entirely safe and fun

What thing is this, pausing before a cyclopean door?

Poor Johansen’s handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this. Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant. The Thing cannot be described - there is no language for such abysms of shrieking and immemorial lunacy, such eldritch contradictions of all matter, force, and cosmic order. A mountain walked or stumbled. God! What wonder that across the earth a great architect went mad, and poor Wilcox raved with fever in that telepathic instant? The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own. The stars were right again, and what an age-old cult had failed to do by design, a band of innocent sailors had done by accident. After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.
- H P Lovecraft, “The Call of Cthulhu

Available now on Etsy, courtesy of our friend Jenn — an awesome knit finger-idol of Cthulhu, sure to provide hours of sanity-ripping fun! Buy it and make regular sacrifices, and you might even be eaten last!

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week, the Great Designer Search challenged us to design a rare splashy enough to be the prerelease card for a set - and also to design the entire common run in one color for that set. They’ve definitely turned the difficulty up a notch for the final test! As a bit of background, I’ve worked with my friend John to design the first set in a block (that is, a linked super-set of three sets) where we’re trying to break out of the flavor ruts of each color. In this block, Blue, traditionally a scholarly color with lots of wizardry and scholarship, is instead a color full of magical beasts, which interact with magic not like a mage might, but rather as a moth interacts with a candle. One of the themes, basically, is that Blue is dumb. Other themes of this kind: White is evil and manipulative; Green is wise and encyclopedic; Red warriors are generals as well as berserkers; Black can cooperate and nurture, in its fashion. The first set saw a Red-centered coalition of beasts, zombies, and hound-men holding fast against a magically gifted army of powerful White-aligned soldiers and mages, while drakes and leviathans annoyed both sides by constantly being wherever magic was happening. In the second set, the mana-tide that empowered the White faction has exploded and unleashed (Blue-aligned) Lovecraftian monstrosities that will force the warring parties to re-evaluate the value of their political struggle, as they face an ontological one. Most of the really nasty Blue stuff is going to be rare, but the pre-release card, The Unnamable (with a tip o’ the hat to HPL), should give a taste. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 5’ »

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here, here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week’s challenge was to follow up on some designs deemed promising in previous challenges; the judges were trying to gauge applicants’ ability to build on existing work. We were given eight cards, and eight sets of designer notes (check out the article for the details) indicating the direction that a hypothetical development team would provide for additional cards. I’ll present my work in the order that the challenge asks for, and add my comments to each card in green. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 4’ »

Previous installments in this series, taking on the Great Designer Search are here and here. Card designs are after the jump.

This week, in the Great Designer Search, we’ve been challenged to create cards for the Un- sets — sets of humorous non-tournament-playable cards, traditionally in silver borders rather than the usual black or white, with fun, silly effects not usually available in regular Magic. They were to be multicolor rares, five of them, all with different color combinations but representing all five colors. Asking us to design non-regular cards is kind of like cheating. This is much harder than last week, certainly, and I don’t think I’ve succeeded on as many of my designs. That said, I’m very happy with a couple — Look! A Monkey! is a card I’ve wanted for years, and Edibility is my comment on the increasingly verbose nature of rules text for simple, intuitive operations (Un- sets are usually pretty meta, so this would be the place). I like the idea of the Border Patrol and of pink-bordered cards, but if it hadn’t been for the multicolor restriction placed on the designs, I’d totally have cracked open the “sixth color of Magic” design space for Pink, with bunnies and ducks and ponies and maybe elephants. There’s a little of that flavor in the pink-bordered Duckbunny, which is about the tenth swing I took at the problem of expressing Pinkness, but I’m still not really satisfied. The rules this week called for printable names, rather than development names, and art descriptions. The latter will be following each card’s text… Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 3’ »

The first installment of this series, in which I play along at home with the Great Designer Search, is here. Card designs are after the jump.

In this installment of the Great Designer Search, contestants were challenged to create ten cards to fill ten very specific holes in a set design. Furthermore, those designs had to work with art that had already been completed for the killed cards. The rules did permit designers to shuffle the art around among the cards. Fitting the designs to art was really hard, and I’m not sure that I did very well on it. To see each card with the art I selected, click the card’s name. I’ve saved my defense of some of my choices for the 150-word statement allowed the designers. In advance, I’d like to say that the Forms are my favorite two designs, and could be the seeds of a megacycle with old favorite Form of the Dragon. Form of the Child, in particular, is the result of a question I’ve been thinking about for a long time: how little mana can be charged for the effect “You win the game,” and how easy can the the concomitant requirements be? It is meant to be an ultimate high-wire act of deck design, and an homage to two great cards in Magic history, Form of the Dragon and Little Girl. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo, part 2’ »

(card designs after the jump)

It’s National Novel Writing Month, and while I’d love to participate, I have this job, which takes up about half of my day each day, yadda yadda. It’s not like I have a novel that’s bursting out of me at this point. And anyway, what I admire most about NaNoWriMo isn’t the torrent of mostly cruddy books that result - it’s the expansion of the do-it-yourself ethos to media of which we normally consider ourselves mere consumers. As an old punk, I can hardly stand against the DIY tide as it rises to its annual peak. My outlet: The Great Designer Search, being held by the Wizards of the Coast, makers of Magic: The Gathering. In brief: The most ingenious feature of Magic is that new cards are released about three times a year, guaranteeing Wizards a generous stream of income and satisfying players by giving them effectively a new game to play every few months. Designing so many new cards that are fun is very difficult, and a position on the Magic design team is widely regarded among those who follow games as wildly desirable, a pinnacle of the profession. So, it’s not a Tom Sawyer fence-painting thing if they offer a design job as a prize in a contest. They’ve done so, and fifteen people are in the finals. The competition among them is playing out on the Web for our enjoyment, with a new design task being assigned to the candidates every week or two. Given the level of passion many players develop for the game, and given the high number of smart people who follow it, the Great Designer Search has attracted a large number of people who are playing along at home in a sort of National Card Design Month. I’m in! By the way, if you’ve given this a shot and want to put your results up somewhere, and they won’t fit into a comment, let me know (in a comment); I’ll host anything reasonable. Continue reading ‘NaCaDeMo’ »

The lovely Punam is currently reading the Book Whose Name We Shall Not Speak. The title may have something to do with a written character, which is deep red, but beyond this I can say no more, as I value my safety and the soundness of my mind. To do any more than hint at the Book’s True Name — and especially to speak Its dread title aloud — might attract Its fell attentions. The rites to appease It, once It has been aroused, are inconvenient at best, dangerous at worst. The author, the “Mad Puritan” Nathaniel Hawthorne, travestied his own fine short story, “The Minister’s Black Veil,” for elements of the plot, and that reckless act may have cost him his life fourteen short years later.

I suspect that most who read the Awful Book do so only when required, usually in high school. Punam, encountering It outside of that context, is able to keep Its power in check by laughing at It regularly, and It is withering under her dismissive reading eye. As she reads each leaf in her 1939 paperback edition, it crumbles and falls away from the binding; her ministrations have tramsmuted It from a Volume Entire into a Pile of Pages. The Book repels all but the staunchest reader, but Punam is simply too mickle a sorceress for even Its sanity-blasting revelations.

The XBox 360 ships with a highly non-trivial music visualization application, called Neon, built by category captains Llamasoft. It is sufficiently non-trivial, in fact, that it has a manual. I was surprised when I grabbed my controller and the graphics seemed to be changing in response to my joystick maneuvers, and then really just kind of bemused. Now I’m enjoying it - it’s a little bonus game, in effect, which happens to showcase 360’s ability to maintain a steady frame rate at any resolution, and to give additional weight to the 360’s ability to read music files (in a somewhat disappointly narrow range of formats, which sadly does not include FLAC) from its LAN-mates.

All it needs now is to expose its web browser functionality — I would not be unhappy to see a third-party browser, either — to be the very best device ever to wear the “set-top box” tag.

Gregg Easterbrook’s excellent football analysis column Tuesday Morning Quarterback has returned to espn.com, and this season’s first, second, and third installations are up. Writing on the (recently resurrected) plastic.com, I’ve called TMQ the only column of its type which possesses literary merit. Easterbrook is funny, well-read and does not shy from doing his research, and his work answers the question of what a scholar would have to say about the least beautiful game.

His return is a little surprising, though, considering the firestorm he kicked up with his ill-considered comments in his now-defunct blog back in 2003. The parent company of espn.com, Disney, booted him when he criticized Disney executives Michael Eisner and Harvey Weinstein in a jeremiad which some perceived as anti-Semitic. After a short hiatus, Easterbrook re-pitched the TMQ tent at nfl.com (archive), and apparently enough time has gone by for his work to be judged again on its own purely footbally merits.

At any rate, I had been waiting for a new TMQ, checking in at nfl.com for the last couple of weeks, when I stumbled upon the column in its new home completely by accident. I figured I’d give Google one more path pointing to Easterbrook’s recent change of address.