robin_d_laws

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robin_d_laws

Apologies to non-locals while I take care of some important business...

The demon of busy scheduling has struck again, leaving me regretting the departure of a recent but much appreciated addition to my Thursday night gaming group. As a result I am putting out an open call for one new recruit. In the past I’ve kept a waiting list, but it’s been many years since I’ve done a call and want to start from scratch. Apologies if you’ve contacted me in the past; please bear with me by getting in touch again.

To join the group, you’ll need to be reliably free on Thursday nights and able to get to the Bloor-Bathurst area in downtown Toronto. We meet from 7 pm to 10 pm.

You will also need a saintly tolerance for my playtesting needs. I run games I’m either designing or need to familiarize myself in order to do freelance work for. Lately we’ve had an unusually long run with a single campaign, which happens to be D&D4. Soon we’ll be switching to the as-yet-unnamed GUMSHOE space game. Often I’ll have to suddenly abandon a successful series in midstream to go on to the next thing. We usually play RPGs but there’s always the chance you may be asked to test-drive a card or board game along the way.

In the past I’ve accepted players on a first-come, first-served basis. This time, I’m looking to cast the new candidate a little more, with an eye to keeping our group dynamic fresh.

If you’re interested, leave a comment or private LJ message with a way of contacting me back. Or if you’re seeing this on the Facebook, leave a message in my inbox. Give me a quick sense of your gaming tastes.

Whether you jump in for the last few weeks of the D&D game or wait till Space GUMSHOE will be up to you.

robin_d_laws

This blog’s first Hero Of Freedom Award goes to whoever first coined the term crotch-bomber to describe Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, along with all of those who have wisely promulgated its use. Ridicule is an important and all-too-underused weapon in the battle against global terrorism. It may not directly deter the depressed and anomic young loner types or the outsourcing psychokillers who recruit them. However, by refusing to act as if we are terrified, we can remove the alleged geopolitical benefit of bombing attempts. With it goes the psychological thrills these guys are chasing, and which keep their rolls called and their coffers filled.

At the same time I humbly submit that the alternate terms underwear bomber and especially pantie-bomber are overdoing it. They smack a mite of schoolyard desperation, where crotch-bomber somehow strikes the right note of dismissive contempt. Let’s, as Ron Burgundy would have us do, stay classy, people.

My hope is that the ridiculously restrictive new TSA regulations handed down after the failed attempt will trigger an overdue attitude adjustment. In the name of warding off a statistically unlikely catastrophe, air travelers have demonstrated a willingness to be ritually inconvenienced for about twenty minutes in the scanner line-up. Not being able to hold anything in your hands or open your carry-on luggage for the last hour of flight crosses a line that might get voters thinking about the costs of ill-targeted fearfulness. Until now, the career incentives for politicians and officials have pushed them in the direction of ever more restrictive measures. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I’d love to see some countervailing pressure that rewards them for playing it cool and not overreacting. Make the intelligence effort smarter, by all means. But airport precautions that don’t change the odds give the attackers much of what they want even when the bombs remain undetonated.

Granted, it’s easier to adopt a stiff upper lip in the event of a near miss. When a plane full of people dies as the result of human malice, odds calculation goes out the window. We are horrified and angered in a way that we wouldn’t be by an equivalent number of fatal road accidents or deaths from lack of preventative medical care.

But even if something spectacularly horrible happens, we North Americans need to toughen up. We’d muster defiance in the face of an actual war. Let’s try some in this ongoing low intensity conflict.

robin_d_laws

Although I am not a life coach (unlike my friend Rebecca, who was best man at my wedding) I had the kind of thought a life coach would have on Friday, when the friends list filled up with various and sundry New Year’s resolutions. On the grounds that writing and game design qualify one for everything, I hereby present this advice for your edification.

Given that the exercise of willpower is given over to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is overworked and underpaid, the traditional resolution is a poor mechanism for impulse control. It is better at generating guilty feelings than at breaking habits we want to rid ourselves of.

Instead, use resolutions to promise yourself a few new adventures in the year to come. Depending on your resources and wherewithal, they might be big, like taking up a new sport or language. More likely you want to pick easily achievable micro-adventures.

For example, my resolutions for the year are:

* achieve mastery over fennel, annexing it into the vegetable rotation
* investigate pozole, with an eye to making some

These, you have noted, are modest and easily achieved. (Well, maybe not the pozole; I haven’t looked into it yet.) If carried out, they will result in pleasure. And, since I couched them as resolutions, the agreeable sense of an action item ticked off the to-do list. If not achieved, I will go over to Mexitaco and have their delicious pozole—a more than acceptable alternate outcome.

Needless guilt bad. Giving a gift to yourself, good.

Thus endeth the life lesson. Happy 2010, everybody.