2321: Treading the Boards

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Watching popular British topical panel show Mock the Week, which has an inexplicably large number of episodes available on Netflix — peculiar to me due to the topical, timely nature of it, not because of any particular lack of quality — reminds me somewhat of one of my favourite activities at university: participating in the university Theatre Group.

We did all manner of things as part of the Theatre Group. We put on plays, of which I was in several, including Macbeth (which we rather edgily revamped to make it look like The Matrix, like no-one had ever done that before), Ivan Turgenev’s A Month in the Country (which we took to Edinburgh, only to discover that the Edinburgh Fringe audience wasn’t as receptive to tragic Russian love stories as we would have liked) and Alan Ayckbourn’s Round and Round the Garden from the Norman Conquests cycle (which we also took to Edinburgh and discovered that the Edinburgh Fringe audience was a lot more receptive to Alan Ayckbourn).

I also directed an entertainingly chaotic production of Twelfth Night after my co-director sent me an email one morning informing me that she would be late back to university at the start of the spring term because she’d decided to go skiing, and would I mind awfully directing the show by myself because she didn’t want to? (That production gave me more nosebleeds than I’ve ever had in my life, but it was one of the most memorable experiences of my university career, in a good way.

We also threw great parties, usually (but not always) after a production, and had a regular night out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos. But the thing that I miss the most, I think — and the thing I’m reminded of when watching shows like Mock the Week and Whose Line is it Anyway? — is the regular improvisation sessions we had just prior to the regular nights out at local grotty (but cheap) club Kaos.

The improvisation sessions grew out of the warm-up activities that had become a Theatre Group tradition when starting rehearsals. These tended to be simple but fun activities that could double as drinking games in a pinch, but were often also designed to get our minds warmed up as well as our bodies and voices, and so quite often incorporated improvisation of various types.

Theatrical improvisation games are a lot of fun if you let yourself get drawn into the experience. This is something I always enjoyed about acting ever since secondary school Drama lessons: getting swept up in a role and feeling like you really were, just for a moment, someone else. And in improvisation you’re not confined by a script: you can take things to some very strange places indeed.

In fact, these improvisations eventually grew into a semi-regular improvisation-based show that the Theatre Group put on called Count Rompula’s Showcase. When you showed up to a Count Rompula’s, you never quite knew what you were going to get. On one particularly memorable occasion, the audience was subjected to The Web of Dan, a rather avant-garde piece that the eponymous Dan and some of his friends had joked about in rehearsals for other shows. I wasn’t directly involved with this eventual production, though I was at least present for the genesis of the idea in the rehearsals.

I miss those days a great deal. I’m occasionally reminded of them when we play Final Fantasy XIV, usually on patch day, and devolve into a series of cringeworthy puns based on the environment and enemies we’re fighting in a new dungeon. (The introduction of the icy dungeon Snowcloak was particularly good for this, as you can imagine.) But nothing will quite match the magic of those days when we sat in a circle, miming the action the previous person had said while saying a completely different action we wanted the next person to perform. Or performing scenes based on silly props. Or, indeed, playing Deutsche Erotika, which sadly is not quite as entertaining as its name might suggest.

1182: Fixed That For You

I’ve had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I’d just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn’t seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn’t arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that’s some money I didn’t really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie’s willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn’t immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn’t even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I’m sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don’t have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don’t have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don’t have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don’t get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I’m glad that I don’t have to do any of the above three things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something get “fixed” by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn’t work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to “fix” the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don’t try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don’t have any screws and 2) they’re a lot harder to put back together once you’ve disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.

#oneaday Day 628: Roleing Wit Da Players

Reading a little about Corvus Elrod and Zakelro’s innovative storytelling game Bhaloidam over on Kickstarter brought to mind my past experiences with tabletop roleplaying. I haven’t done as much of it as I’d have liked to over the years, but the few experiences I have had were excellent ones.

I was a member of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign at university for a while. My character, a thief named Singol Nithryan, was something of a cheeky chappy and there was some excellent banter and rivalry between him and my friend Tim’s character, who was a pompous prig who thought himself better than everyone else. The characterisation of the rivalry between these two characters was completely unscripted, but with each session the plans to outfox each other (well, mostly for Singol to outfox the other chap, whose name I have sadly forgotten) became more and more elaborate. Most times the party settled down to camp tended to end up with Singol cutting his compatriot’s purse and “borrowing” some money — the absence of which his companion often didn’t notice for some time. They weren’t enemies, though — it was good-natured friendly rivalry for the most part, and it made for a fun inter-party dynamic.

To be honest, I can’t remember a lot about the campaign itself and I’m not sure we ever finished it — but we certainly had a blast along the way, and that’s sort of the point. While computer RPGs are all about powerlevelling and reaching the cap as soon as possible, a tabletop experience is all about the storytelling, the interacting and the emergent gameplay that results from cutting loose and improvising a little bit.

The best example of this came with what our mutual friend Will called his “freeform” roleplaying system. It was a system he’d come up with by himself, and it was very simple, requiring, as I recall, only three stats: attack, defense and power. According to the situation, points from each of these stats were spent on various actions, with more points (usually from the power pool) meaning a greater chance of success.

Again, though, it wasn’t about the mechanics, which were almost irrelevant. In fact, the simplicity of the mechanics meant that it was possible — and indeed encouraged — to play bizarre, leftfield characters that simply would have no place in a traditional, say, D&D campaign. As such, our adventuring party — whose backstories we each provided to Will beforehand for him to weave an improvised campaign around — was not your typical RPG lineup to say the least. No, it was a wildly disparate group of… things, that I’d hesitate to call “adventurers” even.

Probably the most normal of the bunch was my character, Rush Hurin, who was born from my wondering what might happen if you combined traditional fantasy tropes with sci-fi. Rush was the last of the elves, and he came from a futuristic Deus Ex-style setting. As the last of his kind, he was a highly sought after commodity. People wanted to do research on him, in other words, but he had absolutely no desire to submit to the demands, prods, pokes and scalpels of some scientists. Consequently, he spent a lot of his life on the run, but, being an elf, had immense agility and was a badass with a sword.

Alongside Rush came Tyrael, played by my friend Tim who was (is) somewhat obsessed with Diablo at the time. Tyrael was a fallen angel in human form who had the ability to, I quote, “go all big and flamey” and also suffered from something of a lack of self control. In one memorable sequence, Rush was fleeing from a skyscraper while Tyrael was turning into his full, multi-storey “big and flamey” form in order to cause some chaos and allow me to escape. That was interesting.

Next up was Arryth (I don’t know how you spelled it), who was an animated suit of armour. Was he a ghost possessing the armour? Was he a sentient suit of armour? We never quite found out, but he proved to be a valuable ally on more than one occasion.

Not as valuable as the Luggage from Discworld, however, who had a predilection for devouring our enemies and, occasionally, spitting them back out again, somewhat confused, into the midst of a tricky situation. He also proved useful for carrying our gear.

Finally came a character I can’t remember the name of, and who was simply an amorphous cloud of pink gas. It didn’t talk much, but it made a good spy and also had the useful ability for flying down opponents’ windpipes and choking them from the inside.

Together, we endured some bizarre adventures which Will was clearly making up as he went along, placing signs in rooms he wasn’t ready for us to visit yet which said “come back later!” and getting his mental challenges from one of those massive puzzle books your parents would buy you on holiday to keep you quiet — before handhelds and smartphones came along, of course. To call our adventures chaotic would be an understatement, to say the least.

But you know what? Those are some of the fondest memories I have of my few sessions roleplaying. It wasn’t about grinding for experience points, making use of my abilities or powergaming — it was about improvisatory, collaborative storytelling, and it was one hell of a lot of fun.

The reason that Bhaloidam has given me such cause for curiosity is that it sounds like something strangely along the same lines to Will’s system. It’s a little more complex, sure, featuring a system to determine how much players influence the game world (and each other) prior to “performing” their actions, but at heart it’s, like our experiences, designed for freedom. It has the scope for telling interesting stories that move far beyond traditional fantasy and RPG tropes and into something that’s not quite roleplaying and not quite improvisatory theatre. It’s a highly interesting concept, is what it is, and I’ll be very curious to see how it turns out in the final project.

If you’re interested, too, check out the Kickstarter page for the project here — you can even help fund its first production run. If you’re a Google+ user, I also strongly recommend popping designer Corvus Elrod and his amazing moustache in your circles.

#oneaday Day 544: Om Nom Nom

After a delicious meal at sort-of Japanese restaurant chain Wagamama, I find myself inspired to write about food. Food is delicious and, after all, essential to survival, so you may as well enjoy what you eat.

I’m not a fantastic cook, really, despite having spent a memorable period working alongside my friend from university and beyond Mike Porter in a pub kitchen. We made a mean prawn cocktail and only occasionally accidentally deep-fried an Ultimate Combo when no-one had ordered one in order to have something delicious to munch on ourselves. (There was also the memorable time that a bunch of food was being thrown out and Mike ended up with a ridiculous number of rib-eye steaks, finding himself eating them for breakfast, lunch and dinner for some time. And the time we had an apple sauce fight that culminated with the pouring of apple sauce into each others’ chefs hats and a strong temptation to pour it down the hairy and perpetually-visible bumcrack of our (female) companion in the kitchen.)

My one redeeming trait in cooking is the fact that I’m willing to experiment and improvise. I’ve made some delicious spaghetti sauces, curries and chilli con carnes using said talent, and they’re never quite the same as each other.

All those foods are staples, of course, and pretty much anyone who’s been away to university knows how to prepare all of the above as a means of dining reasonably nutritionally well on a teeny-tiny budget. But over the years, it’s become clear that the interpretation of each recipe varies enormously according to each person. I, for example, never put onion in anything because onions are actually little Satan poos, and no-one wants to eat Satan’s poo. I may have made that up, but onions still taste like shit (not actual shit) and make me retch if I can taste them, so I avoid them at every opportunity.

I was quite happy with my simple chilli recipe, too — tin of tomatoes, packet of mince, tin of kidney beans, bit of chilli powder — until I went over to a friend’s house one evening and he made a chilli that was somehow infinitely, indescribably more delicious than any I’d ever made. His secret? Using twice as many tins of tomatoes as you “need” and then allowing them to reduce over a much longer cooking period. Also, adding bacon and/or chorizo.

Even within relatively simple foods, then, there is a huge amount of variation. This goes right down to the simplest of the simple dishes. Take two people who enjoy Bovril on toast, for example — one may put a thin film of the beefy, yeasty black stuff on top while the other may enjoy the curious enamel-stripping mouth-burning sensation inflicted by putting slightly too much Bovril on a piece of toast. (Incidentally, try Bovril on toast dipped in Heinz tomato soup. It’s amazeballs. Assuming Bovril doesn’t make you gag.)

I’d like to cook better, and once I get back into my own place again I have every intention of exploring and trying things out. Cooking can be a pain in the arse, but it’s also immensely satisfying when it goes right — to look at, to hear bubbling away in the pot and, eventually, to taste. And if you fuck up, well, you’ve learned from the experience — plus hey, the Chinese takeaway is only just down the road if the worst comes to the worst.

“Healthy” food can eat a dick, though. At least the interpretation from a lot of people, which is either “undressed, extremely dull garden salad” or “fat free, flavour free bullshit”. I’m fully aware that it is, in fact, possible to make delicious and healthy foods — the BBC Good Food magazine have a range of low-cost books with some excellent recipes designed around this very principle for example. But with healthy eating it’s all too easy to fall into a bland, boring trap of flavour free nonsense and forget how amazing it is to eat something with a bit of sugar or salt in it.

Food, then? Delicious when prepared correctly, enough to make you wonder if it was worth bothering with if prepared incorrectly. This has been a message from the Ministry of Stating the Obvious.