisement instead. The only way to see the Mars video is to ever-so-gently tap where it says “swipe” and hope you don’t move your finger a millimeter in either direction when you do so. “Tap” and “Swipe” are not the same thing, guys.

Seriously, a major disappointment. C’mon, guys, you’re frickin’ Wired magazine! Do better.

-The Gneech

EDIT: Followup! Mover and shaker that I am (/sarcasm) I happen to be lucky enough have a friend who works at Wired. And while he’s not on the creative team directly, he did have some interesting things to say about my rant. With his permission, I’ve posted that conversation here, with identifiers removed. Note that he’s speaking only from his own perspective here, and not as an official voice of the magazine.

My Friend: Hey there.
The Gneech: Hiyas. Sorry to be a bummer on release day.
My Friend: *snickers* You are the first negative I’ve heard, and since I’ve been playing with it for months…
My Friend: (Ads BTW, are EXACTLY equal to what’s in the print magazine, that’s required by ABC (Magazine biz) standards)
The Gneech: That’s as may be; but the ads were a minor irritant at best. They aren’t the problem.
My Friend: The Slider you are right.
My Friend: It seems too sensitive in this issue.
My Friend: BTW: Your feedback IS welcome and wanted.
My Friend: I chatted with the designers and senior editors.
The Gneech: Thanks. I was trying to keep my annoyance with the interface separate from things like the content or even conceptually about an electronic magazine.
The Gneech: ‘cos really, I did want to be blown away, not infuriated. ^.^’
My Friend: Part of the UI was intentionally trying to redefine how to interface with a magazine.
My Friend: So SOME of the things you complained about are intentional. (Articles being vertical while everything else is horizontal)
The Gneech: Yeah, but I think there are certain expectations that need to be dealt with, not the least of which is the page-turning one. Trying to get people used to steering wheels to start using inverted joysticks is a plan for disaster.
The Gneech: I think it would be better to rotate the axis — right-left = turn page, up-down = previous/next article.
The Gneech: That way you’d still get the two-axis interface, without randomly irritating people already used to e-readers.
The Gneech: Or a preference setting to change it.
My Friend: Yup, most people are getting the hang of it, once they play a little. But I can understand the confusion. They tried to get it to work like a webpage for each article, and then swipe for the next bit like an ebook. The reverse would be like ebooks for the articles, but the down swipe would be unlike anything else.
The Gneech: Yeah, but webpages are all one scroll, not bracketed columns. It’s FORMATTED like an e-book, but then tells you to read it like a webpage. Type mismatch.
My Friend: Hmm… You know, I think if you send an email to me I’ll forward it to them, I don’t know if THAT can be fixed at this point, but other things can be.
The Gneech: An e-mail of which? A link to the blog? Transcript of the chat?
My Friend: Hmm, or feedback like the blog but directed specifically to the tablet team.
The Gneech: Well, w/ your permission, I’ll post this in a followup (stripping your name out) and then e-mail a link to the whole thing.
My Friend: Sounds cool. Yeah forward and point to the first post as well.
The Gneech: Okeydoke. Will do.
The Gneech: Thanks.

At this point, I suspect a preferences setting would be the best bet, but without being privy to their code, I’m just making my best guess.

-The Gneech

Something that pleases me no end is when somebody buys an ad on gneech.com that catches my eye and turns out to be very cool indeed. Such is the case with The Three Micahs, a blog by M.C.A. Hogarth (a.k.a. “Haikujaguar”) about the business end of creative pursuits. In an engaging and perky writing style she gives artistic types — often less-than-stellar businesspeople — useful tips for getting their heads out of the clouds long enough to actually succeed and hopefully even prosper at their vocation. My first introduction to the blog was a banner ad at the top of my own site (proof that advertising works ).

I am particularly impressed at the holistic (and pragmatic) approach she takes to the artistic life, including the necessity for most of having a day job. Far from seeing this as a curse, she spends a lot of time showing how to integrate the day job into the whole package and use it to fuel your art.

Above all, your #1 strategy: if the job isn’t working for you, start looking for a new one. This Day Job is not your career. Your goal is to make enough money to free yourself from some (or all) of your financial anxieties and to get out of the studio… not to chain yourself to a miserable existence. Remember the mindsets: I am not my Day Job, and I am allowed to choose the work I do. Arm yourself with these realizations and keep looking until you find the right fit.

She also illustrates the blog with cartoon jaguars, so what’s not to love? All my fellow woolly-headed artistic types, I heartily recommend you check it out.

-The Gneech