Comments are now open again. They’ve been going down quite a bit lately (after having been stable for a good long while). Unfortunately, there’s still no indication that WordPress intends to fix this problem. If you ever see the comments closed on a post here at the Alexandrian, please drop me an e-mail and let me know.

March has proven to be a horribly dismal and frustratingly unproductive month for me. (And the silence ’round these parts has only been one small part of that.) My fingers are crossed that I’ll get things turned around and April will be better in all respects. At the very least, I can promise that things will be more active here at the Alexandrian as I’m currently laying in a full slate of content that will launch on Monday.

While I’m here, let me chat about a couple of movies I’ve seen recently…

JOHN CARTER OF MARS

John Carter has become another victim of the “nobody saw it opening day, so it must not be good” fallacy that plagues the toxic combination of Hollywood’s front-loaded marketing schemes and the cult-like worship of the box office in media news.

Were the trailers terrible? Yes.

Have the mainstream reviews been mediocre? Of course. (Mainstream reviewers will always rip apart a genre movie if they’re given free rein to do so.)

But what about the actual movie? It’s very good. Not perfect, but very good.

If you’re a fan of science fiction adventure stories — particularly ones which are mind-blowingly beautiful — then you owe it to yourself to give John Carter a chance to wow you on the big screen before it disappears from theaters entirely.

THE HUNGER GAMES

Recently re-read the books and then watched the movie.

The film is a very good adaptation of an excellent novel. If I had any quibble whatsoever, it would be that Katniss ends up being a slightly weaker character in the movie. This is partly the result of needing to push exposition out of Katniss’ head and into the mouths of other characters (which results in other characters taking away some of her decisions and insights), but it’s also a minor structural issue in which Katniss remains almost constantly reactive and is never allowed to capture the initiative or take control of her situation. (Which is in marked contrast to the book, where I’d argue that Katniss’ unique quality is her ability to force her will onto situations over which she should have no control.)

Despite this, however, Katniss remains one of the strongest female protagonists in film history. (Which is kind of a sad indictment of female protagonists in film. But I digress.)

I have a general rule of thumb about adaptations: If the only thing I didn’t like in the movie were my favorite moments from the book, then the adaptation is a good one. (Why? Because they’re my favorite moments. The odds of the film perfectly capturing my personal vision of those moments is almost nonexistent; and because they’re my favorite moments, any deviation is going to come up lacking in my judgment.)

The Hunger Games passes that test, and also clears another important hurdle: Instead of just regurgitating the book onto the screen, it takes the opportunity to explore the story in ways that the book couldn’t and didn’t.

(This assumes, of course, that the book was good in the first place. In a situation like Field of Dreams — where the original book, Shoeless Joe, was mediocre at best — a different set of rules applies.)

Last January, the Alexandrian swapped over from its previous existence as a cobbled-together morass of HTML to a WordPress installation. This meant that I needed to hand-convert over 500+ posts which existed on the old site. This went at a fairly brisk pace until I hit the mid-point of 2010, which is when I started getting experimental with my HTML coding. This greatly improved the look of the old site; but made converting things over to the new site a bit of a headache (as old formatting would break and new formatting needed to be figured out).

But as of today the Great Conversion is over! All of the old posts and as many of the old comments as survived the slow death of HaloScan can now be found on the WordPress installation (which is what you’re reading now).

Since I’ve just wrapped up the conversion of 2010, here are some highlights from the posts that year:

Node-Based Scenario Design: The manifesto of non-linear adventure design.

Xandering the Dungeon: The manifesto for non-linear dungeon design.

Richard II: Thomas of Woodstock – Script and Ending: An apocryphal play sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare. I edited and made available on the ‘net the first decent edition of the text. It’s missing most of the last scene, so I wrote a replacement.

Hard Limits in Scenario Design: Inspired by an analysis of the GUMSHOE system, this look at hard limits in system design and how they affect (or should affect) your scenario design has played a surprisingly large roll in my thinking about roleplaying games over the past two years.

You Can’t Do That Here: Another GUMSHOE-inspired analysis. Sometimes systems actively prevent certain things from happening. Other times, players get stuck when they start thinking exclusively in terms of the system’s paradigms.

Werewolf Templates: A re-organization of the werewolf templates from 3rd Edition which make them much, much easier to use. (Plus: Bradoch the Wererat, the Spider Weird of Hollow’s Deep, and the Totem Giants.)

UA-Style Rumors for D&D: Originally a thread on RPGNet, these rumors twist your common understanding of the D&D universe. For example: “Underdark? There’s no such thing. The dark elves just live on the other side of the planet.”

Size Does Matter?: A somewhat informative look at the escalating bloat of the D&D system (or lack thereof) over the years.

Fanal the Swordbearer: A three-part series originally written for John Wick’s Orkworld.

The Long Con of DRM: Pretty much everything I said here is coming true.

OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia: The collected edition of the campaign journal from my OD&D megadungeon campaign.

(The highlights from the conversion of 2009 can be found here.)

Couple of bits of site news:

(1) The comments are now working again after being off-line. Not sure how long they were down for (possibly a couple of days), but I really wish WordPress would isolate and fix this bug.

(2) Russian spammers have figured out the math captcha. (I can tell by the dozens of Russian language spam messages filling up my Akismet filter.) Not sure what I’m going to do about it, yet, but this drastically increases the odds that your comment will vanish into the dark abyss of Akismet, never to emerge. Sorry about that.

But if you post a comment and you don’t see it immediately appear on the site, you might want to toss me an e-mail and give me a head’s up so that I can go trolling through the spam filter for it. Thanks!

My current layout project is taking much longer than I anticipated. (It always does.) I should have some more recycled material posted to cover the next few days and then hopefully it will be done.

For today, I’m going to just briefly reflect on just how powerful and effective re-skinning can be. It’s an important part of the DM’s toolkit. And although it’s often talked about in terms of saving prep time, I think it’s arguably more important that re-skinning can so trivially take something familiar and recast it as something mysterious, enigmatic, and evocative.

Although re-skinning has become something of a hot fad over the past couple of years, I first encountered it way back in 1990 when I read an article in Dragon Magazine that dealt with re-skinning spells. (Magic missiles are great for this: You can describe them as pretty much anything.) I think it was issue #162, which would have been my very first issue, but I won’t swear to it and I’m away from my Dragon collection at the moment.

What brought this particularly to mind today was a recent re-skinning I did in my Ptolus campaign:

The creature rears up, plunging its clawed hand into its own chest. It rips out a gob of flesh and hurls it down the length of the chamber. It strikes the wall and spatters. Small globules of white, turgid flesh writhe and bound up into blasphemous creatures of lumbering, squelching flesh…

That’s an osyluth summoning 2d10 lemures. My players were so distressed by this unfamiliar ability that I actually had difficulty finishing the description due to the outcries emanating from the table.

Okay. That’s all I’ve got for today. More tomorrow. And lots more in the near future. (I hope.)

Work on the Alexandrian has been light of late because I’ve been toiling to wrap up a major project.

The big hitch-up at the moment has been layout. Unfortunately, I’ve discovered that Windows 7 won’t run the version of Quark I own, which means I needed to upgrade to a new layout program. After examining the available options, I decided to switch to Adobe inDesign.

While in many ways I’m glad I’ve made the switch, the fact that I’m basically needing to relearn layout from the ground up is definitely complicating the completion of this project. (Which is already far behind schedule.) Things are just similar enough to be confusing. It’s easy to see why lots of people and organizations choose to stick with what they know because it’s what they know.

But if all goes well, I should have a major announcement coming down the pike in the next few days. And starting later today I’ll be posting some of my older professional work to fill the gap.