Can't wait to see 42

Watch on YouTube

I am so excited for the movie 42 to come out this April. I've watched the trailer about six times now, and it looks great. Plus I am a huge Jackie Robinson fan. He was just so cool. You see how truly amazing he was when you look at what that demanded from him in breaking the color barrier. He was actually not the best player in the Negro Leagues. Old man Satchel Paige was a better pitcher, and Josh Gibson was considered to be the best all-around player. But he was damn talented, and moreover, he was a special man. He was polite, well-spoken, a personable and charismatic guy. He was a soldier and even went to college; none of my grandparents did. They picked Jackie because he had the guts to face the brutal, disgusting racism he would encounter with dignity and grace.

Because what he did was about so much more than just making a major league career for a talented ball player. It was a huge mission for the civil rights movement. The eyes of the nation whose minds needed to be changed were on him. And what they saw was that a black man could be so remarkable— smart, classy, strong, talented, all the sorts of things people like and respect —succeeding in the highest arena of the most American game there is. While other men acted like beasts, he faced them with courage and dignity. He never gave in, never let anybody drag him down to their level, no matter how many slurs they yelled at him, no matter how many pitchers tried to bean him. Jackie made people love him, respect him. And when they realized they could love and respect one black man, it suddenly wasn’t so strange to think that maybe all of them deserved that same chance. His virtue and strength were directly responsible for tangible social change.

Because that’s the way. Hate and prejudice’s greatest enemy is humanity. Seeing the humanity of another person does more to break down barriers between people than anyone else.

My first Iron GM

What's a swamped graduate student to do when she's hankering to write larps but swore she wouldn't take on a project that would take her focus away from graduating? Join up with an Iron GM team at the last minute and bang out a game in a weekend!

I got a call from natbudin the weekend before last asking if I wanted to be on their team after they lost somebody at the last minute. I figured, what the heck, I've been meaning to try this at some point, why not help out now? The other members of the team were v_cat and Andrew Sheingold, neither of whom I've written with before, but I was eager to give it a try.

The process was pretty interesting. We got the secret ingredients at 6pm on Saturday, and immediately started brainstorming. We made some progress with an idea, then Vik made the suggestion that before long we should put that thread on hold and spend some time developing a second idea. Not because there was anything wrong with the first thought, but just to see what we came up with instead. And you know what, we ended up going up with our second one. It was more unique, more cerebral, less like your standard "pop larp," as Nat and Vik called it. I can't describe it yet, as I believe the games are confidential until they run at Intercon, but it is like nothing I would have written on my own.

Our writing went pretty damn well. I struggled a bit with the all-night aspect of it. I'm much more of a morning person. I couldn't deal with less than four and a half hours or so of sleep, which was more than anybody else got. But at least I managed to stay up enough to get my share of the work done. Everybody was really contributing, coming up with good material and good writing, and we had a good working dynamic where we could debate ideas and criticize constructively. I was proud of us. We even handed our final product in over an hour before the final 6pm deadline Sunday night.

This game is a weird game, not only the weirdest I've ever written, but the weirdest Nat has ever written, which is saying something! We decided that Iron GM was a good opportunity to do something really experimental, something with a good chance of being a spectacular failure because of the players not getting it, not getting into it, or it just being too difficult a story to represent in the form of a larp. The fact that Iron GM games have pretty much random players and random casting likely won't help. But I've written seven successful games at this point, most of them fairly safe in the sense that if I wrote them well, they were guaranteed to turn out. I was ready for an artistic risk.

We'll see how it goes. If we're lucky, it'll get scheduled in the earlier slot on Sunday at Intercon and I will be able to be present for the running of it. (Break a Leg is running in the later slot.) I shall be fascinated to see how it goes. We also bid it for Festival, where people will be able to self-select into it and we'll be able to send out casting questionnaires, so I think that will be a slightly more representative run of how it really works. But here's to my very first time as part of risky game concept! We'll see how spectacularly we fail!