Sanity, Exit Stage Left

Done. Today, I finally rounded off a long and tough second year of university. Well, not exactly ‘rounded it off’, I still have one re-try to go and need to hand in a revised report, but those are for the near future.
The problem is, barely six hours have passed since I said ‘okay guys, I’m going home!’ and, quite frankly, I’m restless. The last week alone has been spent in so much stress and hard work that I even decided against writing blog posts, for they would take up valuable time that I needed to write two reports, a reflection and a portfolio. I also made the stupid mistake of not writing down the ideas I had, of which I’m sure they were there, but couldn’t recall for the life of me at the moment.
Okay, so, my priorities were somewhere else than my writing for the past week and a half or so. That is done for, now, I had two presentations and four hand-in moments in the past two days, so I have some time for myself. Well, not completely for myself, I still have a job, a paper round, scouting, AAAARGH.

To prevent myself from going slightly insane, I’ve got to make a list, a to-do, things I need to do, so I have something to work to. I’m in this terrible mindset of having to work, thanks a lot, university!
So, here we go, in points:

1. I have a crate radio I need to complete.
1a. Wood needs to be ordered (money is on my desk).
1b. The wood has to be prepared (need the wood for this).
1c. Everything has to be assembled (both soldering and fitting).

2. I have a book to write.
2a. 5000 words (one chapter) a day (+/- 2,5 hours).
2b. Flying Light, the last book in my HELMET trilogy, so I need to keep the background in mind.

3. I have a D&D campaign to keep running and prepared.
3a. Surprises from my players have to be anticipated and/or prepared for.
3b. Unexpected decisions need rewards, make sure inventiveness is met with rewarding action, not punishments and walls.
3c. Make sure I have enough things prepared for the options I have set out so far.

4. Prepare the Savage Worlds introduction session.
4a. Almost done, just the final touches.
4b. Try to run it in the near future.
4c. If they like it, 5 becomes active as well.

5. Prepare the Savage Worlds Declipse campaign.
5a. Prepare the first session, in which the options are laid out.
5b. Prepare ALL THE OPTIONS.

6. Don’t forget, you’ve got a backlog of games.

7. Oh, and a girlfriend.

8. And that secondary exam and revised report, don’t forget those.

9. And you should find time for your friends and the already running D&D/nWoD/oWoD games they surely want you to participate in.

10. And you absolutely shouldn’t forget to re-apply for university, so you can actually complete your education.

… Whew, that’s better. Believe it or not, but having this stupid to do list actually helps me keep an overview of what I’ve got to do and, quite frankly, it’s quite a bit. Certainly something that’ll keep me running for the next three/four weeks, and hopefully for the rest of the vacation I’m looking at, all the way up to September, when university starts again and I’ll have my hands all filled up with the work for that. It also helps that I’ve got three weeks filled up, of which 12 days are set for a scouting camp in Switzerland and the remaining days are to be spent with amazing buddies who want to travel around. It’s going to be great.

Now, to go into a little detail on the more interesting things:

The crate radio was actually planned to be made and completed in January, but this was prevented by my supplier failing to send me the battery until April, despite the fact that I ordered it at the end of November. It’ll be sweet to actually complete it in time for the scouting camp… Even though it’ll be pretty big and heavy.

Bright Dawn was the first book in my HELMET trilogy and, quite frankly, it was pretty horrible when I look back at it. The second book, Death’s Messengers, was leaps better than that. Flying Light, which will be the last book, already has the first chapter and a good part of the second chapter completed, but that was back in February, before I acknowledged my ongoing writer’s block. I’m going to use it to force myself through it, for I’m tired of it, and hope that something decent will come out of it. Maybe I won’t publish it, though my proofreaders will probably be a deciding factor in that.

My players continue to be fascinating me with their choices and decisions in my D&D campaign. I’ve managed to keep them going over the e-mail and had a pretty clear view of what was to be done with them, but they’re throwing wrenches in the cogs left and right. It’s really interesting to try and improvise my way around them, though I’ve already acknowledged the fact that it’s good I’m doing this over e-mail and I’ve got the chance to think out my reactions before actually having to send them out.

That’s about the long and the short of what has started to work in my mind, right now. It’s a pretty damn mess, if you ask me!

Camps and time issues

I spent the better part of last week on a long weekend with my new scouting group, getting to know the kids and the leadership, as well as all of them getting to know me.
It’s a really mixed group, with a couple of kids who act well above their age while there are also a couple that manage to be abundantly childish and act like they should still be in the age group below us. It’s a confusing mix, but somehow, they managed to endear me.

There could have been several moments where this happened. For example during the first night, when I enjoyed my dinner with one of the patrols and they very enthusiastically told me about the way they treated each other (every time he says something stupid, I slap him across the back of his head!), or the time they spent the better part of thirty minutes on a beach to tire me out enough and drag me into the water with my clothes on. It was fantastic to see the way they were testing me out, just to see how far they could go with me (pretty far, I have to say), despite my sickness at the time and the fact that I had already given them the could shoulder a couple of times before to get them off of my back and back to whatever activity they were supposed to be doing.
What I’m really afraid of is that I get too close to the kids. I don’t want them to see me as ‘one of them’, because I’m still supposed to be leading and instructing them, but I’m also by far the youngest person in the leadership team (the others have all crossed the big three-oh) and they’re drifting towards me by virtue of me being able to understand them better than the other leaders. It’s pretty clear when I’m merely observing from the background, they treat the others with just that little bit more respect while they give me just a little more sass.
And I think that’s just fine.
I know I’m walking a fine line when I let these kids talk back to me a little, but it’s up to me to define when they’ve gone too far and to make it abundantly clear that they’d better back up a little bit. As I said, they’re testing me and I’m still testing them. Quite frankly, they’re on the advantage, for I have about twenty-two times more people to test and understand than they do.
When I returned home this Sunday, I was completely exhausted and about ready to crash into the nearest soft surface, but I was also happy. I like those kids and it feels good to get the opportunity to teach them something while I’m also bringing my scouting knowledge back up to par. The rest of the leadership team likes me as well and invited me to join them on their camp to Switzerland this summer, which I happily agreed to. It was also met with cheers by quite a couple of the scouts themselves, which probably means that I made a good impression on them.

What I shouldn’t have done was go to work about an hour after I got back, though. That was a stupid, STUPID decision. I was pretty damn close to a corpse for the better part of that evening, drifting in that grey zone of falling over from exhaustion but not wanting to go to bed because there was quite a bit of work to catch up to.

Because, quite frankly, suddenly disappearing from the internet for four days means that you’re unable to do any work in this day and age. My university teams didn’t stop while I was busy enjoying myself, so I’m more or less compelled to work my ass off now. I’ll make it, though, I’m pretty sure about that. Just need to keep my timetables up.

Playing Cards at the Gaming Table

I like to play Role Playing Games. Pen and paper Role Playing Games, in fact, are amongst the most fun to play, because of their unpredictable nature. Good Game Masters are able to run a basic story three times, in which there are three different routes through the story and about eleventy-billion possible endings.
The charm of the pen and paper RPG is the fact that you’re not bound to what the producers have coded on those little discs, and aren’t forced to buy certain hardware (I, for example, would love to play Killzone some day, if it wasn’t for the fact that I don’t own a Playstation). Everything is in the Game Master’s mind and the only limitation to what the players are able to do is what he or she has prepared and how well he or she is able to improvise his way around players going there where nothing was prepared.
Seeing how I moonlight as a writer, despite a terrible case of writer’s block that’s lasted since frickin’ February, I took it upon myself to see how well I could Game Master (or GM, for those willing to learn a bit of jargon) a short campaign in Dungeons and Dragons (or D&D. See? I’m preparing to use big words often, so I’m not going to use them anymore now). When I started writing, though, I realized that my friends are unpredictable little jerks at times and would surely fail to follow the plot threads I wanted to lay out so carefully. Not because they did it to spite me, but because they’d find numerous things that are more shiny than what I wanted them to find. Things that I did my best to make as dull as possible, to railroad them a little bit. Practiced GM’s will probably roar in rage at this, but hey, I’m not a practiced GM.
So what was my solution? My plan was threefold, namely:

1: I limited their movement space. Not by saying ‘these are the boundaries, don’t leave them!’, or as Yahtzee said so much better in his Wolfenstein review:

“It transpires that the in-game reality,
Has potentials to non-linearity,

The game says: 'on your bike!
Go wherever you like!
As long as it’s in this principality!'”

But by actually limiting the area of where things were happening. It was really quite easy, a big city usually helps and contains more than enough people and events to keep any story interesting. My players might want to get out, and I’ll be able to work with it, but aside from a couple minor hints, they won’t find much.

2: I didn’t lay out a path. During the first session, which was quite recent, I was able to predict quite accurately where they would be going and prepare a couple of locations. That’s because that session covered the road to said city and the introduction of it. I prepared three encounters and then said ‘okay, go!’ to them to go explore and meet people. Instead of making them go from one encounter to the next, I simply filled up the city with interesting people who know things and who are able to provide plot hooks and information. They actually met quite a few of those people.
This does put me in a bit of a bind considering the preparations, though. I’ve already worked out a couple of encounters and, if I continue the role playing over the e-mail a bit, I’ll be able to lead them to a position where I can beautifully prepare a first encounter, but it’ll require a bit of cooperation from my players. That’ll be tricky, at best.

3: I provided quite a lot of hints in the plot hooks. Clear hints. Hints of which I said ‘you’d have to be stupid to miss those’, and I’m not the sharpest knife in the drawer. During this first session, they received enough information to get a clear view of a couple of the major players in the overarching storyline, but somehow, I got the feeling they didn’t really buy that. I blame the overly political and shades-of-grey game we’re also playing, because it made us all distrustful and got us second-guessing just about everyone we meet, but apparently they don’t buy it that I opted to make things a little more black and white.
Granted, one of my players DID catch the hint I threw at them the very moment it went across the table, but he was quickly shushed by one of the others. That was fun to watch.

What I wanted to focus on with this little story are the first and second points. Because I gave them free roaming ability in a limited space, very Assassin’s Creed-esque, they could interact with anyone at any point in time. In other words, mapping out the way conversations would go through limited predictions would be next to impossible. In my notes I’ve got a list of names, followed by short descriptions of who the people are, what they know exactly and what they want. Armed with just that, I said ‘and from there, I’m going to wing it’.

People who know me also know that I’m not that great of an improviser, especially when pitted against some of my friends who are (they know who they are), and when I’m talking, I’m usually not sure what to do with my hands. Well, I know a couple of things, but that would be distracting and awkward.
I knew that was going to be a problem, so I opted to bring a little distraction for myself. I packed a deck of cards with me, which I would just use to shuffle during the improvisation scenes. It’s a sufficiently mindless task that I would be able to focus on the game itself and, if I didn’t make it anything fancy, wouldn’t distract my players from the game, either.
I was wrong.
The moment I got the deck out and started shuffling, I noticed awkward and panicked looks flying around the table. My players are well trained to watch the GM’s hands, in case he starts rolling for something we’re not aware of, and that’s exactly what they asked.

“Rik, why do you have a pack of cards? What are you going to do with those?” they asked.
“Oh, nothing,” I tried to reassure them, “it’s just to keep myself busy, nothing more.”
They didn’t buy it. A couple of them visibly tensed up whenever I grabbed the cards and started shuffling, as if I could whip a card out at any moment, look at it, and say ‘yep, you’re fucked’. They actually declared their fear of that happening.

Now, kids, let me tell you about a little rule that’s well known amongst pen and paper gamers. It’s called Rule Zero and is very basic and simple: Don’t give the GM idea’s. A GM has enough ideas to kill his or her players ten times over already, so anything you add to that can only work to your disadvantage.
With that knowledge, you can safely say that my players broke said rule and, I think we can all agree, that I’d be a bad GM if I don’t come up with some way to incorporate my habit in some way into the game now. In fact, just thinking about this made me get a couple of ideas and rules for said ideas that’ll be just Awesome to work with…
I’m going to love this.
My players are going to hate this.

Now, I’m enjoying the improvising immensely, but there’s just one minor problem with the way I structured my campaign: it’s driving my group apart. Not the players, oh no, they’re great, but their characters are struggling to stay together. One of them has actually already declared the intention that his character has absolutely no reason to stay with the storyline and figure it out, while another of them is actually going in a direction that’s not going to help the party at all. Any good GM would be able to figure it out in such a way that this would be turned around in a way that would benefit both the story and the party. I just make no claims of being a good GM and, quite frankly, my players’ unpredictable nature makes it very hard to build up ideas. For the second case, I think I got something nailed down quite well, but it depends on him for my plan to make the first case work. I just hope I can buy enough time…

On university work

So, back in January of 2011, I was doing a project for my university concerning politicians, tracking them and the website that was to be built around it. Let me spoil you this: I am no coder, and attempting to build websites out of .xml documents was harder for me than it was for other people out of my team.
But that isn’t why I’m writing this. Back then, we were given this ‘amazing’ (quotations mean sarcasm, people!) project lead who was in the habit of sending us e-mails concerning new ideas that had come up in his rotten excuse for a mind. These e-mails were so regular and, well, quite frankly formulaic that we built our own template out of it:

Good [part of day],
[part of day], [location], I got an [exaggeration of awesomeness] idea! [horribly complicated idea][impossible expectations]
[comment that completely overlooks the fact that this will put us back even further than we already were].
[impossible deadline]
[insultingly cheery wish for good luck]
[name]

So, this morning, under the shower, I got an absolutely great idea!

I’ll stop there, because, quite frankly, it wasn’t that great, but I think it gets the point across.
Right now, I’m involved in two project groups concerning research. One is about quantitatively (still hate typing that word) researching the quality of master theses from my university, which is really quite interesting but, quite frankly, not that well thought out. Every time we meet, it is yet another struggle to get everyone back on one line and to make sure that, by the end, everyone knows what they’re going to do and why.
I don’t get why that’s so hard, though. Up until now, I’ve always been quite capable of convincing myself that I knew what was happening around me. It really takes quite a bit to make me throw up my hands and say, ‘I don’t know, why don’t you tell me?’ (no, really, it does). It’s always the same one or two people, though, so I guess I’m either exceptionally stupid and adept at hiding that and those two are capable of relativistic vies of the world, or there’s something going fundamentally wrong with those people.
But venting about other people is something I don’t really enjoy doing. What I do enjoy is going to new, scary places, lose all of the relatively little sense of direction I have and have to ask strangers to tell me where to go (I’m making a point somewhere, bear with me). It’s actually quite scary for someone as socially retarded as I am, though I guess that, for me, it probably bears the same kind of thrill people describe they’re looking for when they’re going to scary movies or Halloween.
So, today, I had to go to the university’s library to find out if we could get an absurd amount of theses from them in digital format. Most of the theses are already available for free use online, but not for the one subject that I was responsible of. Long story short: I had to see what was wrong and what I could do about it. So I had to go to the library to speak with the person responsible for the study subject and speak with him. And I hate libraries. Especially libraries where I haven’t been yet, and the chance of being shushed is actually pretty real (that’s the social awkwardness right there).
I can tell you, this library was two things:
1) flippin’ HUGE.
2) terribly disorganized.
In order to get around, I had to ask an employee to walk me to my destination, and even she told me that she had to look for a bit and that she wasn’t exactly sure where the heck we were at that exact moment. It was a humbling experience for someone who’s so used to working in a supermarket and knowing the general locations of everything quite well, to be in a building that’s so large and cluttered that someone might actually get lost in it.
(about the theses: we found them, turns out I hadn’t defined my search terms quite right…)

The other study (remember? There were two!) is about the Uncanny Valley, a whole different concept in and of itself. Read up about it at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley), or let me give you the general gist of it over here (if you already know it, skip the following paragraph, or read it anyway to correct me on the inevitable mistakes I’m going to make):

Basically, when you see a robot, your reaction and the way you like it will depend on how it looks. If you see a car manufacturing thing, you’ll likely have no feelings for it. If you see the T-800, you’ll flippin’ run. The theory of the Uncanny Valley states that your reaction will be generally more positive when the robot’s appearance comes closer and closer to that of an actual human being, until there’s a point where it is almost human, but not QUITE like it. It’s that gut feeling that something is wrong, maybe because of a slower reaction time, the way the voice sounds, or the simple fact that it never blinks (oh god, those eyes! They don’t blink! THEY NEVER BLINK!). There’s a Doctor Who joke in there.
When the robot becomes actually human looking (think Data, from Star Trek: TNG), it is more than likely that you’re out of this valley and can actually converse with it on a relatively pleasant level. That’s the high and low, long and short, of the Uncanny Valley.
Now, that said, I find this study to be of the more interesting subject, but of the less motivated team. I can’t blame my team, the first one is gobbling up all of our time and actually managing all the necessary reading and getting everything written down requires a lot of work, but when we actually have to perform the study itself, things might just go a bit south. Thank goodness we’ve got everything worked out now, so getting enough results to show something will be a piece of cake. I hope.

Now, then. I’ve had the chance to release a bit of wind that I’ve been holding up. With a bit of luck, it’ll get me through the coming weeks, when my girlfriend has exams and I’m fighting to get those studies done. I don’t like saying it, but things couldn’t have been timed better!

By the way, did someone notice I'm struggling with the actual paragraph work of this blog? Whenever I type something up in Microsoft Word (I like the spelling checker, shut up), it reads every single enter as double, and every double enter as tripple... Very annoying, because I don't know if I want to keep the double enter for paragraphs or not...

Back in the saddle

Back when I was seven years old, my parents introduced me to scouting. I didn’t really think much of it, not really knowing what it was about besides what the little nephews of Donald Duck used to do in the comics. I opted to give it a chance though, because even back then I was a benevolent little bastard, and went to a meeting on a Saturday.

I have to admit that I didn’t really like it, but hey, that was mostly because children are cruel to each other all the time and I ended up being on the receiving end of quite a couple of jokes during those first days. My parents pushed me to keep going, though, so I kept going and toughened up along the way. The motto of ‘what doesn’t kill me, makes me stronger’ was certainly in good use back then.

Through the years, I became more and more invested in scouting. In 2004, when I was fourteen year’s of age, we went to England to join Camp Downe, introducing me to an international scouting camp for the very first time and showing me how amazing it could be to do what I was slowly starting to like doing with people from all over the world.

In 2007 I went to the World Jamboree in England, participating in the 100^th anniversary of scouting in what was, back then, the one largest Jamboree ever held in one place. I was seventeen and, quite frankly, utterly overwhelmed by the amazing camaraderie shown by everyone who was there. I was proud to be a Dutch scout.

Unfortunately, that didn’t last very long. Mere months after that, the group I was part of had shrunk to eight members who almost never saw eye to eye on anything. Whenever we decided to do something, it almost always happened that half of the group folded their arms and didn’t participate. I got frustrated when all we did was sitting around and making campfires. Granted, I didn’t actually come up with any better ideas myself, but it was starting to work on my nerves back then. When I had left a meeting angry, I told myself that I’d stay away for a week or two to calm down and hope that they’d get a little more initiative in the meanwhile.

After three weeks, I called my leader to announce that I was going to stop with scouting. After ten years, I had finally had it and stopped. Quite the feat, some people might say. I was disappointed and, quite frankly, missed going to the meetings. Having my Saturdays to myself was nice, but it still felt like I was missing something.

When the time came to register for World Jamboree 2011, in Sweden, I decided to join Scouting Nederland again as an inactive member. I’d pay contribution like any other member, but didn’t really do anything. The most important reason I did so was to be able to enter the Jamboree as a member of the International Service Team and get the scouting feeling again.

I ran checkout counter duty for the full two weeks in one of the on-site stores, but that didn’t matter to me. I once again had a blast of an experience on an international camp.

 

November that year I met my girlfriend, who was a member and group leader in my old scouting group. Her mother was part of the board.

All that time I missed going to scouting, but then I finally got a push in the right direction. I took the opportunity to do something my girlfriend also enjoyed and get back in the business. Today was the fourth (or fifth? I already forgot) time I led a group of scouts in the eleven to fifteen year old category and I got invited to join their summer camp in Austria. I’m having a blast not much unlike I enjoyed as a youth participant, I’m just enjoying it from the other side of the leadership fence now. I’m taking an immense liking to the group and, from what I hear (I got insider information), they don’t mind me at all, either.

If you came all the way to here, thanks for letting me ramble a bit. Though it forces me to wake up early on a Saturday and it eats massive amounts of my time, I don’t think I’ll start regretting this decision anytime soon.

The Air, the Wind and the Breeze

So, today, I decided that, should I ever want to get that job in the collumn business, I'd better get myself a bit of a portfolio to show to potential future employers.
With that thought in mind I finished the homework I was making, started a more energetic song to write to (Tallulah by Sonata Arctica is great music to work to, but not to write to), cracked open a box of almonds and an energy drink, and started up Write or Die.
Write or Die (shameless plug incoming) is a great tool for people who want to write a certain amount of words within a certain amount of time. In this case I told it that I wanted to write 500 words (rougly one A4 page on Times New Roman 11) in about half an hour (twice the time I usually need when I'm writing), just to make sure that I wouldn't hurry it, have time to think about what I'm going to type and not start spouting random things.

When I was mentally preparing for this, I had a whole text in my mind. Unfortunately, that went down the drain quite quickly, so let's see what I can make of this, shall we?

Writing has always been a bit of a passion of mine. People who sat next to me during school hours could enjoy reading the many stories I wrote by looking over my shoulder on my laptop, or on the scratch paper I had in front of me. With that in mind, it's actually quite logical that I'd look for a job in the collumn business, but I just never really managed to set myself to it. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the economy is going through the drain and I don't want to risk the cozy job I have right now. Don't get me wrong, I'm not enjoying myself there, but at least I'm sure of my job (yay, permanent contract and everything) and I'm working with at least semi-sentient people. I've got no real obligations considering money yet, so it's not about that, either, but doing something that I'd enjoy more would be quite the boon.
I actually tried getting a collumn job before, but the paper I e-mailed never bothered to reply to me. Looking back, it was a dumb idea to just send an e-mail that basically went 'I'll hear from you if you are interested', and to only send one (that's 1, uno, één) mail to only one paper when you've got absolutely nothing to show anyway, but hey, you live and learn.

So that's why I'm starting this blog. It'll allow me to ramble on endlessly about everything and anything that happens to me. I'll update on my life, on what happens around me and on what I just happen to think about. Sometimes it'll be about university, sometimes my family, and it'll probably be a lot about my roleplaying experiences in Dungeons and Dragons, new World of Darkness, and Savage Worlds. The goal is to hit at least one, preferably two updates a week at an irregular schedule, so we'll see how well this goes with my lack of commitment. At the very least, this'll be an interesting experiment to me.