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Tag: boy scouts
RPG-ology #21: Living In the Past
This is RPG-ology #21: Living In the Past, for August 2019.
All four of my grandparents have died. I have also lost my father, and both of my wife's parents are gone. I had a long list of great uncles and great aunts at one time, but it has dwindled to nothing, and of my uncles and aunts I might still have one.
The five and dime at which I bought candy on my way home from school is gone, and I am one and a half hundred miles from where it once stood. There's a long list of good friends with whom I have lost touch—Jay Fedigan, Artie Robins, Jeff Zurheide, Jack Haberer, not to mention Peggy Lisbona, Nancy Codispoti, Ann Hughes, and the girl to whom my mind often returns, on whom I had an impossible crush for two or three years beginning in second grade, Christie Newcomb. At least two of those people, all within a couple years of my age, are dead; and although I have spoken or corresponded with some within the past decade, I cannot say for certain that any one of them is still alive today.
No one will be surprised that the past is disappearing into—well, into the past. That's expected. Young people will wonder why I even mention it. You're living in the past, old man. Get over it. Life goes forward, and will leave you behind if you don't keep up. I know this; I can sigh and let life leave me behind, or I can keep moving forward.
But I've got news for you.
You're living in the past, too.
That talk you had with your girlfriend yesterday—that's now in the past. Get over it; the moment has come and gone. Whatever you should have said, well, you didn't, and you're not going to be able to go back and fix that.
You got beat up last month. It's in the past. It's over, and fading faster and faster into oblivion. Ten years and you might not remember his name. Twenty years and you won't remember that it happened. Yes it hurt, and it hurts, and you're angry and upset about it. But it's the past now. You can't hold on to it; you might as well let it go.
That A+ you got on your math test (or was it the "letter" you received in varsity football, or the badge you earned in boy scouts, or the award you won for your picture or article)—well, that's also in the past. Time is leaving it behind. You will eventually forget it. And everyone else will forget it long before you do.
Was breakfast good today? It's gone already.
You are living in the past. Everything you know, everything you remember, everything you've ever said—even the thoughts you had when you started reading this article–everything is in the past. You can't have it back.
Don't feel bad about it. It's the same for everyone else. In fact, it's the same for the world, quite apart from the people. I'm one of those who are often quoting C. S. Lewis. There are enough of us out here that there ought to be a DSM-IV classification for us. So you'll probably see his name in a lot of these articles if you stay with the series. This time he comes to mind because of a very simple observation he mentioned more than once: most people are already dead.
That is, of all the people ever born, only a very few are alive now.
This moment in time is interesting; if you could know everything that is happening at this instant, it would overwhelm you—even if your knowledge was limited to your own town, there would be more happening this instant than you could grasp, enough ideas for a lifetime of stories. Yet when compared with the past, this instant is no time at all, a desert devoid of interest. In trying to get readers to think and create, I often focus on now. Last month's article, entitled Pay Attention, might at first glance have seemed to have been about the past—but it was actually about capturing the present, living in the moment and learning from what is around you immediately. Writing it down served to preserve it, certainly; but it also served to force you to notice it. The present is always a source of ideas. But the ideas you can get from the present are dwarfed by those you can get from the past.
Assuming you can find them.
My father was a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech, and a helluvan engineer. He drove a reconditioned Model-T to school, poured fifty-weight oil into the crankcase to keep the worn bearings running smoothly, and had to crank-start it by hand on cold mornings. He played fourth sax (tenor) in a dance band to help pay for college, and went to work in an electronics lab for Western Union. When he was head of the lab, he proposed "Young's Law." Accidents occasionally happened in the lab, usually because someone didn't have the right piece of equipment and so tried to use the wrong piece of equipment on the theory that it really wasn't different; the results of such experiments were always strange and confusing. My father's law reads, "Things that are not the same are different." He missed World War II, having been enlisted just as the war ended. All this, and more, was before my birth.
He later took an interest in computers, and in the late 60's spent a lot of time nagging the few computer tinkerers at the company to explain things to him. This led to a few courses, more investigation, and ultimately to his position as head of engineering for Western Union Data Services Corporation, where he designed systems before there were PC's. He holds a couple of patents in focusing microwaves, but he says they really aren't worth much because modern microwave applications rely on reflection rather than refraction.
He met my mother, a New York girl, after he started work in New York; he courted her for a while. She tried to pair him off with a girl from Virginia, thinking that two slow-moving southerners would be a good match, but he wouldn't hear of it.
As for her, she got her bachelor's degree from City College in New York at nineteen. She had skipped a lot of half-grades in the New York City schools, and excelled in math. For quite a few years she worked as an efficiency expert for, I think, General Electric. If you visited her at home, you would see the efficiency expert side of her still maintaining everything in order even now in her nineties as her grandchildren are all adults and she has a couple of great-grandchildren. She left work to raise a family, and when the youngest was old enough she returned to teaching, mostly math, as a substitute primarily although she got roped into substituting full time for several years at one point. She has always looked young; the day after her college graduation, an immigrant bought her a lollipop.
When they were courting, they would ride the train together from Freeport Long Island to The City; they sat with an older man who had known my mother for some time. He did not think that the quiet, slow, polite Mississippi gentleman that was my father was at all right for my fast-paced New York mother. But one day, as my mother was yacking a mile a minute about nothing of any importance and the other two sat in silence listening, she abruptly stopped, and said, "Oh dear, I forgot what I was going to say."
Quietly my father replied, "Don't worry, dear. You'll think of something else."
Their companion roared with laughter, and accepted my father as the right man for my mother from then on.
So, what did your parents do? Have you ever asked? Did they tell you? Their lives are fading from their memories even as you read this; and they were full of stories. Life itself is an adventure. I'd think you'd want to know about them merely because they're your parents, and thus in some sense your story. But if not, consider it a source of game, world, and character ideas.
This article has been slightly updated from Game Ideas Unlimited: Living In the Past, published at Gaming Outpost in the summer of 2001.
Previous article: Pay Attention.
Next article: Snow Day.
Game Ideas Unlimited
RPG-ology #18: Waterways
This is RPG-ology #18: Waterways, for May 2019.
We mentioned rivers, lakes, and other bodies of water in connection with maps when we talked about Country Roads and again when we were talking about the placement of Cities, but we barely touched on them, more from the perspective of their influence on other aspects of our maps and our worlds. Maps and worlds, though, are complicated things, in which everything influences everything, and understanding how waterways work will help us put together better maps.
This is difficult for me, because so much of it seems obvious to me so I expect it will be obvious to everyone else. However, I have the advantage, as I think I mentioned in Shock, of over a thousand miles of long-haul canoeing, so I am perhaps intimately familiar with rivers and lakes and ponds and how they work. I thus hope that I'm not telling you too many obvious points, and that some of this proves to be practical. Let's start with some terms.
A river is pretty much any waterway that flows downhill. They can be big or small, swift or lazy, shallow or deep, straight or meandering, rocky or clear, in any combination. Smaller rivers are often called brooks, streams, creeks, and similar diminutive titles, but the only significant difference is the attitude of the people toward the waterway and the probability of it going dry, which rivers rarely do.
Lakes and ponds are usually found as interruptions in rivers, and they are distinct from rivers in a significant way. A lake or pond is formed in essence when water pours into a natural basin and has to rise to the level of an exit point. Because of this, the surface of a lake or pond is level, while that of a river is always sloped–if you look at the accompanying photo, you can see that the downstream end is downhill. In the vernacular, lakes and ponds are generally distinguished by their size, but technically they are distinguished by their depth: a pond is shallow enough that water plants such as waterlilly pads can root on the bottom and grow on the surface, while a lake has at least some areas in which it is too deep for that. Lakes and ponds are sometimes created intentionally by the use of dams, built by people or sometimes by animals, most typically beavers.
It is difficult to distinguish a sea from a lake in many cases. Seas tend to be the terminus of rivers, at least one and often several, but most of them either drain into or are contiguous with the oceans, which are also sometimes called seas but which as a word tends to refer to the vast expanses of water separating the continents. The two exceptions to the drainage rule are the Dead Sea, which is constantly evaporating and so is too salty to support marine life, and the Mediterranean, which also loses its water to evaporation but is large enough that its salinity, although elevated, is not inimical to such life, and fishing and the like are active there. (It is easy looking at a map to suppose that the Mediterranean drains into the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibralter, but the water there is mostly flowing very rapidly in the opposite direction, salt water from the Atlantic constantly replenishing the losses in the Mediterranean through what some have called the world's largest waterfall. There is an undercurrent flowing westward as a small amount of dense saltier water goes from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, but the bulk of the volume is inflow from the Atlantic.) It is also the case that seas tend to be salty while lakes tend to be fresh, but this is not a hard and fast rule, there being a number of salt lakes in the world. Part of this is because the distinctions between lakes and seas are not made in all Indo-European languages, and English has often translated words strictly that were used loosely.
A passageway that connects two bodies of water of the same or similar level is usually called a strait (or sometimes straits), usually unlike a river because water flows in and out both ends generally with the shifting tides. If it is wider or longer, it is often called a channel, but this word also refers to the best path through a river—rivers tend to carve a deeper groove through which most of the water travels, and boats and ships navigate through these deeper sections either with or against the current. In modern times, these channels are marked by buoys, red buoys to the right when traveling upstream ("Red Right Returning"), black buoys marking the other edge.
A bay frequently appears as a brackish (that is, salty but less salty than the ocean) body of water connecting a river to a sea or ocean. As the tide rises, water from the ocean pours into the bay, often forcing its way upstream reversing the "normal" flow of the river; the Delaware River is brackish as far upstream as Trenton, New Jersey, about eighty miles upstream, about fifty feet above sea level, and this reverse flow is often used by ships to navigate to inland ports upriver. As the tide ebbs the bay drains into the ocean, and the river into the bay, and fresh water makes its way downstream to wash away the salt. Because of the backwash, those upstream ports have rising and ebbing tides, but these are out of phase with the coastal tides that drive them, often by as much as six or eight hours, depending on how far upriver you go. A very small bay-like inlet is usually called a cove; a lagoon generally is a type of coastal pool that fills from ocean spill when the tide rises over its banks, and then slowly evaporates, frequently not completely before being refilled.
A wadi is something like a river, but significantly different. Common to inland tropics such as Africa, the wadi is a watercourse that floods and dries in a seasonal cycle. During the "rainy season" water falls in the highlands and flows down very like rivers, working downstream and gradually covering thousands of acres of ground, pooling but flowing, spreading over wide expanses of open space. Animals are aware of the seasonal cues, and migrate toward the anticipated flood; plants desiccated from drought spring to life and blossom. For a few months it is a lush wet marshy world, water plentiful, wildlife active. Then gradually it all evaporates, leaving the dry grassland to wither in the heat, as the animals scatter to places better able to support them during the drought. The water from a wadi never reaches the seas, soaking into the earth and evaporating into the air long before joining any other watercourse. Wadis do not support ship traffic or permanent settlements, because the water level is non-existent for a significant part of the year and rarely deep enough for more than the smallest craft.
Swamps, marshes, bayous, and deltas all tend to be areas where a river spreads out to a shallow wide area, usually with a channel passing through it somewhere but often a confusing labyrinth of waterways leading to dead ends and shallow muck. Wadis do support marshes and swamps during their wet periods; bayous and deltas tend to be at points where the river meets the sea, and are brackish like bays.
Now, this might sound obvious, but water falls from the sky. Really all of it does. Water in wells and water coming from springs is water that fell from the sky and soaked into the ground, then collected atop or between layers of rock and either sat waiting to be collected or built up pressure from gravity until it spurted through an exit. It gets into the sky by evaporation, the vast majority of this from the vast expanses of tropical oceans—if your world does not have vast tropical oceans, you will have a lot less rain, and a lot less fresh water. Evaporated water, water vapor, is held in greater quantity in denser warmer air; if the air cools or becomes depressurized, it cannot hold as much water and so releases it. This is why so much precipitation (rain and snow) falls on mountains: warm moist dense air currents are shifted upward into cooler low pressure altitudes, and can no longer hold as much water. From there it collects in streams or soaks into the ground.
There is an interesting atmospheric phenomenon at this point. As water falls, it washes carbons out of the air, turning into mild carbolic acid. It has always done this; this is not a modern result of air pollution, although air pollution does contribute to it. Carbolic acid which lands on dirt and soaks into it decays and releases its carbons back into the atmosphere. That which lands on rock and flows into streams dissolves the rock, creating calcium carbonate which washes downstream into the oceans, burying the carbon for millenia. That's not really useful to this discussion, though, so ignore it.
Technically, a well is a hole dug deep enough to hit what is called the water table, the level under the ground where bedrock prevents water from seeping deeper, and so has water refilling it constantly from the surrounding lands. It is sometimes confused with a cistern, which is a dry hole usually lined with stone designed to catch rain when there is rainfall and keep it deep and cool in the ground during the dry seasons. The famed Jacob's Well is actually a cistern.
This is also obvious: water flows downhill. Because of this it is constantly "seeking" the lowest point, and that means it collects into fewer larger rivers. If it pours into a low point—call it a basin—it collects there, rising as a pond or lake until it rises over the lowest edge. A lake can have several rivers feeding it, or no rivers feeding it if it is fed by a spring or springs below its water line, but rarely does it have more than one draining it—odds are good that there will be one lowest point, and once the water starts pouring through it erosion will make that point lower. If the lake is filling faster than it is emptying, it might rise high enough to begin spilling from another point. However, most typically these are near enough each other that the streams soon join creating an island at the head of the river. If the two streams are headed in different directions, it is most commonly the case that one of the outlets will erode until all the water passes through it, the other becoming dry unless it is fed by other water sources below.
Where the ground is steeper, the water moves faster and generally straighter. It follows the lowest ground, but in doing so carves the path deeper, sometimes wider, removing the dirt and softest stone. If it comes into a pocket of harder stone, it will be turned, but the turning will create swirls and eddies which often drill deep spots in the riverbed. The northern reaches of the Delaware River are frequently shallow enough to wade through, but where it turns sharply at Narrowsburg, New York, there are whirlpools during flooding and the depth at the curve is over a hundred feet deep. Rocky rapids form where the ground is too hard to erode easily and the slope is steeper, as the river becomes forced into a narrow space often between high banks and spreads over the area to become swift and shallow, the irregular bottom redirecting the current in directions difficult to predict without surveying in advance.
Where the ground is less sloped, the water spreads to cover a wide path and flows more slowly, but still tends to follow the lowest ground and carve a channel. In older sections of the river these channels are often meandering, and as the water ultimately settles into them they form snake-like slow rivers with very little noticeable current, frequently surrounded by marshy ground, meadows, and flood plains.
As rivers join, they become wider and deeper, and usually become straighter as the land is less able to resist the flow of the water. These wider deeper rivers which ultimately reach the sea are frequently navigable by ocean-going vessels, and as we noted are also subject to reverse flow when the tides rise, thus brackish but also easier to navigate upstream. They will carve deep sections particularly at curves and bends in the river, as in Narrowsburg, creating good ports at such curves, considerably more so than along straight paths. Upstream of a certain point ocean vessels, which have deep drafts to provide stability in rough seas, give way to shallow-draft river boats, able to navigate farther upstream.
The same currents that form harbors on rivers do so where rivers hit the seas, which makes such points doubly convenient for trade, as a port there accesses both the oceans and the river. Such harbors are also created where the coastline recedes sharply, as ocean currents form eddies which create depths near the shoreline, although if the surrounding ground is low there will probably be a river outlet there, and if not the deep water is likely to be surrounded by cliffs, making for good anchorage but a bad place for a port.
So to summarize, most rivers begin from streams in mountains, flowing downhill and collecting into larger rivers, forming lakes in low spots, rapids over steep rocky ground, meandering courses over flatter softer ground, ultimately becoming large enough to support riverboat trade and then ocean vessels, subject at the downstream end to tidal backflow, emptying into seas and oceans sometimes through intervening bays. Harbors form where currents have carved significant depths, usually at the mouths of the rivers and at river bends.
Now you have some idea of how to put the waterways on your maps.
I have omitted canals from this discussion. Men build canals usually where there are two disconnected waterway systems near enough to each other that it would be commercially profitable to be able to run boats or ships between them. Usually these involve mechanical locks which enable the control of the flow of water between the two systems, particularly if they are not at the same level, and typically because such canals often have to cross ground that is higher than either of the waterways (the reason the waterways haven't flowed into each other). Sometimes canals are built to get around sections of a river that are not navigable, if there are navigable sections upstream of falls or rapids. They are a lot of work to build, operate, and maintain, and if neglected gradually deteriorate.
Previous article: With the Odds.
Next article: Treasure Auction.
geography lesson
map-making
RPG-ology #14: Shock
This is RPG-ology #14: Shock, for January 2019.
About a year ago a discussion in the Christian Gamers Guild group reminded me of a couple articles I'd published in the Game Ideas Unlimited series that were lost but worth reviving. This is a recreation of the first of those.
I'm pretty sure it was 1973. I was a Boy Scout and a Junior Assistant Scoutmaster in my last year as a scout before continuing as an adult leader. My father was troop committee chairman and often active in our outings, and Mr. Winkler was the Scoutmaster at the time. Rick Trover and Bob Hamer, who are both part of this story, were a year or two younger than I, and respectively Junior Assistant Scoutmaster and Senior Patrol Leader. It was the troop's first excursion down the Delaware River, although quite a few of us had logged several hundred miles of canoeing through the Adirondacks. We knew that the river had flooded, and that the day before we arrived on the banks at Skinner's Falls to begin our trek Cochecton, New York, a short distance upstream, had been under four feet of water. We did not know that there was a whirlpool under the Narrowsburg Bridge one day south of us. However, never having seen this part of the river before, we were unaware just how far above flood stage it was. Still, we sat in camp on the bank for two days waiting for the water to drop before someone decided that if we were actually going to canoe this river in the week we'd planned, maybe we should get moving downstream.
Ricky and Bob took a canoe and headed up above the falls. I'm not sure whether someone had authorized this. I first became aware of it when people were shouting and I joined the race to the shore to watch them coming down fast from the waters above the falls into the worst possible spot.
Let me describe what we saw Read more

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


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This completes something I've been trying to finish for a while, so thank you SO MUCH!
Could you make an HTML editor (pick one: Dojo, fckEdit, etc) work in the Notes client?
You should be able to do that in a nice way, using an embedded frameset and the WebBrowser-control I used in my Sexifying.. post.
You'd probably have to hide most of the buttons of the DHTML web-editor to avoid creating documents that look horrid in Notes, if your goal is having a cross platform editor.
It would also probably be an effort making the editor run offline, which some customers want from their notes-apps..


text:
Minutes From An Annual Meeting April 17, 2014
An Annual Meeting of the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of Orange was called to order at 6:00 p.m. on April 17, 2014 in the Community Room of Walter G. Alexander, 105 Wilson Place, Orange, New Jersey. The Executive Director advised that all requirements of the Sunshine Law were met. A roll call was taken as follows:
Commissioner Evelyn Hudson-Dorrah
Ernest Booker, Feinstein, Raiss, Kelin & Booker
Chairman Rimes called for a motion to adopt the agenda. Commissioner Rossi moved to adopt. Commissioner Davis seconded.
Authority of the City of Orange Nomination for the Position of Chairman of the Board
of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of the City of Orange
Commissioner Rimes relinquished Chair position to Counsel, Ernest Booker. Counsel called for a motion for nominations for Chairman of the Board of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of the City of Orange.
Commissioner Ross nominated Coram Rimes
(No other names were offered)
Acting Chairman Booker called for a motion to close nominations.
Commissioner Ross motion to close nominations. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah seconded.
Acting Chairman Booker called for discussion
Commissioner Rimes was voted in as Chairman of the Board of Commissioners
Acting Chairman Booker validated Commissioner Rimes as Chairman of the Board of Commissioners. Chairman Booker asked for a motion to acclimate Commissioner Rimes as Chairman of the Board of Commissioners. Commissioner Ross called for a motion. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah seconded.
Chairman Rimes called for a motion to adopt Resolution No. 5281-14 Resolution of the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of Orange Nomination for the Position of Vice Chairman of the Board of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of the City of Orange. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah nominated Commissioner Ross. Commissioner Rossi seconded.
Commissioner Ross nominated Commissioner Williams. Commissioner Davis seconded.
Commissioner Ross motion to close the nominations. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah seconded.
Commissioner Ross requested to withdraw his nomination. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah made the motion to withdraw Commissioner Ross's nomination. Commissioner Rossi seconded.
Commissioner Williams voted in as Vice Chairman of the Board of Commissioners
Chairman Rimes called for a motion to adopt Resolution No. 5282-14 Resolution of the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of Orange Nomination for the Position of Treasurer of the Board of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of the City of Orange. Commissioner Davis nominated Commissioner Hudson Dorrah. Commissioner Rossi seconded. Commissioner Rossi called for a motion to close nominations. Commissioner Ross seconded.
Commissioner Hudson Dorrah was voted in as Treasurer of the Board of Commissioners.
Chairman Rimes called for a motion to adopt Resolution No. 5283-14 Resolution of the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of Orange Nomination for the Position of Parliamentarian of the Board of Commissioners for the Housing Authority of the City of Orange Chairman Rimes nominated Commissioner Ross. Commissioner Davis seconded. Commissioner Ross called for a motion to close nominations. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah seconded.
Commissioner Ross was voted in as Parliamentarian of the Board of Commissioners.
Chairman Rimes called for a motion to adjourn the meeting. Commissioner Ross moved to adjourn. Commissioner Hudson Dorrah seconded.


text:
Category: Roleplaying tips
Wimping: the black hole of GMless games
September 2, 2012 January 26, 2021 Josh Fox 4 Comments
I've been playing a lot of GMless games lately, and because of the absence of a pre-written plot, these games have a lot in common with improv. In improv, there is a term called "wimping", which is when one of the actors – without explicitly blocking what another actor says – effectively reflects it back at them without adding anything to the conversation.
There's an excellent example given here, which I cannot add anything to and so shall quote wholesale:
JEFF: Oh my gosh that thing is big!
MEL: Yeah! It's really huge!
JEFF: It's getting bigger!
MEL: It sure is!
JEFF: My goodness, it's eating the dog!
MEL: The poor dog.
See how Jeff is making all the running in that exchange? Every new element is created by him and merely restated by Mel.
Now, in GMless roleplaying there is typically shared responsibility for creating plot and background elements, so what we have is essentially improv. Each player can add new elements at will, and when someone else adds an element they can either accept it but not do anything with it (wimping) or take it and run with it in an interesting way. It's not exactly news that the latter is a better way to go, and if you've played GMless games you'll probably be familiar with the situation where someone is throwing out interesting material and it is essentially being either ignored or, at any rate, not added to by others.
There's a more pernicious form of wimping, where nobody is really creating new material. This becomes an empty conversation, like those awkward exchanges where you just talk about the weather because you don't want to risk putting anything more interesting into the pot. I'm not sure there's a term for this: I'll call it the double-wimp.
This doesn't happen much in roleplaying because, after all, you've usually got some helpful mechanisms and a shared agenda of creating drama, which push you to create stuff. But roleplayers have their own special kind of double-wimp. Many of us have grown up on GM-created mysteries – the black box containing the plot which, as players, you struggle to uncover. The GM knows what's in the box, but the players don't. The interest for the players is discovering what the GM has invented.
Now think about GMless games. I've more than once seen a player create a black box in a GMless game. It could be a mysterious object (in a recent game there was a literal box with something in it … but nobody knew what it was, even the person who introduced the box), or it could be a vague reference to something that sounds intriguing but which is left undefined. What they've done is effectively wimped on their own narration. They've supplied what should be an interesting plot element, but left a blank where the interest should be. They're hoping someone else will fill that blank, but all too often no-one does. In the absence of a GM who knows what the mystery really is, it becomes vacuous, a cipher.
Moreover, roleplayers are used to the concept of ownership. My character is my character – you don't narrate his actions. Likewise, in more traditional roleplaying the person who introduces a plot element owns it, so others refrain from acting on it. When someone introduces an undefined mystery element, this compounds that natural unwillingness to mess with "their" plot, because nobody is quite sure what it is in the first place.
What you're left with in this situation is a black hole. By its nature it is intriguing and makes the characters want to interact with it, thus sucking the story into its gravity well. But there's nothing there to interact with. To overextend the metaphor slightly, the plot is crushed to death with agonising slowness as the flow of time itself is distorted around it. At least, that's how it can feel at times.
If you're playing GMless games, my advice is to avoid this phenomenon like the plague. Do not introduce mysterious elements if you can help it. If you must, don't throw in a mysterious element unless you know what you're doing with it. You shouldn't be so committed to your idea of what the "truth" behind the mystery is that nobody else can come in and change it, but don't just throw it in and hope someone else will run with it – be ready to run with it yourself. And take the earliest opportunity possible to reveal what the mystery is so that others can more easily play off it. It may even be worth telling the other players out of character what the mystery really is, even though their characters don't know, just to avoid the black hole effect.
Managing campaign endings
August 19, 2012 January 26, 2021 Josh Fox Leave a comment
I was reading this article on Gnome Stew about keeping your campaign alive during the inevitable breaks you'll be taking when holidays, life events and other momentum-breaking occurrences happen.
Loss of campaign momentum is a perennial problem. It is typically the result of one or more of the group losing interest in, and energy for, that campaign. If it's a player, they start becoming harder and harder to schedule in, they stop paying attention in session, and they generally start to make the whole experience feel like a drag. If it's the GM (and it often is!) they find it harder and harder to motivate themselves to prep and to book the sessions. This invariably gets transmitted to the players, who can tell the GM's heart isn't in it. The result is a zombie campaign that nobody is enjoying. To mix my metaphors, such campaigns often suffer death by asphyxiation – without the oxygen of the group's interest they just wither, and one day nobody books the next session.
Image by ChaosRampantKaryn
The Stew article presents some great ideas for avoiding momentum loss during a hiatus, chiefly to do with stirring the pot during the break and avoiding shiny distractions that divert you from the campaign. But to some extent this relies on the group still having momentum; nobody will be bothered to take part in between-sessions activity if they aren't feeling the love.
For me, the way you avoid losing the big Mo is by keeping the campaign within defined boundaries. Nothing can go on forever; we see this in all walks of life, not just gaming. How many times has a TV series overstayed its welcome by one or two seasons, leaving the whole thing feeling tarnished? Well, unlike the TV networks we aren't in this to make money so there's no point in keeping going past the point that we're having fun.
So here's my suggestion. Plan your campaign in self-contained chunks. 8 weeks seems to be a good number, but YMMV. Choose a period of time where everyone can largely commit to attending sessions, and in which a decent arc of the campaign can be played through. (You may find that things don't quite go as you expected, and you need a session or two more – that's fine! Better to exceed your budget slightly than to not have one at all.) Now everyone knows there's a defined end-point, and everyone is working to reach a satisfactory conclusion in that time-frame. You'll be more disciplined about your play, focusing on the stuff that really gets you going.
When you get to the end of a campaign chunk, you can pause for reflection. How are we all feeling about the campaign? Is there something else we'd rather be playing right now? Are we keen to continue, and if so what do we want to do in the next chunk? Is there anything we could change to keep the campaign fresh? My group has developed a tradition of going out for dinner once in a while for campaign reflection, and this would be a lovely way to mark the end of each campaign chunk.
Moreover, the end of a chunk gives you the chance to manage transitions and endings more effectively. Does anyone need to step out of the campaign for a bit – maybe someone has had a baby or is going through a busy patch at work? If so, this change will be less likely to break your momentum. Are people looking to try something different? Because you've built in a break-point, you're managing the tendency for campaigns to peter out, and if/when the campaign finally does end it's more likely to be a nice, satisfying ending that avoids a zombie campaign or death by asphyxiation.
Four types of post-apocalyptic character
August 17, 2012 January 26, 2021 Josh Fox 3 Comments
Just something I've been thinking about. In fictional worlds like those presented in the Survivors, the Road and the Parable of the Talents (to name a few at random), there seem to be four broad character types:
Scavengers. People who are trying to make a living through picking over the bones of the fallen civilisation. They tend to be nomadic because the resources in any given area run out fast. They live hand-to-mouth and, in consequence, can be fairly suspicious of strangers who they may perceive as likely to take what little they have. On the other hand come scavengers might do odd jobs for settled communities they encounter. These people will value portable goods and food the most.
Settlers. People who are trying to make a living in a fixed location, through farming and perhaps trade. These people will value practal skills and re-usable resources (like farmland) most. They may engage in limited trade with other settled communities, if there are any, and may begin to develop the trappings of a fledgling civilisation as a result. They are nevertheless primarily focused on survival.
Predators. People who are trying to make a living through preying on others. Slavers, raiders, groups of armed men who seek to conquer settled communities. These people value strength and weaponry most of all, and are always on the lookout for someone weaker than them to dominate. Ironically their desire to rule could lead to the development of a basic civilisation – they will inevitably seek to dominate or destroy other groups who might threaten them.
Seekers. People who are seeking something more than simple survival. Sometimes they want something quite specific – perhaps they are looking for their lost daughter, for example. Often they are seeking to build something greater than a small farmstead or similar, either through building up infrastructure, trade and alliances, or perhaps through spreading a religion or philosophy. Despite the fact that their eyes are fixed on something more than survival, seekers will often turn out to be the most practically minded of the lot, never content to settle for scratching out a living by hand if they could be ploughing their fields with horses or a tractor.
Am I missing any important categories here?
Racist stereotypes in roleplaying
July 31, 2012 January 26, 2021 Josh Fox 2 Comments
So, I have been keeping a wary eye on the discussion of Wolsung and with a deep breath I ploughed through the RPGnet discussion of it. Now, I haven't read Wolsung and I'm not going to get into my opinions on the game. But there were some interesting arguments thrown around on RPGnet that I'd like to talk about here.
1. It cannot be racism if the target is a fictional, nonhuman race. This seems pretty obviously false. A blatant racist stereotype against a particular real life group remains just as blatant if you shift it wholesale onto a fictional race (particularly if you make the fictional race resemble the stereotype in question in an extremely identifiable way). Whether you did it on purpose or not is beside the point, though when the resemblance is very strong, people may find it hard to credit that it was accidental.
2. It isn't racism if it's about national culture or if national culture is just as important in the game as race. Well, ok, the term "racism" doesn't apply to national stereotypes. This doesn't make it better though. Cultural (and NB also religious) stereotypes seem to have somewhere along the line become the acceptable face of bigotry. But, you know, it's essentially the same deal – painting an entire group with one brush, and a skewed and, uh, stereotyped brush at that. Focusing on the fact that genes aren't involved is missing the point.
3. It's ok because it's an accurate representation of the historical period that the game is modelling (in this case the Victorian age). Well, this is kind of true. It's true that some people, perhaps the majority, maybe even the vast majority[*] of Westerners in Victorian age held pretty horrendous bigoted views about foreigners. Note, of course, that the game permits you to play non-Westerners, so this argument is pretty much missing the point as well – why should the game be presented exclusively from the Western viewpoint? Indeed, why not select a few admirable exceptions to the (perceived) general bigotry to act as your perspective characters while noting, perhaps in a sidebar, the general prevalence of racism. In other words, why view the entire game through the lens of racism?
4. This leads me to a more difficult question, for me at least. Point 3 about is really an allusion to the fact that many of us like our fantasy worlds to model reality quite closely, warts and all. Now, the point has been made to me that if we're happy to fill our games with orcs and airships, why do we suddenly insist on realism when it comes to racism? Well, I just don't think the two things are the same; orcs and airships are essentially background colour, whereas realistic social behaviour is quite fundamental. I'm in the camp that tends to not want to gloss over real-life phenomena like racism. To be clear, my games have not been known for including racist themes or tackling racism – but I'd like to think I could do so, and I'm keen on the idea of games tackling such serious subject matter.
But it's equally clear that if you're going to tackle such serious subject matter in a published game, you want to do so in a careful, nuanced and respectful way. You should ideally have taken some serious study on the matter before charging into such murky waters. I'd go so far as to say that you should take this approach even if you aren't publishing – if you're just playing in your living room. If in our enthusiasm to be realistic, or to faithfully replicate a historical period (albeit with orcs and airships and so forth) we accept any old attempt at "serious" issues, even done in a cartoonish and badly thought-through way, then we're pretty much betraying the principle of gritty realism in so doing, and we've trivialised the issue in the process.
One last thing. I think part of the reason people get so defensive about this is that they think "if this game is racist and I like it, then I must be racist; I'm not racist so the game can't be either". Well, racism isn't like a disease that you have or don't. It's a spectrum of behaviours and cultural themes which permeate the whole of Western society. You are at risk of saying or doing stuff that's racist if you don't examine yourself, even if you yourself are not a racist. You can enjoy a game that covers racial themes, even in a ham-fisted way, without being a racist, but you owe it to yourself to give yourself some careful scrutiny before you do so.
[*] I'm really not sufficiently a historian to argue this point, but the idea that all Victorians were raging racists strikes me as also a possible stereotype.
That guy is up to something
July 28, 2012 January 26, 2021 Josh Fox Leave a comment
When you're playing a game where there's no GM throwing plot at you (e.g. Fiasco) or where there is, but they are leaving you, the players, to decide what to focus on (e.g. Apocalypse World) or indeed, where there is but they aren't creating plot per se at all (any sandbox game), the role of players is different to your traditional GM-as-plot-provider game. And you have to do different things to make those games fun. Things which might even be considered antisocial in another game.
What I'm talking about is having an (in character) agenda. Your character should be up to something. They have at least one thing that they want, and not just in an abstract "fleshing out my character" way, but in a concrete "this is what I'm going to do right now to get it" way.
Fiasco is a perfect example because the entire drama comes from your stupid, short-sighted, out-of-control characters pursuing your goals. The game even forces at least one of you to have a game-generated Need! But it still needs the oomph from the players, the drive that makes the game tick. You can't be sitting back and fading into the background in a game of Fiasco! Or rather, you can, but you (and the other players) may not have as great a game as a result.
Now I want to be clear here, I'm not saying that you should be constantly pushing your character's agenda Out Of Character. When it feels like you can't turn around for character X getting up in your face trying to do their thing, that isn't fun. Your character is up to something, yes. You, on the other hand, are up to something else – trying to make sure everyone has fun, hopefully.
Fiasco and other "GMless" (or GM-light) games throw the spotlight onto the players in a way that can be a lot of fun. If you're pushing your character into action to get what they want, while leaving space for the other players to do that for their characters, you'll get a lot out of these games.
Plot overload
During a recent playtest I encountered some serious problems with plot overload. At the start of the game I threw too many things at the player group, causing them to become confused, and sucking up far too much time dealing with the chaos. By the end I was trying desperately to draw things back and get the game back under control, but it was pretty much too late and I ran out of time to fix the problem, leading to a damp squib ending.
Point is: it's easy to assume that the more there is going on, the more enjoyable the game is likely to be. But there's only so much stuff a group can handle at once. As a GM whether you're running a planned storyline or a more spontaneous, low-prep game (this was the latter) you need to think about these issues. Figure a group can maybe handle a couple of things at once, in a long-term campaign, but in a one-off or introductory session, you probably don't even want to make things that complex. One thing at a time is probably enough!
You might be worried about the players having enough to do, and that's a fair point. Nobody said the problem couldn't be multi-faceted. But don't force the players to concentrate on too many threads at once or they'll lose the plot entirely. At best they'll be entertained but confused; at worse, you'll lose their interest altogether.
A Little More Conversation…
July 19, 2012 January 26, 2021 Frax 2 Comments
What I most want out of role-playing is a really good conversation. A conversation which is meaningful, important and changes something, perhaps the relationship of the characters involved or the perceptions of my character or even the world in some way.
This aspect of gaming (which to me is fundamental) is rarely mentioned in the system books – Apocalypse World gives it more airtime than most, although it only really talks about having rules to regulate conversation, not about how to achieve a good conversation.
But even rarer is a system or piece of GM guidance which expressly supports and nurtures good conversations. Dogs in the Vineyard is arguably a system designed for social interaction/conflicts which should be about having interesting conversations. However I find DiTV 's dice mechanics so complicated and dice heavy that it largely sidelines the conversations it is supposed to be supporting.
The idea of mechanics being used to support conversation itself feel controversial to me and I'll probably come back to it.
What I hadn't realised is how much this desire to get amazing conversations happening influences my GMing style. It turns out my games are run primarily to encourage and support the interesting conversations between the PCs and NPCs. This manifests in a number of ways:
1. I rarely speed up a conversation to get to the action (in fact often the opposite).
2. I pitch my plots and information dissemination to inspire and sustain conversations.
3. I create NPCs with feelings, emotions and complex motivations, who are capable of sustaining good conversations.
4. I make the time for my NPCs to have serious those one-to-one conversations with the player characters to establish meaningful relationships with them.
5. I prefer to run my sessions one-to-one giving players the feeling they have the luxury of time to just talk.
I had my lightbulb moment in a recent Amber session I ran. The players thought that the focus of the session was the action based rescue of an NPC. The focus of the session for me was the conversations which would naturally occur once the NPC was recovered. I was lucky that this difference in expectation didn't wreck the game and it could have easily been a disappointment. The actual rescue was quick and easy and took relatively little time. If the players were expecting to enjoy several hours of sneaking around, fighting guards and defeating an end-of-level boss they would have been very disappointed.
I have written many times about the importance of agreed expectations for successful gaming. I had no idea I was consistently breaking my own rules, – bad GM, no cookie.
I was lucky in that my players enjoyed the session regardless (down to my choice of players rather than anything else I expect!) I learned a good lesson though. I'll be giving much more obvious signposts in future.
Metagaming intelligence
[Due to a cutty pasty error, this post made no sense whatsoever the first time I posted it. Hopefully it makes at least a modicum of sense now, but if not at least you know that's how I intended it.]
My question for today is, should one attempt to roleplay the intelligence of one's character? It has been often remarked that when playing a character with a low intelligence score (or whatever the stat is in your system au choix), one finds oneself encountering situations where you, the player, can see a clue/solve a puzzle/make a plan, but (perhaps) the character would not be able to. Some folks say that in this situation you should play dumb.
I'm not so sure. First, it's relatively unusual for a game to contain a "problem solving" stat. The intellectual stats often include something around memory, academic ability etc. They do sometimes mention "reasoning". But there are many ways to make an ommelete. Ok, bad analogy, there aren't that many ways to make an ommelete. Forget the analogy. The point stands though: a character could come up with a brilliant plan because (a) they reasoned it out; (b) they made use of animal cunning/intuition/etc to come up with the plan; (c) they didn't really know what they were saying and sort of stumbled across the plan; (d) they have some specialist skill which made it appropriate for them to come up with the plan; (e) they were having a moment of uncharacteristic genius… and so on.
Ok, fine. But say your character is in a game where there are stats for animal cunning, intuition and so forth, you don't have a relevant specialist skill, and you've had so many great ideas recently that you're pushing your "moment of uncharacteristic genius" quota for the year. What then? Well, I still think there's nothing inherently wrong with saying, out of character, "it would be a really great idea if we did X… my character would never come up with that plan of course". The other players are then free to decide on the basis of their character's wonderful stats that they came up with the idea instead. Or if none of you can come up with an excuse to have such a plan in character, then you can all enjoy the delightful piquancy of the moment as you stumble into disaster yet again. Heh.
Some people will say that this is meta-gaming, or that it means you're a bad roleplayer. Whatever. Unless you're playing some super-immersive game, we're all here to have fun, and it's reasonable to look for excuses to come up with an awesome plan rather than find reasons not to. Don't get me wrong, I don't like it when people break character at inappropriate moments, moments of tension or high drama, but the rest of the time, screw it.
Of course, the trouble is, while the above makes perfect sense, I'm playing this hardcore immersive roleplayer, so I just have to keep quiet. Sigh.
Choose your own adventurer
May 29, 2012 January 30, 2021 Josh Fox Leave a comment
A long time ago (for verily I am a long way behind on my podcasts), Happy Jack's were discussing the idea of creating pregenerated characters for one-offs but providing a list of disadvantages to choose from for each character. You get a pre-genned character but you can give it a bit of customisation. This got me thinking – why even stop there? You can give each character options for powers, skills, whatever. You could even give them options for backgrounds. Choose between a rival who is trying to kill you, a secret you can never speak of, or a long-lost sibling believed dead. The GM could then hand you an index card with more detail about your chosen option. It would mean the GM couldn't rely on any individual background detail coming up, but it gives you a bit more ownership over your character. And the unused backgrounds could easily be saved for the next one-off, so you aren't wasting too much effort.
One-offs can very easily be just railroaded experiences, you're handed a character and away you go. I've got nothing against that – but this seems to be a really simple way to replicate some of the fun of character gen without sucking up so much time that you no longer have time to play the game.
Since drafting this article, I gave the idea a try as part of a one-off Dogs In the Vineyard game I ran for a con. Dogs traditionally lets you gen your own characters, but given that I didn't have a lot of time, I decided to just create the characters in advance. But I didn't want people to be stuck with whatever I gave them so each character had two alternate sets of traits, which I chose to illustrate possible backgrounds for those characters. (For example one of the characters could either be the guy who grew up in the big bad city and pulled himself up by his bootstraps, or the guy whose parents expected too much of him and he rebelled and went off to do something different from what they wanted.)
It worked pretty well, and I'd definitely do it again. It hardly added any time to my prep, and equally it added almost no time to the game compared to just handing out fixed characters.
Johari's window
May 26, 2012 January 30, 2021 Josh Fox 3 Comments
Ok, apologies in advance to management experts, because I am about to abuse a well-loved management metaphor until it is hardly recognisable anymore.
Johari's window is a neat metaphor for learning and feedback. Picture a window divided into four quadrants. The top-left quadrant is things that I know about me, that you also know – public knowledge about me. The bottom left is stuff I know about myself that you don't know – my secrets, things I could reveal to you in future. The top right quadrant covers information about me that you know but that I am unaware of – this is important for management theory because it's the space in which feedback can happen. The bottom right isn't seen as especially important for management theory and it isn't important for this post either. It's the domain of things about me that nobody knows. Maybe there some great insight that can be gleaned there, but if there is, I (rather appropriately) don't know what it is.
Image by Brent O'Connor
Incidentally, I have no idea who Johari is either. Whatever. [Edit: Googling around, because I just *had* to know, I see it's actually called "A Johari Window", so probably Johari is some kind of acronym and not a person at all. I shall persist in imagining I never discovered this.]
So, what does all this have to do with gaming? The answer is that you can use it for character generation. When you create your character, draw a window and write stuff in each quandrant.
The bottom-left and top-right corners are for unresolved questions about your character. Who was that masked man? Who killed your father? What is the meaning of your birthmark? Why can't you remember anything from the night of the 21st, and what happened on that night? Are you going to save humanity, or destroy it? But which quadrant you put each question in tells you whether this is a Dark Secret type of question – one you're handing to the GM to answer, which might have an answer that you don't like (top right quadrant), or one you're going to answer yourself, at a dramatically appropriate time (bottom left quadrant). I suggest that by using Johari's window, we can signal to the GM what questions are for her to answer, and which questions we want to keep for ourselves. Maybe you could even put some questions in the bottom right – these would be open to anyone to try and answer.
The top-left corner of the window has a use, too. Put things in there that are known at the start of the game. (Known to you as players, that is – maybe not to your characters.) By putting stuff in there you're saying to the GM "this stuff is off limits". If I say that my character is the son of a noble jedi knight, and put that in the top left corner, then the GM should not reveal partway in that the knight in question is actually Darth Vader. That would have been a cool plotline, but by putting my heritage in the top left I'm telling the GM to stay away from it. Break the top-left window pane at your peril.


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Count on our event specialists at Cabaret to help you discover what type of air conditioning you need for your tent event. We will evaluate your tent size, number of guests, power supplies available and ductwork and then set up your system and get it working before your event begins. We also work to make the air conditioning system as quiet and non-invasive as possible. Find out more at 718.356.8500 or 212.534.TENT or request a quote online. We look forward to helping you plan the perfect cool event. Literally.


text:
Q: JavaFX - How to remove ListView & TableView's bands? I'm adding JavaFX ListViews & TableViews to my app in their default style.
The odd rows got a white background and even rows got a grey background.
I don't like those bands, especially on unpopulated rows.
I tried the following CSS settings on my ListView with fxid:list_PayMethod but doesn't help.
(this page doesn't recognize the fxid as part of the code, so it is not inside the grey box, please note.)
#list_PayMethod {

    .list-cell:odd {
        -fx-padding: 0px;
        -fx-control-background: #F4F4F4;
        -fx-control-inner-background: #F4F4F4;
    }

    .list-cell:even {
        -fx-padding: 0px;
        -fx-control-background: #F4F4F4;
        -fx-control-inner-background: #F4F4F4;
    }

    .list-view:focused .list-cell:focused:odd {
        -fx-padding: 0px;
        -fx-control-background: #F4F4F4;
        -fx-control-inner-background: #F4F4F4;
    }

    .list-view:focused .list-cell:focused:even {
        -fx-padding: 0px;
        -fx-control-background: #F4F4F4;
        -fx-control-inner-background: #F4F4F4;
    }
}

Is there any way to set all to write or all grey?
Thanks!

A: Replace -fx-control-background with -fx-background-color and that should be enough.
.list-cell {
    -fx-background-color: #F4F4F4;
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


Results of the Heikin Ashi chart performance. Performance of all unusual price charts. An example of their combined application.
How to filter off trading flat. How to identify signals. Combined application with other types of price charts. The final working scheme.
This is the final part of the educational block, devoted to my big experiment of comparison of unusual price charts, identifying their advantages and disadvantages.
The last chart described was Heikin Ashi candlesticks. In the last educational post, I found out that the indicator is often late; I also divided all possible Heikin Ashi candlesticks into three groups.
As I already noted in the last training article, the first and the second candlestick types send many false signals (see the zones in red circles in the chart above). The third type indicates changes more accurately, however, it is extremely seldom at the beginning of the price movement; so, if you enter a trade according to this signal, you will be rather late and may miss a lot of profit, or you might even face losses.
To filter off sideways trends in the Heikin Ashi candlestick chart, you need to apply trend indicators and charts. It may sound a little strange, as the Heikin Ashi, itself, is suggested to be a trend indicator.
First, let's study the technical analysis tools, applied to the Heikin Ashi candlesticks. MACD is a trend indicator; however, it is clear that its signals lag far behind the price and, in fact, it sends a buy or a sell signal too late.
When you switch to a shorter timeframe, the lag is getting less; however, in in the zone of sideways trend, there are more false signals.
That is, the problem of random signals of sideways movements is still not solved. There will be still many random signals when trading flat.
To be fair, I must note that moving averages won't provide the needed result as well. First, moving averages themselves are a lagging indicator; second, they also send a lot of false signals in trading flat; and applying a lagging indicator to the lagging Heikin Ashi chart is a double lag. Therefore, to solve this problem, you need to utilize other price charts together with the Heikin Ashi candlesticks.
First, let's analyze the marked period in the charts of Renko, Kagi, Line Break and Tic-Tac-Toe.
As you see, the studied zone in these charts looks much shorter than that in the Heikin Ashi chart. It is because there you can remove the market noise from the chart, that is, in these charts, you should ideally see only the trend moves.
In practice, it is not that simple of course. The matter is that none of the charts does it in way I'd like. Each chart has certain sensitivity to the price changes. But, unfortunately, this sensitivity is often static and can't be adjusted to the market situation, so, when the volatility is low, it wouldn't indicate any changes, as the whole market movement may not reach the needed value. First of all, it is about the Line Break chart, where the price change unit is always constant; that is why it sends too many random signals in the sideways trend.
The same problem is with the Range chart that doesn't take time into consideration , but also has a set unit of the price change, which doesn't consider the market real situation.
The other three chart types – Renko, Kagi and the Tic-Tac-Toe are more convenient with this respect and apply a dynamic variable as the price change unit; it is set by the ATR index (Average True Range). This ability lets the indicators adjust to the market changes; however, it also has some drawbacks. The matter is the whole history in the chart is constantly changing due to variable ATR index; it doesn't change the displayed market situation fundamentally, but the signals, sent before, can disappear, making it more difficult to analyze the trading history of an instrument accurately.
In addition, each of these price charts has unique properties that can be applied to trading.
First, look at the Renko chart in the top part of the window (you can learn more about it in my first post, devoted to this experiment). I marked the sell and buy signals with arrows. I'd like to emphasize that the arrow is not at the first box, but at the second one, as the signal itself is sent only after the box is complete and the next one emerges.
As it is clear from the Heikin Ashi chart, the buy signals, like the sell ones, mostly come with a long lag. If you followed such signals, you would obviously lose. Therefore, you should be extremely careful when using Renko to filter off the sideways signals.
A more interesting situation is painted by Kagi (see a more detailed description in article Big Experiment (part 3). Kagi chart).
The key levels to buy and sell are marked with the lines of shoulders and waist there. If the chart has completed the waist and goes up, there is a buy signal. If there is the shoulder and the price goes down, it is a sell signal. The projection of these signals in the Heikin Ashi chart can be used to prove the candlesticks of type one and two to trade inside the channel.
The last chart to study here is the Tic-Tac-Toe chart that indicates the trend moves the best of all. In the studied range, there are no clear buy or sell signals; however, the Tic-Tac-Toe chart clearly shows the entire consolidation process, which in general looks like a symmetric triangle. The pattern breakout from above has proved the sell signal, giving an opportunity to stop the loss at the right time.
Eventually, the experiment results suggest that each of the nonstandard price is lagging behind the actual market price. The degree of lagging is directly related to the indicator sensitivity.
Each of the studied charts spots trends quite well, but the most interesting, in my opinion, are the Kagi chart and the Tic-Tac-Toe.
Kagi helps you identify the key levels and mark the signals of the trend reversal. The Tic-Tac-Toe is good for the global analysis and indicates the technical analysis patterns that are not clear at the first sight.
Taking into account that all the charts are lagging, applying moving averages to them send even later signals, compared to the general market trends. This fact suggests that there is no point in using additional indicators, based on nonstandard charts.
The best results in the tests have been performed by the combination of the common trading systems in the Japanese Candlestick charts and the charts of Kagi and Tic-Tac-Toe. You can also apply Heikin Ashi as a confirming signal.
All the signals must be checked in the shorter timeframes.
An example of a good combination of different charts is shown in the picture below.
There is a combination of charts, consisting of three windows, to analyze different timeframes. In the left window, there is a common Japanese candlestick chart of the 4-hour timeframe, supplemented with a number of indicators – it is the trading strategy, providing signals to enter and exit trades. In the central chart, there are the support/resistance levels, indicated by the Kagi chart. In the given example, the ticker has touched the support levels and is rebounding.
By means of the Tic-Tac-Toe chart in the BTCUSD 4H timeframe, you can easily identify the global patterns, having the strongest influence at the moment. Finally, there is a complete picture, showing the merging global pattern of the symmetric triangle. It is clear that the BTCUSD ticker has closely approached the support zone and suggests the growth potential as high as 6670 USD. In the Japanese candlestick chart, there is a buy signal that is proved by both the Kagi chart and the Tic-Tac-Toe. In addition, there is a clear risk zone, indicated by the triangle bottom leg and the support levels in the Kagi; this suggests the place to put stop losses.
That is just an example of how these charts can be applied, rather than a standard scheme. I think it is possible to find a better use of these charts and to fulfill their potential by 100%. But you must always remember that none of the described charts indicates the price extremes – highs and lows; and so, to put stop losses and profit targets you still need to consult the common Japanese candlestick chart.
This concludes my big experiment with unusual price charts on BTCUSD example. I really hope that you find this information interesting and helpful.


Enhanced COX-2 and ASC protein abundance in human retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells are attenuated by Elovanoids (ELV) under uncompensated stress (UOS).
Support Supported by NEI EY005121 and the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Foundation.
Pranab K Mukherjee; Enhanced COX-2 and ASC protein abundance in human retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) cells are attenuated by Elovanoids (ELV) under uncompensated stress (UOS).
. Invest. Ophthalmol. Vis. Sci. 2018;59(9):4027.
Purpose : The photoreceptor specific enzyme ELOVL4 generates very long chain (>C28) polyunsaturated fatty acids n-3 (VLC-PUFAs, n-3). While ELOVL4 mutations are linked to vision loss and neuronal dysfunctions, the roles of VLC-PUFAs lipoxygenated product ELOVs (ELOVs) is just evolving (Bhattacharjee S, et al. Sci Adv. 2017; Jun B, et al. Sci Rep. 2017). The subject of this study is to investigate mechanisms and targets involved in ELVs mediated regulation of proinflammatory genes in RPE under-stress.
Methods : 72h grown human RPE or primary cultures of human RPE (h-RPE) were serum starved for 8h, oxidative-stress(UOS) was introduced by H2O2 (600µM) plus TNF- α (10ng/ml), and then challenged with 200nM concentrations of elovanoids for 6h. Western-blot analysis using 20-25ug protein was analyzed on a 4-12% agarose gel for 2h at 125 volts using the 6h treated cell extracts. Protein was transferred on nitrocellulose membrane, blocked 1h in 3% BSA solution, and probed with primary antibodies of COX-2 (Santa-Cruz Biotechnology, TX) and ASC (Millipore, Mass). All the proteins were detected using ECL kit (Amhersham).
Results : Here we report that proinflammatory gene COX-2 and Picard protein ASC are upregulated under UOS in human RPE. Interestingly ELVs methyl esters: 32:6- Me, 34:6-Me and 34:6-Me-acetilenic attenuated the UOS mediated enhanced upregulation of the proteins (COX-2 and ASC) in RPE under stress. Our results suggest that ELVs may play an important role in downregulating the expression of proinflammatory genes in cell signaling.
Conclusions : Inhibition of UOS –induced upregulation of COX-2 and ASC by ELOVs in h-RPE cells may play a mechanistic role as protector and modulator of the inflammatory response to foster RPE and photoreceptor cell survival.
Supported by NEI EY005121 and the Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Foundation.


text:
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain Hymns of Faith. Wonder Workshop, 1992.
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain Hymns, Featuring Hand-crafted Instruments. Brentwood Music, 1991.
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain Hits. Brentwood Music, 1990.
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain Heritage: A Treasury of Old Time Mountain Photos. Mountain Trail Press, 1984.
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain Fly Patterns. North Fork Creative Production, 1996.
Anonymous. Smoky Mountain All-time Greatest Hits. Brentwood Music, 1996.
Anonymous. Smoky Images, Volume 1: Smoky Wildflowers. Ambassador Video Productions, 1998.
"Smokies Road Problem Again." National Parks 35, no. 153 (1960): 15.
Anonymous. "The Smokies: Permits, Maps and Bears." Appalachian Trailway News 20, no. 3 (1959): 39.
Anonymous. "The Smokies." Wachovia 66, no. 4 (1979).
"Small Beginnings." National Wildlife (World Edition) 23, no. 3 (1985): 5-7.
"A "Sky-Post" for the Smokies." National Parks 33, no. 137 (1959): inside cover.
Anonymous. Six-Room Schoolhouse, Gatlinburg.. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1925.
Anonymous. Six-Room Schoolhouse. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1915.
Anonymous. The Six-Room Schoolhouse.. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1920.
Anonymous. Sister Pasquina Tamagni. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1971.
Anonymous. The Sinks on Little River 12 miles from Gatlinburg Courtesy of Jerry Mcutchan. Arrow--Coner, March 1953.. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1958.
Anonymous. Showing the progress of the new building - Feb (about 5th) 1914. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1914.
Anonymous. Showing school, church, and new homes in Gatlinburg.. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1939.
Anonymous. Shiro Otani Anagama Kiln Firing - Early 80s.. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1983.
Anonymous. "Shelter Use on the A.T. Rationed in the Great Smokies." Appalachian Trailway News 33, no. 4 (1972): 59-60.
Sevier Settler, Edited by Anonymous. S & S Publications, 1984.
Anonymous. Sevier County: Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, & Sevierville Street Atlas. Superior Mapping Co., 1996.
Anonymous. Settlement School Notes. The University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collections: From Pi Beta Phi to Arrowmont, 1923.


6th November 2007 – James Bond Ultimate Collectors Casino Edition released on DVD!
This week sees the release in the UK of a new DVD box-set presented in deluxe acrylic packaging containing the complete MGM Bond library of 20 films from Dr. No through to Die Another Day, plus the new two-disc version of 2006's Casino Royale starring Daniel Craig. In addition, the collection will feature two sets of branded Casino Royale playing cards and a complete set of poker chips from Carta Mundi, as seen in the film.
With the films now available in a confusing array of different box-sets, 2-disc and single editions throughout the world, 007 MAGAZINE presents the ultimate guide to buying 007 on DVD!
The James Bond Ultimate Edition DVDs were originally released in the UK [REGION 2] in August 2006 to tie in with the cinema release of Casino Royale. The DVDs were housed in a special limited edition attaché case containing all 20 films and also available in single 2-disc editions. The set was re-released in December 2006 in a rather tasteless silver box with the same content.
November/December 2006 saw the release in the USA & Canada [REGION 1] with the films split randomly across four box sets. Most of the films have now also been released in single-disc editions featuring the film only, with the only extra features being the commentaries already on those discs.
The content of the Ultimate Edition DVDs is the same throughout the world and all regions are presented uncut. Since their original UK release it became apparent that errors in the digital restoration of some of the films meant that changes were made to the later Region 1 editions.
A fully detailed breakdown with audio/visual comparisons can be found in our exclusive article available in the SPECIAL FEATURES area of 007 MAGAZINE OnLine.
Whilst there is no denying the fact that the Ultimate Edition versions are far superior in picture quality to the Special Editions released in 2000, the remastering process employed by LOWRY DIGITAL IMAGES resulted in some unfortunate colour changes which have been corrected for the most part on the Region 1 release.
The frame comparison from Dr. No (above) shows the dramatic upgrading in picture quality between the new Ultimate Edition and the original 2000 Special Edition DVDs. The sharpness and clarity of the image reveals far more detail than was present in the earlier version and is one of the most remarkable improvements in the series. The first three films benefit from now being presented in their correct aspect ratio, whereas the SE versions were cropped left and right. The Ultimate Edition DVDs also feature DTS & 5.1 soundtracks remixed by Mi Casa Multimedia and while they do open up the soundstage somewhat and are more dynamic in keeping with the cleaned up visuals, they have been created in such a fashion that some of the original sound effects (and in some cases music tracks themselves) are changed in order to achieve the desired multidirectional sound effect.
With the exception of Live And Let Die, The Spy Who Loved Me and For Your Eyes Only, the 'original' (mono or stereo) soundtracks are only available on the Region 1 (USA & CANADA) DVDs. The Region 2 editions do not give the viewer the choice of hearing the film how it was originally made!
For a full comparison of the audio/visual differences in the DVDs see our exclusive 007 MAGAZINE OnLine article.
The inclusion of Casino Royale (2006) in the latest version of the Collectors Box Sets provides the opportunity to purchase all 21 official James Bond films in one fell swoop. However, since this latest DVD was not produced as part of the Ultimate Edition series it retains its original cover art which stands out from the rest of the collection. It should also be noted that Casino Royale (2006) does differ slightly between regions. Both Region 1 and 2 editions are identical to their theatrical release and contain cuts/substituted shots in order to attain the current rating.
Collectors note: The complete uncut version of Casino Royale (2006) is available in Region 3 (NTSC) [South East ASIA]. The French Region 2 DVD (PAL) is also uncut and includes the original English soundtrack option. The Blu-Ray edition is identical and both items can be easily imported to the UK via Amazon.fr.
The R1 release includes the theatrical pre-cut (MPAA) PG-13 release and the R2 (UK) DVD has the slightly cut (BBFC) UK version which removed one shot of a knotted piece of rope handing over Bond's shoulder before the torture scene. The accompanying line of dialogue "Such a pity" as spoken by Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) is also missing, making the scene play somewhat differently to how it was originally intended by director Martin Campbell. The Region 3 version is essentially the 'directors cut' before changes were made by the various certification boards.
Shot of Dryden's contact being drowned in the UK R2 edition [ROLLOVER] Replacement shot in the US R1 version.
2 shots censored from the UK R2 edition but present in the otherwise cut US R1 version.


[LAUSANNE] Picture-based crop insurance could make its debut in Kenya next year after a study in India found that it may avoid the pitfalls of other insurance schemes.
As trained smallholders photograph their crops during the growing season and dispatch the pictures for expert analysis, the approach could cut costs by reducing the number of field visits by loss assessors.
Insurance could insulate farmers in low- and middle-income countries against regular crop catastrophes and give them the security to invest and experiment. But the costs of processing large numbers of tiny farms, and the high frequency of crop failure have thwarted the success of traditional insurance, said Francisco Ceballos, an associate research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), Washington DC, United States.
Over the last 20 years, a cheaper version known as index-based insurance, which pays out en masse when triggered by adverse weather, for instance, has often been unpopular amongst farmers, he added. This is because smallholders may get no payout if their crops fail for other reasons such as pests and because the weather may be measured at stations at some distance from the farm and not provide an accurate picture of what an individual farm experienced.
Ceballos told the Tech4Dev conference held in Switzerland last month (27-29 June) of an IFRPI-led randomised study in Haryana and Punjab, India, about the potential of photo-based crop insurance.
According to the study, which is yet to be published in a journal, researchers encouraged wheat farmers to use a smartphone app to photograph their crops throughout the growing season. The photos were sent to agricultural experts who calculated the crop productivity with the help of an image recognition tool that calculated a greenness index for each photo.
Their assessments were then compared with the farmers' actual productivity, measured by cutting samples of their crops in the field.
The farmers successfully took the photos in the manner prescribed, the researchers found. When the farmers' crops were physically assessed, it was found that the picture reviewers had correctly distinguished between three categories of farmers – those who had lost less than 20 per cent of their crop, lost 20 to 50 per cent, and lost 50 to 100 per cent, which meant that the correct insurance payouts could be given.
The farmers were also insured under a weather-based index insurance scheme, which paid out to any smallholder who lived in an area where the local weather station had recorded higher-than-normal night temperatures and unusually abundant rain at the end of the wheat season.
The farmers were also insured, for comparison, under a weather-based index insurance scheme, which paid out to any smallholder who lived in an area where the local weather station had recorded higher-than-normal night temperatures and unusually abundant rain at the end of the wheat season. But this scheme failed to distinguish between different levels of crop failure.The trial would bundle insurance with access to stress-tolerant seeds and advice texted back to the farmers based on their photos.
William Nedgwe, Kitui County director at the Kenya Meteorological Department, says: "I like it … but it would be based on the level of trust that the farmers and the insurers would establish.
"We have seen it with climate index-based insurance where, when you get someone to make the measures of the rainfall, they would manipulate it to favour themselves.


text:
enum PlayerLogicEvent
{
	E_PlayerEvent_RoleList,
	E_PlayerEvent_PlayerMove,
	E_PlayerEvent_PlayerJump,
};

class CPlayerLogic
    : public CLogicBase, public NFSingleton<CPlayerLogic>
{
public:
	CPlayerLogic() {};
	virtual ~CPlayerLogic() {};
    CPlayerLogic(NFIPluginManager* p)
    {
        pPluginManager = p;
    }

    virtual bool Init();
    virtual bool Shut();
    virtual bool ReadyExecute();
    virtual bool Execute();

    virtual bool AfterInit();

	// ·¢ËÍÏûÏ¢
public:
	void RequireRoleList();
	void RequireCreateRole(string strRoleName, int byCareer, int bySex);
	void RequireEnterGameServer(int nRoleIndex);
	void RequireMove(NFVector3 pos);

	// ½ÓÊÕÏûÏ¢
private:
	void OnRoleList(const int nSockIndex, const int nMsgID, const char* msg, const uint32_t nLen);
	// ½øÈëºÍÀ뿪
	void OnObjectEntry(const int nSockIndex, const int nMsgID, const char* msg, const uint32_t nLen);
	void OnObjectLeave(const int nSockIndex, const int nMsgID, const char* msg, const uint32_t nLen);
	// Òƶ¯
	void OnObjectMove(const int nSockIndex, const int nMsgID, const char* msg, const uint32_t nLen);
	void OnObjectJump(const int nSockIndex, const int nMsgID, const char* msg, const uint32_t nLen);

private:
	void AddRecord(const NF_SHARE_PTR<NFIObject>& object, const std::string &strRecordName, const NFMsg::RecordAddRowStruct &data);

public:
	std::vector<NFMsg::RoleLiteInfo> GetRoleList() { return m_RoleList; }

private:
	std::vector<NFMsg::RoleLiteInfo> m_RoleList;
};

#define g_pPlayerLogic (CPlayerLogic::Instance())

#endif

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub